Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  Almost as soon as he arrived in Kayenta, Everett learned from a letter from his parents that a poster he had entered in a competition had won first prize, with an honorarium of twenty-five dollars. The money could not have come at a better time. On March 1, in a letter to his family, he detailed his purchases:

  I have spent $6 for a burro, $1 for a seamless sack, $2.50 for a Dutch oven, $2.00 for a Navajo woven cinch and some rope, $8 for a tarpaulin to keep out the wind, rain, and snow. I’ve spent as much again on food, but I have enough to last several weeks now. Bread is not sold in this country, so I have learned to bake squaw bread, corn bread, and biscuits in my Dutch oven. Yesterday the biscuits were perfect.

  Despite this boast of self-sufficiency, Everett was not too proud to plead for help from home (as he would throughout the next four years). “I would appreciate it,” he wrote, “if you sent some Swedish bread, peanut butter, pop, and Grape Nuts. They are unobtainable luxuries in this country.”

  Everett failed to keep the letters he received from family and friends while he rambled across the landscape, stopping at one remote post office after another to gather his mail. We have only faint echoes in his own letters by which to judge the tenor of his family’s reaction to his headlong flight. Christopher and Stella had always been loving and indulgent, but there is evidence that now they worried about their son’s safety. Apparently they planned to make their own trip to the Southwest to check up on Everett’s well-being, for on March 21 he deflected their parental anxiety with uneasy humor: “As for hunting for me with Dorinda [the family auto], I don’t believe you could get the car here. It would sink in the sand, rattle to pieces on the rocks, get stuck in a river bottom, slide off a cliff, or run out of gas miles from a service station.”

  Throughout his ten months in the outback in 1931, Everett wrote faithfully to his parents and Waldo, ending each letter with “Love to all” or “Love to everyone” or (while he was still cloaked in his pseudonym) “Love from Lan.” And he was still dependent on Christopher and Stella for packages of food and painting equipment. Yet there is no getting around the fact that this first really ambitious journey away from home was in part a flight from the family’s intrusive intimacy.

  Everett confided to Waldo his need for separation and privacy from their parents. “Of course our letters should be strictly personal,” he wrote to his brother. “Surely mother did not read that last letter, worded as it was? Also I wrote that these private letters should not be opened.” Because Waldo was still living at home at age twenty-one, this insistence on privacy was awkward. “You ask for a separate letter,” Everett wrote in another 1931 missive, “and I presume this is personal, as are your letters to me.”

  In 1931, of course, the country had not yet begun its painful crawl out of the Depression. Christopher had given up his vocation as a pastor and taken jobs with the Chautauqua Art Desk Company and later as a probation officer in order to support his family and his own ailing parents. Waldo was living at home to save money while he looked for a job. Everett’s vagabondage during a time of such widespread poverty, combined with his material dependence on his parents, hints at a streak of self-indulgence fueled by a sense of entitlement.

  Apparently he and Waldo quarreled over this matter. Worse, the younger brother had the gall to deride his sibling as a cop-out for adopting a conventional trade. During a brief period, Waldo worked as a secretary for the Fleischmann’s Yeast Company. On May 2, 1931, Everett scolded him in a long letter:

  I feel that you are worthy of a better position than the present one. The idea put forward by some, that all necessary work is honorable and beautiful because it must be done, means nothing to me. As far as I am concerned, your work is quite unnecessary, since I can keep very healthy without Fleischmann’s yeast.…

  I myself would sooner walk a whole day behind the burro than spend two hours on the street car.

  Waldo, in turn, must have criticized Everett’s unwillingness either to go to college or to look for a job, for in the same letter, Everett fires back:

  Somehow, I am very glad not to be home, where civilized life thrusts the thought of money upon one from all sides. With an adequate stock of provisions, I can forget the cursed stuff, or blessed stuff, for days and weeks at a time.

  Your censure was quite deserved in regard to providing my needs, but remember that I have asked for no money, and that most of the equipment I asked for was unprocurable here, and necessary to my life.

