Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  As the infection worsened, Everett pushed his way south and down toward the outskirts of civilization. In early August, in order to see doctors, he retreated all the way to the towns of Visalia and Tulare, out on the flat farmlands of the Central Valley, which was scorching hot at the height of summer. One physician soaked Everett’s hand in Lysol and hot water. The next day, he wrote, “[T]he nurse laid me out on the operating table, and after my hand had soaked, the doctor injected Novocain and slashed and probed in four places.” Four days later, another doctor diagnosed blood poisoning.

  Despite the seriousness of his injury, Everett kept hitching rides back into the near edges of the forest, where he retrieved his burros and tried to resume his vagabondage. “I am not a good left handed camper, but I did my best,” he recorded on August 4. He wrote a letter home using his left hand, the script slanted backward, the scrawl like a child’s. This was, however, a somewhat theatrical gesture, for at the same time, Everett kept up his diary entries with his right hand.

  Contact with the outer world plunged Everett into a new depression. In a ranger cabin, he listened to a radio broadcast. “I heard the San Francisco news by radio,” he wrote, “and was disgusted at the advertising and the vulgar quality of the news & sports.” But in Visalia, he caught a broadcast of classical music on another radio. “The concert was glorious,” he wrote. “I was drunk with the beauty of it.” To the strains of Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain,” Everett “whirled and wove a dexterous pattern with my feet, reaching and maintaining a frenziedly fantastic mood until I was exhausted.”

  At last Everett’s hand healed, and he resumed his journey. Something was troubling him beyond the infection and Grandma’s pregnancy, however. The 1933 diary had become such an unintrospective habit that, reading between the lines, one guesses that in some half-conscious way, Everett was censoring his own darkest ruminations. Thus he ended an August 21 entry, full of the trivial happenings of the day, with a single, unelaborated line, “I had a huge fire, and some hot stew, then thought long long thoughts.”

  On August 28 he let down his guard ever so slightly: “I thought strange thoughts, and looked forward to San Francisco. My longing for the desert has increased.” Already anticipating a 1934 return to Arizona, he started chanting not melodies from Dvořák or Beethoven, but Navajo songs and words. That same day he made a confession of which there is no hint in the previous three months of diary entries: “I find sleep very unpleasant. I cannot bear to yield consciousness without a struggle, especially as I sleep so poorly. I call sleep temporary death.”

  Despite these inklings that the exuberance of summer in the Sierras had faded, Everett determined to complete his journey by reaching Yosemite. At the beginning of September, somewhere in the high country, he at last intersected the John Muir Trail. Even here, traveling most of each day above timberline, he was seldom alone for more than a few hours at a time. On October 2 he met a solitary rider, who told him he had come from Yosemite in only eleven days, but in Everett’s judgment, the man had “completely ridden down” his horse by pushing the traverse so fast. In the end, it would take Everett twenty-seven more days to reach Yosemite.

  The diary hints at periodic spasms of gloom. “Supper and thoughts,” Everett wrote on September 11. The next five lines are erased, with not a single word left standing. Another entry begins, “After a woeful, restless night full of evil dreams …” Everett’s dread of sleep may have sprung from those recurrent evil dreams, as his unconscious took over, mocking the joys that filled his waking days. But the content of those dreams, he was unwilling to confide even to his diary. On September 6, however, he announced, “I set less and less value on human life, as I learn more about it. I admit the reality of pain in the moment, but its opposite is not strong.”

  On September 8 a minor accident threatened to abort the whole journey. The detailed account of it in Everett’s diary reads like a surreal nightmare. Thrashing through “a tangle of prickly brush” on Goddard Creek, Everett stirred up a bees’ nest. He was stung at least a dozen times.

  I struggled frenziedly down to the water, tearing my shirt. I had to leap down onto some wet rocks, then I climbed up on some more, pulled out the stings and the bees in my hair, threw off my clothes, and plunged into the water. Then I seemed to burn all over, and looking down, I discovered that my body was a mass of poison oak blisters. The shock nearly broke me, and I felt sick all over. When I was trying to put on my shirt, I fell into the water, and could not find the strength to get out until I was half drowned.

