Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  In despair, Everett found the faint Monument Valley road and headed back toward Kayenta. Two days after the debacle he wrote,

  I started to walk there to ask help of my Mormon friend, but a mile away, I turned about and went back. It was not that I couldn’t stand being laughed at by the whole town, for it really was funny, and such things don’t bother me. But it would be asking too much of the Mormon, and anyway, for a long time I had flattered myself that I could “take it,” and always had, without complaint, so I thought this was a good time to show myself.

  At the time, in the windy night, Everett’s predicament was decidedly not funny. Returning to the bend in the road where the burros had bolted, Everett found two saddle blankets snagged in the rocks. With these he approached the hogan, got a fire going inside, and slept fitfully through the rest of the night.

  In the morning it started to rain, but with first light he found the burros’ tracks. It was not long before he came upon his pack animals. Cockleburrs “was standing stock still, looking very foolish. Leopard was nearby, equally sheepish, his saddle under him, but unhurt.” A canteen and Everett’s camera were missing, but after half an hour of searching in circles, he found both. All was well, the catastrophe avoided. Everett returned to the hogan, where the fire was still blazing. “I felt perfectly delighted with everything,” he insisted to Waldo, “gave the burros an extra ration of oats, hobbled them out, and put on the pot to cook my supper and breakfast.”

  Just how carefully Everett was now structuring the record of his excursion is revealed in the fact that his account of the mishap near Agathla in the letter to Waldo matches almost word for word another telling of the episode in a letter to a family friend, Emily Ormond, even down to the “purple loco bloom buffeted about by the wind.” The letters home, no longer merely news dispatches, had become drafts of chapters in a book he might someday write to share his adventures with the world. In this sense, in 1934 Everett had finally become as ambitious a writer as he already was an artist.

  Everett had been in Arizona for only a little more than two weeks when he wrote Waldo on May 3. But he claimed that in that short span, “I had many other thrills when I trusted my life to crumbling sandstone and angles little short of the perpendicular, in the search for waterholes and cliff dwellings. Often I was surprised myself when I came out alive and on top.” He repeated the formula almost verbatim to Emily Ormond, but added, in his characteristic perfect tense, a grandiloquent boast that has nonetheless become one of Everett’s signature mottos: “I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear.”

  In 1931 and 1932, in pursuit of cliff dwellings that he hoped no other Anglos had ever visited, Everett had done some bold climbing, but now, in 1934, he pushed the margins of safety to a thinner edge than ever before. In these daring scrambles, there may have been a hint of a suicidal impulse. Everett seems to have realized as much, for in a letter to a Los Angeles friend named Edward Gardner, he declared, “Yesterday I did some miraculous climbing on a nearly vertical cliff, and escaped unscathed, too. One way and another, I have been flirting pretty heavily with Death, the old clown.”

  If Everett reached and explored Monument Valley during early May, it was during a very brief visit, for by May 5 he was in Chilchinbito, a Navajo outpost sixteen miles southeast of Kayenta. There he made his first new friend of the 1934 outing, a Hispanic trader named José Garcia. To his mother, Everett wrote in praise of the man,

  When I came here last night, Jose’s kindness and courtesy almost brought tears to my eyes, for there is something very fine about him, and I have not met many of his kind in this country. His father, a wizened old pioneer of the Spaniards, is here too. They are good, simple people without sophistication, living happily in this at present untroubled part of the world. Jose speaks four languages—English, Spanish, Navajo, and Zuni.

  Everett offered to paint a geologic wonder on the western skyline—a triple tower of dark rock called the Three Fingers—for Garcia. Lingering about Chilchinbito, he noted “some handsome, lithe young girls among the Navajos.” (An undated photograph survives, in which Everett stands beside a Navajo hogan, next to a handsome native woman holding a baby in a cradle. Everett supplied the caption: “My Navajo Wife.”)

  It was a shock a month later when Everett learned that José Garcia had been killed in an accident. The trader, he wrote Bill Jacobs, “was riding the load on a truck. A wheel came off, and the whole load fell on him.”

