16 minute read
West by Southwest
NEWS FLASH: EVERETT REUSS
STILL MISSING IN UTAH WILDLANDS
Everett Reuss Must Have Looked Like This When He Disappeared: Frozen In Time As A Handsome Boy
There is an old joke about the ingredients for a perfect story: religion, royalty, romance, and mystery — “Good God, the Queen’s pregnant, whodunit?” The joke isn’t so great, but the formula holds up pretty well. And no place in the world has been more fertile for romantic mysteries than the wilderness Southwest. The Lost Dutchman and dozens of other vanished fortunes in gold, Butch Cassidy and the Hole in the Wall gang, mysterious murders, and vanished river runners, the Lukachukai Mountains harbor a “lost city”, described by a Spanish explorer, but never found in modern times. Less well known are native stories of hidden turquoise mines, huge serpents that eat livestock and caves full of sand paintings. New Mexico isn’t called “The Land of Enchantment” for nothing. But no mystery fits the formula better than the saga of Everett Ruess, who disappeared in the canyonlands south of Escalante, Utah, late in 1934. Ruess was not yet legally of age. While the religious element of his myth may be the most enigmatic, hardest to pin down, it is probably the most important as well, the key to his longevity in the public imagination. What religion? The boy was a nature lover, a dark pantheist, who sought the ultimate answers in the song of the wind, as he wrote. A young boy, with a handful of poems a few letters and a couple of diaries, managed to articulate a philosophy that puts him in the company of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. As someone once noted, however, Henry David, however much he loved nature, went home and slept in his own bed at night. Everett Ruess espoused a relationship with nature that was monastic in its simplicity, wholehearted in its embrace, but ultimately deadly in its execution. Like EdAbbey, Ruess did not proselytize, did not seek converts. Neither of them believed that the wilderness was meant for everyone. And the dark side of Ruess’poetry and other writing has always troubled me. There is a lot of sinister imagery, darkness, moonlight, whispering wind, and even hints of his mortality.
In the depths of the depression, here is a youth determined to find freedom (if not fame and fortune) by celebrating the natural world in word and picture. For a solitary fellow who eventually falls off the edge of the earth, Ruess’adventures are very well documented. There are boxes of photographs, drawings, woodcuts, and poetry to supplement his detailed letters home. The only page missing is the last one. Royalty? In between stints in the desert, Everett sought out some of the foremost artists and photographers of his time, dropping in on them for extended stays as a house guest. Among others he counted the friendship and patronage of Maynard Dixon, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Dorothea Lange—all of them lovers and explorers of the Southwest. The boy was anything but shy. There is also the contradictory matter of his family, who were very supportive of Everett. They were well-to-do in a very poor period for most Americans. His mother was an established artist in her own right. Reuss, who bummed around the west trading block prints and small watercolors for food, once noted in a letter home that he was aware of the freedom offered him by an inheritance of several million dollars. In other words, his possible death by starvation and his fascination with unencumbered hobo life were hardly harsh realities—more like flirtations. Like all serious risk takers, Everett was most alive when dancing on the edge of the cliff. Of course, the romantic element is all over this story, like the chocolate coating on a cherry cordial. For one, this precocious young man was athletic and handsome. Portraits of him show a smiling, clean-cut face, squinting into the merciless sun, trustworthy as any boy scout. Artist, poet, self-styled “vagabond for beauty”, Ruess epitomized the romance of the open road. Freedom was his catch phrase, natural beauty his holy grail, wilderness his playground. He left the single word NEMO wherever he rambled. Nemo is the name of the strange captain in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a popular book by Jules Vern. Nemo is something like the Flying Dutchman, cursed to never set foot on land. In Latin Nemo means No Man. And of course, mystery is what keeps this story alive and in the headlines. How could this boy disappear so completely? How is it possible that
in eighty years nobody has been able to turn up a clue? Of course, the last place Everett was seen alive is now at the bottom of Lake Powell. There have been plenty of theories but no real clues. A really good mystery shouldn’t have a solution, I suppose. When the public finally went looking for the boy, there was no trace at all. Though his two burros were eventually located, happily cropping grass and clueless as to the fate of their master, not another scrap was ever located. No trace of his gear. (Some believed the local Navajos took everything. They might have done him in as well.) Many months later a Navajo tracker claimed to find his boot prints in three
He Was Also Facinated By The Landscape Of Point Lobos And The Pacific Coast At Carmel
Ernie’s Selfie
West by Southwest
by Ernie Bulow
locations. Most questioned permanent tracks in the shifting sand. No clothing, no body, no last inscription on the canyon walls. Total silence. James Dean, the ultimate iconoclast of my generation, the “Rebel Without a Cause”, seems to be fading away, slipping from public consciousness.
