Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  Everett launched his 1933 journey by getting Waldo to drive him from Los Angeles to the southern portal of Sequoia National Forest. And Waldo brought along his girlfriend. “Betty and Waldo necked at fifty per,” Everett noted in his diary, but added, “Betty seems a good sport, no matter what she does.”

  The very first diary entry on May 27 records a turn of events that might well have set Everett off on the wrong foot. As he packed his belongings in Los Angeles, he wrote, “Bill Jacobs did not call, so I called, and his mother said he was asleep, having decided to go some other time. She sounded heartbroken, but I was relieved.”

  Everett’s best friend had stood him up in 1931, after promising to share his Southwest excursion with him. Before that, he had reneged on some Christmas trip together. In 1932, Jacobs had belatedly showed up in Roosevelt, where he pried Clark away from Everett’s sojourn to go off on a far less ambitious project—from which his mother had driven him home to Los Angeles. Now, it seems, Bill had once more backed out of a journey with his chum, deciding at the last minute to sleep in rather than bother to telephone Everett with news of his change of heart.

  Such feckless behavior might well have exhausted the tolerance of the most magnanimous of companions. It may be evidence of Everett’s lingering annoyance at Bill that none of the surviving 1933 letters is addressed to him. Yet Everett forgave once more, and in 1934 wrote some of the deepest and most intimate letters of his short life to his stay-at-home pal.

  On his second day in Sequoia, Everett bought two burros from a local wrangler. For a week or so in his diary, he referred to them simply as “the black burro” (or “Blackie”) and “the gray.” By June 3 he had named his animals, not with classical allusions such as Pericles or Pegasus but with the homely tags of Betsy (the black) and Grandma (the gray).

  It was Everett’s intention to climb through the Sequoia National Forest to reach the high Sierra, but upon his arrival he learned that there was far too much snow in the backcountry to set out for alpine regions in early June. Instead, for a full month he made jaunt after looping jaunt out of an essentially stationary base camp, effectively going nowhere.

  The diary during these weeks is uncharacteristically impersonal. Granted, Everett was not recording his doings in hopes of impressing any future reader, but there is a sameness—even a tedious attention to detail—about the entries, as Everett records every single thing he did each day. A sample:

  I tried to write in the studio, then in the lodge. I talked to John, who clerks there and is studying medicine at Stanford. Then Mickey McGuire, the information girl, came in for a while. I couldn’t write there, so I went back to the Post Office to wait for the mail. The Postmaster and his wife looked at my pictures.

  In 1932, despite his setbacks and fatigue, Everett’s journey had an overriding design, as he followed his northeast vector 260 miles as the crow flies from Roosevelt to Mesa Verde. But the tramps of his first month in Sequoia in 1933—many of them day hikes without his burros—seem aimless and arbitrary. He spent almost as much time swimming in streams and fishing as he did hiking. He was seldom far from a road, and he often hitched rides from passing cars to get where he wanted to go for a day or two.

  And during that month, he ran into a constant stream of strangers, many of whom he stopped and talked to at length, while with others he set out on hikes and fishing trips. The year before, Everett had declared as his abiding principle, “After all the lone trail is best.” But there weren’t many lone trails in the Sequoia forest in June 1933, and, oddly enough, Everett did not seem to mind that fact. To be sure, on June 23 he complained to his diary, “Thus far, I’ve had only two days of uninterrupted solitude.” But a more characteristic entry was the one he wrote on June 12: “It was delightful to sit in the shade of the redwoods, watch the flag flutter and the men digging in the sun, everyone happy and smiling, working, conversing or watching. The whole atmosphere was of spaciousness, peace, and contentment.”

  In 1933 there were many sectors of the Sierra Nevada in which Everett could have wandered through true wilderness without running into other people. The north fork of the Palisades, for instance, where the ruggedest mountains in California thrust into the sky, was seldom visited. Later in the summer Everett would climb Mount Whitney, at 14,505 feet the highest summit in the forty-eight United States, but even in 1933 that hike was a popular tourist outing along a gentle and monotonous trail.