  Out of the blue, its provenance undecipherable, emerges a long letter to Frances, dated May 5 and written in Chilchinbito. At the Kayenta post office, Everett had received a letter from Frances with photographic negatives in it, presumably mailed from San Francisco. Everett’s response begins guardedly enough, as he repeats almost word for word the encomium on José Garcia that he had written to his mother. Slowly the letter warms toward the personal. “You should see the glorious color,” he tells Frances, “when the first light of dawn spreads on the golden clifftops and the grey-blue pinyon-clad slopes.”

  The impulse to show the Southwestern landscape to the girl with whom five months earlier he had fallen in love nudges Everett toward a reflection on “my life in the cities.” He concludes a meandering paragraph, “I do not know if I shall ever return to the cities again, but I cannot complain that I found them empty of beauty.”

  In the next sentence, Everett’s regret (as quoted in the previous chapter) about the dissolution of his linkage with Frances pours forth: “I was sorry, though, that our intimacy, like many things that are and will be, had to die with a dying fall.”

  Then Everett resumes his guarded pose, as he tells Frances in abstract terms about his first three weeks in the desert—“a life of strange contrasts,” as he labels it. “There has been deep peace, vast calm and fury, strange comradeships and intimacies, and many times my life and all my possessions have tottered on the far side of the balance.”

  The letter closes with a wistful hint of how much Everett misses Frances:

  But much as I love people, the most important thing to me is still the nearly unbearable beauty of what I see. I won’t wish that you could see it, for you might not find it easy to bear either, but yet I do sincerely wish for you at least a little of the impossible.

  Love from Everett.

  * * *

  So far as we can trace Everett’s wanderings during his first few weeks in 1934, they amount to tame Arizona forays out of a base in Kayenta—the first a simple hike up the road (today’s U.S. Highway 160) to Dinnehotso, followed by the jaunt past Agathla toward Monument Valley, then the reconnaisance of Chilchinbito (“bitter water” in Navajo, Everett informed his parents) toward the south.

  But Everett had an overriding itinerary in mind, which he outlined in a letter to Waldo on May 3. “Today I am starting for Chin Lee [Chinle], Canyon de Chelly, the Lukachukais, and the Carrizos. I shall probably be gone a month or two. Chin Lee will be my next post office.”

  So far as we can tell, Everett carried out his program to the letter, making a loop of 170 miles. He was back in Kayenta by mid-June. Most of the terrain he explored through the rest of May and early June, however, was not new to him. He had had memorable experiences in Canyon de Chelly in both 1931 and 1932, finding the Anasazi necklace the first year, having his horse Jonathan collapse and die the second. In 1932 he had pushed on out of Canyon del Muerto to cross the Lukachukais into New Mexico. Shiprock and Mesa Verde had disappointed Everett, so this time he would not extend his journey to the northeast, but would turn straight north from the crest of the high mesas of the Lukachukais to poke through the neighboring maze of canyons and buttes called the Carrizos—the one part of the loop with which he was unfamilar, and still today one of the most unfrequented regions in all the Southwest.

  The whole of that itinerary lay within the Navajo reservation. Despite his ambivalence about Indian character, Everett was determined to learn more about Navajo culture, and to teach himself a serviceable vocabulary of Diné words.

>   Whether or not Everett was truly bipolar, as some analysts would have us believe, he certainly underwent extreme mood swings over short periods of time. On May 5, the same day that he wrote his plaintive letter to Frances, he dashed off another to Bill Jacobs that is full of exuberance and triumph. “Once more I am roaring drunk with the lust of life and adventure and unbearable beauty,” it begins.

  The letter marks the first time in more than a year (as far as we know) that Everett had written to his best friend. In it there is no hint of lingering resentment about Jacobs having so often stood Everett up, backing out of journeys together at the last minute. No matter how deep his funks, Everett seems never to have nursed a grudge. His gentle forgiveness of parents who scolded him or friends who let him down forms one of his most endearing qualities.

