Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  At last Everett started painting again, and he spent hours copying Anasazi pictographs and petroglyphs. Every day he greeted Navajos living in the canyon, yet once more he unhesitatingly spent nights in disused hogans. And at least once, he again burned the logs of an old hogan in his campfire, for he records that an elderly Navajo woman “taunted” him for doing so. (The taunting was more likely a stern berating. Navajos will usually abandon a hogan after someone has died in it, and sometimes they will break down a wall “to let the spirit out” or even burn the structure. But for an Anglo to take apart a hogan just to feed his campfire would amount to a serious profanation.)

  Once more, Everett sought out “untouched” prehistoric ruins—ones that he hoped no one had visited since the Anasazi abandoned them in the thirteenth century. He made a daring climb toward a high cliff dwelling, but backed off fifty feet below it. “For a long time I looked at the dwelling and shuddered,” he wrote that evening in his diary. “Once I made as if to climb up, but the rock crumbled.… I might have climbed up the narrow crack of soft sandstone, but I knew I would be terrified at descending, with no place to put my feet and the rock crumbling in my hands.”

  In Canyon de Chelly, Everett seemed rejuvenated. At night, he “chanted” poetry out loud as he perused his anthology by flashlight. Reading Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” provoked a meditation on his own belief system:

  [Emerson] like many others I have read is horrified at the atheist, or rather, he pities him. Personally I seem to be an agnosticist. I don’t see how an intelligent person can believe anything, even determinism.… I can’t believe in a God just because other people do.… Prayer is foreign to my nature. I could not seriously attend church and worship.

  Although he did not need to say so in his diary, this declaration was an implicit rejection of his father’s faith, for Christopher had not only graduated from the Harvard Divinity School, but had served for years as a Unitarian minister.

  Digging in Anasazi ruins, Everett found arrowheads that he undoubtedly kept. Scraping away the floor of a subterranean kiva, he unearthed a yucca sandal. But on July 19 he recorded another onset of the pain afflicting his eyes: “I felt drunken. I reeled and swayed in the saddle and felt decidedly out of my usual nature. For some time I could hardly see.”

  Somewhere near Spider Rock, the striking 810-foot-tall, freestanding pinnacle, Everett turned around and headed back down Canyon de Chelly to its junction with its northern branch, Canyon del Muerto. Whether or not the pain in his eyes darkened his spirits, Everett plunged abruptly into the doldrums. All at once, the manifesto he had sent as a postscript to his July 12 letter to Waldo seemed hollow. After spending a whole afternoon sitting in a hogan reading Emerson and Ibsen, Everett wrote in his diary,

  I felt futile. It seems after all that a solitary life is not good. I wish I could experience a great love. I find that I cannot consider working, even in art. To be a real artist one must work incessantly, and I have not the vitality.… More and more I feel that I don’t belong in the world. I am losing contact with life. It seems useless to paint, when Nature is here, and I can’t paint anyway.

  Three days later his mood had not changed. “I think I have seen too much and known too much—” he wrote, “so much that it has put me in a dream from which I cannot waken and be like other people. I love beauty but have no longer the desire to recreate it.” In his funk, Everett once more pondered death, as he misquoted from memory two lines from Edwin Arlington Robinson: “ ‘Who goes too far to find his grave, / Mostly alone he goes.’ ”

  Such passages reveal how invaluable the surviving diaries are for anyone who wishes to comprehend the mind and soul of Everett Ruess. Nearly all the “famous” Ruess quotes—the ones reprinted as mottos on calendars and posters—come from the letters. The 1932 and 1933 diaries are far less deliberately poetic than the letters he sent home from the trail, but they are truer to his real experience. If we had only Everett’s 1932 letters by which to judge his second Southwest expedition, we would have almost no awareness of the doubt and despondency that plagued him throughout the journey.

