Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

As Rusho conducted his research in Escalante in 1982, he learned that one local rancher, some years before, had actually bragged about killing Everett. Rusho managed to interview the man in his home, but “found his memory was suffering from old age. He did remember that a young artist had disappeared near Davis Gulch, yet he said that he knew absolutely nothing about the incident.” Rather than leap to a facile conclusion, and out of compassion for the alleged confessor in his confused state of mind, Rusho did not name him in Vagabond, and left the whole rustler theory unresolved.

  Rusho’s conclusion about Everett’s fate was, “We are left without a final answer, only riddles within riddles.”

  The legend of Everett Ruess is inextricably tied up with the mystery of his vanishing. But Gibbs Smith has often said, “I was never interested in the mystery. It didn’t matter to me.” In the closing pages of Vagabond, Rusho agreed, making the case that it was Everett’s vision, not his disappearance, that accounted for his lasting appeal:

  His love of wilderness, his sense of kinship with the living earth, his acute sensitivity to every facet of nature’s displays—all of these, because of their intensity in one young man, gave Everett rare qualities. What made him unique were his reactions to the striking and dramatic landscapes of the American West.

  By the time Vagabond was published, Waldo was seventy-three years old. Although Christopher and Stella had not lived to see it, in Rusho’s book the family finally had the solid monument to Everett’s legacy that that they had desired, of which On Desert Trails had been only a preliminary sketch. Waldo was involved in every aspect of the new book’s production, and he had placed such complete trust in Gibbs Smith that it had led him—despite the Kellner debacle—to hand over all of Everett’s original letters that he still possessed.

  By now, however, Waldo had become a sometimes crotchety caretaker of his brother’s flame. The preparation of Rusho’s book caused much friction among the author, the publisher, and the brother (who was executor of Everett’s estate). Waldo dearly hoped that Wallace Stegner would write an introduction to the book, but Stegner declined, saying he was “too busy on a book.” Stegner’s assertion in Mormon Country that Everett “was not a good writer” had stuck in Waldo’s craw ever since 1942. In April 1983 he complained about the judgment in a letter to Stegner, adding, “Of course he had much to learn; if his 1934 journal can ever be found it will represent his most mature writing.”

  Stegner responded generously. On Desert Trails, he wrote Waldo, was “a sort of classic of its kind—It is the original lone nature-lover’s journal, the original adventure of a sensitive young man into country then known only to a few Indians and a few Mormons in the oaseis [sic] towns.” To counter Waldo’s disappointment about his declining to write the introduction to Vagabond, Stegner advised, “Forewords go by like water. The book remains.”

  Waldo and Gibbs Smith turned next to Edward Abbey for the introduction, but he too declined, citing the pressure of other writing. Yet at Smith’s behest, Abbey wrote a sonnet for Everett that was published as an afterword in Vagabond. In 2009, Smith called it the best poem Abbey ever wrote, while noting that the author of Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang was not renowned for his efforts in verse. The sonnet is indeed a fervent, mystical evocation:

  You walked into the radiance of death

  through passageways of stillness, stone, and light,

  gold coin of cottonwoods, the spangled shade,

  cascading song of canyon wrens, the flight

  of scarlet dragonflies at pools, the stain

  of water on a curve of sand, the art

  of roots that crack the monolith of time.

  You knew the crazy lust to probe the heart

  of that which has no heart that we could know,

  toward the source, deep in the core, the maze,

  the secret center where there are no bounds.

  Hunter, brother, companion of our days:

  that blessing which you hunted, hunted too,

  what you were seeking, this is what found you.

  In the end, for the introduction Gibbs Smith secured the services of New Mexico writer John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War. Waldo so hated Nichols’s first draft that he prevailed upon Smith to force Nichols to make massive revisions. In the midst of these unpleasant negotiations, Waldo wrote a friend about Nichols’s introduction, claiming to be “quite depressed and discouraged (haven’t even slept at all a couple of nights due to thinking about it).”

  What so upset Waldo was Nichols’s celebration of Everett as a half-mad desert mystic. Though the introduction is highly laudatory, much of his take on the young wanderer survives even in the relatively sanitized version Smith published. Excerpts:

  By the time Everett Ruess disappeared, he had fashioned a magnificent obsession that probably killed him.

