Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  Meanwhile, Everett had gained a new companion. Somewhere near Kayenta in April, he had adopted a “rez dog”—a mongrel, probably abused and abandoned, of the sort that hung around trading posts scrounging for scraps of food from strangers. “I found him last night, lost and squealing for help,” Everett wrote to Waldo on April 19.

  All the longing for friendship that had gnawed away at Everett during his solitary canyon jaunts was now directed toward the dog. As he wrote to his brother:

  He is a little roly poly puppy with fluffy white fur, and blue brown patches on his head and near his tail. His eyes are blue, and his nose is short.…

  I haven’t yet decided about his name, but may call him Curly, because of his tail. When he is large enough, I am going to train him to go behind the burro, occasionally nipping the donkey’s heels, so that we shall be able to go faster.

  Curly would be Everett’s constant companion through the next thirteen months. Rather than nipping at the burro’s heels, the pup learned to ride on its back, comfortably seated between the saddlebags. After Everett finished his 1931 ramble through the Southwest, he would take Curly home to Los Angeles with him, then back to Arizona in March 1932.

  As he left Kayenta in early May, Everett set off to the southeast toward Canyon de Chelly. The great twin-forked sandstone labyrinth at the head of Chinle Wash, as John Wetherill no doubt told Everett, was full of Anasazi ruins, some of them, including Antelope House, White House, and Mummy Cave, as spectacular as any in Arizona. Canyon de Chelly was also one of the most sacred places in the Navajo universe.

  Only a month before Everett set out, on April 1, 1931, President Herbert Hoover had declared Canyon de Chelly a national monument—in celebration of the Anasazi ruins, not of the Navajo presence. (The people who lived in the canyon were never consulted about the governmental decree.) If Everett was aware that the place had just been made a national monument, he did not mention the fact in his letters. Eighty years after Hoover’s fiat, Canyon de Chelly remains unique in the National Park System, the only park or monument devoted to prehistoric ruins but inhabited solely by Native Americans who endure the uneasy compromise of leading their private lives while tourists tramp and truck-ride through their backyards.

  It took Everett four days to cover the seventy miles from Kayenta to the ramshackle town of Chinle, at the mouth of the canyon system. His first several days there served to sour his feelings about Navajos. The poverty of the town struck him forcefully, as he tried unsuccessfully to snag even the most menial temporary job to boost his meager funds. But the prejudices of his privileged upbringing trumped his compassion. On May 10, he wrote to Bill Jacobs:

  The Indians are not very lovable here. This morning, when I looked for my burro, I found that his bell and tie rope had been stolen (from his neck). Peg[asus] had evidently been mistreated, as his legs were skinned.… Experienced Indian traders say that a Navajo is your friend only as long as you give to him. Certainly none of them would go to church if the missionaries did not give them food and clothes.

  Once launched in this vein, Everett vented his pent-up disdain:

  The Navajos do not help one another. If one Indian is trying to corrall a herd of horses, and they start to escape past another Indian, the latter will stir neither hand nor foot, but will only laugh. When a Navajo begins to be helpless and decrepit, the others cease to have anything to do with him. The government used to give such Indians a few rations once a week, but now times are hard and they only get grub once a month. In consequence they go to all the white people and beg.

  Since its first publication by Bud Rusho in A Vagabond for Beauty in 1983, this May 10 letter has triggered an endless stream of speculation, for Everett signed it

  Love and kisses,

  Desperately yours,

  Evert.

  Amateur psychologists have seized upon this scrap of verbiage to buttress their arguments that Everett was gay, or at least bisexual. But it seems far more likely that the sign-off was mere badinage between long-time buddies, as Everett parodied the style of teenage love letters.

  Everett spent nine days in Canyon del Muerto, the system’s northern branch, and three in Canyon de Chelly proper. Exploring Anasazi ruins was his chief objective, painting with watercolors his main diversion. Upon his return to Chinle, he bragged in a letter to Bill Jacobs, “Saw a goodly portion of the 1200 cliff dwellings, & made half a dozen paintings.” (There are actually even more than 1,200 Anasazi sites in Canyon de Chelly, but in a mere twelve days no mortal could have seen more than a small fraction of them.) “Many of the ruins are well nigh inaccessible,” Everett added, detailing the kinds of risks he was willing to take to get into a remote prehistoric site: “I made a foolhardy ascent to one safely situated dwelling. Part of the time I had to snake my way along a horizontal cleft with half my body hanging out over the sheer precipice.”

