Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  With the publication of the book, an instant Chris McCandless cult was born. Over the years, hundreds of devotees have made their own pilgrimages to the derelict bus in the wilderness, which has gained the numen of a holy shrine.

  The success of Into the Wild brought Everett Ruess a huge new audience. Readers who admired the mystic flights embodied in McCandless’s letters and the makeshift diary he kept in the Alaskan wilderness found in Everett a true kindred soul. Like Everett scorning Waldo’s humdrum life, McCandless wrote a long letter to an eighty-year-old friend he had met hitchhiking in southern California, all but ordering him to hit the road and “adopt a helter-skelter style of life.” Amazingly, the octogenarian, swayed by his young friend’s ultimatum, did just that. Like Everett, McCandless adopted a pseudonym, calling himself Alexander Supertramp, before reverting to his given name in a last, desperate SOS note taped to the bus. Like some of Everett’s letters, several of the last ones McCandless mailed to friends have the resonance of farewell notes, including the postcard he wrote, just days before starting down the Stampede Trail, to a man who had given him a temporary job in South Dakota: “If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again I want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild.”

  In the chapter titled “Davis Gulch,” Krakauer noted the “uncanny parallels” between McCandless and Ruess, the “incendiary passion” they shared. “ ‘NEMO 1934,’ [Everett] scrawled, no doubt moved by the same impulse that compelled Chris McCandless to inscribe ‘Alexander Supertramp/May 1992’ on the wall of the Sushana bus—an impulse not so different, perhaps, from that which inspired the Anasazi to embellish the rock with their now-indecipherable symbols.”

  Ranging across the Southwest on McCandless’s trail in 1993, Krakauer heard echoes of the romantic myth that Everett was still alive decades after his disappearance. As he later wrote:

  A year ago, while filling my truck with gas in Kingman, Arizona, I happened to strike up a conversation about Ruess with the middle-aged pump attendant, a small, twitchy man with flecks of Skoal staining the corners of his mouth. Speaking with persuasive conviction, he swore that “he knew of a fella who’d definitely bumped into Ruess” in the late 1960s at a remote hogan on the Navajo Indian Reservation. According to the attendant’s friend, Ruess was married to a Navajo woman, with whom he’d raised at least one child.

  Krakauer tracked down Ken Sleight, with whom he discussed the significance of the enigmatic NEMO inscription on the granary in Grand Gulch. Sleight offered his theory that Everett might have drowned trying to swim the San Juan River at the mouth of Grand Gulch. Then he mused,

  “Everett was a loner, but he liked people too damn much to stay down there and live in secret the rest of his life. A lot of us are like that—I’m like that, Ed Abbey was like that, and it sounds like this McCandless kid was like that: We like companionship, see, but we can’t stand to be around people for very long. So we go get ourselves lost, come back for a while, then get the hell out again. And that’s what Everett was doing.

  “Everett was strange,” Sleight concedes. “Kind of different. But him and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That’s what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.”

  * * *

  Gary James Bergera’s “ ‘The Murderous Pain of Living’: Thoughts on the Death of Everett Ruess,” published as an afterword to the 2000 reprint of On Desert Trails, makes the most thoughtful case to date that Everett may have committed suicide. “For many readers of Everett Ruess’s remarkable letters home,” Bergera begins, “a terrible melancholy permeates almost every line.” The essay assembles a small anthology of the gloomiest and most despairing quotations from those letters, including the ones in which Everett anticipates his own death. Bergera freely admits that “I focus on particular aspects of Everett’s character at the exclusion of others.” Yet he is convinced that “what emerges from a careful review of Everett’s writings is a portrait of a gifted yet depressive young artist whose tortured engagement with life both powered his creative expression and propelled him toward his own self-destruction.”

  Bergera does not go so far as to label Everett as bipolar. Instead he sees him as hypomanic—a psychiatric diagnosis that indicates a milder form of bipolar affective disorder. According to one source, hypomania is “characterized by optimism, pressure of speech and activity, and decreased need for sleep. Some people have increased creativity while others demonstrate poor judgment and irritability.” All these symptoms closely match some of Everett’s recurrent states and moods.