  Several students of Ruess, combing the texts of both the diaries and the letters, have advanced the theory that he was bipolar—or, to use the term current in the 1930s, manic-depressive. Certainly the evidence is there of extreme and sudden mood swings. But to lay a psychiatric diagnosis on a person one has never met (pace Freud on Leonardo) is all too facile a guessing game. In the effort to understand Everett’s sexuality, it is more important to attend to all the nuances of his attraction to various friends and strangers than to label him as gay or bisexual. In the same way, the mood swings speak for themselves, and to deduce that Everett had a bipolar disorder does little or nothing to aid our understanding of this complicated and articulate young adventurer.

  Despite his gloom, Everett pushed on up Canyon del Muerto. On July 21 he finally renamed his horses. Bay became Jonathan “because he is so sweet tempered, meek and gentle,” wrote Everett; Whitie became Nuflo “after the mischievous old guardian of Rima in [W. H. Hudson’s] Green Mansions.” By a twist of fate, the renaming would have the effect of a malediction.

  Fifteen months earlier, after his April 1931 foray into the Tsegi, Everett had written to Bill Jacobs about suffering “enough pain and tragedy to make the delights possible by contrast,” but he never made clear what that pain and tragedy were. Now a real tragedy occurred.

  On July 22, at the head of del Muerto, Everett started his horses up the steep trail leading out of the canyon. That evening he vividly recorded what happened:

  It was so steep that I led Nuflo, and Jonathan had to be urged. Finally he fell or lay down at a rough spot about half way up. I thwacked him but he would not rise, so I unpacked him there.… When I pulled out the pack saddle, Jon slid off the trail, turned over three times on the downslope, and tottered to his feet. I led him up, put Nuflo’s saddle on him, packed Nuflo, and slowly descended.

  Instead of continuing his ascent out of the canyon, Everett wisely returned to his previous night’s camp. But then:

  I unloaded and led the horses on the bank where the grass was very sparse. I didn’t hobble Jonathan. He went around in circles and didn’t eat. I washed a cut on his leg and he stood for a while, then staggered sidewise and fell into a clump of cactus where he lay awhile. Then he got groggily to his feet, tottered again and collapsed. Then I prepared myself for the worst and began looking at my maps to see how near a railroad was. In a little while, I looked at Jonathan again, and he was dead—eyes glassy green, teeth showing, flies in his mouth.

  “So for me,” Everett sermonized that evening, “Canyon del Muerto is indeed the canyon of death—the end of the trail for gentle old Jonathan.”

  On the spot, Everett devised an unusual funerary rite. Carrying Jonathan’s saddle, he climbed up to the ruin where the year before he had discovered the Anasazi cradleboard. There he deposited the saddle. In his diary he wrote,

  I don’t think anyone will find the saddle. The baby board was where I left it last May, except that the hoops had fallen into the bin. My printing on the board—Evert Rulan etc., was almost obscured. The rain washed away my tracks. The saddle is well cached. The ghosts of the cliff dwellers will guard it.

  This is the only surviving admission that Everett ever made about carving or writing his name as a graffito in a prehistoric ruin. It was not the last time he would do so, however. (If, in subsequent years, some Navajo or pot hunter or archaeologist revisited the ruin and found the strange assemblage, with Everett’s 1931 alias inscribed on the cradleboard, he or she left no record of the discovery.)

  Jonathan’s body, of course, Everett had to leave in the grass where the horse had collapsed. “I suppose the Navajos will steal his shoes,” he noted in his diary.

  The remark about pulling out his maps to look for the nearest railroad seems to indicate that at the moment of Jonathan’s death, Everett realized the rest of his journey was doomed. But later in the same
diary entry, he mused, “I don’t think I’ll buy another horse. I haven’t the money and one will do. Having only Nuflo, I’ll care for him more solicitously.”

  Gamely, Everett coaxed the heavily laden horse up the steep trail out of Canyon del Muerto. At a trading post near the Navajo settlement of Tsaile, he bought supplies—not only cookies, peanut butter, and cereal, but cigarettes. The 1932 diary first reveals the fact that Everett regularly smoked on the trail. One entry a few days after his resupply makes no bones about the pleasures of tobacco. Ensconced in yet another hogan, “I smoked half a dozen cigarettes, watching the beautiful spirals of blue smoke, blowing rings, and looking at the fungus on the rafters.” Everett’s mother had voiced her concern about her son’s habit, for in his next letter to Stella, he minimized his usage: “No, I haven’t smoked regularly, just once in a few weeks.”