  At times his writing seems pompous; often it is truly beautiful.

  It would be easy to make fun of Ruess, conjecturing that in the end he must have literally exploded, his slight body incapable of containing all the melodramatic sensations he tirelessly ladled into it. But I picture him simply expiring on the edge of a sandstone cliff, in the shadow of some high circling buzzard, convinced that he could never again return to civilization.

  Even in this much-revised final version, Nichols’s appreciation of Everett is one of the most nuanced and perceptive that any devotee ever produced. One can imagine that Everett himself would have liked it. But Waldo brooked no criticism of his beloved brother, no matter how balanced by praise. Intimations of madness and suicidal leanings, which Nichols was not the first to suggest, pushed one of Waldo’s most sensitive buttons.

  The very word “vagabond” in Rusho’s subtitle disturbed Waldo. “It has negative or bad connotations to many people,” he wrote a friend.

  For Waldo, an even touchier subject than suicide was homosexuality. As Gibbs Smith’s editor was putting together the selections for Vagabond, Waldo tried to persuade him to omit the letter Everett wrote to Bill Jacobs on May 10, 1931, with its closing “Love and kisses, / Desperately yours,” but he was overruled.

  In 1984, Waldo befriended Diane Orr, a documentary filmmaker who wanted to make a movie about Everett. As the sales of Vagabond in the first year after publication hovered in skimpy numbers, Waldo wrote Orr on July 24, speculating, “Maybe many don’t want to buy it because they think by the Jacobs letters E was a homo.” Orr, who became one of Waldo’s closest confidantes, revealed to him that Bud Rusho himself had wondered about Everett’s possible homosexual leanings.

  Waldo adamantly rejected such inferences. As he wrote Orr, “[W]henever E was at home, we had beds in the same bedroom and often talked together before going to sleep. And I think I knew him pretty well. And I think my parents did too. He definitely was not a homo, or homo-inclined.”

  Waldo’s liberal temperament was evidently at odds with an unmistakable (if perhaps latent) homophobia. To Orr, he went on:

  In my late teens and early 20’s around Hollywood, being very good looking in those days, a number of “queers” tried to make advances, but I had too many pretty girls I was interested in to have any interest at all. I know what queers are like, having seen plenty in Hollywood. Then in our embassies we had problems with quite a few of them, and they are considered security risks. Some were so flagrant that all of us knew about their “persuasion.”

  Yet in another letter to Orr, Waldo backtracked a step or two: “It’s no crime to be a homo. But my brother was not one so I don’t want people thinking or saying he was one, even if such a good person as Christ was one.”

  For all his discomfort with various aspects of A Vagabond for Beauty, Waldo was keen to see the book succeed in winning a wider audience for Everett’s artwork and writings. The hints that that was starting to happen heartily gratified him. As early as October 1983, Waldo told bookseller Ken Sanders, “I have even had people write me that they wanted to memorize all of E’s writings!”

 
* * *

  One sign of the gathering mystique around Everett came in 1984 from the small Mormon town of Kanab, Utah, just north of the Arizona border. A press release for the “First Annual Desert Vagabond Days” announced, “Everett lives! This is the theme of a unique festival of Western arts to be held in Kanab, Utah, June 15 and 16.”

  Invited as an honorary guest, Waldo rode in the opening parade. The festivities, mixing rodeo and art festival, included a square dance, a doll show, a horse show, a “Special Everett Ruess Exhibit,” a “Kaibab Squirrel Celebration,” and a “Highway Sign Shooting Competition.” The festival was repeated in June 1985, again centered around Everett, but adding such events as a horseshoe pitching contest, “Jackpot Team Roping,” a “Western Cooking Contest,” and a “Fun Shoot.”

  In 1985, fifty years after the Escalante ranchers had started searching for the lost youth, Gibbs Smith commissioned a friend to make a pair of bronze plaques commemorating Everett. His intention was to mount one on Dance Hall Rock, a small but prominent sandstone dome forty miles out the Hole-in-the-Rock Road from Escalante, the other in Davis Gulch, fourteen miles farther southeast. (In the flat hollow on the south side of Dance Hall Rock, the Mormon pioneers had organized square dances in November 1879, to boost morale in the face of oncoming winter and the difficulty of the trail ahead.)