  Besides the deep snow in the backcountry, another excuse for Everett’s ensconcement in the lower part of the Sequoia National Forest (which adjoins Sequoia National Park) was the effort to find buyers for his paintings to help finance his trip. Yet by heading straight for a popular national forest and park, Everett guaranteed that he would not find much solitude. His diary through June records encounters with park rangers, Civilian Conservation Corps workers, roadbuilders, telephone-line workmen, post office personnel, policemen, and of course tourists. On July 5, after a short probe into more-remote regions, Everett groused in a letter to his family, “When I came down from the back country, I found the park overrun with tourists.”

  What did he expect? The diary makes it clear that what kept Everett rubbing elbows with strangers was his eternal longing for true, deep friendship. As unintrospective as most of the entries are, a few veer into the murky depths of that longing. On May 28, his second day in Sequoia, he fell in with a stranger named Wes Leverin, with whom he took a moonlight hike. “I like Wes,” he wrote. “He had delicate, handsome features.” The hike, he added, “was a glorious experience for me.”

  Then, just as the diary becomes reflective, three lines have been erased—but not entirely. The cryptogram left on the page reads,

  Just two sentences after the partially expunged passage, Everett wrote, “It was good to be called by name and made one of them.” Who the “them” refers to is unclear.

  On June 20, Everett recorded another glancing encounter with attractive strangers, as he hiked along Colony Creek.

  Three willowy young school teachers with glasses on passed on the other side of the stream. Apparently they did not trust me, for they would not reply to my greeting. I am again mistrusting myself in relation to other people.

  This provocative remark is immediately followed by an eighteen-line erasure, one of the longest in either of the two surviving diaries.

  Whatever Everett wrote in those missing lines must have been provoked by the glum insight about “mistrusting myself in relation to other people,” for when the text resurfaces, he is still miffed by the schoolteachers’ snub:

  The girls came back, and I crossed to meet them, speaking to them as I crossed the brook. They went right on in silence. Not to be outdone even in ill breeding and insolence, I went straight up the hill as if that had been my intention.

  Despite these occasional fits of melancholy, Everett’s diary records day after day of enthusiasm and joy. He was reading voraciously again—Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (“I was rather disappointed in it”); the rest of Gargantua and Pantagruel, which he had begun in 1932, and which delighted him; H. M. Tomlinson’s The Sea and the Jungle, which grew on him after a shaky start; and Norman Douglas’s witty novel of decadence on Capri, South Wind. The last book prompted a curious diary entry: “Finally I finished ‘South Wind,’ enjoying the final Bacchic scene. It is truly amusing to me what people say before they pass out. Everyone should have the experience, I think.”

  We know that Everett smoked an occasional cigarette. Whether he regularly drank alcohol is uncertain. In all his surviving writings, there are only a few glancing mentions of beer or wine. When others got drunk, as at the Holbrook parade and rodeo, Everett seemed to play the role of the sober bystander. Yet there are those odd allusions to “Bacchic revels.”

  Of course, Prohibition had been in effect since 1920, and would not be repealed until December 1933. Because drinking was illegal, Everett would not readily have confessed in print (even in the privacy of his diary) to any personal indulgence in alcoho
l. Moreover, we know that Stella was a lifelong teetotaler. It may be that if Everett drank, or ever got truly drunk, he would have had an additional reason to keep it to himself, for fear of offending his mother.

  As he hiked in the forest, Everett often sang out loud. Sea chanties and cowboy ballads, he mentions in one entry, but more often he hummed his favorite classical music. “I drank at a stream,” he wrote on June 12, “and strode gallantly up, singing some Dvorak melodies, putting all the volume I had into them. The forest boomed with my rollicking song. Then the transmuted melodies of Beethoven, Brahms, and the Bolero rang thru the silent forest.”

