Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  Whether Edward Weston made any appraisal of the young artist’s paintings, Everett’s letters do not reveal. Those epistles home, some as long as five pages, only rarely strive for rhetorical or poetic effects, as they would increasingly over the following years. They are still closer in style to the reportage of Everett’s Valparaiso years, as he simply summarizes his adventures. But some of the poems and essays Everett was writing at the time already struggle to express in words the transports that landscape brought to his spirit.

  I awoke with a quiver, nerves tautly on edge. It came again, what had wakened me—the harsh, weird scream of a grey gull swooping low above me in the darkness. A heavy, clinging fog had set in, making the place indescribably desolate. Nothing was visible.

  After hanging around Carmel for more than three weeks, Everett decided to strike out for wilder country, setting his sights on Big Sur, which in 1930 was still little traveled. A combination of hitchhiking and walking brought him to the rugged seacoast, where he camped out, climbed the hills, explored the shore, and painted. For the first time, Everett carried his belongings and food in a backpack. Even the tribulations of this first foray into semi-wilderness added zest to the outing. As he wrote his family on July 24:

  I made a watercolor under the most difficult conditions I have yet endured. The wind blew sand into my paint and on my picture all the time I was painting. The sand is still stuck to the picture, and produced an interesting effect, but I don’t think there will be much color left on the picture when the sand comes off.

  As the days flew past, Everett took an odd job here and there to earn a little cash to pay for his groceries. While still in Carmel, he spent several days caddying at a local golf course. To picture the future desert wanderer lugging gentlemen’s clubs around a manicured eighteen-hole layout requires an imaginative stretch, and in fact, Everett hated the routine that required him to show up at the caddymaster’s shack and hope to be assigned to a foursome.

  One of Everett’s best poems, which he called “Pledge to the Wind,” evokes a landscape like Big Sur. It closes,

  Here in the utter stillness,

  High on a lonely cliff-ledge,

  Where the air is trembling with lightning,

  I have given the wind my pledge.

  Yet even Big Sur was not wild enough for Everett’s increasingly restless soul. By early August he had determined to head off to Yosemite, still vivid in his memory from the 1923 trip there with his mother. He arrived on August 4, laid out his campsite on the banks of a tributary of the Merced River, and spent “the most miserable night of my life.” By the next morning he could joke about the bivouac in a letter to his family:

  At first it was so hot that my blankets were covered with sweat. But I had to swathe my face in a towel to keep out a few of the millions of mosquitoes. Burrs got stuck to my blankets. After a fitful night’s sleep, I woke up in the hot sunshine, and found that thousands of ants were swarming through my pack.

  So far, Everett’s California travels had been relatively tame, yet the sight of a sixteen-year-old lugging a fifty-pound pack on his solo journey had caught the attention of many a passerby. “On this trip,” he wrote his family, “I have been given all kinds of advice, from whether or not one should own a car, and if so, what kind, to whether I should go crooked or straight.” It is odd, given Everett’s passion for travel, yet somehow characteristic, that he never learned to drive an automobile.

  During his days in Yosemite, Everett swam in the Merced, hiked the park’s trails, and marveled at the tameness of the wildlife (in broad daylight, a deer entered Everett’s camp while he was off hiking, tore loose the wrapper on a loaf of bread, and ate every crumb). Even in 1930, in August Yosemite was thronged with tourists. If Everett sought solitude, he was bound to be disappointed. At Camp 7, “Some people from Oklahoma moved in on one side of me,” he wrote home. “Another car is on the other corner, while in back of me, two young men who work for an Insurance Company in Los Angeles, have their tent.”

  To pose himself a physical challenge, Everett joined a ranger-led group hike from Camp Curry to Glacier Point, a 3,200-foot ascent in only two miles of steep trail. “It took me 3 hours and a quarter to climb up,” he boasted. “The usual time is 3 and 1/2. But the record is held by an Indian, who went up in 46 minutes.”