A Woodcut of Monument Valley. He Was Largely Financed By Selling His Art And “The Kindness Of Strangers.”
Freddy Fender, who passed away not so long ago, didn’t even get an obituary (Rolling Stone snubbed him completely). I could go on in this vein ad nauseam. Fame is fickle to say the least. I first came across the Everett Ruess legend, best I remember, in Wallace Stegner’s book Mormon Country, in a piece called “Artist in Residence”. Stegner was drawing primarily on the series of letters printed in issues of Desert Magazine in the late thirties. The publisher of Desert, Randall Henderson led a couple of search parties and eventually collected all the Reuss material in a book called On Desert Trails with Everett Ruess, published in 1940. The delightful book is full of photos, woodblock prints, watercolors, maps, commentary. It has recently been reprinted. EdwardAbbey takes up the Reuss legend in his commentary to the picture book “Slickrock” and the story stayed alive among the aficionados of the Colorado Plateau. My friend Ken Sanders, publisher of Dream Garden Press, issued a magnificent series of wilderness calendars in the eighties and they were stuffed with information on the high plateau and wilderness in general, with significant dates and quotes from important nature writers. Everett Reuss was one of his authors. In other words, it was a great story, known to the wilderness brethren, told around campfires on river trips. (Remember, his last resting place may have been in the cold waters of the Colorado River.) I was pleased in 1983 when W.L. Rusho updated the legend in a new book, Everett Ruess:AVagabond for Beauty. The introduction was by John Nichols, the afterword contributed by Edward Abbey, both friends of mine. I wish the photo reproductions were a little clearer, the pictures a little larger. There is one enigmatically titled photograph of Everett standing in front of a Hogan next to a woman holding a baby in a traditional cradleboard. He wrote on it, “My Navajo Wife.” Obviously this wasn’t literally true, but his motivation is unclear. Some people have wondered at the lack of any significant female in Everett’s passionate life. Several people made the claim that Ruess spoke passable Navajo, a very difficult language to learn. A decade passes, more or less. There isn’t much new material. Utah publisher Peregrine Smith reprints On Desert Trails, then a new book by Mark Taylor, Sandstone Sunsets: In Search of Everett Ruess. Taylor said he had spent ten years chasing the Ruess legend before sitting down to write the book. It seems more like a book about Mark Taylor and his quest than about Ruess, not that it isn’t interesting. One of Taylor’s lines of inquiry picks up on the question of Ruess’sexuality. He ties, possibly, Everett’s disappearance to Emery Kolb, the Grand Canyon photographer who turned out to have skeletons in his own closet,
He Also Painted In Watercolor, Like This Study Of Rocks And Light
literally. Law enforcement people still don’t know the identity of bones found hidden in a boat after Kolb died. Taylor also explores a couple of stories of confession; one a drunken cowboy, another (almost plausible) of a renegade Navajo who was implicated and eventually convicted of killing another white man. But, ultimately, he doesn’t have an answer either. There are four favorite endings to the story. The first, and most likely I suppose, was that Ruess, always the risk taker, fell off a cliff, died of a rattlesnake bite, or was drowned trying to swim the Colorado River. Local Navajos helped themselves to his gear (though nothing ever turned up, not even a scrap of clothing) so there was no trace. The two burros remain a puzzle. He was murdered. There are at least three possible suspects for this scenario, not to mention the local Navajos who had killed and robbed other wandering white men. If the body was dumped into the river, it would never come to light. There have also been rumors that he ran into some cattle rustlers who mistook him for a federal agent and offed him. That part of Utah was criss-crossed by outlaw trails. One persistent theory says he never died at all, just disappeared into the wilderness he loved. He has been spotted, over the years, like Elvis. He is usually seen in Mexico, the deserts of California, and the Navajo Reservation. The southwest is full of Undead—from Billy the Kid, to Ambrose Bierce, to Butch Cassidy, and dozens more. The major problem with this answer to the riddle is Ruess’flamboyant personality.