  It took Everett hours to get back on the trail, as he vomited up his breakfast. “I could see nothing but blackness,” he reported, “and fell back, exhausted, dizzy, and faint.” Struggling to bash his way out of the undergrowth, he fell down repeatedly.

  It seems probable that the reeling, staggering fit that Everett suffered had nothing to do with poison oak, but was instead caused by anaphylactic shock brought on by the bee stings. Depending upon the victim’s allergic susceptibility, the reaction to a dozen or more bee stings can range from annoying to fatal. Back in camp that evening, Everett searched for old lemon peels to rub on his skin, for one trail acquaintance had told him that was a good remedy for poison oak. Two days later, Everett still had swollen lips and eyelids. But by September 13 he admitted to his diary that the poison oak rash had disappeared entirely. “Either it was something else,” he wrote, “or some powerful counter agent stopped it.”

  Anaphylactic shock was first diagnosed in 1902, but by 1933 it was little understood or recognized, and its relationship to insect bites and stings was not fully clarified until the latter half of the twentieth century. In all likelihood, Everett had a close call with death in the tangle of underbrush on Goddard Creek.

  Beginning on September 18, when Everett stumbled upon “a camp of disappointed hunters,” he embarked upon a nine-day detour in his jaunt toward Yosemite. The six hunters hired the nineteen-year-old to burro-pack their supplies into the upper reaches of Fish and Silver creeks in the high Sierra, and to cook and wash dishes for them. The diary account of this junket reads like a chapter out of Don Quixote, as the incompetent hunters miss one shot after another, but finally kill a deer too young to be legal game. They also shoot a doe (another violation) just to enrich their dinners with venison. Much of the men’s camp time is taken up with drinking, cursing one another, and worrying about game wardens. One of the hunters regularly gets lost on his daily prowls in search of four-point bucks.

  Everett seems to have tolerated this nonsense with good humor, gotten along fine with the drunken bumblers, and kept his appraisal of their follies to the privacy of his journal. On parting, the men gave Everett ten dollars, a pack of cigarettes, and some of their poached venison.

  Throughout the last leg of his 1933 journey, thoughts of the desert Southwest increasingly swam through Everett’s head. Near Mono Creek on September 15, he stared at an escarpment called Vermilion Cliffs, then wrote, “They are a very pale pink, and make me wish for the real Vermilion cliffs of Utah and Arizona.”

  At last, on September 29, Everett reached Yosemite. To his surprise, Grandma had lasted the whole trip without yet giving birth. By now, most of the tourists were gone. “The deer hunters are discouraged or sated,” he wrote, “the school boys have gone back to their studies, and vacation time is over for the populace. But this is not vacation time for me. This is my life.”

  Despite this boast, Everett spent only two weeks in Yosemite. He climbed Half Dome by the cable route and made several forays along trails he had not explored in 1930. But his diary captures few expressions of the glories of the landscape, and the fulfillment of his goal to return to Yosemite sounds like an anticlimax. Everett spent as much time in the park headquarters, museum, library, and store as he did in the outdoors. The mail from home that he gathered was “disappointing,” although he was pleased to cash the latest of the unfailing string of money orders from his parents that he had received throughout the last four
months. Buying groceries, he splurged on such luxuries as caviar and foie gras. Washing up in the Ahwanee Lodge, Everett saw himself in the mirror, perhaps for the first time in months. “My self confidence dropped to zero at once,” he wrote tellingly. “I looked like a ghoul or an ogre.” At once he tried to improve his appearance by going to a barber, who not only gave him a haircut but shaved off his beard and whiskers.

  Everett’s plan was not to head back to Los Angeles, but to proceed directly to San Francisco and launch the life of a bohemian artist. On October 3, he recorded his fantasy:

  I planned how I would rent a little garret on some city hilltop, and have a place all my own. From it I would sally forth to make color studies of tropical fish in the park, to concerts, to library expeditions, and devil may care wanderings in the city and on the sea front.

  The unspoken assumption behind this pipe dream was that Christopher and Stella would continue to subsidize their son as he crafted his artistic career.