  To his disappointment, Everett saw that the ruin “had already been rifled” by previous pot hunters (or archaeologists). Even so, it was here that he made the finest discovery yet of his short career as a wilderness sleuth:

  One room, however, was rocked shut, & on opening it, I thot for a moment I saw a cliff dweller in his last resting place. But the blankets, tho mouldering with age, were factory made, & a Navajo baby was buried therein. Odd, because the Navajos are superstitious about the Moquis [Anasazi]. However, in sifting dirt in a corner, I found a cliff dweller’s necklace, a thousand or so yrs. old. About 250 beads, 8 bone pendants, 2 turquoise beads, & one pendant of green turquoise.

  Odd indeed. As Everett had learned, Navajos generally steer well clear of prehistoric ruins, for they believe that places of the dead are full of physical and spiritual danger. Although not unheard-of, a Navajo burial in an Anasazi ruin was a rare phenomenon, bespeaking some shamanistic ritual that an Anglo latecomer could only guess at.

  Everett kept the necklace and later mailed it home. It was, as he had written in the poem he had composed at age thirteen, “a very precious treasure find,” one he remained proud of throughout the rest of his short life.

  In another Anasazi ruin nearby, Everett found a baby’s cradleboard. This relic he left in place. Some fourteen months later he would return to the site, under very strange circumstances.

  The twelve-day journey into the sandstone labyrinth was not without its tribulations. Three times Pegasus got stuck in quicksand. Another debacle was caused by a burro that was a resident of the canyon. Everett solved it with the shotgun he had carried throughout his 1931 journey so far, but which he had almost mailed home as unnecessary. The only use he had made of it before entering Canyon de Chelly was to kill a chipmunk that turned out to be “too small to eat.”

  In the May 23 letter to Bill Jacobs, Everett recounted the drama with the local burro as quixotic comedy:

  Au printemps [in the spring], a young burro’s fancy seriously swings to thots of homosexual love. My burro is old & virtuous, but was handicapped by the pack, which he swung under him, then dented both canteens, & dragged about till it came off. Then the white ass pursued him about the country while Pegasus kicked constantly & ineffectively, only drawing blood once. I wanted to continue my way, but tho I pelted the ass with stones, he didn’t seem to mind. Then I peiced [sic] the old Stevens together, loaded it with 7 1/2, & almost shot off the animals [sic] anus. But the next day, when I repassed, he came for more trouble, & I gave it to him in the legs.

  Back in Chinle, Everett managed to sell one of his paintings for a dollar. In the letter to Jacobs, Everett narrates the transaction in the arch, worldly-wise tone that seems to have been the default mode of communication between the teenage friends. But the scene reverberates with an ambivalence about relationships that had already become part of Everett’s makeup.

  Pretty soon I can start in as a columnist giving advice about how to be happy in love. Pretending interest in my pictures, the doctor’s wife enticed me to her home & spent almost 4 solid hours this aft. telling me about her troubles. Her husband, 43,
is going with a young nurse, & she’s disconsolate. All about her little boy that died & how she’s getting estranged from her husband. She couldn’t decide whether to go away or stick it out.… Another of the tragedies of life.

  Was the doctor’s wife flirting with Everett? If so, was he interested? This encounter may have been another of those half-glimpsed possibilities with women, like the lakeside invitation to dinner by a woman friend of his family camping alone in Yosemite the previous summer.

  On the same day that he wrote to Jacobs, Everett mailed a far less personal letter to his parents and Waldo. The jaunty note amounts to a plea for financial support. Ever solicitous, Christopher and Stella had mailed their son a package containing groceries and cash, which he opened upon his return to Chinle. Everett expressed surprise at such parental generosity, especially when, as he wrote back, “the financial situation is so pitiful at home.” One item in the package delighted him: “Secretly, I had wished for puppy biscuits, but never dreamed you’d be thoughtful enough to send them.”

