Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  * * *

  After August 2, Everett stopped writing in his diary. The reason was not that he had lost interest in keeping a record, but simply that he had run out of pages. In the last six pages of his bound journal, Everett had transcribed quotations from famous poets. These passages had been entered earlier, perhaps even before he left Los Angeles.

  The quotations form a small anthology of some of the verses that meant much to Everett. The poets cited range from Stephen Vincent Benét to John Masefield, from Keats to Yeats, from Euripides to Baudelaire. Everett may have been quoting from memory, for in his transcription of parts of Swinburne’s “The Garden of Proserpine,” he inadvertently dropped the sixth line of the famous penultimate stanza:

  From too much love of living,

  From hope and fear set free,

  We thank with brief thanksgiving

  Whatever gods may be

  That no life lives for ever;

  That dead men rise up never;

  That even the weariest river

  Winds somewhere safe to sea.

  The diary situation is further clarified by a line in Everett’s August 3 letter to his family, asking them to mail not only books by Baudelaire and Blake but “a diary book (mine is full).” When the new diary did not arrive in time, Everett scrounged some loose pages on which he made highly telegraphic entries from August 3 to August 17 (those pages are folded and tucked inside the bound, river-soaked original journal, now housed in the Marriott Library at the University of Utah).

  However brief, those entries record a series of visits to Anasazi ruins. What Everett did with Nuflo during his two weeks in Mesa Verde is unclear, but he got to the ruins by riding with tourists in their automobiles, and he put up with the regimen of ranger-guided tours. By now Everett had given up camping as well, as he spent his nights in a ranger cabin.

  The entries read like a laundry list of ruins knocked off: “On to Kodak House.” “Jug House ruin.” “Over to No. 11. Couldn’t get in.” Occasionally, Everett elaborates: “Went to No. 16. Upper terrace well preserved—Fine doors. Skeleton ex. preserved. Fondled skull.” On August 11, Everett wrote, “JW 1890.” In some ruin, he had found the inscription of the Kayenta trader and self-taught archaeologist John Wetherill, engraved in the rock forty-one years before Wetherill would meet Everett and set him on his Anasazi path toward the Tsegi Canyon system.

  Despite the blasé tone of these entries, constrained as they are by a shortage of paper, Mesa Verde made a lasting impression on Everett. One of his best blockprints is a deft rendering of the four-story ruin called Square Tower House, as seen from the rim above.

  In Mesa Verde, Everett managed to get poison ivy again. He met a few strangers interesting enough to consider as friends, but backed away: “Herb very travelled—music, studied at Chi. Art In. [the Art Institute of Chicago]. Yet we don’t seem to strike a note.”

  What Everett did not find was a tourist willing to drive him to Los Angeles. After making a four-day excursion to some of the more remote western arms of the national park, Everett wrote a last letter home on August 25. Then he started hitchhiking. What happened to Nuflo, he did not bother to record.

  From Mesa Verde, Everett got a ride not all the way to Los Angeles, but only to Gallup, New Mexico. From there, as he wrote a friend seven months later, “I persuaded an unwilling chauffeur to take me as far as Williams [Arizona]. Then he wanted to drop me again, but helped by my magnetic personality I persuaded him that he was foolish not to take me to the [Grand] Canyon, which he finally did.”

  The great chasm briefly reawakened Everett’s wanderlust. He lingered long enough to make two round trips down five-thousand-foot trails to the Colorado River and back up to the South Rim. Both times he carried his own gear in a knapsack, rather than rent a burro from the Park Service. Somewhere in the canyon depths he killed his eighth rattlesnake of the summer—“a rare species found only in the Grand Canyon,” he bragged unabashedly.

  At last Everett got a ride to Kingman, Arizona, just thirty miles east of the Nevada border. From Kingman he mailed home most of his gear. But during the next few days he managed only to patch together short rides westward. “Stranded” (his word) in the blazing heat of Needles, California, Everett sent a telegram home pleading for rescue, “but the wire was never received,” he later wrote, “and I got a ride straight through, arriving in dense fog in a strange part of the city.”