  Despite the optimism of that vision, Everett’s mood was glum. The same day he wrote, “My thoughts were bleak. At dark I made a fire to cheer myself.” On October 8 he recorded matter-of-factly that he had spent the last seventy straight hours without sleep.

  From the park library, he borrowed a novel by Charles Morgan called The Fountain. A best-seller when it was published in 1932, but virtually unread today, it revolves around the saga of a British soldier interned in Holland during World War I, who gets entangled in a passionate affair with a German officer’s wife.

  From its opening pages on, the book made a strong impact on Everett. “[M]y heart leaped when I learned the subject,” he wrote, “the contemplative life, the inner stillness which I too am striving to attain, tho I am not done with the wild songs of youth.” He devoured the novel in a day and a half. Midway through the book, stirred by the forbidden love affair around which it pivots, Everett paused to record the deepest statement that he had made that year in 194 pages of tightly scrawled diary entries: “I suppose a great and soul filling love is perhaps the greatest experience a man may have, but it is such a rarity as to be almost negligible.”

  In some sense, that sentence, with its mingled hope and despair, could stand as an epigraph to Everett’s life.

  Everett finished his diary on October 12, as he prepared to sell his burros, leave Yosemite, and make his way to San Francisco. But at the bottom of a last, otherwise blank page, he wrote a final line: “What a strange dream about Waldo!”

  * * *

  Judging from the letters and the diary, it is hard to know what the 1933 expedition meant to Everett. From it emerged no deep reflections about his purpose in life, no manifestos comparable to the one embodied in the postscript to the letter to Waldo mailed from Chinle, Arizona, in July 1932. Except for the admirable push in September along the John Muir Trail to Yosemite, Everett’s wandering seemed rather aimless. There was little true exploration about it, for throughout his four and a half months in national forests and parks, Everett almost never strayed from a well-maintained trail.

  If the purpose of the journey was to find inspiring landscapes to capture on paper, there is surprisingly scanty mention in the diary of hours spent sketching with pen and pencil or painting with watercolors. Far more paragraphs (and more zestful ones) narrate Everett’s toil as a fisherman. But the stalking, landing, and devouring of trout sound like the play of a boy at summer camp, not the quest of an artist.

  Nor did Everett find much of his treasured solitude in 1933. If his goal instead was to discover a lasting companion, a soul mate of the sort he had given up hoping Bill Jacobs could ever be, he came up empty. Not only did the Sierras fail to give Everett even a glimpse of a “great and soul filling love,” but he did not forge a single serious friendship there that survived the journey. The dozens of strangers who briefly shared a camp or trail with Everett flit in and out of his diary like shadows. As early as June 8, in his first letter to Waldo, Everett had written, “What I miss most here is intellectual companionship, but that is always difficult to find.” Difficult indeed, for none of the Neds or Charleys or park rangers or willowy young schoolteachers whose lives briefly crossed Everett’s seemed to promise intellectual friendship.

  The hunger for the desert Southwest, for real wilderness, that assailed Everett during the last weeks of his trek through the Sierras would point his life in a truer direction—the direction around which the cult of Everett Ruess that has grown ever since his disappearance is based. But before he could return to Arizona, Everett had high hopes for San Francisco.

  In his last letter from Yosemite to his parents, on October 4, Everett pleaded, “I’d also like to have another 200-page diary book if you can find one reasonably.” But if he kept a diary during his months in San Francisco, it has disappeared. Once again we have only Everett’s letters to speak for his experiment in living as a starving artist in the city.

  In El Portal, near the western gateway to Yosemite, Everett managed to sell Betsy and Grandma to an acquaintance from Visalia whom he had met in Sequoia. It was a good bargain, for Everett unloaded the animals for the same price he had paid for them in late May. The buyer drove Everett to the town of Merced. From there he hopped a freight to Sacramento—the first time, so far as we know, that Everett dabbled in the hoboes’ preferred means of transportation. It was all fun and games, as more-seasoned vagabonds taught him the ropes. “When we pulled out,” Everett wrote home on October 17, “one of the fellows found a reefer [a refrigerator car], and while the cars were gathering speed, we ran the length of the train on top, leaping from one car to another, till we reached it.” Inside the “reefer,” Everett lounged on a pile of fresh cantaloupes as he “swapped yarns” with his fellow railroad bums.