  Yet that letter to Jacobs is oddly impersonal. Everett voices no curiosity about what his pal may be doing back in Los Angeles. Instead he makes an oracular declaration of the quest he has chosen to pursue. And once again, comparing his proud independence to the wretched lives of “suffering, struggling, greedy, grumbling humanity,” he strikes a tone of Nietzschean arrogance. One of the least attractive aspects of Everett’s five-year swagger across California and the Southwest is the way that, surrounded by the detritus of the Depression, he managed for the most part to ignore the hopelessness and poverty he saw at every hand. And when he did not ignore it, he sometimes railed against the stricken men and women whose paths he crossed as if their blighted dreams and everyday misery were their own fault, the natural outcome of failed imagination and sedentary torpor. All this, while Christopher and Stella were subsidizing his endless ramble.

  “I shall always be a rover, I know,” Everett announces to Bill in the May 5 letter. “Always I’ll be able to scorn the worlds I’ve known like half-burnt candles when the sun is rising, and sally forth to others now unknown.” Everett explodes with joy: “Oh, it’s a wild, gay time! Life can be rich to overflowing. I’ve been so happy that I can’t think of containing myself.” Yet such flights are counterbalanced by a sense of doom. “Finality does not appall me,” he tells Bill, “and I seem always to enjoy things the more intensely because of the certainty that they will not last.”

  The letter closes with the kind of thundering tonic chord Everett cherished in the symphonies of Beethoven or Tchaikovsky: “Alone I shoulder the sky and hurl my defiance and shout the song of the conqueror to the four winds, earth, sea, sun, moon, and stars. I live!”

  Anyone interested in retracing Everett’s extraordinary 1934 journey in day-by-day or even week-by-week detail will be disappointed, for the surviving letters float on such a high philosophical plateau that ordinary events and chance encounters get lost in the spiritual ether. And yet, on the basis of seven paragraphs transcribed into a May letter from Canyon de Chelly to his Los Angeles friend Edward Gardner, the diary too may have glossed over daily life to focus on the transcendental.

  That letter begins with a modicum of detail. Somewhere near Chinle, Everett swears, “I narrowly escaped being gored to death by a wild bull.” The letter is headed simply “May,” from “East Fork of Canyon de Chelly.” “For five days I have been in this canyon,” Everett testifies. “I have not seen an Indian, and it is a week since I saw a white skin.” The solitude that he had not seemed to miss in the Sierras the year before had reclaimed him in all its splendor, provoking deep thoughts:

  Strange, sad winds sweep down the canyon, roaring in the firs and the tall pines, swaying their crests.… I am overwhelmed by the appalling strangeness and intricacy of the curiously tangled knot of life, and at the way that knot unwinds, making everything clear and inevitable, however unfortunate or wonderful.

  This pensée prompts Everett to transcribe the passages from his diary. Since his early teenage years, Everett had striven in his writing to compose aphorisms, one- and two-line gems that nailed strikingly original perceptions. There is always the danger in such utterances of sounding an all-knowing ex cathedra note—not a comfortable pose for a college dropout who had just turned twenty.

  Yet a selection of excerpts from the diary passages copied for Edward Gardner makes a small anthology of some of Everett’s lines that are most often quoted today:

  All accomplished works or deeds perish or are forgotten eventually. No love lives forever, and no two can completely understand one another, or if they do, it kills their love.

  For to think is the beginning of death.

  Beauty isolated is terrible and unbearable, and the unclouded sight of her kills the beholder.

  But he who has looked long on naked beauty may never return to the world.

  The absorbing passion of any highly sensitive person is to forget himself, whether by drinking or by agonized love, by furious work or play, or by submerging himself in the creative arts.… But the pretense cannot endure, and unless he can find another as highly strung as himself with whom to share the murderous pain of living, he will surely go insane.

  In 2000, the historian Gary James Bergera would title an essay that argued that Everett had commit suicide “ ‘The Murderous Pain of Living’: Thoughts on the Death of Everett Ruess.”