His Rendering Of Tower House At Mesa Verde
of a new magazine published in Durango, Colorado, called Inside, Outside, Southwest (along the lines of Gallup Journey) by Amy Maestas which gives an excellent overview of the Ruess Legend.
And in December, the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff had a month-long exhibit of Ruess art and memorabilia along with at least two special presentation programs at the museum. I wasn’t able to make it over there. All of this attention to a boy who went missing over seventy years ago is provocative. At a time when global warming has long passed the theory stage, when even Republicans are loath to allow unlimited oil drilling, when even the hard-core conservatives are fed up with unlimited pollution, perhaps it is the right moment for a new patron saint of ecology. John Nichols, writing about Ruess’ultimate obsession, quotes Albert Einstein: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” While I’m not sure that Einstein’s sense of the mysterious is the same as mine, (him being a mathematician and all) I think we can agree that it is a sublime moment when an ordinary human being gets a glimpse of some great truth and finds his emotional equipment overloaded and inadequate to take it all in.
Looking up at the Milky Way on a winter midnight somewhere on the Colorado Plateau, I know the spirit of Everett Ruess is lurking nearby.
But some folks just have to ruin romance and mystery. A lot of people were happy when a Navajo looked for, and found, bones of a man his grandfather had buried in a remote shallow overhang, tucked behind a saddle. Grandpa claimed he saw someone else club the man to death.
Then some academics from the University of Colorado matched the skull to Reuss’face and claimed it was him. Later another Colorado researcher claimed the DNA matched as well.
But Utah’s state archaeologist and others soon raised questions about the findings. The archaeologist said Ruess’surviving dental records don’t match the condition or characteristics of the teeth on a lower jawbone that was found among the remains. The worn teeth also suggest a strictly American Indian diet.
To clear the air, the family had a government agency do another DNAtest and they did not find a match. What they found prompted this 2009 headline from The Denver Post:
Utah Bones Aren’t Those of Wandering Poet Everett Reuss After All
I mean, it wouldn’t be a romantic mystery if they found the poor guy.
Finally, there is a strong possibility that he killed himself and then Nature and the Navajos covered it up for him. His writings always had a dark streak, a melancholy that doesn’t fit with anyone so young. He often referred to his own death and the pain of living on any but his own terms.
All of the above material is common knowledge, available in the books cited. While Ruess’story has always interested me, I don’t have any new information, no new theory about his disappearance. Like some others, I have felt at times that Everett was a little too self-serving, working hard at building the legend that followed him. It has even been suggested that he lost it at the end; that the solitude and privation, coupled with his own melodramatic personality, drove him over the edge, which works for theories three and four. What really interests me is the Ruess legend has had a sudden revival of amazing proportions. His official website (extensive and well constructed) gets thousands of hits. Three films about the life and disappearance of Everett Ruess have been made in recent years. More books and articles appear every year. Most amazing of all, Escalante, Utah, the probable scene of his demise, has just held their annual Everett Ruess Days.Afew hardcore locals call it an art festival. There is still a strong feeling in that neck of the woods against the “Hollywood queer” tree hugger. I gather it is a pretty impressive gathering, considering the remoteness of the town. For the first annual event the promoters brought in Waldo Ruess, Everett’s brother, now in his nineties Some locals call Everett’s followers “Ruesstafarians”, but the fact remains, disciples he has. There is a very entertaining article in the October issue
I Could Believe This Was Everett Ruess’ Farewell
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