  “Equipment” such as Grape-Nuts and soda pop may indeed have seemed necessary to Everett’s life in Arizona. And before the year was out, he would ask his parents for a sizable sum of money, and receive it with scarcely a murmur on their part.

  * * *

  From his temporary base in Kayenta, Everett planned his first forays into the canyonlands. It was John Wetherill who turned the young man’s attention to Monument Valley and the Tsegi Canyon system. The trader even drew a sketch map for Everett to follow. Everett’s thirst for adventure had already focused on the dream of finding Anasazi ruins no other Anglos had ever seen. Forty years earlier, John Wetherill and his four brothers had been able to do that to their hearts’ content, but by the 1930s, all but the most minor and remote Anasazi sites had been discovered by government explorers, miners, pot hunters, and archaeologists. Still, Everett wrote Bill Jacobs on March 9:

  I am going to pack up my burro, and take a jaunt thru Monument Valley to a row of cliffs I know of, explore every box canyon, and discover some prehistoric cliff dwellings. Don’t laugh. Maybe you thought they were all discovered, but such is not the case.… Most of the country is untouched. Only the Navajos have been there, and they are superstitious. In the event that I find nothing, I shall do some painting and have some interesting camps.

  Thanks to an endless stream of classic Western movies, Monument Valley is famous today the world over for its stunning sandstone buttes and pinnacles, but in 1931 it was virtually unknown to tourists. A single rutted two-track dirt road wended its way through dunes and hills to reach the heart of the valley; barely navigable by sedan when dry, the road was impassable after rains. Navajos lived among the monumental geologic formations, as had the Anasazi before them, but the sole permanent Anglo presence was the trading post established by Harry Goulding in 1924. It would not be until John Ford shot the film Stagecoach in Monument Valley in 1938 that the place got pasted onto the tourist map. Only in 1958 did it become an official tribal park.

  Everett found Monument Valley all that he could handle. In a somewhat dispirited letter to his family, he summarized his visit: “I spent two days, sketching, reading, cooking, and camping. The coyotes howled close at night, and the burro wandered far.” Everett’s first attempt to probe a box canyon turned into a fiasco. High winds and a snowstorm made traveling miserable; a waterhole he had counted on was dried up; and Everett, the burro, alternately sat down and refused to budge or jostled his load until it shifted so badly that his owner had to stop and lash it back in place. After an overnight in the “gloomy, sunless place,” Everett the sixteen-year-old declared himself “very glad to get out of Gloom Canyon.” He did find some cliff dwellings, but, to his disappointment, “All the ruins I saw had been investigated before.”

  The burro that Everett had bought from a Navajo and named after himself was more than a beast of burden; it quickly became a companion. In some of his letters, Everett coyly characterizes the animal’s quirks:

  Everett, the burro, has been fattening out and becoming more lively and tractable. The first time I put a real pack on him, he ambled along for a mile and then lay down in the center of a path, but I think he is over that habit. When well treated he is a very droll creature, with his white nose and stubby ears. Every once in a while he snorts and shakes his head from side to side, ears flapping. He keeps turning his ears, individually too.

  But learning to train a pack animal by trial and error, with no lessons from experienced wranglers, was a troublesome business. Everett could not conceal
the exasperating failures of that first month on the trail:

  After sunset I kept going, trying to reach an old Navajo hogan of which I knew. Finally I tied the burro to a tree and floundered around in the darkness and sandhills until I found the hogan. Then I couldn’t find the burro. Then I couldn’t find the hogan, after locating Everett. After two more searches for each, I made camp with the burro. A flying spark burnt a hole in my packsack. My knife got lost, somehow.

  If such setbacks discouraged him, or made him wonder whether he was in over his head on this Southwest pilgrimage, Everett kept such thoughts to himself. “This country suits me nearly to perfection,” he wrote Bill Jacobs on March 9. Anticipating his destiny as a loner, he added, “The only things I miss are a loyal friend to share my delights and miseries, and good music.”

  On March 28, 1931, Everett turned seventeen. That day he opened a package of food his parents had mailed to Arizona. “What a birthday feast I had!” he exulted in a letter home.