  Dance Hall Rock lies on Bureau of Land Management land, while Davis Gulch is wholly within Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. The former authority granted permission for the plaque placing, but the latter refused. Smith nonetheless organized a mini-expedition of some twenty Ruess partisans. They included Waldo, now seventy-five years old, Bud Rusho, and Pat Jenks, one of the two teenage boys who had picked up a bedraggled Everett near the Grand Canyon in June 1931 and driven him and his burro to the Jenks family ranch near Flagstaff, where Everett spent several weeks recuperating.

  On May 11, the ceremony at Dance Hall Rock went off as planned. Within a short time thereafter, however, some relic collector stole the bronze plaque.

  Gibbs’s entourage drove on to the head of Davis Gulch, where they camped. Gathered around a fire, the devotees listened as first Jenks, then Waldo, then Rusho spoke about Everett and his legacy. In the morning the party hiked along the rim of Davis Gulch, which in its upper two miles is a very narrow slot canyon. Permission or no, the team had determined to install the plaque. As Waldo later wrote to Diane Orr, “Someone had made a rope ladder maybe 50 or 60 ft. long and many younger people went down it and … set a plaque I guess in some crevice where only very unusual hikers might ever see it.” The plaque is still in place.

  With the publication of Vagabond, Everett began to move from the realm of romantic cult figure into the more rarefied circles of academe. In 1989, for instance, Bruce Berger hailed Everett in an essay for The North American Review titled “Genius of the Canyons.” (Berger meant “genius” in the classical sense of genius loci—a spirit inhabiting a place.) Like Gibbs Smith, Berger felt that Everett’s cardinal achievement was to see the Southwest in a new way: “Ruess was almost the first to travel that country not to prospect, to herd cattle, to scheme a railroad or escape from the law, but simply to relish it, to absorb it, and to shape that love in the arts.”

  Other critical evaluations of Everett’s achievement followed, including a judicious essay by the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist N. Scott Momaday, who wrote:

  Of all the myths that pervade the American landscape, none is more pervasive than that of the solitary man whose destiny it is to achieve a communion with nature so nearly absolute as to be irrevocable. It is the act of dying into the wilderness, actually or metaphorically. When Everett Ruess disappeared in the Escalante wilderness of Utah in November 1934, he succeeded to that mythic ideal; he became one with the wild earth.

  These commentators all pointed out that Everett had been only twenty years old when he disappeared. Very few painters or poets have made their mark at a comparable age. In the Western tradition, only two writers who died younger than Everett come to mind: Anne Frank, exterminated by the Nazis at fifteen, whose diary made her posthumously famous; and Thomas Chatterton, the eccentric eighteenth-century poet and forger of medieval documents, who committed suicide at seventeen. Among painters, it is hard to name one whose works live on but who died before the age of thirty. The Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele, dying at twenty-eight, is a notable exception.

  Give Everett only five or ten more years of life and writing and painting, and his literary and artistic output might have been far more significant.

  Stimulated by Vagabond, the Salt Lake City–based filmmaker Diane Orr determined to make a movie about Everett. In 1984 she began a long correspondence with Waldo, which grew into a close friendship. Trusting as ever, Waldo lent Orr many original documents of Everett’s, including his 1932 and 1933 diaries.

  Early on, Orr communicated to Waldo her high expectations for the work. At one point, she said, Robert Redford was interested in helping finance the project. And Kevin Costner, she claimed, was in line to play the role of Everett.

  Yet the project languished for more than a decade, as Orr had trouble raising funds. By 1990, a note of vexation had crept into Waldo’s correspondence with the filmmaker: “There has been a great deal of stress and strain on me over these many years re my brother and talking about him so much to you and other people. This has been very hard on me and hard on my family.”

  In the same letter, Waldo confessed, “I am aged 80 and really ‘slipping’ lately and don’t know how much longer I’ll last. I seem to remember hardly anything anymore.”

