Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  Another, dated simply “May,” announces, “I am drunk with a searing intoxication that liquor could never bring—drunk with the fiery elixir of beauty.…” But that intoxication by nature comes at a price: “I am condemned to feel the withering fire of beauty pouring into me. I am condemned to the need of putting this fire outside myself and spreading it somewhere, somehow, and I am torn by the knowledge that what I have felt cannot be given to another.”

  Whenever Everett tried most earnestly to express the rapture that solitude in the wilderness brought him, he tended to lapse into melodrama. Beneath the passion pulses a vein of self-pity, as he casts himself as a martyr to his own obsession. But this is the writing of a twenty-year-old. Other passages prove that along with a weakness for the grandiose, Everett had a sense of humor, and could poke fun at himself in an ironic mode. Had he lived longer, the melodrama might well have been tempered by wisdom. There was indeed the potential for a John Muir in Everett Ruess, a nature and adventure writer who could at once sing the glory of the natural world and yet keep a sense of proportion about the limits of human endeavor in the wilderness.

  Beauty and friendship remained the twin goals of Everett’s quest. But the short-lived liaison with Frances seems to have convinced him that he could not have both. And if he had to choose, he would choose beauty.

  * * *

  Back in Kayenta in mid-June, Everett retrieved another batch of mail as he planned the next leg of his open-ended journey. On June 19 he wrote to his parents, “I am on my way to Navajo Mountain now, and probably will not get back until July or August.”

  Rising to a summit of 10,388 feet just north of the Arizona-Utah border, Navajo Mountain has long been a sacred location for the Diné. It stands, moreover, in what is still today one of the most remote regions of the Southwest. The sharp, twisting canyons that crease the mountain’s western and northern flanks are among the ruggedest in the United States. Near the mouth of one of those tributaries of the Colorado River, hidden in a bend of sandstone, looms Rainbow Bridge, the largest natural geological span in the world.

  In previous years, the closest Everett had come to Navajo Mountain was during his solitary prowl through the Tsegi system in 1931. At the ruin of Keet Seel, the largest cliff dwelling in Arizona, Everett had camped only twenty-five miles southeast of the mountain. On other treks across northern Arizona, he had often seen Navajo Mountain in the distance, for it is one of the lordliest landmarks in the Four Corners region.

  John Wetherill, the Kayenta trader, would have told Everett all about Navajo Mountain and Rainbow Bridge. In 1909, Wetherill had guided the first party of Anglos to discover the great arch (though some historians dispute this claim). After that, he built the Bridge Trail traversing the northern slopes of Navajo Mountain, one of the most cunning horse-packing routes in the country, which traverses miles of slickrock slabs. Wetherill then guided scores of tourists along the trail to Rainbow Bridge, among them Teddy Roosevelt and Zane Grey. And in 1922, guiding the Bernheimer Expedition, he blazed another trail to the bridge that linked soaring defiles on the southern and western sides of the mountain, solving the crux passage through Redbud Pass with dynamite.

  The route by which Everett planned to approach Navajo Mountain was a challenging one, as he intended to pass once more through Monument Valley, then proceed straight north almost to the San Juan River, where he would turn to the west and cross lofty and seldom-visited No Mans Mesa before arriving at the lower slopes of the sacred mountain. Then, instead of riding one of Wetherill’s trails, Everett planned to find his own way over a high shoulder of Navajo Mountain before winding down toward Rainbow Bridge.

  Never in any of his four previous excursions through California and the Southwest had Everett tackled wilderness quite this remote or difficult. By now, however, “I flattered myself that I could ‘take it,’ ” as he had written to Waldo in early May.

  Before leaving Kayenta, on June 17 Everett wrote a long letter to Bill Jacobs. That piece of writing offers some of the most revealing insights into Everett’s state of mind during his 1934 expedition. Annoyance about his friend’s having backed out of so many trips that Everett had proposed lingers about the opening paragraphs, as he teases Bill, “Do you know, it is in a way rather sad that you cannot have had some of my wild experiences, for you have the desire to use such things, and I do not. Perhaps it is your craving for material security.”