  Another of Bergera’s medical speculations makes the distinction between pernicious anemia and folic anemia. On July 21, 1932, Everett wrote in his diary, “Physically I feel very weak. I would not be surprised to learn that pernicious anaemia has set in again. A slight bruise has taken three weeks to heal.” During one of his stays at home in Los Angeles, Everett may well have been diagnosed as suffering from pernicious anemia. In the 1930s, the cause of the malady—a deficiency of vitamin B12—had not yet been identified. Bergera notes that this form of anemia “affects people primarily over age fifty.” It is more likely, he believes, that Everett suffered from folic anemia, caused by a dietary shortage of raw leafy vegetables. (During his travels, Everett seldom if ever mentions eating vegetables of any kind.) In the 1930s, doctors made no distinctions among the various anemias—they were all lumped under the quaint heading of “tired blood.”

  Although anemia might explain Everett’s bouts of lethargy, fatigue, and sore muscles and joints, particularly during his 1932 journey, it would have had nothing to do with his possible hypomania, whose causes remain unknown today. But both, Bergera believes, could have contributed to suicidal inclinations.

  Bergera briefly discusses Everett’s sexuality, citing both passages in which he writes about being attracted to girls (Frances, the Mormon girl in Tropic, the Indian woman whose photograph he jokingly captioned “My Navajo Wife”) and to men and boys whose good looks he found appealing, as well as the sign-off in the Bill Jacobs letter, “Love and kisses, / Desperately yours.” But he stops short of labeling Everett as bisexual. Instead, Bergera gathers all these inklings under the rubric of Everett’s “attempt to understand his own sexuality.”

  At the end of “ ‘The Murderous Pain of Living,’ ” Bergera spins out a possible scenario covering Everett’s last days. He admits that there is no hard evidence for this chain of events—they amount at best to a what-might-have-been. The virtue of this narrative is that it dovetails neatly with the puzzle of what the searchers found—and didn’t find—in Davis Gulch in March 1935.

  In Bergera’s telling, Everett led Cockleburrs and Chocolatero into the gulch by the livestock trail. From a camp on the canyon floor, “he explored nearby side canyons, cliffs and buttes, until he found a wild, lonely spot that reminded him of a place he had been before.” Back at his camp, he loaded up one of the burros with his camping gear, food, diary, and painting kit, led the animal to his special spot, and unloaded the baggage. Then he led the burro back to the Davis Gulch camp and constructed the brushwork corral to confine the two animals in the upper part of the canyon, where they had plenty of grass to feed on.

  Returning to his special place, Bergera imagines, Everett “gathered up his gear, all the beauty he had carried with him, and secured it in a recess he knew no one would ever find.” Then,

  Slowly with the setting sun, the misery and anguish of the past four years began to wash away and Everett felt life loosen its grip. From this altar of beauty, he gazed one last time across the horizon. Content that he had kept his dream, Everett knew he was now going to make his destiny.

  What the actual agent of Everett’s suicide might have been, Bergera does not venture to guess. In the end, the scenario is simply a romantic fantasy, to which few of the partisans who make up the Ruess cult subscribe.

  Along with well-thought-out and sensitive commentaries such as Bergera’s, the enigma of Everett’s di
sappearance has elicited responses from clairvoyants and mystics just this side of the lunatic fringe. The most ambitious and curious work in this vein is a slender book by Mark A. Taylor called Sandstone Sunsets: In Search of Everett Ruess, published in 1997 by Gibbs Smith.

  The problem with Sandstone Sunsets is that it’s really about Mark Taylor, not Everett Ruess. On the very first page the author announces, “This year marks the tenth anniversary of my quest to find Everett.” Yet near the end of his 116-page meditation, he admits, “I had not solved the mystery of Everett’s disappearance.” His consolation: “I know much more than when I began, especially about my own undefined quest or journey.”

