Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  On you, my nature-loving child.

  May you look deep and wide and high;

  Your art all nature glorify.

  Such verses suggest that Everett was Stella’s favorite. It is hard to imagine Waldo, praised for his purity and courtesy, not holding a grudge against the impulsive younger brother in whom their mother saw a nature-loving poet.

  On rare automobile rides from Brookline, the whole family set out on literary tours of eastern Massachusetts, visiting Walden Pond and the homes of Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott; the House of the Seven Gables in Salem, which had inspired Hawthorne’s novel; and the Revolutionary War sites in Lexington and Concord, including the “rude bridge that arched the flood” of Emerson’s poem. Everett’s penchant for wandering off came to the surface on these outings. As Stella wrote in her journal,

  One Sunday Christopher took the boys on an historical jaunt to the old North Church, and some way lost his small son. Everett proceeded to hunt up a policeman and journeyed to the police station, there to eat chocolates in perfect confidence that his father would find him. His father did, but it was after several hours of distraction!

  In 1920, Christopher was reassigned by the Chautauqua Art Desk Company to a post in New York City. The family spent two years in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, then two years in Palisades Park, New Jersey. Taking advantage of the proximity of highbrow culture, Stella enrolled her gifted younger son in classes at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. From a home in New Jersey that the Ruesses named Cherry Croft, mother and son made frequent trips to Greenwich Village for classes in wood-carving and pottery-making. After class, the pair of aesthetes would head off to New York’s famous museums, or to such bookstores as Scribner’s and Brentano’s, or to poetry readings by the likes of Edward Markham (remembered today, if at all, for “The Man with a Hoe”).

  In 1923, after her father fell ill, Stella and Everett took a cross-country journey by train to Los Angeles to care for him. They turned the trip into a sightseeing excursion, making a brief but memorable stop at the Grand Canyon. Then, during her father’s convalescence, Stella and her nine-year-old son visited Yosemite Valley, where they went on several long hikes. In the middle of one, while they bathed in the Merced River, as Stella recalled five years later, “E was nearly drowned in the pool, choosing just the moment when I happened to be swimming under water!”

  Everett kept a diary during this long detour into the West. It may be the earliest of his writings to survive. The entries are short and often perfunctory, but they nonetheless reflect the nine-year-old’s wide-eyed curiosity about everything he saw in the countryside, and they presage the voracious wanderlust of Everett’s late adolescence.

  The boy’s first reaction to the Grand Canyon is surprising, given the fascination the place would come to have for him in his late teens.

  April 4. Saw the Grand Canyon of Colorado. When I first looked over I was scared, but the next time I could see better. There are red and grey stone turrets rising up. The canyon is a mile deep, and I couldn’t even see the river.

  I looked at it through a spy glass in the lookout tower. Mother went down to the bottom on a horse. I saw a silly woman on a rock waving her arms. She would have fallen over if another woman hadn’t caught her.

  Stella’s ride on the back of a mule (not a horse), while, as she put it, “E’s impressions were all from the rim where he stayed with our English traveling acquaintances,” probably marked the last occasion on which the mother proved more adventurous than her son.

  The longest entry in Everett’s 1923 diary is devoted to the several-day trip to Yosemite, where mother and son slept outdoors at Camp Curry. (Everett makes no mention of nearly drowning in the Merced River.) The young diarist briefly notes his first view of El Capitan, the nearly vertical 2,700-foot precipice of sheer granite that commands the valley, but he was more interested in the wildlife. “On the way [to Camp Curry] we saw chipmunks, as numerous as the falling leaves almost, peering at us from every nook and cranny, we saw a fawn and some deer.”

  Several days later:

  After supper I fed a deer whose name was Jenny. She was a female, but the males would not come near you. The males have horns, but the females do not. I tried to pet Jenny but she balked, and would not let me. Jenny was very greedy and took large bites of biscuits, and I was soon back for more. One lady put a biscuit in her mouth and Jenny walked up and took it out.

