Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  One of Muir’s most famous exploits, climbing a hundred-foot-tall Douglas fir to ride out a Sierra thunderstorm in the treetop, is the kind of jeu d’esprit Everett might have indulged in himself. With the good fortune to live till the age of seventy-six, Muir matured and developed as he became a pioneering environmentalist, co-founder of the Sierra Club, and probably America’s greatest nature writer. (It would seem inevitable that Everett must have read Muir, especially given their overlapping fascination with Yosemite, but the explorer-naturalist’s books are not among the scores that Everett mentions reading in his diaries and his letters. In a June 10, 1933, diary entry, however, in the high Sierra Nevada, Everett writes, “I thought of John Muir and his solitary strolls here, long ago.”)

  None of Everett’s predecessors or potential role models, however, launched their wandering careers at anything like the early age of sixteen. And we are left to speculate whether, had he lived as long as Muir, Everett Ruess might be acclaimed today as the artist and writer who, more than any other American, championed the quest for beauty for its own sake as he pursued an insatiable solo vagabondage through the landscapes of his heart’s content.

  * * *

  On March 22, 1932, Everett arrived once more in Roosevelt, Arizona, having hitchhiked from Los Angeles with his dog, Curly. At the Tonto Cliff Dwellings just south of Roosevelt, Everett rendezvoused with a friend named Clark, who had preceded him to Arizona. We know so little about Clark that even his last name has escaped the record. The young man seems to have been a crony of both Everett and Bill Jacobs, perhaps a former high school classmate. Everett’s plan was evidently to share another ambitious sojourn throughout the Southwest with a good companion. In his first letter home, Everett wrote, “Everyone here is favourably impressed with Clark.” Yet from the start, it was obvious that Clark was a relative novice in the outdoors. He would have to play acolyte to Everett’s wilderness priest.

  The excursion got off to a dismal start. The Apache to whom Everett had entrusted his burros over the winter had let Percival get stolen (or so he told Everett), while Cynthia was now pregnant. In the end, Everett sold Cynthia to a couple in Roosevelt, who fancied the burro as a pet for their young son.

  The feckless behavior of the Apache triggered an outburst against Indians in general. “I have learned that all Indians are children,” Everett wrote to Waldo, “unable to attain to anything like the white man’s intelligence, and what this [Apache] could not understand, he counted as nothing.”

  On March 28, Everett turned eighteen. Unlike the previous year, he made no mention of this milestone in his letters home, preoccupied as he was with getting his vexed expedition under way.

  From Arizona, Everett wrote to Bill Jacobs about the travels in the vicinity of Roosevelt that he and Clark took as warm-up hikes. Sometimes the letters record boyish fun: “I am enclosing for you the rattle of a snake I killed. Clark skinned him and I ate him.” But early on, Clark disappointed Everett. In a long letter to Waldo, Everett wrote, “Clark is a childlike slave to tobacco, his grammar is faulty, he has little understanding of art, and he himself has admitted that he is very selfish.”

  One curiosity is that in these first 1932 letters to Jacobs, Everett reverts to signing himself “Evert.” At the same time, he is “Everett” in his letters to his family. The “dual existence,” perhaps, had kept its grip on the young man through his winter months at home.

  The delay in setting out from Roosevelt was caused by the unavailability of the burros, and by the fact that even at the start of the journey, both Everett and Clark were almost out of cash. As early as March 30, in his first letter to his parents, Everett complained,

  It is very peaceful here now—too peaceful. Clark and I are both sick of waiting, and we want to hit the trail as soon as possible.…

  I spent thirteen dollars on food and utensils, and have four dollars left. Clark is broke.…

  If you are going to send any money in April, right now is the time to send it.

  At the end of his 1931 journey, Everett had seemed embarrassed by his financial dependence on his parents. Now, just a few months later, his tone is almost arrogant, as he not only prods Christopher and Stella to send money, but orders from them a minor lending library of books. The works that Everett demands his parents mail to him are Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Voltaire’s Candide, Petronius’s Satyricon, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Zola’s Nana, and Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. Of the Mann and the Dostoevsky, Everett writes, “Get them in the modern library series, otherwise they will be too bulky. These two will not cost more than two or three dollars.”