  Bill himself was evidently an ambitious writer, for Everett further taunts his friend, “I have no desire to bend my efforts to entertaining the bored and blase world. And that’s what writing amounts to—or at least your kind, I think. Your stories, if polished and published, would serve to divert various morons and business people.”

  For Everett, this was an uncharacteristically blunt remark. As if to excuse his peevishness, he went on, “I hope this gets you down, for I feel like puncturing the stupid satisfaction and silly aspirations of the world this morning.”

  In his disdain for common humanity, for Thoreau’s “mass of men lead[ing] lives of quiet desperation,” Everett often veered toward the misanthropic. In June 1934, if the letter to Bill Jacobs is any indication, Everett’s mood reached a new nadir of antisocial contempt. “Often, alone in an endless open desert, I find it hard to believe that the rest of the world exists,” he confessed. And, “Personally I have no least desire for fame. I feel only a stir of distaste when I think of being called ‘the well known author’ or ‘the great artist.’ ” This comment marks the first time in the surviving 1934 letters that Everett ponders the career that, despite his protestations, he had been aiming at for more than four years—that of the wandering artist supporting himself by selling his work. Perhaps the effort to launch that career via studios and galleries in San Francisco had so discouraged him that he felt he had to turn his back on hopes of fame or recognition.

  The same letter rails against the Anglo settlers of the small towns Everett had passed through. “It has come to the point,” he swore, “where I no longer like to have anything to do with the white people here, except to get supplies and go on.” Traders, in Everett’s view, were the worst: “Behind bars in their dirty, dingy, ill-lighted trading posts, they think of nothing but money.” Everett had recently bought a Navajo bracelet made of three turquoise stones set in silver. He claimed that he had spent “all my money” on the piece of jewelry “and was broke most of the while since.” During the next several months, the bracelet became Everett’s favorite personal adornment. He never failed to marvel how the stones reflected the glimmer of a campfire or caught the rays of the sun. “But one of my trader friends,” he complained to Bill, “asked as soon as he saw it, ‘How much did it cost?’ ”

  In this remarkable, far-ranging letter, Everett made a kinder assessment of Navajos than of white settlers.

  I have often stayed with the Navajos; I’ve known the best of them, and they were fine people. I have ridden with them on their horses, eaten with them, and even taken part in their ceremonies.… They have many faults; most of them are not very clean, and they will steal anything from a stranger, but never if you approach them with trust as a friend. Their weird, wild chanting as they ride the desert is often magnificent, with a high-pitched, penetrating quality.

  Having proclaimed his disdain for fame, Everett abruptly announces, “Beauty has always been my god.” Like so many of the utterances in the 1934 letters, this is not news shared with a friend (Bill well knew how Everett felt about beauty), but a declaration for eternity. And so it has served, for that line is one of the most oft-quoted sentences that Everett ever wrote.

  It is characteristic, however, that in the same letter Everett climbs down from his lectern in the clouds to chat with his old friend: “Did you get The Purple Land?” he asks. “This trip has been longer than I expected. I have wandered over more than 400 miles with the burros these last six weeks, paying no attention to trails, except as they happened to serve me, and finding my water as I went.” The mileage total may be
a slight exaggeration, but Everett’s sense of mastery was well earned. Despite the bad start when his burros got loose near Agathla, by 1934 Everett had come into his own as a wanderer.

  He was still, nevertheless, tied to his parents’ generous handouts. On June 19, he wrote to thank them for their latest package, which included a bridle, several magazines, and some dried plums: “I had never tasted them before.” Everett goes on to place his next order with Christopher and Stella:

  There are a couple of things I wish you would send me; Don Quixote, a Modern Library book which you can get for 95 cents, and eight of those half-pound chocolate bars which you can get downtown for eight or nine cents each. Get half of them plain, and half with raisins and peanuts.

  Despite his contempt for the residents of Kayenta, during his brief stop there in June, Everett made the acquaintance of several young men who would furnish one of the highlights of Everett’s 1934 excursion. “There is an archaeological expedition in town now,” he wrote Bill Jacobs. “Some pretty likeable and intelligent young fellows are in it, and I expect to visit their camp when I come back from the mountains.”