  That day or the next, Everett mailed a curious letter. It has no salutation, but after Everett’s disappearance, one of his parents added an annotation after Everett’s signature, “To friends from the high Sierra in 1933.” The letter opens with a proclamation of happiness the pitch of which Everett would seldom again match:

  During the last few weeks, I have been having the time of my life. Much of the time I feel so exuberant that I can hardly contain myself. The colors are so glorious, the forests so magnificent, the mountains so splendid, and the streams so utterly, wildly, tumultuously, effervescently joyful that to me at least, the world is a riot of intense sensual delight. In addition to [which] all the people are genial and generous and happy, & everyone seems to be at his best.

  Yet two paragraphs later in this atypical letter, Everett slips into his odd usage of the perfect tense, as if the joys of the summer—of life itself—were already over: “Oh, I have lived intensely, drinking deep!”

  Everett’s extreme high spirits in 1933 after a 1932 campaign so riddled with gloom and despair form one paradox. His comfort surrounded by strangers in the Sequoia after glorying in solitude in Arizona forms another. And yet a third lies in the two landscapes, as different from each other as can be found in the United States. In the canyons and deserts of the Southwest, one treasures openness, distant horizons, and azure skies, even barrenness itself. In the Sequoia National Forest there is little openness and only the odd glimpse of the sky: instead, one is surrounded by towering trees—not only the famous ancient redwoods, but cedars, firs, and lodgepole pines. That Everett could equally love both landscapes may testify to the omnivorousness of his passion for nature. Or it may simply reflect that to be outdoors, on his own, on the move, with no end to the journey in sight, amounted to him to the most important thing in life.

  * * *

  On June 26, Everett claimed in his diary, “I plotted my course for the next two months to my entire satisfaction.” If so, the vagaries of his rambling through July and August make it hard to discern the shape of that course. In general terms, his plans involved traveling north into the high Sierra, climbing Mount Whitney, and eventually making his way to Yosemite National Park, which he had last visited in 1930. But the actual route of his wandering veered far from a steady trek along that northern and northwestern compass bearing.

  By the end of June, the deep snow in the high country had started to melt. On June 29, with a friend met along the trail, Everett climbed Alta Peak, a modest summit 11,204 feet above sea level. Reaching the top in late afternoon, he gazed to the north and for the first time saw Mount Whitney.

  In the beginning of July, launched on the High Sierra Trail, Everett escaped the shadowy woods and began to traverse alpine meadows and glades. He left the national forest behind and entered Sequoia National Park, which encloses Mount Whitney. By now, Everett was riding Betsy and using Grandma as his pack animal. The streams were running high everywhere, and the greatest obstacle to his progress was coaxing his balky burros to ford even the shallowest brooks.

  In the high country, Everett still ran into strangers virtually every day—backpackers, mule- and horse-packers, trail-building crews, and rangers. By the 1930s, the High Sierra Trail had become a standard objective for outdoorsmen and women who were hardier than the casual tourists who flocked to Sequoia to drive up and park next to such prodigies as the General Sherman Tree. Although it traversed mountain passes and rocky boulderfields, the trail was excellently maintained. Everett’s daily task was not to blaze his own route through the wilderness, as he had for long stretches in Arizona in 1931 and 1932, but to sort out the signposts along the trail that would guide him from one valley to the next. Nor was this alpine terrain deep wilderness, for Everett records regular visits to ranger stations, old cabins, and working ranches.

  In early July, the mosquitoes “tormented me fiercely,” he complained, making it hard to paint or even to write in his diary. Yet his spirits stayed high. Fishing had become a serious diversion. For bait, he usually stuck grasshoppers and other bugs on the barb of his hook, but strangers he met along the trail traded or gave him dry flies (the Royal Coachman was his favorite). What kind of fishing rod he had, Everett does not mention. His technique was crude but effective: once he had snagged a trout, rather than play it toward shore, he would jerk it out of the water, then retrieve it as it thrashed in the weeds. More than once, he catapulted a fish to shore, snapping it loose from the hook, but then couldn’t find his catch in the underbrush.

  Everett’s diary lavishes many paragraphs on the wiles and pleasures of trout fishing. On July 30,

  After patient casting in a deep pool, I felt a tug on my line, and, thrilled to the core, swung the pole, and the biggest fish I ever caught thudded up on the bank. I hunted five minutes before I found him in the deep brake, but he was still flopping. I could hardly close my fist on him. He was a foot long and weighed at least a pound. How I shouted.

