It is striking how seldom Everett mentions painting or drawing in either his diary or his letters from 1932. In the comprehensive July 12 letter to Waldo, Everett admits, “I have not been able to paint for some time, but I am going to try some more before I admit defeat.”
A fog of depression, then, hung over Everett’s first four months in the Southwest in 1932. The traveling seemed to be reduced to a process of going through the motions. And every now and then, the leaden reportage of his daily doings in the diary was interrupted by a wail of existential anguish, as on May 22: “I often wish people meant something to one another, and one could find people to one’s taste.”
On May 23, near the small settlement of Young, Arizona, Everett made a deal with a local rancher to trade Pacer for two burros. He named his new charges Peggy and Wendy, though he later claimed that neither name really fit. Now Everett concocted a modus operandi he had not previously tried: he would ride Wendy, pack his belongings on Peggy, and connect the two animals with a leash. But his progress was thwarted by one snafu after another. The horse saddle, modified to fit a burro, was too big for Wendy and kept slipping off. Peggy stubbornly tugged on her leash, trying to head off in a different direction, thereby stopping Wendy in her tracks. And both burros balked at every stream crossing.
During the last weeks of May and into early June, Everett climbed north through pine forests toward the high escarpment of the Mogollon Rim, which he then followed east before dropping down to the town of Holbrook. His itinerary matched the routes of today’s state highways 288, 260, and 377. Even in 1932, an auto road covered this ground. “Half a dozen cars passed,” Everett noted on May 30, “and one tourist stopped and took my picture for me.”
How far from the true wilderness forays of the previous year was this dispirited trudge with recalcitrant burros! Everett was not even sure where he was headed, or why. During his down moments, the whole journey started to seem pointless. “Felt that the trip was foredoomed to failure,” he noted on May 31, “that I’d be overcome with melancholy if I visited the places I’ve seen before. Afraid to go home because that would be an admission of failure & I’d be ashamed to face Bill and Clark. [2 lines erased.]” The blank in the diary immediately preceded another cryptic complaint:
If only Sam would write to me about New York. I can’t yet believe that he has left me in the lurch. I felt distinctly different from other people, knew that I was a freak, in spite of Jean’s angry denial of it. Already I’ve drifted too far away from other people. I want to be different anyhow, I can’t help being different, but I get no joy from it, and all common joys are forbidden me.
At this remove, we have no idea who Sam or Jean was, or what they meant to Everett.
However obliquely or privately, in passages such as this Everett was slowly coming to terms with the destiny he felt forced upon him, which was to be a lifelong loner. A little more than a month later he would announce his fate in a triumphant postscript to Waldo, but now there was more gloom than gratification in the realization. To be a loner meant to be condemned to loneliness. On May 29, Everett’s diary recorded another anguished outburst:
I wish I had a companion or someone who was interested in me. Bill and Clark, however, would be worse than none. I would like to be influenced, taken in hand by someone, but I don’t think there is anyone in the world who knows enough to be able to advise me. I can’t find any ideal anywhere. So I am rather afraid of myself. Obscurantism.
During his slow burro march toward Holbrook, Everett was going through a dark night of the soul. But that ordeal would ultimately have a curative power. After Holbrook, Everett’s wandering regained purpose and even a modicum of joy, although the transports of 1932 would never match those of the previous year.
Since he was seldom alone for very long on the road to Holbrook, Everett began to strike up casual friendships among the local ranchers. Most of them were Mormons, who with characteristic hospitality offered the young man a place to stay and free meals. During the month of June, in fact, Everett spent more time sleeping in ranch houses and barns than he did camping out.
Frustrated by the tribulations of managing Peggy and Wendy, Everett changed his mind about burros and decided he wanted to buy or trade for a pair of horses before continuing his journey. From June 6 to 27, he lingered in and around Holbrook. At several different ranches he helped men break wild horses, castrate cattle, brand cows, build a shack, and other chores. Everett was thus getting an excellent apprenticeship as a cowboy, but he knew that was not his ultimate goal. The hard work seemed to justify the free room and board his new acquaintances offered the vagabond, but if one reads between the lines of the diary, it seems that Everett was essentially mooching off the generosity of the locals.