  From Everett’s daring cross-country jaunt toward Rainbow Bridge, only two letters and a fragment of a third survive. The traverse of No Mans Mesa nearly turned disastrous. A high, elongated butte stretching from north to south, it is guarded on all sides by rimrock cliffs. No trail leads to the top. In late June, Everett led his burros down Copper Canyon, a tributary of the San Juan that runs the length of the east side of the butte, then veered westward to tackle steep slopes soaring more than two thousand feet toward the mesa top. Somehow Everett found a break in the cliffs, but, as he wrote Bill Jacobs a few days later,

  Near the rim it was just a scramble, and Leopard, whom I was packing, in attempting to claw his way over a steep place, lost his balance and fell over backwards. He turned two backward somersaults and a side roll, landing with his feet waving, about six inches from the yawning gulf. I pulled him to his feet. He was a bit groggy at first; he had lost a little fur, and the pack was scratched.

  To reach Navajo Mountain, Everett now had to find a way off the west side of No Mans Mesa, then cover twenty-five trailless miles across two more mesas separated by the deep ravines of Nokai and Piute Canyons. This was country almost never traveled by Anglos, inhabited only by a scattering of Navajos and a handful of San Juan Paiutes—the latter people belonging to one of the most marginalized Native American tribes in the United States. Of this adventure, Everett wrote not a word.

  On June 29 he was camped at War God Spring, 8,700 feet up the southeast flank of Navajo Mountain. There he wrote another long letter to Bill Jacobs, containing another rich outpouring of joy. It had not rained in a month, so he had had to search long and hard for water holes, but, he boasted, he and his burros had never gone more than two days without water. It was now high summer. The brown desert in the distance that Everett gazed upon from his lofty perch scorched in the sun, but the glade in which he sat to write his letter was idyllic.

  The beauty of this place is perfect of its kind; I could ask for nothing more. A little spring trickles down under aspens and white fir. By day the marshy hollow is aswarm with gorgeous butterflies.… There are a hundred delightful places to sit and dream; friendly rocks to lean against—springy beds of pine needles to lie on and look up at the sky or the tall smooth tree trunks, with spirals of branches and their tufted foliage.

  So transported was Everett by this perfect campsite that he waxed lyrical about how much he loved his burros “when they stand up to their knees in wildflowers with blossoms in their lips and look at me with their lustrous, large brown eyes.”

  His afternoon delight nudged Everett to another Nietzschean pronouncement, in which he couched a further reproof to Jacobs for his unwillingness to stray far from his Los Angeles home:

  The perfection of this place is one reason why I distrust ever returning to the cities. Here I wander in beauty and perfection. There one walks in the midst of ugliness and mistakes.…

  Here I take my belongings with me. The picturesque gear of packing, and my gorgeous Navajo saddle blankets make a place of my own. But when I go, I leave no trace.

  Yet the fleeting joy Everett found on Navajo Mountain, he was increasingly convinced, depended not only on solitude, but on his differentness from other people, on the “freakish person” he had confessed himself to be to Bill Jacobs back in 1931. Now he wrote Bill, “I have some good friends here [i.e., in and around Kayenta], but no one who really understands why I am here or what I do. I don’t know of anyone, though, who would have more than a partial understanding. I have gone too far alone.”

  War God Spring lies on an old trail that leads to the summit of Navajo Mountain. To get from that camp to Rainbow Bridge, Everett had to traverse a high, trailless forest toward the west and descend 2,500 feet in rugged Horse Canyon to intersect the trail around the mountain that John Wetherill had blazed in 1922. That was a considerable bushwhack, but not one Everett bothered to mention in his letters.

  The next day at sunset, he wrote a letter to his parents, locating his camp as “a day’s journey from Rainbow Bridge.” Awed by the landscape opening before him, he tried to describe it to his parents:

  [T]he country between here and the San Juan and Colorado rivers and beyond them is as rough and impenetrable a territory as I have ever seen. Thousands of domes and towers of sandstone lift their rounded pink tops from blue and purple shadows. To the east, great canyons seam the desert, cutting vermilion gashes through the gray-green of the sage-topped mesas.