  It was a fitting end to Everett’s star-crossed 1932 expedition. Looking back on that journey, Everett could not have failed to be disappointed by how far short his accomplishment had fallen from the standards he had set during his 1931 excursion. He had spent five months in the Southwest, not ten, and during some ten weeks of his time, he had effectively been marooned, first in Roosevelt, then in Holbrook. His 1932 journey had covered less than half the distance of his previous year’s pilgrimage, and relatively little of his traveling had taken him through true wilderness. Much of the time on the trail in 1932, Everett was plagued by exhaustion, by aching throughout his body, and by some kind of painful eye affliction. He never sorted out the logistical problems posed by a series of inadequate pack animals. And he had suffered four calamities—the schism with Bill and Clark, the beating and disappearance of his dog Curly, the death of Jonathan, and Nuflo’s plunge into the Mancos River.

  Back home, Everett was not at all sure what he wanted to do with his life. His parents had plans for their younger son, however, and they had nothing to do with further vagabondage in the outdoors.

  FOUR

  “I Go to Make My Destiny”

  IT WOULD BE ALMOST NINE MONTHS before Everett hit the trail again—the longest hiatus in his five years of wandering. Soon after arriving home in September 1932, he enrolled as a freshman at UCLA, almost certainly in response to pressure from his parents. Although he had done well in high school, Everett insisted in a letter to a California friend that “I got in [to college] by rather a fluke.”

  Since he did not keep a diary during the time he was anchored at home, and there was no reason to write letters to his family or to local friends such as Bill Jacobs, this nine-month span remains the haziest period in Everett’s life after the age of sixteen. A few scraps of his college essays survive. They suggest that academe brought out a stiff, dutiful formality in his prose, so different from the rhapsodic flights of his letters from the trail. One specimen: a single-page essay on the English Reformation, which earned Everett a D in History 5A. “There is nothing permanent in the world except change, which is inevitable and omnipresent,” Everett wrote, veering dangerously astray, before he closed the essay with a lame pronouncement: “If we believe in evolution, then we must believe that the English reformation was fated, and that Henry was only the tool, if a good tool, to bring it about.”

  Even when he chose a subject dear to his heart, as in another one-pager that he titled “Navajo Hardships,” the woodenness prevailed: “The Navajo seems to thrive on his meager diet, which consists of three staples, coffee, mutton, and naneskadi or squaw bread.”

  A single piece from his UCLA semester transcends the humdrum plod. It is titled “I Go to Make My Destiny,” and it closes with the kind of proud yet tragic manifesto that was becoming the stamp of Everett’s vision:

  Bitter pain is in store for me, but I shall bear it. Beauty beyond all power to convey shall be mine; I will search diligently for it. Death may await me; with vitality, impetuosity and confidence I will combat it.…

  My heart beats high, but my eyelids droop; tomorrow I will go. Adventure is for the adventurous. Life is a dream. I am young, and a fool; forgive me, and read on.

  In 1983, Bud Rusho transcribed parts or all of five letters written by Everett between September 1932 and March 1933. The originals of all five have since disappeared. Passages in these letters, however, sketchily document the young man’s moods and intentions during his nine months at home. In January, having completed only one semester, Everett dropped out of UCLA, putting college behind
him for good. To one friend, he dismissed the experience in the mock-pompous style he and Bill Jacobs had started to affect in 1931: “How little you know me to think that I could still be in the University! How could a lofty, unconquerable soul like mine remain imprisoned in that academic backwater, wherein all but the most docile wallow in a hopeless slough?” Less ironically, Everett added, “Even after climbing out of the maelstrom of college, I find that life is still awhirl, though no longer a swirl. I have, however, been on several Bacchic revels and musical orgies.”

  What those revels and orgies really amounted to, we have little idea today, but they may have consisted of nothing more than listening to records and attending the occasional concert. “Music means more to me than any other art, I think,” Everett wrote to one friend. Another letter opens, “I have just been listening to Cesar Franck’s Symphony in D Minor. I turned out all the lights and danced to it—then to Saint-Saens’ bacchanal in ‘Samson and Delilah,’ until everything whirred.”

