Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  Something to do with intimacy scared Everett, even while he fiercely craved it, and that tension lay at the core of the insatiable wandering loner he was fast becoming. It is tempting to trace the tension to the intrusive closeness Christopher and Stella had forced upon both their sons. Yet in his letters to his parents, from childhood through age twenty, Everett never once lashed back, never shouted “Leave me alone!” Nor did he ever cut off communication with them.

  In the same letter to Jacobs, Everett commented, “My grandmother wrote one solicitous letter. ‘When are you coming home?’ she asked.” It was a question not worth answering. To Jacobs, as to his family, Everett reveled instead in the open-air freedom and self-sufficiency of his new life, even while he seemed a bit surprised that he was capable of pulling it off:

  I throw my camps in all manner of places. I have slept under cedars, aspens, oaks, cottonwoods, pinyons, poplars, pines, maples (not the typical maple), and under the sky, clouded or starry. Right now I am under cedars [junipers], with pines all around. Cedar bark is excellent tinder.

  Desert rats have told me few camping secrets, but here and there I’ve gleaned some. I can take care of myself rather well now. Before I had the pack saddle, I used the squaw hitch, but now I throw a double diamond hitch. It wasn’t hard to learn.

  Everett spent the next five weeks in the Grand Canyon—two weeks on the South Rim, two weeks in the canyon depths, and a last week on the North Rim. The majesty of the landscape clearly held him in thrall, for he would return in future years to make further probes into the colossal chasm. Yet the letters home are strangely lacking in evocations of the beauty of the place. One such effort appears in a July 16 letter to Everett’s father:

  I followed obscure trails and revelled in the rugged grandeur of the crags, and in the mad, plunging glory of the Colorado river. Then one sunset I threw the pack on the burro again and took the long, steep uptrail. I traveled for several hours by starlight. A warm wind rushed down the side cañon, singing in the pinyons. Above—the blue night sky, powdered with stars. Beside—the rocks, breathing back to the air the stored up heat of the day. Below—the black void. Ahead—the burro, cautiously picking his way over the barely discernible trail. Behind—a moving white blotch that was Curly.

  The heat in the inner gorge in mid-July was debilitating. Everett claimed that the thermometer rose above 140 degrees Fahrenheit—an exaggeration, for the all-time record at Phantom Ranch, at the foot of the Bright Angel Trail, is 120 degrees. The average daily maximum on the river in July, however, is a searing 106.

  Everett cooled off by swimming in the turbulent Colorado, unintentionally “drinking gallons of the muddy water” as he did so. Then he lay on the sand in the shade of the suspension bridge across the river and watched damselflies flitting through the air. To get Pericles to cross the bridge, however, proved a strenuous challenge. The burro balked time and again, until, as Everett wrote to Jacobs, “I finally banged him across with an old shovel.” This initial difficulty in getting a pack animal to cross a major river, even on the secure span of a bridge, would be repeated on future outings. And it would eventually furnish a critical clue in the mystery of Everett’s disappearance in 1934.

  The reticence of Everett’s letters during his five weeks in the Grand Canyon (he writes more about Pericles and Curly than about his own doings) is curious. Only a single cryptic sentence in an August 1 letter to Bill Jacobs hints at an adventure of consequence: “Recently I had the most terrific physical experiences of my life, but recovery was rapid.” Recovery from what? An accident? A bad scare? Simple exhaustion?

  It would be understandable for Everett to minimize close calls and hardships in his letters to his family, but for Bill Jacobs’s ears, such ordeals ought to have made for juicy telling. By July, Christopher and Stella were getting even more worried about their wayward son. Once again they proposed an auto trip out to Arizona to meet him, apparently with the idea of bringing him back to Los Angeles, even if it meant bringing Pericles and Curly to California as well. And once again, in a letter to his father, Everett fended off their solicitude:

  You must be definite in any plans you make for me, as I am crossing to Utah before much longer. It would cost money to have the burro fed and cared for, and the city is no place for a dog. Again, could you spare the time for the trip—two days each way? Eight days altogether. Then too, you would probably have trouble with the car. Personally, I feel no craving for city life, unless it is for the more expensive aspects of it. But use your own judgment in the matter.

