“We did have some
moments of beauty together, didn’t we?”
Those assuring yet wistful
words were penned by a young man named Everett Ruess in 1934 in a farewell love
letter to a girlfriend, several months before he disappeared somewhere in the
desert of the American Southwest.
The line is quoted
in the book Finding
Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of A Legendary Wilderness
Explorer by David Roberts (Broadway Books, 2011) and serves as
a poignant reminder of what matters most in life.
Everett was born on
March 28, 1914, to Stella and Christopher Ruess, intellectual parents who
possessed a literary bent that welcomed strong and independent thought. At an
early age Everett and his older brother Waldo (named after the poet/philosopher
Ralph Waldo Emerson) were encouraged to keep their own diaries and probe deep,
philosophical questions. Almost from the beginning, it seems, Everett was destined
to walk a different path.
By the time he
graduated high school the country was limping along in the midst of the Great
Depression; options and opportunities were few and far between for men of his
age. But he had the chance to go to college, attending UCLA for one semester
before something inside told him that wasn’t what he wanted to do.
He dropped out and
began taking off by himself on solo travels through the tall canyons and vast
mesas of California and Utah. By the time he turned 20 he was a self-declared
wanderer and explorer, as well as an aspiring artist, poet, and nature writer
who in his letters and journals showed introspective depth and creative promise
well beyond his years.
As he saw it, being
an artist was all about searching for truth and meaning in the world. By 1934 he
was all but obsessed with the idea of going on a journey, a quest, to challenge
himself physically and mentally like never before. For that he turned to the
beauty and danger of the desert.
He bought two pack
mules and set out for the rugged lands in and around Navajo country of Arizona,
armed with little more than his painting kit, a writing journal, and the carefree
hubris only youth can provide. As for food and provisions, he packed what he
could, which wasn’t much. He would worry about that later.
The desert became
his home as he hiked, climbed and slept in the dirt under the stars in one
canyon after another, reveling in the solitude and freedom from city life. Yet still
his adolescent angst showed through as his diaries spoke often of melancholy
desires to find a special companion to share his life with. That, along with
his devotion to pushing the limits and writing and painting pictures of nature,
were constant themes in his journals and letters.
Every so often Ruess
would pass through a small town or village where he would find a local post
office to send out correspondence to family, friends, and the aforementioned
girl of his dreams, Frances. (Exactly who she was or how he met her remains a
mystery.)
The
last known letter Everett wrote was to his brother and was dated November 11,
1934. It included the following declaration:
As to when I shall visit civilization; it will not be soon, I think. I
have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant
life I lead, more keenly all the time...Do you blame me then for staying here,
where I feel that I belong and am one with the world around me?
As the months
rolled into 1935 the letters stopped coming. His parents grew alarmed and
organized horseback search parties, but by then they already feared time and
the vast desert spaces were working against them. Hopes were raised when Everett’s
two mules were recovered healthy and unharmed in the middle of a canyon. But as
for Everett Rues, no trace of him was ever found.
To this day many
theories have been put forth as to his fate – everything from being ambushed
and murdered by area cattle rustlers to his committing suicide by drowning in
the Colorado River. Others speculate that he took a Navajo bride and lived the
rest of his life in private seclusion.
What makes this all
the more unsettling these many years later is the fact that the writing that
survived him occasionally spoke of a dark and foreboding awareness of things to
come.
From a poem he
titled “The Wilderness Song”:
Say that I starved; that I was lost and
weary;
That I was burned and blinded by the desert
sun;
Footsore, thirsty, sick with strange
diseases;
Lonely and wet and cold…but that I kept my
dream!
To an earlier letter to his brother:
“I’ll never stop wandering. And when the time
comes to die, I’ll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.”
If any of this
rings a bell, it may be because the story of Everett Ruess is eerily similar to
that of another romantic nomad, one who would die alone in the wilderness of
Alaska some sixty years later — Christopher McCandless, memorialized in the
bestselling book and film adaptation Into
the Wild.
Like Ruess, McCandless
was young and idealistic, fancying himself a free spirit unbound by caution or
anyone else’s expectations, only to meet with tragic results in the end. For both
men a curious fascination has grown up around their story, based in no small
part on the few but soulful words they left behind.
Did Everett Ruess find
whatever it was he was looking for? Did he pay the ultimate price to do so? No
one knows. But as evidenced by one line in a love letter to an unknown woman,
maybe he did find his answer, not in the wilds of nature but within himself. In
the midst of it all, the doubt, the pain, the loss, there are still moments of
beauty in this world to be found and cherished forever.
“We did have some
moments of beauty together, didn’t we?”
Such is wisdom. And
the price we pay for it.