  The pity is that here and there, Taylor may actually have been on the trail of important new evidence about Everett’s fate. In Escalante, he heard a rumor that one of the 1935 searchers had stolen and kept hidden for decades all of Everett’s camping gear, perhaps even his journal. Taylor goes so far as to contemplate breaking and entering the houses of one or two of these “suspects,” but manages to restrain himself.

  One is tempted to dismiss this whole line of inquiry as Taylor’s fantasy, but for some odd facts. In A Vagabond for Beauty, Rusho unambiguously claimed that the first 1935 search party had come upon Everett’s burros in their brushwork corral, and that “[o]n the fence were a bridle, a halter, and a rope.” According to Rusho, Gail Bailey, a member of the search team, took the gear and burros back to Escalante, kept the animals there for a while, where they were “ridden occasionally by the village children,” then removed them to a sheep camp in the high country.

  In his 1939 article in Desert magazine, however, Hugh Lacy, whose own Escalante research was conducted only a few years after the Davis Gulch discovery, reported, “The burros were in a natural corral large enough in good season for several months’ grazing, but the weather was backward and they were thin and starved. Their halters had been found weeks before, it later appeared, by an Escalantan who thought nothing of their significance.”

  Indeed, for six decades after the search, until his death in the 1990s, Gail Bailey was suspected by some of his neighbors of having come across Everett’s last camp on a solo outing sometime before the March 1935 search, and of having appropriated Everett’s belongings. In that most xenophobic of Mormon towns, however, such scuttlebutt was rarely shared with outsiders.

  Scrambling for a dramatic climax to his quest narrative, Taylor decides to hike to the top of Kaiparowits Plateau. That gigantic, convoluted tableland overlooking the Hole-in-the-Rock Trail, he argues (as have other commentators), has never been thoroughly searched for signs of Everett’s passage.

  From his camp, at sunset, Taylor gazes at the horizon.

  Out on the line between heaven and earth, the silhouette of a face began to form. One by one, each facial feature appeared like magic; they were perfect to the minutest detail. It was my friend Everett Ruess! I had been waiting and watching for this moment for a long time. Everett was smiling, and his lips seemed to reach up, tenderly kissing the heavens above. The wind swirled around my head, and I felt almost giddy.

  “Good night, Everett,” says Taylor out loud, before returning to his campfire.

  * * *

  In one sense, the proof that a cult has staying power comes when its iconography enters the realm of kitsch. In 1994 Waldo made a deal with a Utah-based designer and artist, Steve Jerman, licensing him to produce and sell memorabilia incorporating some of Everett’s best blockprints. On the website everettruess.net, today’s customer can buy numbered prints, postcards, journals, T-shirts, coffee mugs, water bottles, and refrigerator magnets (eight dollars apiece, shipping free) decorated with prints given arbitrary titles after Everett’s disappearance such as “Granite Towers,” “Fishing Shack,” “Junipers,” and “Tree No. 1.” Escalante Outfitters, a restaurant and outdoor gear shop in Escalante, sells Vagabond Ale, with a Dorothea Lange portrait of Everett on the label.

  Two bad detective novels, Jenny Kilb’s Pilgrim Fool (2003) and Jack Nelson’s To Die in Kanab (2006), spin their plots around modern sleuths solving the mystery of Everett’s fate. Debora L. Threedy, a University of Utah law professor, wrote a full-length play called The End of the Horizon that premiered in 2008 at Salt Lake City’s Plan-B Theater Company. The play dramatizes the anguish of the family’s loss after Everett’s disappearance (in the premiere, Threedy herself played Stella Ruess).

  It was perhaps inevitable that pop and folk song writers would take up the Ruess legend. A number of ballads about the lost vagabond are regularly played at festivals, and can be downloaded on the Internet. Perhaps the best of them are “The Wild Escalante” by Walkin’ Jim Stoltz and “Everett Ruess” by Dave Alvin. The latter song memorably ends,

  You give your dreams away as you get older

  Oh, but I never gave up mine

  And they’ll never find my body, boys

  Or understand my mind.