  For the nine-year-old, the high point of the trip was the nightly tourist stunt performed by Park Service officials well into the 1960s, before it was terminated as an ecological atrocity. Everett describes it with unfeigned awe:

  There was a great camp fire, and moving pictures were shown. Then there was a signal from the top of Glacier Point, and every one craned their necks upward. Someone whispered—“The firefall.” Then a stream of dazzling brightness issued from out the sky it seemed. One could not distinguish the outline of Glacier Point from the Darkness. Then it ended.

  The spectacle was concocted by setting a huge red fir tree trunk on fire, then pushing it off Yosemite Falls. As it fell, the tree blazed a glowing path, spangled with water-spray, through the night.

  By the end of the summer, Stella and Everett were back in New Jersey. The next year, Christopher was once again reassigned by the Chautauqua Art Desk Company, this time to a job in Chicago. The family packed up and moved to Valparaiso, Indiana, from which town Christopher commuted fifty miles to work. He was hardly an absent father, however. On August 5, 1924, already installed in his Chicago office but awaiting the arrival of his wife and sons, Christopher wrote to Everett:

  Will you not send me a postal card every day as Waldo does, and on it write your diary entry for the previous day? I would enjoy it. I don’t like to have people feel that one of my sons does this, but that the other laddie forgets his daddy, do I?

  At the time, fourteen-year-old Waldo was spending his summer on a ranch in Montana, where he unabashedly bragged about a “little girl” who had become his constant companion. Perhaps this spurred Everett to envy, for in the same letter, Christopher reassured his younger son:

  You will also love many little girls as you grow up in that way, and some day when you are older and more of a man and able to earn money and build a home, you will marry as Mother and I did and have beautiful sons and daughters, of whom you will be as proud as I am of you and of Waldo, and as Mother is.

  Christopher’s letters to his sons were always loving, but they carry an undertone of stern demand that the boys live up to the highest moral and intellectual standards. “Dear Leonardo da Vinci Everett,” Christopher saluted his son in another 1924 letter. “If you were like him and Waldo were like Ben Franklin, than [sic] would make a great pair of great men from our little family.” A year earlier, while Everett was still only nine, Christopher admonished the “laddie”:

  You may let Mother read this letter, too, if she will promise to hug you for me, or spank you, as the occasion may suggest.…

  You know President Coolidge has two boys now, and the whole world is watching those boys. They are regular fellows too. They know how to work and how to play.

  All this enforced intimacy, combined with such rigorous injunctions to behave as what his father called a “PG” (“Perfect Gentleman”), could have easily turned Everett into a mama’s boy or a precocious show-off at school, or a sullen rebel. Yet Everett seems to have bent in none of these directions. From the Valparaiso years emerge several other examples of the earliest of Everett’s writings to have survived. One of his most beguiling youthful works he titled “All Boy, Age 11, Secret Diary.” The diary was evidently not secret, for the surviving copy has been typed, probably by Everett’s proud father.

  The entries reveal an active boy with the normal eleven-year-old’s penchant for both mischief and adventure, and they also demonstrate that Everett had developed a sly sense of humor. There is surprisingly little of the show-off in them. Excerpts:

  Jan. 10: Waldo, Mother, S
heldon and I went ice-skating and I found out that I had weak ankles.… I read a book at Sheldon’s house about the land of Oz and I think that it is an awful good book.

  Jan. 26: … Here I go

  On my toe

  Through the Snow.

  The Ice it’s slippery

  And the Mud, it’s mickery.

  So it’s quite a job

  To catch a Bob.…

  Feb. 29: There is no February 29th in this year.

  March 20: Today I was all happy inside and could hardly keep from yelling for tomorrow I am going to Chicago. I don’t like to do homework. It never does you any good anyhow.

  May 11: My turtle has got the crawling fever. He is crawling all over. Mine is named Prince Crawlaway II and Harold’s is Prince Crawlaway I.

  Sept. 10: Today I and Harold and Sheldon went out tonight. I honked horns of autos and rang doorbells. We set water traps too.