  Yet Everett was still strapped for funds to continue his journey. He had long since spent the twenty-five dollars in prize money he had won in the poster competition. He had tried to wangle odd jobs, but “All attempts to find work have failed. Hard times prevail [in Chinle] as elsewhere.” As if embarrassed by having to beg for an allowance, Everett sketched out a mock-serious budget of his living expenses. Opposite such items as “rent,” “electricity,” and “telephone,” he proudly entered “nothing.” Likewise for “burro insurance” and “doctor bills.” Totaling up the column, he wrote “usually under $20.”

  There is no question that Everett was practicing an extremely frugal existence. But the odd one-dollar sale of a painting was not going to tide him through the months of further ramblings he still craved. In the May 23 letter to his parents, he announced his next destination: “the Hopi country and Grand Canyon—about 200 miles distant.” As the crow flies, the three Hopi mesas lay only about sixty-five miles west of Canyon de Chelly. But the nearest rim of the Grand Canyon was another seventy-five miles farther west. Two hundred miles was a reasonable guess as to how far Everett would have to travel on foot. And the country between Canyon de Chelly and the Grand Canyon was some of the starkest in all the Southwest.

  Everett did not write home again until June 8, a little more than two weeks later. In the interim, he made his way to the Hopi mesas, which on this first visit disappointed him (he would later change his mind about those ancient villages). “The pueblo of Walpi was rather a disillusionment,” he reported to his family. “There is an element of incongruity in the juxtaposition of old stonework and fences made of bedsteads.” Oraibi, which vies with Walpi for the claim of being the oldest continuously inhabited town in the United States, was also a letdown. Everett’s only comment: “The dust and heat were extreme.”

  The truth of the matter was that on this trudge across the Arizona badlands during the scorching days of early June, Everett got into serious trouble. On June 7, somewhere near the outpost of Cameron, a pair of teenage boys driving a pickup south toward Flagstaff encountered the loner with his burro and his dog. One of them, Pat Jenks, nineteeen at the time, never forgot this chance meeting. In 2009, at the age of ninety-seven, he recounted it to a Tucson newspaper reporter. Jenks and his friend Tad Nichols were surprised to see “a boy hunched over without a cap to protect him. He looked forlorn and he looked very sad.

  “We stopped the car,” Jenks went on, “got out and talked to him. He told us who he was. He was discouraged because he hadn’t been able to sell his woodblocks.

  “We asked him, ‘You want a drink of water?’ He misunderstood. Handed us his canteen—it was almost used up.

  “I said to Tad, ‘We’re not leaving him out in the desert this way. We can’t do that.’ ” The boys tied Everett’s gear to the roof, unloaded the back of the pickup, and managed to coax Pegasus onto the flatbed. They drove on to Jenks’s family’s Deerwater Ranch, west of Flagstaff. “I guess he stayed about a month,” Jenks recalled in 2009. (The actual stay, according to Everett’s letters, was less than two weeks, but ranch life among the cool pines and aspens at eight thousand feet on the slopes of the San Francisco Peaks served to rejuvenate a badly depleted youth.)

  In his June 8 letters to his family and to Bill Jacobs, Everett completely played down his semi-rescue by the boys with the pickup. To Jacobs he wrote,

  [W]hen I was at the Little Colorado river yesterday, about to turn westward [toward the Grand Canyon], two boys in a light Ford truck stopped to talk. They were very much interested in what I was doing. One of them wanted to buy my picture of a cliff dwelling, but he didn’t have the money, of course. Suddenly he decided to take me, my burro, and Curly to a ranch of his in the Coconino forest in the San Francisco peaks. I didn’t think it feasible, but the three of us lengthily shunted the donkey on, after much maneuvering.

  In Everett’s telling, this change in his plans was simply an unplanned lark, a chance to make new friends and to explore yet another corner of the country. But in the same letter, he admitted that his burro was in bad shape: “Peg is old and broken down, and his broken leg scrapes the other and bleeds. Tho I gave him a couple of days rest, his back is sore. He is really only half a burro.” How the animal broke its leg, Everett never explained—much less why he had tried to push on with a crippled beast of burden.