  The literary heft of this reading list sounds ostentatious, as if Everett were trying to prove to his parents that he didn’t need college to provide him with a good education. Christopher and Stella dutifully shipped their son the books, although they substituted works by Balzac and Lord Dunsany for the Mann. By April 20, less than three weeks after placing his order, Everett had read all the books his parents sent him except The Brothers Karamazov. Still moored in Roosevelt, he mailed the other books home.

  The new tone in these letters to his parents smacks of the entitlement that Everett was always in danger of slipping into half-aware. “Other things you might send,” he adds in the March 30 letter, “are, a sheaf of this paper, the dog biscuits, and a pair of thick white socks which I think are in one of my droors.” As if to soften the peremptoriness, near the end of the letter he teases, “If you send all the things I have mentioned you will be doing very well indeed.”

  Hanging around Roosevelt as they tried to organize the logistics of a major journey drove both Clark and Everett to frustration, and they started to get on each other’s nerves. When Clark finally received money from his own parents, as Everett complained in a letter to Waldo, instead of contributing it to the purchase of supplies, he spent it on “his hotel bill.” That glancing remark reveals that rather than camping out, the boys were squandering their diminishing funds on lodging and hotel meals.

  By early May, Clark and Everett were still stuck in Roosevelt. And by now they had agreed to part ways. We lack, of course, Clark’s version of the story of the falling-out, but Everett later explained his side of it to Waldo.

  I bought grub, candy and cigarettes for Clark and myself for five weeks, then I told him I did not intend to wait any longer. I invited Clark to leave with me, but he refused to consider it unless he could have a horse and saddle. As I did not have one myself I certainly couldn’t offer him one.

  At this point, sometime in early May, Bill Jacobs arrived in Roosevelt. To Waldo, Everett wrote,

  Earlier in the day Bill had come and persuaded Clark to join him. Bill invited me to go with him, but I had no faith in him and wanted to carry out my plans. I didn’t really believe I’d like them as traveling companions anyway. I had grown tired of Clark already.

  After parting from Bill and Clark and setting out alone, Everett had no regrets, though the rancor among the three friends still perturbed him. On May 22 he wrote in his diary, “[Two words illegible] put distance between me and Clark. As companions they don’t fit the bill. Neither has anything to teach me, tho they seem to think so. If they had, why wouldn’t I respect them instead of pitying them?”

  In 1998, Bud Rusho published Everett’s 1932 and 1933 diaries, under the title Wilderness Journals of Everett Ruess. Except for a pastiche of extracts printed in the 1940 volume On Desert Trails with Everett Ruess, the only published versions of Everett’s letters and diaries until now are those that appear in Rusho’s A Vagabond for Beauty and Wilderness Journals. But Rusho omits some letters entirely, and cuts passages from others without indicating his excisions. He also silently removes passages from the 1932 and 1933 diaries, even though he purports to present verbatim everything Everett wrote.

  Rusho’s omissions in both books smack of deliberate expurgation. Sometimes the cuts may be dictated by a sense that certain passages may be simply
boring or unimportant—long discussions by Everett in letters to his mother, for instance, about the specific materials he needs to make his paintings and blockprints. But other excisions seem aimed at camouflaging unpleasant episodes in Everett’s life. Just as Stella was appalled by her son’s penchant for killing rattlesnakes, so Rusho seems discomfited by some of Everett’s behavior—his thoughtless looting of Anasazi ruins, for instance, and his mailing home the treasures he had unearthed. Rusho likewise edited out Everett’s criticisms of others, or even passages that detail conflict. It is almost as though Rusho were at pains to protect Everett from himself, or from the occasionally childish or churlish sides of himself, and at pains as well to protect those others (Clark, Bill, Waldo, his parents, even the Apache he entrusted with his burros) who, were they living today, might be hurt by what Everett had to say about them.