  Oct. 8: I got copped by Mrs. Taylor for shooting a match up to the ceiling and I was told to stay in, but I forgot all about it.

  To sharpen his artistic talents, Stella enrolled Everett in classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. But the great discovery of his Valparaiso years—1924 through 1928, from age ten to age fourteen—was nature. The countryside was lush with woods, into which Everett wandered at will. An old Indian trail, perhaps blazed by the Miami tribe, passed very close to the town. The kinds of outdoor stimulation that were hard to come by in Brookline, Brooklyn, or Palisades Park now cast their spell over Everett. His passions focused on creatures of all kinds, ranging from insects to mammals, and on all things Indian.

  A number of Everett’s school essays from this time survive. These two- or three-page exercises deal with rats and mice, flies, crows, skunks, coyotes, and birds. One is titled “The mt. lion as the friend of the deer.”

  During this period, Christopher apparently worried that Everett was becoming too interested in nature, at the expense of human beings. On September 30, 1926, he wrote to his son:

  You have a good mind. Now you need to observe people as you observe things and learn to make many friends. Try to please people. You are a little like your daddy, who gets so interested in ideas at times that he is absent-minded about people. That is bad. Because people have feelings.

  A paradox that would lie at the core of Everett’s being during the wandering years of his late adolescence may have had its genesis in Valparaiso. The boy was by nature gregarious and outgoing, so much so that in California in his late teens he would think nothing of going up to the homes of such famous artists as the photographers Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, knocking on the front door, and introducing himself as a fledgling protégé. Yet on his extended journeys with pack animals across the Southwest, Everett would conclude, “After all the lone trail is best”—partly, as he put it, “because I’m a freakish person.”

  In Indians, Everett found what for a while seemed the perfect solution to those contradictory tensions. Indians were people, but around Valparaiso it was not living natives that caught the lad’s fancy, but the prehistoric relics they had left behind. In those Indiana forests, Everett found his first arrowheads.

  In Valparaiso, he wrote a pair of poems about arrowhead discoveries that are remarkably accomplished for his age. The better of the two, written in November 1927 at the age of thirteen, was titled “The Relic.”

  In a deserted field I found an arrowhead.

  Worn by the rains and snows of many a year,

  It had survived its maker, buried here,

  For he who shot the arrow from his bow was dead.

  How far this chisled piece of stone leads back the mind!

  By careful Indian craftsman it was wrought,

  For many purposes had it been sought.

  To me it was a very precious treasure find.

  Throughout his later wanderings in the Southwest, Everett would continue to delight in “precious treasure finds,” mailing or bringing home arrowheads, Anasazi pots, and even an intact necklace he found in a burial site. Modern readers of Everett’s letters and diaries, in which he brags about keeping ancient artifacts, are often disturbed by his acquisitiveness, but it is worth remembering that in the 1930s there was no prevailing ethic to discourage the looting of prehistoric ruins. Every country store and saloon had framed arrowhead collections hung on the wall, the points arranged in pleasing designs, and the metates (stone basins) on which the ancients had ground their corn were routinely used as yard ornaments and doorstops.

  The school essays from Everett’s Valparaiso years are mostly short and dryly matter-of-fact pieces, but several hint at higher strivings. The most interesting of them is an eerily prescient short story called “Vultures.” It begins:

  A man lay sprawled on the stinging hot sand beneath a twisted Joshua tree in the desert. Its crooked shade made a fantastic pattern, and fell in sultry stripes across his weary body. The shadow moved, and with a tired lurch, the man moved his head into a band of shade.

  This dramatic beginning is clarified only in the third paragraph:

  The man was an artist. He had come here to die—or to recover his lost ambitions. His sensitive eyes roved over the unreal landscape; the barren wastes of sand, the desert cliffs, the bleak, bent cactus trees darkly outlined against the moon, over which there passed a ghostly wraith of cloud. But the artist’s soul was dead within him; the weird beauty was not reflected in his face, stoical and hopeless.