All this interplay with Arizona families, however, distracted the young man from his solitary woes. The diary abounds in pithy appraisals of these new friends. Of a drifter nicknamed Hot Cakes, Everett wrote, “[He] has an inferiority complex, I think, and he talks big in order to hide it.” Of another ranch hand, “Oscar is a small man, all muscle, with a turned up red nose. I like him the best of the bunch.”
Everett hung around Holbrook long enough to attend the town’s June 25 parade and rodeo, which culminated in a drunken brawl (a wide-eyed bystander, he recounted every blow and insult in his diary). He argued with a Mormon host about whether the Earth was only six thousand years old and had been created in six days. To humor the man, Everett attended church, where he rose and read out loud a favorite passage from the Book of Ruth (“Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God”). “On the whole, it was quite interesting,” Everett recorded in his diary, “and Mr. Crosby must have thot I behaved quite well for an unbeliever.”
Yet true companionship still eluded him. “I haven’t met anyone to talk to since Bill and Clark,” he lamented on June 22. “Yesterday I wrote them a good long letter, with any irrepressible superiority complex showing thru. Clark says I antagonize everyone and whoever learns to know me finally becomes disgusted. There may be some truth in that. I don’t try to please people I don’t respect.”
In keeping up a correspondence with the friends he had left behind in Roosevelt, Everett evidently was not willing to burn all the bridges between himself and Clark and Bill. Bill and Everett would in fact stay friends and trade letters through the rest of Everett’s life. Yet in Holbrook, he was still contemptuous of his unambitious pals. In that town he received several letters from his parents, who also sent money and a whole new package of books, including Mann’s The Magic Mountain. From Stella, he got news about Bill. “Mother wrote that Bill’s mother drove out to take him home,” he noted in his diary. “What a fuss about him. I suppose Bill and Clark went, because they certainly couldn’t do anything in this country.”
After much haggling in and around Holbrook, Everett secured two horses. There he abandoned Wendy and Peggy, without bothering to mention in his diary what happened to the burros, just as he had traded away Pacer near the town of Young without apparent regret. The first of the two horses, purchased from a rancher for six dollars, was “skinny as a rail, and twelve years old.” A local man colorfully disparaged this nag by telling Everett that “he wouldn’t give two hoots for the powder to blow my horse to hell.” It would be a prescient appraisal.
For the next several weeks, Everett called his horses Bay and Whitie, before renaming them Jonathan and Nuflo, respectively. By the end of June, he was restless to hit the trail. All the socializing and the indoor comfort had worn thin. On June 23 he wrote in his diary,
I will be glad when I am alone again. It is too much work for me to get along with other people. Yesterday I lay on the bed looking at the ceiling papered with ragged yellow newspapers, and thot of other ceilings I had looked at dismally. Trees and skies don’t give the same futile feeling.
Even before Holbrook, Everett’s spirits had started to take a turn upward. Camped near Zeniff
, a straggling Mormon community below the Mogollon Rim (a ghost town today, Zeniff is reduced to three crumbling adobe buildings), Everett recorded a gleam of hope on June 3:
Again I am in the desert—the desert that I know, red sand, cedars, great spaces, distant mesas, and behind, the blue of the Mogollons.
The fire flamed straight up, and for awhile, I was almost able to be happy in the present, rather than in anticipation.
* * *
On June 27, Everett made his getaway from Holbrook, heading northeast. Despite his fear that he would be “overcome with melancholy if I visited the places I’ve seen before,” he had decided to return to Canyon de Chelly, where he had had some of his most transcendent experiences in 1931.