  The cumulative effect, sadly, is to bowdlerize Everett, if ever so slightly. Rusho’s portrait of the vagabond who has by now become such a cult figure needs to be restored to its unretouched state. There is no danger that a fuller picture of Everett Ruess, warts and all, will damage his legacy. He was far too interesting and complex a person for that. Everett survives his faults and foibles.

  * * *

  Just before saying goodbye to Clark and Bill, Everett paid a local rancher ten dollars for a horse, named Pacer by his owner. At the beginning of his 1932 outing, Everett had decided to use a horse rather than burros to carry his gear. And he intended to ride the horse as much as he could, rather than use it only as a pack animal. It was a trade-off that would vex him throughout his season in the Southwest.

  Leaving Roosevelt, Everett forded the Salt River and climbed high into the Sierra Ancha mountains to camp. On his second day out, a disaster of sorts occurred. In a telegraphic shorthand bespeaking Everett’s exhaustion, his diary captures the dark feelings of that panic-stricken night. In the middle of preparing his dinner, Everett realized Pacer was missing.

  Dashed frantically in all directions for half an hour, then found his trail back up the road. Half a mile along was the rope, broken again. Soon sighted Pacer and he galloped off ahead. Prayed to God and cussed him. Dark, but half moon. Shouted to car but he went around it. Another car stopped and the driver had Pacer by the neck but I didn’t have the rope ready, and Pacer got off over the hill. Driver must have thot me stupid. Ran and ran. Pacer kept slowing and looking back.… Finally got a loop over his head. Both drenched with sweat. Tied both ends of the rawhide on his neck and rode him back.… Curly had eaten all my supper. I called him and beat him severely. Fried spuds and wrote. Thot of fluent, blistering swearing.

  The diary reveals Everett’s ever-present doubt, despite his marathon journey of the year before, concerning his competence to perform such basic trail tasks as keeping track of a hobbled horse. And it makes clear the source of Everett’s fury at his once-beloved dog. A few days before leaving Roosevelt, while Everett was off on an errand, Curly had broken into the henhouse of a resident named Wilson and killed three chickens, for which Everett had to reimburse the owner.

  The morning after the moonlight chase, Everett wrote,

  Slept late. Curly was not in camp. Called and called as I left. Thot I heard barking, but he didn’t come and I didn’t search. I thot he would trail me but he didn’t.… No signs of Curly. Probably when he finds I’m gone he’ll go back to Wilson’s, kill more chickens, and J.C. will write to my parents. I wish he were shot. His distemper is still bad. He doesn’t know enough to get out of the road. He kills chickens and steals food. I can’t afford to feed him. I can’t trust Clark at all. Curly might drown in the river, but its unlikely.

  Poor Curly! Killing chickens and gobbling down what must have looked like leftover supper amounted to normal canine behavior. But the former rez dog may have remembered beatings from before Everett had adopted him, and to slink away for good was a matter of sheer survival.

  Both the 1932 and 1933 diaries, in general, are utterly different in tone from Everett’s letters. In this sense, they emphasize how increasingly Everett turned to his letters to craft memorable and rhapsodic passages evoking the beauty and power of the wilderness. They are conscious performances in a way the diary entries are not. Moreover, the diaries reveal the funks, the depressions, even the despair into which Everett periodically lapsed, a side of his personality he tried to keep out of the letters. What a fuller understanding of this enigmatic adventurer we would have if the 1930, 1931, and 1934 diaries were not irretrievably lost!

  The diaries also present another conundrum. Everett wrote in pencil, and in the pages of the surviving bound ledger books that he used as journals, many passages have been erased. Rusho indicates these blanks in Wilderness Diaries by inserting brackets, as follows: “[9 lines erased].”

  After Everett’s disappearance, one of his parents, probably Christopher, typed up passages that seemed particularly eloquent. In so doing, that parent regularly made minor revisions to Everett’s prose. From this known fact, Rusho leaps to the conclusion that in the diaries themselves “the Ruess family … actually erased sentences that might prove embarrassing to them or to other people.”