  A single line in an August 19 letter to Waldo records Everett’s attainment of the goal of this jaunt through true wilderness: “When I walked to Rainbow Bridge at night I found a six-inch scorpion beside my bed at dawn.” Yet Everett never described the colossal arch in his letters, at least in the ones that have survived.

  A curious side of Everett’s nature worship is that truly grand landscapes left him inarticulate. In Yosemite in both 1930 and 1933, he scarcely mentioned the colossal granite monoliths such as El Capitan. Although he climbed Half Dome, he barely described the ascent in his diary. In the Grand Canyon in 1931, his eye was not on towering buttes and plunging gorges, but on damselflies flitting through the air just above his head as he lay on his back on the bank of the Colorado River. Perhaps the monumental sweep of Rainbow Bridge left him comparably speechless. The “friendly rocks to lean against” and “springy beds of pine needles to lie on” at War God Spring were more congenial to his temperament.

  By the end of the first week of July, Everett was back in Kayenta. There he caught up with the archaeological team whose members he had first met and liked three weeks earlier. Rather than simply visit their camp, he persuaded the men to hire him on as a cook and packer.

  Everett had had a fascination for the prehistoric past ever since childhood, telling his father at age thirteen that he was deliberating between a career as an archaeologist and one as a naturalist. So far, however, his curiosity had mainly taken the form of pocketing artifacts he found in Indian ruins. Now, for the first time, however briefly, Everett would see what professional archaeology was all about, as he participated in an excavation at as remote and eerie an Anasazi site as his fondest wishes could have fixed upon.

  * * *

  The team outfitting in Kayenta was part of a massive, multi-year project called the Rainbow Bridge–Monument Valley Expedition. Between 1933 and 1938, researchers undertook an extensive survey of Anasazi ruins ranging (as the title indicates) from Monument Valley through the Tsegi Canyon system, and across the Rainbow Plateau to Rainbow Bridge—all in country that was part of the Navajo reservation. The rationale for the project, run by the National Park Service, was to lay the groundwork for a new national park encompassing those scenic and cultural wonders. Had such a park come into existence, it would have torn out of the reservation some three thousand square miles, or about one-eighth of its total area.

  Most aficionados of the
backcountry Southwest are heartily glad such a park never got established. Instead, today a tiny square around Rainbow Bridge constitutes Rainbow Bridge National Monument, while three more minuscule squares covering the stunning ruins of Keet Seel, Betatakin, and Inscription House add up to Navajo National Monument. Monument Valley is a Navajo Tribal Park. And the convoluted Tsegi system (minus Keet Seel and Betatakin), the whole of the Rainbow Plateau (across part of which Everett had traveled from No Mans Mesa to War God Spring), and all of Navajo Mountain remain reservation land. For the most part, the magnificent country that the NPS had its eye on in the 1930s remains pristine wilderness.

  The director of the RB-MV Expedition (as it is usually abbreviated), was Ansel Hall, a Park Service archaeologist based in Berkeley, California. In Kayenta, Everett had noted, a number of the “likeable young fellows” on the team were UC Berkeley students, who had friends in common with Everett. During its far-ranging six-year study, the RB-MV project surveyed hundreds of remote and mysterious sites. What was more, the teams also spent weeks excavating some of the more interesting sites.

  The team that Everett signed on with was led by Lyndon Hargrave, then thirty-eight years old, the field director of the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, one of the leading research facilities in the Southwest. But the leader in the field, and the man who hired Everett, was H. Claiborne (“Clay”) Lockett. In a letter to his parents, Everett described Lockett as “a grizzled young chap of 28, widely experienced, and a magnificent humorist. He is an ethnologist and something of an artist as well.” Also on the team, serving chiefly as a guide, was Ben Wetherill, John’s son. As a teenager, Ben had lost an eye when he was kicked in the head by a horse, but he would go on to shape a career as a wilderness guide almost as remarkable as his father’s. Given to depression and dark moods, Ben had a loner’s disposition the equal of Everett’s at his most melancholy.