  Everett’s second backcountry jaunt, into the maze of the Tsegi Canyon system, was a far greater challenge than his tour of Monument Valley. From eight-thousand-foot-high mesas about ten miles south of the Utah border, five separate streams run south, carving lordly canyons in the ruddy sandstone and leaving sheer six-hundred-foot cliffs riddled with spacious natural alcoves. The streams converge in a single waterway, the Tsegi (Navajo for “canyon”), before emerging from the labyrinth at Marsh Pass, a gentle saddle at 6,750 feet above sea level—now, as in 1931, the highest point on the nearly straight, seventy-mile-long road between Kayenta and Tuba City.

  The Tsegi was an Anasazi paradise. Two of the largest and most magnificent cliff dwellings in all of the Southwest, Keet Seel and Betatakin, are hidden away in distant branches of the canyon system. Small squares of land surrounding those ruins define Navajo National Monument today, and visitation at those prehistoric villages is tightly regulated. The rest of the Tsegi is Navajo land, and every branch contains smaller but equally stunning Anasazi cliff dwellings, all of them seldom visited even today. In 1931, the whole of the Tsegi was true wilderness.

  The Anglo discovery of Keet Seel came in 1895, by a party including John Wetherill and led by his older brother Richard. The Wetherills spent two seasons digging in the ruins, bringing back an immensely rich trove of artifacts, mummies, and skeletons that ultimately found their way to various museums. Betatakin, tucked away in a short side canyon, was first visited by Anglos only in 1909. The party that discovered it included a prominent archaeologist, Byron Cummings, and was guided by John Wetherill, who learned of the ruin’s existence from a Navajo living near the mouth of the Tsegi.

  It was natural, then, that John Wetherill would point Everett Ruess to one of the landscapes he most cherished. The Tsegi, moreover, lay only ten miles west of Wetherill’s trading post. In early April, Everett led his burro into the canyon system, camping out there for the better part of two weeks. His letters home do not rave about the beauty of the ruins or the scenery, but he was struck by the isolation of the place. “No one was in the valley there,” he wrote Bill Jacobs, “not even an Indian, though there was some Navajo stock.” At Keet Seel, Everett discovered, kept, and mailed home an artifact that he called “a mother of pearl ornament of value”—most likely a pendant made of shell traded to the Anasazi from the Pacific. More ghoulishly, he also scavenged and sent home “a part of a human jawbone with teeth.”

  Everett’s return to Kayenta triggered one of his dark funks. In an April 16 letter to Bill Jacobs that begins cheerily enough, he reaches a dispirited impasse:

  Somehow I don’t feel like writing now, or even talking. Both actions seem superfluous. If you were here, you might understand, but too much is incommunicable. If I were there—but that is unthinkable. You cannot understand what aeons and spaces are between us. I feel very different from the boy who left Hollywood two months ago.

  The year before, on his California pilgrimage, even in Big Sur or Yosemite, Everett was seldom alone for as long as a day at a time. It may be that in the Tsegi the loner Everett felt destined to become was born. The April letters to Bill Jacobs reveal a side of his character that he had almost never before let others see. On April 18, Everett wrote again to Jacobs:

  These days away from the city have been the happiest of my life, I believe. It has all been a beautiful dream, sometimes tranquil, sometimes fantastic, and with enough pain and tragedy to make the delights possible by contrast. But the pain too has been unreal.

  In this letter, for the first time, Everett articulates the link between solitude and pain, treating both as if they were his inevitable burden as an artist. That tension may have been at the heart of what he called his “dual existence.” As he wrote to Jacobs, “A love for everyone and everything has welled up, finding no outlet except in my art.”

  But tragedy? Surely the nuisances of burro management did not justify such a grandiose term. One wonders whether Everett was simply being melodramatic, dignifying an acute sense of loneliness with a literary conception of irrevocable harm.