  There is strong internal evidence, however, that the person who erased the passages was Everett himself.

  What is maddening is that the erasures often come just as Everett is probing most deeply into his psyche. For example, on May 19, four days after Curly ran away, Everett reaches a truly low point. The diary: “I’m in a bad position. No dog. An old broken down horse. [2 lines erased.] I may not be able to trade Pacer for a burro. I will die if he gives out on me.”

  If it was Everett who erased the passages, his motive may have been simply to guard his privacy, just as, responding to his parents’ wish to read his 1931 diary at the end of the summer, he had refused, citing it as “too personal to be read by anyone but the author, in its present state.” The evidence that it was Everett who later erased the passages emerges in another lacuna at the end of his despondent May 19 entry. As Rusho publishes the text, it reads,

  Killed a scorpion in the gunny sack pack. Gnats and mosquitoes. Alone again. The crazy man is in solitude again.… Pacer munched foxtails. The full moon, round and yellow, in the chalky blue sky over distant mesas. No Curly to pet. No [word missing] to hold [8 lines erased].

  In the diary itself, however, the eight-line erasure is more accurately rendered as follows:

  [1 line erased]

  stupid

  [2 lines erased]

  I’d

  [2 lines erased]

  be done.

  Whoever erased the passage left four words intact—“stupid,” “I’d,” and “be done”—each at the left margin of the page. This practice, repeated often in both the 1932 and 1933 diaries, would have been a very odd thing for a parent determined to expunge embarrassing entries to do. If Everett left those few floating words unerased, they must have served some arcane purpose. To remind himself, perhaps, in later years what the self-censored passage had been about—or perhaps to tantalize a future reader with a kind of cryptogram hinting at secrets too dark to share.

  The 1932 journey seemed jinxed from the start. The diary entries through the end of May record almost no joy, and precious little pleasure. For one thing, the country north of Roosevelt, through which Everett now traveled, was not true wilderness, but cattle country. Everett kept running into ranchers, and now and again he performed odd jobs for them to earn a bit of cash.

  He seemed, however, to be physically worn out much of the time. On May 18 he wrote, “I felt too weary to climb to the cliff dwellings, so followed the old man about working in the gardens and making fence. I was so weak I could hardly listen to what he said.”

  In a July 12 letter to Waldo, Everett confessed his frailty, even while it shamed him:

  Physically, I am not very tough. I haven’t the constitution of a day laborer. I soon wear out at a job like road building, or digging & lifting. This seems to be my physical make up, because tho I ha
ve tried many times, I find I can’t do a man’s work in physical labor.

  This weakness, in Everett’s mind, was tied up with his loneliness: “I don’t have much trouble getting along with people, but I have the greatest difficulty in finding the sort of companionship I want.”

  Later commentators, notably Gary James Bergera, have speculated that Everett may have suffered all his life from either pernicious or folic anemia. The former is caused by a deficiency of vitamin B12, the latter from an absence in one’s diet of green leafy vegetables. In a revealing July 21 diary entry, Everett wrote, “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.” This passage is immediately followed by five erased lines. But once again, not all the words are erased. The cryptic remaining text reads:

  Clark I

  [2 lines erased]

  happy

  H as. If not by happy.

  In the letters from 1931, there is virtually no mention of exhaustion or weakness, much less of anemia. Instead, Everett brags about his fitness and his energy. It is hard to disentangle the 1932 diary’s confessions of fatigue and weariness from Everett’s depression and his lingering upset over the rupture with Clark and Bill. Every few days in his diary, he drops a disparaging remark about his former pals, as if to convince himself all over again that he was right to leave them behind in Roosevelt and strike off on his own.

  Everett’s immediate goal, as he wandered north and east, was to find more prehistoric ruins. But even these disappointed him. In Pueblo Canyon, where a local had told him he could find a seventy-room cliff dwelling, Everett found far fewer structures, and they were “all crumbled.” “I was unwilling to push thru more brush,” he wrote in his diary. “I was scratched sufficiently as it was. I took one photograph. There was nothing to paint.”