  Christopher and Stella took the hint and stayed at home.

  From the North Rim, Everett headed toward Zion National Park. It took him nine days to cover 130 trail miles—slow going for Everett, because each day he hunkered down in the shade through the hottest afternoon hours. “Zion Canyon is all I had hoped it would be,” he wrote to his family on August 18. But except for a single passage in a letter to Bill Jacobs a month later, Everett sent home no account of what he saw or did in the park. One paragraph in a letter written to Jacobs while he was still in Zion hints at a certain burnout: “I write by firelight. The crest of the sandstone cliffs is bathed in moonlight. I know it is beautiful, but I can’t feel the beauty.”

  But this blasé mood may have had a mundane cause. In Zion, Everett contracted a bad case of poison ivy. To Jacobs, he vividly described the rash’s torments:

  For six days I’ve been suffering from the semi annual poison ivy case—my sufferings are far from over. For two days, I couldn’t tell whether I was dead or alive. I writhed and twisted in the heat, with swarms of ants and flies crawling over me, while the poison oozed and crusted on my face and arms and back. I ate nothing—there was nothing to do but suffer philosophically.

  As he had the year before in California, Everett seems to have regarded poison ivy as a congenital predisposition to which he had the bad luck to be prone, not as an infection that could easily be avoided. He complained to Jacobs,

  You may remember that last year I took antitoxin injections and bounced happily off on my vacation—within a few days I was suffering it again with dull resignation. One chap says to use saltwater, another gasoline, another claims tomato juice is a sure cure. Nothing I used in times past alleviated the raging perceptibly.

  The only inkling of Everett’s awareness of the cause and effect of poison ivy emerges in a defiant line in the same letter: “I get it every time, but I refuse to be driven out of the woods.”

  The low mood brought on by the poison ivy nudged Everett toward some unusually deep reflections upon his own nature. In the August 27–28 letter to Jacobs appears one of the paragraphs most often quoted by latter-day analysts of Everett Ruess:

  My friends have been few because I’m a freakish person and few share my interests. My solitary tramps have been made alone because I couldn’t find anyone congenial—you know it’s better to go alone than with a person one wearies of soon. I’ve done things alone chiefly because I never found people who cared about the things I’ve cared for enough to suffer the attendant hardships. But a true companion halves the misery and doubles the joys.

  To those who want to see Everett as homosexual, the phrase “a freakish person” rings as a veiled admission of that orientation. Yet even if it implies nothing more than that Everett felt too different from others to kindle lasting friendships, one wonders just how hard he tried to find a “true companion.” In California the year before, he had made instant pals of Edward Weston’s teenage sons, and in Yosemite he had had no trouble finding hikers to share a trail with. But in Arizona and Utah in 1931, there is no indication that Everett invited anyone to set off into the backcountry with him.

  In any event, this letter marks the first unambiguous expression of the longing for a soul mate that would plague Everett throughout his short life. He never acknowledged the kind of terrible loneliness that the extraordinary solo journeys he was undertaking would have inflicted on a normal seventeen-year-old. But he would return no
w and again to the lament that he could not find that “true companion”—whether or not he meant lover, mentor, or partner in the wilderness.

  There is more, however, to this manifesto of a solitary aesthetic than meets the eye—or less, depending on how one parses it. In Vagabond, Rusho published only part of the letter to Bill Jacobs. The full text gives a personal context to Everett’s oft-quoted statement about being “a freakish person.”

  The paragraph that in Rusho’s book begins with “My friends have been few …” actually starts with a preceding sentence: “What’s all this poppycock about half formulated plans and half hearted invitations?” Then, after penning his manifesto for the solitary life, Everett complains,

  Then too I never could make anyone do anything for me; I’d feel like someone if you actually kept your promise; it was one, you know.