  Over Christmas vacation, Everett visited Carmel and Monterey, renewing acquaintances he had forged in 1930, including his friendship with Edward Weston. On the seacoast, he tried to sketch, but the winter cold defeated his efforts: “[M]y fingers shiver and I have paper after paper covered with wavy, erratic lines which are hard to decipher.”

  One of the few memorable experiences Everett had had at UCLA was hearing T. S. Eliot give a poetry reading. And sometime in February, probably in Los Angeles, Everett attended a concert recital by Sergei Rachmaninoff, the great Russian composer and pianist, fifty-nine years old at the time but still at the peak of his performing powers. The event so moved Everett that he wrote a short essay (for himself, not UCLA) trying to render Rachmaninoff’s pianistic legerdemain in prose:

  His long tapering hands dart over the ivory like shadows shifting and interweaving under a tree as the wind blows through the leaves above. He hunches forward farther. One hand shifts to a single point and pounces on a key like a cat on a pixie. It is a large Persian cat, and having missed, it recoils and withdraws its paw in a flash, but not the slightest discomfiture is reflected in its face.

  The other hand is the pixie.

  On February 13, Everett wrote Rachmaninoff a letter. After fulsomely praising the Russian’s performance, he offered him his essay:

  I myself am a young artist.… I thought that you might be interested in the phantasy which you in your turn have inspired, so I am sending you what I wrote Monday night after your concert.

  With no tinge of hypocrisy,

  Everett Ruess.

  Rachmaninoff was a cooler genius than Edward Weston. If he in fact received Everett’s brash homage, he never bothered to respond to it.

  With college out of the question, still feeling no pressing need to land a real job, Everett turned his thoughts back to wandering. By the spring of 1933 he had decided not to return to Arizona and the canyons, but to make a second jaunt into the high country of California. “In a month or so when it is hot,” he wrote a friend on March 23, “I am going to shoulder my pack and go up into the Sierras, with some rice and oatmeal, a few books, paper, and paints. It will be good for me to be on the trail again.”

  Why California, when the true Southwest had proved so much more powerful for Everett? In a September 1932 letter, he elaborated, “After months in the desert, I long for the seacaves, the crashing breakers in the tunnels, the still, multi-colored lagoons, the jagged cliffs and ancient warrior cypresses.” Yet it would not be the coast of Big Sur to which Everett headed in late May 1933, but Sequoia National Forest.

  Above all, the restless young man needed to get away from home. About to turn nineteen, he was eager to cut loose from the family bonds that confined him to the house on North Kingsley Drive in Los Angeles. In his March 23 letter, Everett projected beyond the summer: “After the Sierras, I may stay in San Francisco and have the experience of another city.”

  But already he was concocting a campaign for 1934, an expedition on a grander scale than anything he had yet attempted: “Next year I expect to spend the whole year in the red wastes of the Navajo country, painting industriously.”

  * * *

  Waldo, having turned twenty-three, was still living with his parents. He had taken yet another stopgap job as a temporary stenographer in a Los Angeles office. That summer he would land a steadier post with a water company in San Bernardino, some fifty miles east of L.A., which required him to move out of the family house and rent a place of his own. On learning this news, Everett wrote in his diary, “It must have been a wrench for him to pull up stakes.”

  Some might chalk up the oddity of two ambitious brothers still living at home at the ages of nineteen and twenty-three to the familial closeness that Christopher and Stella had imposed on their sons since they were infants. More likely, however, it was simply a by-product of the Depression, for during all the years of Everett’s vagabondage, Christopher was struggling to make ends meet for the whole family.

  Certainly Waldo had demonstrated plenty of footloose independence long before the age of twenty-three. During the two summers when he was twelve and fourteen, he had worked on a ranch in Montana, far from the family’s residence at that time on the East Coast. (Waldo’s ranch idylls filled the much younger Everett with envy.) At only sixteen, Waldo had gone off to Antioch for college, though he failed to graduate. One reason may have been that his restless itch to see the world led him to interrupt his schooling as he cadged a job as a deckhand on the transatlantic liner Leviathan. To get hired, he had to fudge his age by four years, claiming a birth date of 1905, not his actual 1909.