Twenty miles north of Holbrook, Everett crossed the boundary of the Navajo reservation. Now the strangers whose paths he crossed were not Mormon ranchers, but Indians. As he had started to do the year before, Everett made an effort to befriend Navajos and to learn about their culture. Sharing their campfires, he unsqueamishly ate native food—coffee, mutton broiled over the fire, and naneskadi, or Navajo bread. One man agreed to teach Everett Navajo phrases. He dutifully recorded his lessons in his diary: “Chynn ya go—I want to eat.… Ado beg zduh ut si seh ut-t-ih ha day sha to—Don’t be afraid, little girl, I’m going,” and the like. The next day, Everett learned that the man had been pulling his leg, uttering nonsense syllables and proffering bogus translations, while his friends listened in silent amusement.
The xenophobia of some of the Navajos, Everett handled in stride. “They talk about me in Navajo,” he noted on July 7, “and I retaliate by speaking French.” On the reservation, Everett regularly sought out empty hogans in which to sleep—a practice that would have offended the natives, had they known about it. (Even though he carried a tent, he pitched it and slept in it only rarely.) On July 2, Everett unabashedly recorded in his diary how he had broken the lock on one hogan and forced his way inside. A week later he took apart a half-ruined hogan and burned its logs in his campfire. Such deeds shock the modern reader, but they were not uncommon in the 1930s. Everett’s thoughtless appropriation of Navajo dwellings can also be seen as stemming from his sense of entitlement, the same cockiness that allowed him to knock on Edward Weston’s door and introduce himself (as he would with other famous artists in 1933 and 1934).
Along the trail, after killing every rattlesnake he could find, Everett kept the rattles as souvenirs. Once that summer he horrified some Navajos by flaunting a newly killed rattlesnake. (In Diné mythology, the Great Snake is a supernatural being woven into the very geology of the landscape.) In his diary, after he showed the dead snake to some young men, he recorded their reaction: “They said I would die, and looked at the snake. They ran like little girls when I waved it at them.”
Everett’s ambivalence about Native Americans emerged in another set piece, as he sermonized in his diary about the limitations of Navajo culture:
I have been observing more and more fully that the Navajo owes everything he has to the white man. His food is mutton, bread, and coffee. All these were brought by the white man. [Sheep, to be precise, had been introduced to the Diné not by Anglos but by the Spanish.] His clothes are borrowed. All he has left is his language, ceremonies, and a few customs. In spite of all the things he did not have before, he seems a pitiful creature to me. Yet he is always ready to laugh and sing.
Yet tempering such pronouncements was Everett’s openness to individual Navajos. In Ganado, near the famous trading post established by John Lorenzo Hubbell in 1883 (the first Anglo trading post on the rez), Everett was invited to stay in the hogan of a Navajo who lived nearby. “His oldest daughter, Alice,” Everett wrote, “is the most beautiful Navajo girl I have ever seen.” During the next few days, Everett paid inordinate but shyly mute attention to Alice’s comings and goings.
Such an observation could be cited to argue that Everett’s orientation was firmly heterosexual. Yet only two days after meeting Alice, a strange episode involving a young Navajo named Lefty (Everett calls him “a boy”) with whom he had shared some ranch chores occurred.
At night he wanted to sleep with me, outside. He crawled under and snored irritatingly. Late at night the sky darkened, wind whistled, and a light shower moistened the air. We moved inside.
[The next morning] I managed to awaken but fell asleep again while Lefty was preparing breakfast. I had an ugly dream about him.
Even as his spirits gradually improved, Everett continued to suffer from the exhaustion that had debilitated him since setting out from Roosevelt two months before. His stupor was intensified by the desert heat of summer. And he had developed a new problem with his eyesight. On June 28 he wrote, “My eyes are wretched. They have been paining me severely. I couldn’t recognize my horses until I was upon them.” Two days later, “For hours I lay half dead on the sand under the pinion, feeling too weak to rise. My eyes burned when I read, and nothing seemed to give joy. Mentally I wrote my last letter.”
Despite the pain in his eyes, Everett voraciously read the books his parents had mailed him. In June and July his diary records the consumption of Mann’s The Magic Mountain (which alternately bored and enthralled him); the Arabian Nights; Shakespeare’s plays; Ibsen’s Ghosts; Emerson’s essays; a collection of letters from famous men (Everett singles out Mendelssohn, Wagner, Liszt, Jules Breton, and the sculptor-poet W. W. Story); an anthology called The Fifty Best Poems of America; a travel narrative about the Pacific by Frederick O’Brien; William Morris’s medieval novel A Dream of John Ball; Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”; George Bernard Shaw’s Socialism for Millionaires; a government report of a survey among Navajos; religious tracts the zealous Mormon Mr. Crosby had given him; and assorted newspapers and magazines he found in stores and homes along the way.