  As it would turn out, Waldo lasted another seventeen years, dying on September 6, 2007, the day after his ninety-eighth birthday. During his last years he suffered from some kind of dementia. Friends attributed it simply to old age, but his daughter, Michèle Ruess, is convinced that his mental decline dated from a single accident that occurred in July 1987, when, working in his garden in Santa Barbara, he was stung by a horde of yellow jackets. Waldo went into anaphylactic shock and nearly died. According to Michèle, he was never the same after that.

  Orr’s movie was finally released in 2000, sixteen years after she had started work on it. Titled Lost Forever: Everett Ruess, the movie mixes documentary artifacts such as newspaper clippings and Everett’s paintings and woodcuts with reconstructed scenes. In the latter, Everett is played not by Kevin Costner but by a young actor named Mark Larson. And those scenes take considerable license with the known truth. In particular, Orr portrays Everett as homosexual, and she dramatizes a final rupture with his parents that never took place.

  Waldo was not happy with Lost Forever. According to Michèle, “My father was very upset by Diane Orr’s film. He saw it once and never wanted to see it again.”

  It took Orr so long to make Lost Forever that her film was preceded a year earlier by a Turner Broadcasting System documentary about Everett called Vanished! The director of this effort was Dianna Taylor, daughter from the second marriage of Dorothea Lange (who had taken the memorable black-and-white photographic portraits of Everett in 1933). A feeble production, Vanished! strays even further from the historical record than Orr’s semi-documentary did.

  Vanished! aired on TBS in 1999, then dropped out of sight. It is unavailable today, while Orr’s Lost Forever still sells steadily on DVD.

  * * *

  In 1987, Waldo sold the rights to Everett’s woodblock engravings and prints to the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) for $8,000. Three years later he complained to Diane Orr, “The last I heard they were selling for $2200 a set but I heard they were raising the price.” SUWA adopted Everett’s print of a youth leading two burros in silhouette as the alliance’s logo. During the first eleven years of merchandising the artwork, SUWA took in $88,214 from sales of the prints.

  In 1998, Bud Rusho and Gibbs Smith collaborated to publish Everett’s 1932 and 1933 diaries as Wilderness Journals of Everett Ruess. As he had in editing Everett’s letters, Rusho omitted many
passages from the diaries, without indicating their excision even by ellipses.

  Vagabond was still selling well, fifteen years after it was first issued. In 2002, Gibbs Smith brought out a “combined edition” of both Vagabond and Wilderness Journals, adding many photographs that had never been published before, including a generous selection of pictures of Everett in his childhood and early adolescence. Two years earlier, in 2000, Smith had also published a new edition of the 1940 On Desert Trails with Everett Ruess, adding a provocative afterword by the Utah historian Gary James Bergera.

  No single event, however, ratcheted up the megawatt power of the Everett Ruess cult like the publication in 1996 of Into the Wild. In a long feature article for Outside magazine, Jon Krakauer had first written about Chris McCandless, the alienated and idealistic young man who had graduated from college, fled his family, hitchhiked and driven all over the West, then made his way to Alaska, where he hiked into the wilderness north of Denali, intending to live off the land. After 113 days on his own, McCandless had succumbed in August 1992 either to starvation or to accidental poisoning from a wild potato plant. He was twenty-four when he died.

  Fascinated by this passionate loner and vagabond, with whom he closely identified, Krakauer expanded the article into a book. To research McCandless’s zigzag peregrinations, he performed a tour de force by retracing the young man’s path over two years, locating and interviewing many of the otherwise obscure men and women who had befriended the wanderer as he ranged from Texas to California, Washington State to South Dakota. And in Alaska, Krakauer backpacked down the Stampede Trail to the abandoned Fairbanks city bus in which McCandless’s body had been found three weeks after he died.

  As he set out on the trail of Chris McCandless, Krakauer had never heard of Everett Ruess. Tipped off by this writer to the parallels between the two romantic adventurers, Krakauer devoured A Vagabond for Beauty, then made his own trip into Davis Gulch. In Into the Wild, he devoted an eleven-page chapter to Everett. The book became a surprise success, eventually spending 119 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. By now it has been translated into more than twenty-two languages, including Korean, Finnish, and Catalan. And in 2007 it was made into a feature film directed by Sean Penn.