  How I looked forward to that Christmas trip with you—it fell thru. Always then you told me you’d certainly be with me this summer; you waived my doubts. Yet we both feel the undeniable lure of far places.

  But I know there are many drawbacks to my way of living & traveling—things you wouldn’t want to do. Don’t come unless you want to.

  Your letter was good; I couldn’t complain—but letters are poor substitutes for speech and companionship.

  It seems clear, then, that Jacobs had backed out of a promise to share the 1931 ramble through the Southwest—or at least the summer portion of it—with Everett. And a planned Christmas trip before that had failed to materialize, presumably because of Jacobs’s change of heart. “Don’t come unless you want to” may imply that Everett had renewed the invitation in mid-journey, asking Bill to join him somewhere near Zion.

  Worse, Jacobs had gone off on other trips with other friends. “Why do you say no news,” Everett went on, “tho you tell me nothing of your trips except that you took them; what sort of companions did you have? what were the ups and downs?”

  The August 27–28 letter thus serves in part as the wounded outcry of a jilted friend. The pain and jealousy Everett cannot hide imply nothing about overt homosexuality, but Bill Jacobs was the true companion with whom Everett had hoped to share his wandering quest. Yet the letter modulates away from anger, as Everett tries to repair the friendship with news of his own adventures. Toward the close, he quotes the first four lines of a poem he had been working on, written in a loose blank verse:

  I have been one who loved the wilderness—

  Swaggered and softly crept between the mountain peaks

  I listened long to the sea’s brave music;

  I sang my songs above the shriek of desert winds.

  Everett would continue to work on this poem—arguably the best he ever wrote—for another two years. It was published posthumously in 1935, under the title “Wilderness Song,” in the Los Angeles Daily News. Its penultimate stanza (quoted in the prologue to this book) has served ever since as a kind of autobiographical epitaph for Everett:

  Say that I starved; that I was lost and weary;

  That I was burned and blinded by the desert sun;

  Footsore, thirsty, sick with strange diseases;

  Lonely and wet and cold … but that I kept my dream!

  The remarkable August 27–28 letter to Jacobs, signed simply “Evert,” contains another important declaration: “I expect to resume my old name soon.”

  * * *

  Seven months into his 1931 expedition, recovering from the bout of poison ivy, worn out by the desert heat, and perhaps beginning to tire of the natural beauty he so ardently sought, Everett might have been expected to pack it in and head for home. But nothing could have been further from his thoughts. On August 28 he wrote his family, “I expect to continue my wanderings for a year more at least—my itinerary is planned, & I have work to do.” This letter, which Christopher and Stella must have read with dismay, also elaborates on Everett’s intention to revert to his given name: “Uncle Alfred was mistaken or trying to be ironic when he said I went back to the old name. However I expect to do so anyway very soon. I tire of the experimentation & entanglements, and after all there’s not much in a name.” He closed the letter, “Love from Evert.” Only on September 18, for the first time all year, did he write “Everett” at the bottom of a page of correspondence.

  From Zion, Everett planned to return to the Grand Canyon, then, as the days grew chillier, push on farther south. “As to what I’ll do when it’s cold,” he wrote his family on September 9, “I expect to spend the winter in the cactus country of southern Arizona. I’ve never seen that country, and it’s warmer there.” Everett’s resumption of his given name was tied up in some psychic way with the geography of his journey. “I think it would be better to use [Evert] Rulan until I am out of the Grand Canyon country,” he explained.

  The young man’s haughty assertions of independence were undercut by his need for regular shipments of food and money from his parents. On September 18, for instance, he wrote, “If you want to send food don’t send Eusey’s jell a teen—it tastes like glue. It is a long time since I’ve had cookies. The peanut butter, raisins, & prunes you sent were good.” The day before, “I cashed the welcome 5 dollar m.o. [money order]. Money doesn’t seem to go very far, tho. Soon I must buy new shirts, socks, and shoes.” Everett was aware that his parents’ own budget was stretched to the breaking point. On September 17 he sympathized, “I don’t understand how you scrape along now that Mrs. Ryall’s rent is gone.”