  Aneth Nez and his wife at his Enemy Way curing ceremony, 1971. (Daisey Johnson)

  Denny Belson and Daisey Johnson. (Dawn Kish)

  Comb Ridge, near where Denny Belson found the anomalous crevice grave. (Dawn Kish)

  The crevice grave, after it was disturbed by the FBI team. (David Roberts)

  A button, found in the crevice grave, made by the Zions Cooperative Mercantile Institution, a Salt Lake City-based manufacturer of clothing goods. (David Roberts)

  Beads and pendants from the grave site. (David Roberts)

  The upper and lower jaws of the skull found in the crevice grave, prepared for study by Dennis Van Gerven in his University of Colorado lab. (David Roberts)

  Daisey Johnson (left) and Michèle Ruess, Everett’s niece, near the grave site on Comb Ridge. (David Roberts)

  A sketch by inscription expert Fred Blackburn of the faded “NEMO” found in Grand Gulch. (David Roberts)

  The NEMO inscription found by Greg Funseth in 2001 on the Escalante Desert. (David Roberts)

  Davis Gulch from the rim. (David Roberts)

  PART THREE

  What Aneth Saw

  TEN

  Jackass Bar

  I FIRST CAME UNDER THE SPELL of Everett Ruess in the late 1980s, when I read Rusho’s A Vagabond for Beauty. The mystical passion of Everett’s response to the wilderness, blazoned again and again in the letters he had sent to friends and family, impressed but also disconcerted me. The oracular intensity of such pronouncements as “I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear” or “Beauty isolated is terrible and unbearable, and the unclouded sight of her kills the beholder” seemed too dramatic to have issued from any experience on the trail. Like Wallace Stegner, I was bemused by “the extravagance of [Everett’s] beauty-worship.” But like Stegner, I also thought at once of the parallel of John Muir. What won me over to Everett was the simple realization that everything of his that I read had been written before the age of twenty-one.

  The sense of doom that haunted other passages in the letters counterbalanced the ecstasy. In light of Everett’s disappearance, some of these declarations had an eerie power. The most resonant of them came in the postscript to the letter to Waldo in July 1932: “I’ll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I’ll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.”

  About the blockprints reproduced in Rusho’s book, I had no reservations. The prints were strikingly simple and vivid, condensing the landscape into a few bold elements with a Japanese economy. By the age of twenty, it seemed to me, Everett was already an accomplished artist.

  What I most admired about Everett Ruess, however, was his journeys themselves. Many of the places he had hiked to I knew from my own exploration of the Southwest, which had become—after two decades spent in rapt devotion to unclimbed peaks and routes in Alaska—my favorite wilderness. Yet Everett had crisscrossed Arizona, Utah, and the corners of Colorado and New Mexico when those regions were far less known and explored than they were by the 1990s. The four hundred miles in six weeks that Everett had covered
on foot in 1934 far surpassed any continuous jaunt I had ever made, whether in Alaska or the Southwest. And Everett had performed so much of his traveling alone, with only pack animals for companions. I had done plenty of solo hiking and backpacking in the wilderness, always with an acute awareness that a simple misstep or fall could spell disaster. But my longest solitary outing had stretched across a paltry five days.

  Finally, the mystery of Everett’s fate held me, like all other Ruess partisans, in thrall. In the twentieth century, among English-speaking explorers, only the disappearances of Amelia Earhart over the Pacific in 1937 and of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine on Everest in 1924 seemed to me to outweigh as legends the vanishing of Everett Ruess. Was there a chance that his remains would someday be found, as Mallory’s were in 1999, seventy-five years after his death?

  In 1998, on assignment for the premiere issue of National Geographic Adventure, I set out to see if there was anything new to be learned about Everett’s demise. Reading Vagabond, I pondered the four leading theories as to how he had met his end. The one most plausible to me (perhaps because I was a climber myself, and had often scared myself silly trying to get into inaccessible Anasazi ruins) was that Everett had fallen off a cliff, and that his bones lay wedged in some obscure cleft or had been scattered by predators.