  We have almost no idea what adventures Everett had or what discoveries he made in 1934 in Canyon de Chelly, the Lukachukais, or the Carrizos, for only four letters survive from that more than month-long circuit, and they unfold a relentlessly internal narrative. A two-page letter to his parents from the Lukachukais, however, recounts an idyllic night and following day. This, too, is a calculated performance, as Everett strives to write beautiful prose. Yet there is promise in that prose of the attentive nature writer he might have become. Riding Cockleburrs and leading Leopard, Everett set out at twilight for a moonlit jaunt to a high crest. But a thunderstorm threatened to turn the lark into an ordeal.

  For awhile the northerly sky was clear, and stars shone brilliantly thru the pine boughs. Then darkness closed upon us, only to be rent by livid flashes of lightning, and thunder that seemed to shake the earth. The wind blew no longer, and we travelled in an ominous, murky calm, occasionally shattered by more lightning. Finally the clouds broke, and rain spattered down as I put on my slicker. We halted under a tall pine.

  The storm blew quickly by, gone within an hour of its arrival. The rain stopped, the stars came out again, and Everett resumed his ride. “By moonlight we climbed to the rim of the mountain, and looked over vast silent stretches of desert. Thirty miles away was the dim hulk of Shiprock—a ghostly galleon in a sea of sand.”

  The next day, in glorious sunshine, Everett lounged in a meadow and wrote the letter:

  Flowers nod in the breeze, and wild ducks are honking on the lake. I have just been for a long, leisurely ride on Leopard, skirting the edge of the mountain, riding thru thickets of rustling aspen, past dark mysterious lakes, quiet and lonely in the afternoon silence.

  None of Everett’s nature writing the previous year, in either his letters or his diaries, matches the pastoral lyricism of these passages. But in the Sierras, Everett had not once found himself ensconced in such trailless wilderness as the Lukachukais offered in abundance, nor had he been able for days at a time to luxuriate in true solitude.

  At the small town of Lukachukai, just west of the aspen- and pine-thick forests rising toward the New Mexico border, Everett had picked up a batch of mail, including, to his surprise, another letter from Frances. Camped alone in a high meadow a few days later, he wrote a long epistle in response. “It shocked me slightly,” he confessed, “when you spoke of my greed for life. That is a harsh word, but I guess it is true. I am not willing to take anything but the most from life.” In defense of that greed, Everett quoted a memento mori from FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat: “You know how little while we have to stay, / And, once departed, may return no more.”

  Everett was evidently more than slightly shocked by Frances’s stricture, for he devoted another long paragraph to justifying why “I … don’t like to let opportunities for living slip by ungrasped.�
�� From this declaration emerges a complaint:

  There are too many uninteresting people—like the trader at Lukachukai. He certainly made me feel like hitting him. He is a typical moron, only interested in food, business, and home. I was telling him about Canyon de Chelly and del Muerto, and with no provocation he remarked that he had lived here a long time and had never been to them and never expected or intended to. Obviously his decision was right for a person like him, because wherever he might go, he would see nothing beautiful or interesting.

  Sadly, in the 1934 letters there are all too few such vignettes of Everett’s doings on the trail or in the outposts where he resupplied. With his rationale for his “greed for life” off his chest, Everett lapsed into fine nature writing, as he replayed the moonlight ride through the thunderstorm, adding further details. The subtext of these paragraphs is a defiant claim: “I’m doing fine out here all by myself.” But love broke through Everett’s defenses. “I enjoyed your letter,” he interrupts himself, “and I know I did not mistake myself when first I liked you. We did have some moments of beauty together, didn’t we?”

  And with that, Frances vanishes from the chronicle of Everett’s life, slipping away as evanescently as she had suddenly appeared the previous December to disturb him with giddy hope, followed by wistful regret.

  From the 1934 journey, a few pages have survived that seem not to have been parts of letters addressed to anyone, but instead resemble set pieces of nature philosophy. Most of them are undated, but they may well have been composed during his month-long loop through the Lukachukais. One recounts a stormy night on a high crest, ending, “Then in wild, whirling fury, the storm rises, boiling and seething until with a furious upward rush, the whole horizon is submerged, and it fills the air with swirling, stinging, blinding snow. With this black dawn I perish.”