  After a couple of other freight-train rides, Everett “dismounted in Oakland.” From the railroad yard he proceeded to the house of friends of his family, who put him up while he searched for an apartment across the bay in San Francisco.

  It took him a week to find and rent a small place on Polk Street—today a chic gay district, but in 1933 a less lively and slightly rundown neighborhood. After he was established there, he wrote home a droll description of his garret. Three of his own blockprints hung on the wall, along with one by Hiroshige for which he had traded, and the battered sombrero he had worn in the Sierras. His saddlebags and Navajo blanket lay on the floor. A simple table served as his desk, from which he could look out onto the street. At night, a neon light outside bathed the curtains with “a rosy glow.” “There are no cooking possibilities,” Everett explained. “I have eaten three cooked meals in the last two weeks. I get along famously on fruit, sandwiches, and milk.”

  Shortly after arriving in this city of artists and intellectuals, Everett started pounding the pavement in search of dealers who might show some interest in his work. His mother had sent him linoleum blocks, so he was able to carve, ink, and process new prints; Stella also mailed him prints he had made in previous years. On November 24, Everett reported a gratifying breakthrough. Paul Elder, who ran an influential bookstore-cum-gallery, took the whole batch of prints Everett showed him on consignment. But later, Everett reported, “I went to Paul Elder’s today, and they haven’t even got around to putting my stuff up, so naturally they haven’t sold any.” In January he passed on gloomier news: “A while ago I was reliably informed that Paul Elder’s are and have been on the verge of bankruptcy for a long time, and that I should take my stuff out as soon as possible, as they would not pay me anything even if they sold all my stuff.”

  Everett was able to sell prints here and there to new acquaintances, or trade them for such luxuries as concert tickets. He threw himself into the cultural life of San Francisco. During his first two months there, he went to lectures by the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens and the artist Rockwell Kent (himself a bold adventurer who captured such remote landscapes as Greenland and Alaska in masterly woodcuts and paintings); a concert by the Russian violinist Mischa Elman; a chamber music rec
ital featuring Italian music; and operatic performances of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’Or and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. He also signed up for life classes in drawing (at fifty cents a session). No sketches of nude women, however, seem to have survived in Everett’s portfolio.

  The would-be artist could not fool himself with the presumption that he was making money or even breaking even. When Waldo sent him an unexpected check as a Christmas gift, Everett responded with embarrassment: “[M]y first feeling was that I did not want it. I know too that you could ill afford to spare it.” But he went on to confess, “I sold a couple of pictures today, and spent the money already. Half the time I am broke or without money for carfare and telephone.”

  The truth was that at nineteen, Everett was still completely dependent on the “allowance” that his parents regularly mailed him. And there are signs that he was now taking their generosity for granted. On October 29 he wrote to his parents, “In regard to the remittance, I suggest that you put $10 of the October money (if you haven’t already sent it) in the bank for me against the desert trip, and send the other 15 odd as soon as you can.”

  As he had with Edward Weston in Carmel in 1930, now in San Francisco Everett had no compunctions about presenting himself on the doorsteps of famous artists. He had long admired the paintings of Maynard Dixon, who as a young man, two decades earlier, had himself crisscrossed the Southwest and captured its landscapes in oils and watercolors. Only a little more than a week after landing in San Francisco, Everett sought out Dixon’s studio and introduced himself. Like Weston, Dixon was charmed rather than put off by this pushy young stranger.

  The linkage with Dixon would prove one of the most fortuitous of Everett’s brief career. One day the master gave him what Everett called “perhaps the best art lesson I ever had.” It was, he wrote his mother, “a lesson in simplicity.”

  The main thing Maynard did was to make me see what is meaningless in a picture, and have the strength to eliminate it; and see what was significant, and how to stress it. This he showed me with little scraps of black and white paper, placed over my drawings.