  In 1930 it was still possible to find prehistoric Indian relics in the park. Guided by an expert amateur who had collected three hundred arrowheads in Yosemite, Everett found his first three points, made of black obsidian, after digging in the ground of an ancient campsite on the valley floor. He pocketed the arrowheads without a second thought.

  During the next few days, Everett undertook his first solo hikes. But since there was no escaping the campground crowds, he also embraced the park’s makeshift social life. At Camp Curry, his group was treated to “selections on the piano, violin, & banjo in addition to whistling,” followed by a “two-reel movie” about Yosemite’s bird life. “The Park Naturalist whistled the calls of all the birds.”

  To his delight, Everett felt that he was getting in shape and toughening up as a camper. “As to being lonesome for a good bed,” he announced to his family, “I sleep quite well on the ground here and don’t mind it at all.… I could very happily keep up this life indefinitely if I had the money.” Instead, he dreaded the onset of September, with its “coming of school time.”

  Though his parents and his brother were lovers of the outdoors, Everett’s backpacking was a self-taught process of trial and error. Midway through his Yosemite lark, having exhausted himself on a hike to Merced Lake, he realized that his blankets were unwieldy: he needed a sleeping bag. “You can buy one for $15, that is quite good enough,” he hinted to Christopher and Stella. “My blankets weigh far too much, take up too much space, and aren’t as warm as a sleeping bag.”

  In the third week of August, Everett headed for the high country of Tuolomne Meadows. By now he had worn his boot soles “nearly to paper,” and had rubbed holes in all his wool socks, so that “I am wearing them with the heels on top.” Solo hikes were his preference, but he had not yet concluded that “after all, the lone trail is best.” Often Everett joined other hikers on the way to distant lakes. He was curious enough about these chance companions that he could later mail home thumbnail résumés of their lives. Several of these strangers were homesteading in the park, having lost their jobs in the first year of the Great Depression. Others hailed from as far away as Australia.

  Yet a certain shyness kept Everett from forming any lasting attachments on the trail that summer. On one hike he ran into a party who were in the middle of a nine-day cross-country backpack. Everett envied their ambition; had he known such a long jaunt was possible, he wrote home, he would have signed up for it. The party included “some very nice young women who were from Washington D.C. and Michigan. I hiked with them until I reached Little Yosemite, about 8 miles from my camp.” But then there is no further mention of the women.

  On another occasion, Everett struck up a conversation with a woman camping alone at Booth Lake. It turned out that she was from Hollywood, and “She owns a flat four doors from Grandma, whom she knows well. Her name is Mrs. Miller.” Everett added, “She wanted me to be her guest at supper, so I had another good meal.”

  The 1930 letters are not often reflective or deeply personal, and of course no teenager shares all his thoughts and feelings with his parents. Yet, here and there, Everett offers a glimpse of his inner self, foreshadowing the wilderness worshiper he would become in the following years.

  There are many things I do, and which I think out, while on the trail. When I halt for a rest, I watch an ant crawling out of a footprint, or I toss stones, seeing how near I can get them to the edge of the path without making them fall off. As I hike, I count the burro’s shoes which have been cast. Or if it is a steep climb, I feel the sweat drip from my face and hair. This morning when I stopped to rest, I found an unfinished arrowhead beneath a tree.

  And
only rarely in the 1930 letters does Everett attempt to ponder his mission in life: “It seems that my ambitions are always to be allied with the A’s—artist, author, archaeologist, and adventurer. Lately, the arrowheads have preceded the art, but I expect to get back to sketching quickly.”

  Despite selling a few of his watercolors over the summer, Everett was running out of money. On August 12 he wrote to his parents, “I have only a little left as it is, and prices are high in Yosemite.” He added, “You might send a dollar or two, but don’t send five dollars.” The bashful pleas for handouts from home would continue throughout the next four years.

  Over the summer, Everett had covered far more miles hitchhiking than he had on foot, even though he calculated that his season’s tramping had added up to two hundred miles. But he finally identified the critical flaw in his first extended campaign of vagabondage: the fifty-pound pack was too much for him. As early as July 7, from Carmel, he complained in a letter to Bill Jacobs, “After I hike about a mile, my both arms begin to go numb from fingertips to shoulders, because the pack cuts off circulation. After a few more miles, they are paralyzed, so that I can’t tie a knot or even unfasten the pack.”