  It is clear, however, that his journey into the Tsegi had a profound impact on Everett. Never before had he confronted such deep wilderness, much less traveled solo through it for days at a time. The experience changed him for good, as the letters he wrote home demonstrate. The April 18 letter to Bill Jacobs contains the first paragraph that stands by itself as a conscious performance, almost a prose poem. And that paragraph marks the first time that Everett lapsed into his strange usage of the perfect tense, as if he were looking back on a life that lay behind him:

  Music has been in my heart all the time, and poetry in my thoughts. Alone on the open desert, I have made up and sung songs of wild, poignant rejoicing and transcendent melancholy. The world has seemed more beautiful to me than ever before. I have loved the red rocks, the twisted trees, the red sand blowing in the wind, the low, sunny clouds crossing the sky, the shafts of moonlight on my bed at night.… I have been happy in my work, and I have exulted in my play. I have really lived.

  Yet in Everett’s heart, joy was inextricably tied up with a sense of doom. On May 2, he wrote to Waldo:

  I must pack my short life full of interesting events and creative activity. Philosophy and aesthetic contemplation are not enough. I intend to do everything possible to broaden my experiences and allow myself to reach the fullest development. Then, and before physical deterioration obtrudes, I shall go on some last wilderness trip, to a place I have known and loved. I shall not return.

  As if to certify his transformation, Everett now dropped the pseudonym he had adopted for the last three months and invented a new one. In the same letter to Waldo, he explained:

  Once again, I have changed my name, this time to Evert Rulan. It is not as euphonious or unusual as Lan Rameau, but to those who knew me formerly the name seemed an affectation. Evert Rulan can be spelled, pronounced, and remembered, and is fairly distinctive. I changed the donkey’s name to Pegasus.

  “Rulan” looks like an amalgam of “Ruess” and “Lan,” and of course “Evert” is much closer to “Everett” than “Lan Rameau” had been. The new pseudonym seems to signify a shift in Everett’s mind as he edged back toward acceptance of his given name and his true identity. By the middle of September 1931, he was once again signing his letters “Everett.” It would be more than three years before he assumed his third and last alter ego, giving himself an alias stranger and more ominous than either Lan Rameau or Evert Rulan.

  By May, Everett was ready to push on from his Kayenta base camp. In a letter to Waldo, he outlined a planned itinerary that was so ambitious, it has the stamp of fantasy about it:

  After the Grand Canyon, Kaibab and Zion, I shall go South for the winter, perhaps pausing in Mesa [Arizona], where a friend has relations. After working in the cactus country of southern Arizona, I may go northward thru New Mexico, Rocky Mt. Park, and Yellowstone to Glacier.… At all events I intend to spend a year or two in the open, working hard with my art. Then I sha
ll wish for city life again, and to see my old friends if they still exist.

  Such a journey would have covered, at a very minimum, 1,700 miles. Everett did not specify to Waldo whether he planned to cross such expanses on foot with his burro, or give up tramping for the hitchhiking that had propelled him through California the previous year.

  This long May 2 letter really amounts to a blueprint for the life Everett imagined himself leading:

  After having lived intensely in the city for a while (It may not be in Hollywood), I feel that I must go to some foreign country. Europe makes no appeal to me as it is too civilized. Possibly some unfrequented place in the South Seas. Australia holds little allure for me now. Alaska is too cold and Mexico is largely barren, as is most of S. America. Ecuador is an interesting place with its snow capped volcanoes, jungles, and varied topography. As to ways and means, that problem will be solved somehow.

  This worldly-wise appraisal of foreign lands by a teenager who had never been outside the United States may be tongue-in-cheek. But about his goal as an artist, Everett was dead serious.

  It is my intention to accomplish something very definite in Art. When I have a large collection of pictures, done as well as I can do them, then I am going to make a damn vicious stab at getting them exhibited and sold. If this fails, I’ll give them away to friends and those who might appreciate them.

  What is so striking about Everett’s life-plan is that he saw his wandering not as a distraction from the business of becoming an artist, but as a crucial prerequisite for it. Other artists and writers (one thinks of Gauguin in Tahiti, Sir Richard Burton in Africa and the Near East) shared the same kind of vision, linking travel to exotic lands with creativity itself, but to find that conviction so firmly fixed in a seventeen-year-old is rare indeed.