On the Subject of Disappearance: The Tale of Everett Ruess

I spoke of disappearance in yesterday's post.Today, I am thinking of it in regards to Everett Ruess, whose story has intrigued me ever since I first heard about it from John Kiewit, who, like Ruess, was fascinated by the epic beauty and grandeur of the West. It was John who gave me the book Everett Ruess: Vagabond for Beauty by W.L. Rusho.

Born in 1914 to educated and artistic parents, Everett Ruess enrolled only briefly in formal classes at UCLA before taking off on his own kind of learning adventure. Apparently a very confident and appealing young man, he managed to meet and study with quite a few impressive writers, painters, and photographers of the time, including Edward Weston, Maynard Dixon, and Dorothea Lange.His own block prints,watercolors, journals, and letters reveal a promising artistic talent and exuberant appreciation of the beauty of the natural world. He seemed to possess a heightened sensitivity that comes across sometimes as youthfully melodramatic, but I picture him wide-eyed and filled with wonder as he tramps around the Sierra Nevada, the California coast, and the Southwestern wilderness during the 1930s.

His writings are filled with lavish descriptions of the skies, the weather, and the breathtaking scenery he witnessed. "Oh, but the desert is glorious now, with marching clouds in the blue sky, and cool winds blowing," he rhapsodized in a letter, "the smell of the sage is sweet in my nostrils, and the luring trail leads onward."

Elsewhere he declared, "Beauty has always been my god; it has meant more than people to me."

But Everett was by no means a recluse. "I have been meeting all types of people," he wrote, "artists, writers, hobos, cooks, cowmen, miners, bootleggers..." An archaeologist whom he met in Arizona described him as a "strange kid" but a "free spirit" who simply "loved the Navajos and everybody, loved animals, burros, dogs, kids, and everything."His warm and intimate letters to his family and friends clearly reveal his affection and devotion to others.

And then he vanished. He was last seen near Escalante, Utah in 1934.

A twenty-year-old who abruptly disappears in the vast, wild lands of the Southwest is by definition a haunting mystery, but Everett's own words, lifestyle, and preferences have given the story a somewhat mystical dimension and fueled speculation for decades that his disappearance was a fate he chose and orchestrated. It so happens that one of his favorite passages from Willa Cather's Death Comes  For the Archbishop, whichhe marked in his family's copy, begins as follows:

...It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it...[The Indians] seem to have none of the European's desire to "master" nature, to arrange and recreate. They spent their ingenuity in the other direction; in accommodating themselves to the scene in which they found themselves...

One persistent theory was that Everett fell in love with a Native American girl and was absorbed into that culture. There is in fact a photograph in which he is standing beside a young Indian woman who is holding a papoose, and beneath which he wrote the caption, My Navajo Wife, a quip that would later contribute to the fantasy.

He had written to his parents that they would not hear from him for at least twomonths. He had carved the name NEMO, Latin for "no one", into a rock face. (Wallace Stegner called the latter information "both useless and tantalizing", a description which could apply to most of the snippets gathered about Everett over the years.)

But he does at times seem to be predicting something.

“My burro and I, and a little dog, are going on and on,” he wrote, “until sooner or later, we reach the end of the horizon.”

Perhaps more ominously, there were journal entries such as this: "I have been flirtingpretty heavily with death, the old clown."

And most prophetically: "I don't think you will ever see me again, for I intend to disappear."

I have been thinking about Everett Ruess lately because a few days ago my friend Steve-in-Utah informed me that the mystery has now been solved, 75 years later. He sent me this link to a site that explains -- and it was a murder, ugly, tragic and entirely unromantic, after all.

And so, the tale of Everett Ruess draws at last to its conclusion. And I suppose that if there is some consolation here, it is that a young man lived the life he chose, and that there are still places of wildness and beauty that have not vanished.

“I thought that there were two rules in life,” he wrote in June of 1934, “Never count the cost, and never do anything unless you can do it wholeheartedly. Now is the time to live.”

Ah, yes. There is the now.