  The story is only two and a half typed pages long, but the prose vividly evokes the desert landscape that would become Everett’s chosen wilderness. The unnamed artist’s mission is a three-day stagger in search of an epiphany. At last it comes:

  Though he had not found the inspiration he sought, the desire to live was suddenly reawakened. Tortured flesh complained insistently and would not be denied. In sudden frenzy he turned about and began in tottering haste to retrace his way.

  But the turnaround comes too late. Out of water on the third day, the man crawls atop a lonely butte to die. A torrential rainstorm sweeps the landscape.

  The rain passed, leaving the desert glorious and cool. As the vultures poised in the air and came to tear him to pieces, he looked toward the horizon. All that was left of his anguish now vanished, and a light shone in his eyes, as he saw the dying sun flood the waste lands with splendor. The last thing he saw was the burnished bronze of a vulture’s wings, glinting in the sunlight, as it snatched his eyes out.

  He did not feel the pain. A moment later, the blood-hued sunset passed swiftly to night.

  In the summer of 1928, after the Chautauqua Art Desk Company had folded, Christopher found a new job in California. The family moved from Valparaiso to Los Angeles, where Christopher started work as a county probation officer.

  Less than two years later, Everett would begin the serious vagabondage that became the true mission of his short life, and that would, against all odds, make him posthumously famous.

  * * *

  In June 1930, at the age of sixteen, while still a student at Hollywood High School, Everett set out on the first of his five annual expeditions, as he hitchhiked up the coastal highway from Los Angeles to Carmel. The diary that Everett kept during that first rambling trip may be irrevocably lost. What we know of the 1930 outing (the least ambitious of the five that Everett would undertake) comes from some sixteen letters he wrote to his parents and to Waldo, and a single letter to his high-school friend Bill Jacobs.

  In Carmel, one of the first things Everett did was to find the studio of the famous photographer Edward Weston, knock on the door, and introduce himself. “A man who gave me a ride near Morro Bay had told me about him,” Everett wrote to his mother.

  Weston was forty-four years old that summer. He had already taken some of his most celebrated photographs, including many of the nudes and still lifes that would become his hallmark achievements. Solo exhibitions in New York City had been devoted to his work. Two years after Everett’s visit, in 1932, Weston would cofound Group f/64 with A
nsel Adams and others.

  The brazen confidence it took for Everett to thrust himself upon such a distinguished artist may have originated in his upbringing. The boosterism of his parents (“Leonardo da Vinci Everett”) may well have instilled a sense of entitlement in the aspiring poet and painter. But the fact that Weston did not simply turn away the uninvited guest testifies to Everett’s charm, and perhaps to the notion that Weston saw real talent in the lad. During the next several days, Everett palled up with Weston’s teenage sons, Neil and Cole (both younger than he), for fishing and swimming excursions. Weston himself invited Everett to eat dinner with the family and to sleep in his garage.

  In view of Everett’s later obsession with the desert Southwest, it is interesting that on this first journey, it was the ocean and the seashore that captivated him. During the days spent in the Westons’ orbit, Everett sometimes camped out on the beach. Writing home about these solo bivouacs, he could not suppress a gleeful pride in his newfound self-sufficiency.

  First I chopped plenty of firewood. Then I made my bed, and cooked supper. A short time after supper, I went swimming. After the swim, I went to bed, and enjoyed the extra blanket.

  Wednesday morning, I had Cornflakes and condensed milk for breakfast.…

  All his life, Everett would suffer agonizingly from poison oak and poison ivy. In one letter home, he admits, “The poison oak is nearly over on my face, but it is still flaming on my legs and hands.” Given how sensitive he was to the oily resin that caused his outbreaks—the rashes forced him to be hospitalized more than once—it is a puzzle that in both California and the Southwest, Everett never seemed to learn how to avoid coming in contact with the three-leaved plants. Instead, Everett seemed to accept the itchy rashes as a medical condition like asthma or anemia.