  Even as he struggled on, crossing the Lukachukai range, walking beside Nuflo more often than riding, Everett felt his weariness spread through his whole body. On July 23 he confessed, “[T]here was such a stiffness and soreness in my limbs as I had never known before. My shoulders seemed bruised and my thighs ached piercingly when we climbed.”

  On July 26, Everett crossed the state border into New Mexico. The town of Shiprock, the largest he would pass through since having left Holbrook, lay a mere twenty miles ahead. The day before, he had jotted down a cryptic testimony about his private feelings:

  I went swimming, made pop corn, and wrote a good letter to Bill. While there is life, there is hope. I still think at times that the future may hold happiness. I shall wait and see. I have waited three years already, and not in vain.

  Despite his falling-out with Bill and Clark in May, Everett was determined to preserve his friendship, at least with Bill. The “good letter” devoted several pages to recounting Everett’s adventures of the previous months, including a long passage (much of it copied verbatim from his diary) detailing Jonathan’s death and Everett’s caching of his saddle in the cliff dwelling. Yet toward the end, Everett complains about his old friend’s failure to keep up his end of the communication: “Now I expect some kind of reply from you—if it isn’t a better letter than the last one, I really won’t answer.”

  Yet Everett was unwilling to end on a sour note. Instead, he mooted the question of some later voyage with his pal. Everett closed,

  I might be back there [in Los Angeles] in a few months, tho I don’t know how I would get back. If I did, would we have a chance to hit the trail together into the Sierra wilds? Give me some advice, tell me my faults, my virtues, if any, open up your heart, and write lengthily if you love me.

  The tone here is quite different from the “Love and kisses, / Desperately yours” sign-off of Everett’s May 1931 letter to Jacobs. In some sense, Everett genuinely loved Bill, and the feeling may have been mutual. This says little or nothing, however, about any overtly homosexual relationship between the young men.

  From Chinle, Everett had announced in his letters home that his next post office would be Shiprock. But when he arrived in that flatland town on the banks of the San Juan River, he was disappointed to pick up only a single letter, from his mother. He wrote her back, offering a short account of Jonathan’s death. “I’m going on to Mesa Verde,” he vowed, “about 70 miles by highway and trail. There I expect to rest awhile, and if I can find a tourist who will take me to Los Angeles, with my luggage, I’ll go with him.”

  Jonathan’s death and Everett’s physical ailments had taken their toll. On July 27 he wrote, “My legs are weaker than ever. I’m filled with a violent desire to go home.” Yet he would stick it out in the Southwest for another month, and castigate himself for not staying longer and attempting more. On July 29 he wrote in his diary,

  I could not sleep for thinking of the future. I was sure I wanted to go on thru the Carrizos to Kayenta and Monument Valley, Betatakin, Keet Seel, Inscription House, Rainbow bridge, and Grand Canyon. I felt I’d never forgive myself if I went away without seeing more of the West.

  Such an itinerary would have effectively doubled the mileage of Everett’s 1932 wandering, as he would have looped back westward to revisit the places that had meant the most to him the year before, throwing in some new destinations (Rainbow Bridge, Inscription House) to boot.

  Instead, from Shiprock Everett headed north toward Mesa Verde. For almost twenty miles, he followed a highway, the old Route 666 (today’s U. S. Highway 491). At one point he hitched a ride in a truck driven by a Navajo. Nuflo was tied to the back of the vehicle. “It irked him,” Everett noted, “to be obliged to step along at a proper pace.” Other autos passed by as Everett walked or rode his horse.

  There were two comely girls who slowed their car to look at me. One, in a red and black shirt, looked quite nice. Then there was a Louisiana car, with a haughty young fellow with black mustache and sombrero and a longhaired black beauty beside him.

  On July 29, Everett crossed another state border and entered Colorado, at the same moment also leaving the Navajo reservation. At a trading post on the Mancos River, he left Highway 666, planning to head east up Mancos Canyon. The trader, however, professed to know nothing about this southern approach to Mesa Verde.