In terms of his own Southwest odyssey, the most interesting book Everett read that summer is one whose title and author he does not name. On July 12 his diary reports that he
read a book about the Navajo country & a boy who started in New Mexico, had money, good horses & equipment but was the grossest sort of tenderfoot, stayed on the highways for several months, met a friend in Santa Fe, then together they went up thru Frijoles to Mesa Verde & to the reservation. They were here several years ago when things were much wilder. There was hardly any trail to rainbow bridge—they picked their way very adventurously. They were always changing horses—trading one & paying 8 to 15 dollars to boot. They got to see the Indian dances & sand paintings, met all kinds of interesting people.
The book was Clyde Kluckhohn’s To the Foot of the Rainbow, today regarded as a Southwest classic. Despite Everett’s put-down of the “greenhorn” who was a rich kid and who overpaid for horses, Kluckhohn and Everett were kindred souls. (It is a pity they never met.) The book recounts a 2,500-mile ramble across the Southwest undertaken in 1925 by Kluckhohn, twenty years old at the time, and two buddies of the same age. Kluckhohn had the same appreciation for scenic beauty and the same curiosity about Indian cultures and prehistoric ruins that Everett did. He would go on to become a Harvard professor and the leading Navajo ethnographer of his era.
Despite his suffering and his loneliness, on the reservation Everett was reawakening to the magnificence of the landscape. On July 1, in the midst of a storm, Everett wrote in his diary, “The rain beat down steadily. I made a sketch and photographed a butte. The beauty of the wet desert was overpowering. I was not happy for there was no one with whom I could share it, but I thought how much better than to be in a school room with rain on the windows.”
On July 11, Everett reached Chinle. Renewing his friendship with some of the residents gave his morale another boost. There, at the gateway to Canyon de Chelly, he made a new resolve, writing in his diary, “I think I’ll extend my leave another year. I’ll get a couple of good horses and a good saddle.” At last, it seems, Everett had not only come to terms with his destiny as a loner, but had embraced it with passionate convict
ion. On July 12 in Chinle, he wrote five densely crowded pages to Waldo, summing up the first four months of his 1932 adventure. It is one of the longest and richest letters Everett ever sent to anyone. The epistle is penned in ink, but at the bottom of the last page he added a postscript in pencil:
I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wildernesses. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. After all the lone trail is best. I hope I’ll be able to buy good horses and a better saddle. I’ll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I’ll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.
This manifesto has become the most oft-quoted statement that Everett ever wrote. And in light of his subsequent disappearance, the sibylline final sentence has stood as a kind of epitaph for the vagabond for the last seventy-seven years.
* * *
Now, instead of wandering somewhat aimlessly, Everett had mapped out his destinations for the next few weeks. He would ride up both Canyon de Chelly and Canyon del Muerto, emerging at the headwaters of the latter branch, then cross the Lukachukai Mountains to arrive at Shiprock, New Mexico. Resupplying in that town in the northeast corner of the reservation, he would head farther north to expore Mesa Verde. In 1931 his looping forays had never taken him so far east. Except for the trip by train across the country at the age of nine, Everett had never before entered New Mexico or Colorado.
Riding up Canyon de Chelly, Everett was assailed by nostalgic memories of his 1931 jaunt.
I passed the sandspit where I shot the burro last year, and came to the fork of Monument Canyon and Upper Canyon de Chelly recognizing the spot where Pegasus had stuck in the quicksand. I saw my old campsite and remembered how I raised my cocoa to my lips and drank “to the long, long dead whose bones are there above me” (in the dwellings). I remembered how I fondled Curly, then a small puppy, and sang to the moon and the rising night wind.
Finding Everett Ruess Page 10