  More vaguely, Everett admitted to Jacobs, “A host of misadventures have occurred, and while they were very unpleasant at the time of happening, I don’t regret one of them now.” In the letter he wrote the same day to his family, Everett did not even hint at such “misadventures,” nor did he mention the maimed and worn-out condition of his burro.

  At the Deerwater Ranch, Everett chipped in with the chores of cutting down aspen trees and building fences. He also hiked up some of the peaks that towered to the east. Six months later, back home in Los Angeles, Everett wrote a thank-you note to Pat Jenks, as he conjured up the delights of his recuperative stay at the ranch. He spent hours, he remembered, “lying in the long, cool grass or on a flat-topped rock, looking up at the exquisitely curved, cleanly smooth aspen limbs, watching the slow clouds go by.”

  Before he left, Everett gave Jenks one of his paintings, a canyon landscape. The two young men corresponded for the next three years, and after Everett’s disappearance, Jenks stayed in contact with his family. In 2009, the old man still had Everett’s watercolor painting hung on his wall.

  Still bent on exploring the Grand Canyon, Everett headed north from the Deerwater Ranch around June 20. En route, he stopped for six days at a sheep camp, where he earned a bit of cash by chopping wood and watering and branding lambs. The camp was full of “interesting characters,” as well as an abundance of burros. Eventually Everett traded his shotgun for a fresh burro, which he named Pericles, or Perry for short. To Bill Jacobs he wrote, “The new burro, though older than Pegasus (about 25), has four sound legs, a strong back, and is far handsomer.… Pegasus was left behind, free to kick his heels as he listed.”

  By June 30, Everett was camped on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. From Chinle he had walked, by his own reckoning, three hundred miles to get there. The whole of his 1930 ramble up the California coast to Yosemite had lasted two months. Now Everett was almost five months into his far more ambitious peregrination across the Southwest. Despite his trials and setbacks, and his poverty—“My total monetary wealth is 4 cents,” he wrote Jacobs, only half-facetiously—Everett had not the slightest urge to head for home. He would stay on the trail, in fact, for another five and a half months.

  * * *

  The adventure Everett had been living since early February had changed and shaped his character. In June 1931 he was still only seventeen years old. The surviving letters that he periodically mailed from wayside post offices give us the only window into Everett’s personal development during that year, but they are full of potent hints.

  By the end of June, the wanderer was still signi
ng himself Evert Rulan. The notion of a “dual existence” was all tied up with Everett’s quest to understand himself. In his mind, that duality had much to do with the difficulty of intimacy with others.

  By 1931, apparently, Bill Jacobs was Everett’s best friend, replacing Waldo as his closest confidant. The letters to Jacobs are deeper, more private, and more confessional than the missives he headed “Dear Father, Mother, and Waldo” or simply “Dear Family.” The bond between the two adolescents was a strong friendship bordering on a kind of love. But to express that affection, Everett took refuge in the mannerisms of boys feigning learned pomposities with fancy vocabularies. Lapsing into this mannered style, Everett produced some truly clunky sentences. From the June 30 letter to Jacobs: “Not having enjoyed a college course in psychology, I surmise from your writings that you feel rather belabored by circumstance, and, unable to strike back, have striven, in a small way, to bolster up your ego by laying bare to me my frailties.” It is not hard to read between the lines, however, to see the teasing fondness beneath the put-down. In a sense, the banter between Everett and Bill was not unlike that of athletes trading locker-room insults.

  In the June 30 letter, Everett admits that he is writing regularly to other friends.

  You inquire … about my other correspondants [sic].… Aside from my parents, three “fortunates” are blessed by my letters. One is five years your senior, the other four years younger than you. Of the three, you are by far the most prompt in replying. By all means hold your place.

  It seems weird that Everett did not identify the other two correspondents by name. Today we have no idea who they were. But the tenor of Everett’s coy admission is akin to that of a man taunting his lover with the threat of unspecified rivals.