  In his last letter home, mailed from Yosemite on August 22, Everett outlined the scheme that would transform his wandering.

  I was becoming extremely weary of being told by everyone that I had a load, or, “Say, isn’t that heavy,” or “what a load that boy has,” etc. ad nauseum [sic]. So I went to the Camp Curry scales and weighed it. What was my surprise to learn that, with but a pound of food left, it weighed 48 pounds! Evidently I am not as weak as I thought I was.

  However, I have thought for some time that I would like to have a burro next time I start a hike of this kind. They cost $1.50 a day, and you can buy them for $15 or less.

  One of the longest letters Everett wrote that summer, covering four pages in tight pencil scrawl, this missive serves in some ways as a précis of his apprenticeship in wandering. As always, Everett paid close attention to the minutest phenomena of the natural world:

  At one of the brooks where I stopped for a drink, I noticed the curious shadow effect produced by the skaters, or water bugs. They have six legs, four large, and two small. Each leg, or foot, is placed on a drop of water which somehow throws a shadow. As the skaters move, these small round dots of shadows skim to and fro on the bottom of the pool.

  But Everett also had a zest for outdoor play, as he and another hiker climbed the cliff behind camp, seized a log, and pried loose a huge granite boulder to send it plummeting down the precipice. “It finally slid off, and with a great flurry of sparks from the friction, it crashed down,” wrote Everett unashamedly. “There was a short silence, and it struck the ground far below, crashing through the brush and over some trees.”

  During these August days, Everett felt a growing malaise about returning to “normal” life:

  In the morning, I shouldered my pack once more, and started down to the valley. The whole atmosphere was one of anticlimax. I was returning from the mountains and the solitude to the valley, the noisy, uninitiated tourists, and eventually to the city and its sordid buildings and business places.

  By the beginning of September, Everett was back in Los Angeles, where he started the last semester of his senior year at Hollywood High School. He could not wait to set out into the wilds again. But he would not immediately return to Big Sur and Yosemite: the goal for the 1931 pilgrimage would be the vast and daunting Southwest, of which Everett’s sole experience was his fearful stop at the Grand Canyon in 1923, at the age of nine.

  *Curiously, we cannot be sure how Everett Ruess pronounced his last name. Over the decades of the twentieth century, various family members pronounced the patronymic either as “Roo-iss” (rhyming with “Lewis”) or as a single-syllable “Roos.” As recently as 1960, Everett’s brother used the two-syllable version, but today most of Everett’s closest surviving family members prefer the Germanic “Roos.” The reason for the variation is itself obscure, but may derive from Everett’s mother’s feeling that “Roo-iss” was a more poetic pronunciation. The cultural origins of the name are also uncertain: it could be Russian, as in Russland, or German (Ruß is German for “soot,” and may allude to the profession of chimney sweep), but the name “Ruess” is exceedingly rare in Germany today.

  TWO

  “I Have Been One Who Loved the Wilderness”

  AT THE AGE OF ONLY SIXTEEN, in January 1931, Everett graduated from Hollywood High School. His parents hoped that he would soon go to college, but the headstrong youth had a better idea. In early February, he hitchhiked east out of Los Angeles. The rides he got from strangers amounted to a cross-country adventure in its own right: a Buick Eight driven at seventy-five miles an hour by an old man with a dog; a lift in a potato truck; a harrowing lift from “a couple of Long Beach toughs” who drove through the night without headlights and kept running out of gas; and a final jaunt over “a very wild road” from Flagstaff to Kayenta in the car of an Indian mail carrier.

  By February 13, Everett was installed in Kayenta, Arizona, smack in the middle of the Navajo reservation. He would crisscross the Southwest continuously throughout the next ten months. But his first item of business was to buy a burro. That transaction marked the start of a complicated and ambivalent relationship that Everett would cultivate with Navajo men, women, and children through many weeks in 1931, 1932, and 1934.