  Only eighteen months after Everett set off for the Sierra Nevada, moreover, Waldo would take a job that uprooted him from California and transplanted him to China, where he would linger contentedly for years, even while Christopher and Stella pleaded with him to come home.

  There is no evidence that Everett ever tried to land a steady job. In a UCLA essay, he sneered like a Nietzschean Übermensch,

  Work is a malevolent goddess, made impossibly conceited by unlimited and untempered flattery.…

  When I am bowled over and trampled upon by the contemptible fools who rush madly to cast themselves upon her pyre, my face flushes to the roots of my hair, but I do not look back to see the evil leer in the eyes of the thwarted goddess as I pick myself up, flick decorously at my smirched clothes, and thread my way past the pitiable throngs swarming to her sacrificial altar.

  A sense of entitlement unmistakably runs through such grandiose pronouncements. Yet at the same time, on the trail Everett strove to be as frugal as possible, and to earn enough money by selling his paintings and hiring on for short-term jobs (chopping wood, rounding up cattle, packing for tourists with his burros, and the like) to get out from under the burden of accepting handouts from his parents.

  Sometime shortly after his 1931 expedition, Everett wrote down two columns accounting for his profit and loss during the ten-month ramble. “Earned income” began with the twenty-five-dollar poster prize he had won, and included such minutiae as “Posing Pericles … $.20” and “Burro’s load of wood; Roosevelt … $1.00.” The column totaled $76.50. On a separate page, headed “Expenditures, other than for food,” Everett confessed not only to such necessities as buying his burros, but also “Shoe repair … $2.00,” “Haircut … $.50,” and “Telegram … $.65.” Significantly, Everett failed to add up this column. Had he done so, he would have arrived at a total expenditure of $62.50. He might then have prided himself on coming out fourteen bucks in the black for his ten-month odyssey, except that he knew that the cost of food had plunged him deep into the red. And on a third page, in a spidery hand so cramped it breathes embarrassment, he noted:

  Unearned Income

  Dee’s gift 2.00

  Bill’s 1.00

  Parents 53.

  5

  10

  71

  15

  There was no getting around the truth. Everett’s campaign to become a self
-sufficient itinerant artist had to be bankrolled by Christopher and Stella.

  The letters home from Sequoia and the Sierras during the summer of 1933 not only dutifully thank his parents for a steady stream of “stipends,” but make many a request for goods and books to be mailed as soon as possible. Thus on June 16, only three weeks into his journey:

  I received the note from father and one from mother, also a letter from Waldo and the 5 dollar order from father.… I find that my shoes are wearing out, and I am forced to ask you to send me my boots.… In the same package I wish you would send my can of Viscol, which was on the back porch, a bottle of India ink, a few pencils for writing … an old pair of sunglasses for the snow (gray or blue), if you have an extra pair, and “Casuals of the Sea,” a Modern Library book on my shelf in the closet. After you’ve sent them, you might send what is left of my allowance, because if I leave [Sequoia National Forest] before July, I shall need it to outfit myself.

  From Everett’s four-and-a-half-month exploration of the Sierra Nevada in 1933, only a handful of letters to family and friends survive. It would be hard to trace the journey of his body and soul that summer and early autumn, but for the fact that his 1933 diary is intact. That journal is so different from the one he kept in 1932 that it seems as though the author has been magically transformed. Everett made an entry every day between May 27 and October 12, and most of those entries are substantial. Although he records down moods and self-doubts, the general tone of the diary is hearty and exuberant. There is scarcely a vestige of the exhaustion and despair that haunted him through his 1932 traverse of the Southwest.

  That his parents had worried about his psychological state during his nine months at home is revealed in the closing lines of one letter home: “No, I am in no danger of a nervous breakdown at present. How about you?”