  The unabated affection in Everett’s letters to his parents does not ring of cynical manipulation, as if he were posing as a dutiful son in order to keep up the flow of his allowance. The love sounds genuine. One must chalk up Everett’s fending off his parents’ attempts to control his life at the same time as he pleaded for supplies and cash to the sense of entitlement in which he had basked since childhood. At his most selfish, he treated his parents almost as though they were patrons committed to supporting a budding artist through thick and thin. Thus: “If you wish to send things, you might send a bottle of India ink. The bottles it is sold in are not much good, for the corks always come out easily.” Or: “Some time in October you will receive some negatives of pictures of Curly, Pericles, & me. A hiker from New York took them. I wish you would make four prints of each, sending three of each to me.”

  Yet Everett did not even feign politeness as he rejected his parents’ attempts to bend his life’s path. Christopher and Stella were deeply disturbed that Everett showed no interest in going to college. Sometime that summer, they sent him a brochure for a junior college. On September 17, Everett wrote back,

  I studied the Junior College pamphlet, and I don’t feel enthusiastic. The place must be like a jail, with all the rules and regulations. What an anticlimax it would be after the free life. There was nothing in the art course that seemed worthwhile.

  At some point, Christopher and Stella also asked Everett if he would send home his diary so that they could read it. The sharing of diaries had been a mandatory family ritual since both Everett and Waldo were old enough to write. But now Everett responded, “Regarding the diary, I must dash your hopes. I’ve finished writing it, true, but I’m not done with it. It is too personal to be read by anyone but the author, in its present state.” (It is this 1931 diary that has long since gone missing, probably for good.)

  It took Everett eight days to reach the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, as he traced a different return path from the one he had followed heading out toward Zion in August. On September 30, writing to Bill Jacobs again, he announced his plan to “start down the hole,” cross the Colorado River, and make the five-thousand-foot ascent to the South Rim. On the North Rim, at an altitude of eight thousand feet, Everett sensed the changing of the season:

  Winter is close at hand; the maples are crimson, and flurries of yellow aspen leaves swirl about with each breeze. On many hillsides the yellow leaves have blackened, and the trees stand bare and silent. Soon the snows will be here, but I won’t.

  Such lyrical evocation
s of the countryside are increasingly rare in the letters Everett sent home from September on. It may be that he poured all his poetic energy into his diary. A single letter to Waldo quotes eight paragraphs from the diary—the only passages from his 1931 journal that have survived. And those sentences brim with the rhapsodic:

  Sunset made all the misery worth enduring. Far to the north and east stretched the purple mesas, with cloudbanks everywhere above them. Some were golden brown and vermillion [sic] where sunshafts pierced the low clouds. A rainbow glowed for a moment in the south. That was a promise.

  Clouds of all kinds and shapes arched overhead, stretching in long lines to the horizons. Some were like swirls of smoke. Then twilight—a rim of orange on the treeless western hills. The full moon appeared, rolling through the clouds.

  On the strength of paragraphs such as these, we can safely judge that, eight months into his 1931 expedition, Everett had not even begun to burn out on natural beauty.

  By the second week in October he was camped on the South Rim. Not since May 2 had he written a letter to Waldo: all the epistles home bore the salutation “Dear Father, Mother, and Waldo,” or simply “Dear Family.” On October 9, however, Everett sent two long letters to his brother. Along with the letters to Bill Jacobs, these are the most personal and heartfelt that Everett penned in 1931. The first one begins, “I was delighted to hear from you yesterday. I’d almost given you up—thought you were tired of me.” Apparently the fact that for months Waldo had not bothered to send a letter separate from the ones their parents had mailed had led Everett to fear an estrangement. Now he half-confides a secret in the first paragraph: “I would have replied yesterday, but I was expecting an important change which has not occurred. The season is changing—cold winds shriek ominously, and then there is meaningful silence. I expect change in my life too.”