  There was nothing timid about Everett’s initial dealings with the indigenes. Somehow, within days of arriving in Kayenta, he had appropriated a Navajo hogan for his living quarters. (One imagines the sixteen-year-old simply walking up to some family’s homestead and knocking on the door, as he had at Edward Weston’s house the year before.)

  Yet certain cultural criticisms had already crystallized in his mind. Within his first few days in Kayenta, he wrote to his parents:

  I have had a few disillusionments about Indians, here. For one thing the Navajos are scrupulously dishonest. When I leave my hogan for a while, I have to take all my posessions [sic] down to the store. Once I left a few pots and pans behind. When I came back they were outside in the mud.

  And to Waldo, he wrote:

  The Indians around here are very poor, having no income except from their sheep and the blankets they sell. A statistician here figured that the per capita income from sheep, including wool and hides, is $13.40 a year. The Navajos live in filth.

  In the end, Everett bought a burro for only six dollars. He promptly named the animal Everett, and began signing his letters with the pseudonym Lan Rameau. As others have pointed out, l’âne is French for “the donkey.” It also has, as a second meaning, “the ass” or “the idiot”—suggesting a self-deprecatory joke on Everett’s part. Rameau may have been a nod to the eighteenth-century composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, for since childhood Everett had been passionate about classical music.

  This was the first of three occasions on which the vagabond would reject his given name, assuming a temporary alias in its place. The transformation puzzled and apparently disturbed his family and friends. On March 1, Everett wrote to his parents and Waldo: “Please respect my brush name. It is hard to lead a dual existence.… How do you say it in French: ‘nomme de broushe,’ or what? I would like to know.… It’s not the perfect cognomen but I intend to stick by it.”

  In taking on a pseudonym, Everett consciously linked his discomfort with his name to a sense of a “dual existence.” Here is one of the earliest hints of Everett’s melancholy, brooding side, suggestive of a confusion of identity. By calling Lan Rameau a “brush name,” the sixteen-year-old made it clear that in the wilderness he felt himself to be an altogether different person from the one who chafed impatiently at home in Los Angeles.

  Everett elaborated in a letter to Bill Jacobs:

  As to my pen name, although it is really a brush name, I am still in turmoil, but I think that I will heroically stand firm in the face of all misunderstandings and mispronunciations. I�
�ll simply have to lead a dual existence.… The name is LAN RAMEAU, and the friend who helped me select it thought it was quite euphonic and distinctive. Personally, I felt that anything was better than Ruess.

  During his first weeks in Arizona, the weather was atrocious. “It has rained, snowed, hailed, or showered every night since I have been here,” he wrote his parents in an undated letter. “Now it is blowing an icy gale. Heavy, lead colored clouds are in the offing. On one side, the hills are still covered with snow.”

  Neither the weather nor the strangeness of reservation life daunted Everett. His first letters home in February and March 1931 brim with zest and eagerness. As he waited for the snow on the mesas to melt, he planned his initial jaunts: they were to be exploratory probes into nearby canyons in search of Anasazi ruins. If Everett’s fascination with Indian relics had first been sparked by the arrowheads he found in the forest surrounding Valparaiso, Indiana, now he anticipated far more ambitious quests into Southwestern prehistory. In Kayenta, he traded one of his watercolor paintings to the store clerk for “an ancient Indian bowl”—a decorated Anasazi pot.

  In Kayenta, Everett also made the acquaintance of the legendary trader, guide, and self-taught archaeologist John Wetherill, who had found more Anasazi ruins on the Navajo reservation than any other Anglo. “Wetherill is the man who discovered Mesa Verde,” Everett wrote Waldo on February 13, “and was in the party which discovered Rainbow Bridge. He is the best guide in the Southwest.” Sixty-four years old that February, Wetherill was glad to share his knowledge of the backcountry with the sixteen-year-old greenhorn.

  We know that Everett kept a diary in 1931. That book, alas, is lost, just like his diary from his previous journey in California. Once again we have only Everett’s letters to family and friends by which to retrace his path during his first ten months in the Southwest.