  Everett bought new supplies, including half a watermelon, and set off, following a faint trail that paralleled the river. He had gone only a quarter of a mile when the second disaster of his 1932 campaign occurred. Once again, his diary vividly recounts the fiasco.

  [T]he trail led along the edge of a bank in a quite narrow pass with the high bank above & below. I supposed it was passable, because it was there. Nuflo went ahead, scraped safely by, but around the turn, the ledge was narrower. There was nothing to do but go on, and Nuflo was within a few yards of safety when at a particularly narrow spot, his kyak [pack sack] pushed him out and he began to slip off. He lunged up again, but once more, the pack pushed him off. He clawed the ledge frantically, then fell down into the current of the muddy Mancos. It was deep near the bank, and he floundered about and wet his pack. When the kyaks were full of water, he could not lift them, and he floundered miserably and floated downstream several yards. He could not stand up.

  Petrified, Everett stood on the bank and yelled, “Oh, for God’s sake, for GOD’s sake.” Then he sprang into action, leaping into the river up to his waist. As he tried to pull the horse back onto the bank, a neck strap broke and the saddle and pack sacks fell off. Everett got Nuflo onto shore, tied him to a cottonwood, then went back into the river after the sodden gear. A precious blanket floated away. At last, hauling his equipment in pieces, Everett got the rest of it onto dry land. “I … heaved at the bedroll,” he later wrote. “It weighed like lead. I had to try a dozen times before I could get it on the bank.”

  Everything he owned was soaked through. His camera and flashlight were ruined. With a sense of desperation, Everett hung everything on a nearby fence, hoping to dry out his gear. To his further dismay, his precious sketch case was also soaked. He spread out the papers on which he had made his paintings and drawings, but, as he recorded, “Most of them are spoiled.” His food had turned to mush. Even the diary was soaked. (Later, in Los Angeles, after Everett disappeared, his mother wrote on the cover of the bound record book: “1932 diary. This fell into the River with all of Jonathan’s pack, in Canyon del Muerto.” Stella had confused the two horse catastrophes, but her pride at saving the diary in legible form was self-evident.)

  As he had started up Mancos canyon, Everett entered the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation. He was no longer in Navajo country. While he struggled with his gear, he wrote later, “Two women came by—smiled, but did not offer to help.”

  To his further dismay, it started to rain. Everett flung a tarp over the “wreckage,” left Nuflo tied to the tree, and hiked back to the trading post. There he bought cigarettes and candy and borrowed clothes, a rug, and a canvas to sleep in before returning to the debris of his camp. At the end of the long day, Everett wrote, “Tho I had not let it show, I really felt overwhelme
d by what had happened.”

  During the next few days, Everett struggled slowly up Mancos Canyon, searching for any of several tributary gorges that would lead up onto the high tabletop of Mesa Verde. His mood was dismal. Several times he got lost, but Utes more helpful than the two women who had smiled at his river predicament put him back on the right trails. “Nuflo was exasperating,” Everett wrote on July 31. “If I tried to lead him he pulled back like a burro, and if I drove him, he was constantly turning around and leaving the trail.”

  The next day, Everett recorded, “I am in no great rush to reach the park. It will mark the termination of my wanderings—my independence. I can’t even see the [cliff] dwellings independently. All tourists go in an auto caravan with a ranger.”

  On August 2, Everett entered the national park, visited the headquarters, and then adjourned to the group campground. He was disappointed to find not a single letter awaiting his arrival. The next day he wrote to his family, putting up a brave front:

  In spite of all the reverses, hardships, and difficulties, I find the wilderness trail very fascinating.… I think it would be cowardly to turn back at this stage of the game.… You have no idea how flabby and pale the city is, compared with the reality, the meaningful beauty, of the wilderness.

  But Mesa Verde, thronged with tourists, was not wilderness. And Everett was played out. During the next few days, as he joined those auto caravans to visit the famous ruins, he looked hard for a tourist from California who would be willing to drive him home.