  On his best day, Everett caught forty fish. For breakfast on July 27, he ate eighteen trout, fried in cornmeal and bacon grease.

  One of the highlights of Everett’s July adventure was an epic battle with a rattlesnake. He spotted the serpent coiled and rattling beside the trail, threw rocks at it to no avail, then tried to prod it with a stick. He succeeded in stabbing the snake, then forcing its head into the dirt, but his prey slithered away into underbrush and rocks. Without the slightest sense of shame, Everett described what happened next:

  The brush was almost impenetrable. Taking my life in my hands, I reached down and caught his tail, loosed the makeshift spear, and whipped him out on the rocks. He was very much alive, but after a few tries, I mashed his flat head and cut it off.… Only six rattles, and he is not long, but what a fight we had. It was true sport.

  Hunting rattler’s as I do comes nearer to real sport than almost anything I know. It has the necessary element of danger, for it is not sport unless opponents are somewhat evenly matched, and the quarry can turn the tables on the pursuer. By comparison, fishing is a diversion for senescent bachelors.

  Despite this gloating credo, Everett would continue to fish avidly throughout the rest of his time in the Sierras.

  During this part of the summer, Everett was reading two works “with the greatest of pleasure”: Richard Burton’s unexpurgated translation of the Arabian Nights and Edward FitzGerald’s brilliant and idiosyncratic rendering of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat. At regular intervals, he transcribed stanzas of the latter into his diary, as well as summaries of the tales in the Arabian Nights. Everett’s enthusiasm for these Victorian versions of Near Eastern classics is significant, for both works are paeans to the hedonistic life. Yet both are full of carpe diem reminders of mortality.

  On July 22, after transcribing FitzGerald’s lines, “Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why; / Drink, for you know not why you go, nor where,” Everett wrote, “I was completely swayed by Omar’s thoughts, and I decided I’d certainly get some wine from Lee if I could.” This comment is the closest Everett would come in either of the extant journals to admitting to a craving for alcohol.

  On July 14, at the Kern River Hot Springs, Everett bumped into two teenagers named Ned and Charley, who happened to be students at Hollywood High School, from which Everett had graduated in 1931. Both also turned out to be Bible-reading Christians, and on the spot Ned tried to convert Everett
to his fundamentalist beliefs. In his diary, Everett assessed the pair: “Ned has some intelligence, but Charley is rather callow.” Nonetheless, he paired up with the youngsters to climb Mount Whitney. Six days later they reached the summit—the highest point of land Everett would reach in his short life. On top,

  Charley counted the names in the registry book and I took pictures. In the book we entered our names and a legend from the tale of Abu Hasan [from the Arabian Nights] which nearly made us die of laughter. No doubt coming visitors will be affected by it too.

  The next day, Everett parted ways with the young lads.

  From Whitney, Everett might well have headed northwest along the John Muir Trail, which runs 211 miles from the summit of that peak to Yosemite, as it links up a series of mountain valleys and high passes. (Construction of the trail began in 1915. By 1933 it was complete except for one section at the headwaters of the Kings River.) Instead, Everett wandered up and down the Kern River, lingering in Sequoia National Park and eventually turning back south to the lower national forest where he had begun his journey in late May. For the first time, a certain disappointment undercut his exuberance. “I have found Kern Canyon rather monotonous and depressing,” he wrote on July 28. “There is no variety. The rocks are a dull gray, and the forest is an impenetrable tangle that cuts off all outlook.”

  Then a series of minor mishaps interfered with his plans. The first was his discovery that Grandma was pregnant. “Poor ignorant creature,” Everett wrote, “she had no knowledge of contraceptives!” A passerby experienced with livestock examined the burro and told Everett that Grandma would give birth in about a month. The second setback came when Everett developed an infection on the palm of his right hand that festered and spread. “I hardly slept, the pain in my hand was so great,” he wrote on August 2.