In Search Of Everett Ruess
I’ve always had special admiration and a high degree of interest in Everett Ruess. Well known to most Edward Abbey fans and western wilderness lovers, Ruess is more interesting and inspirational than Christopher McCandless of Into the Wild fame. He was a true romantic, an artist, writer and wilderness wanderer, who spent most of his early adult years exploring the Southwest, until at age 20, he went into the Utah desert with two burros and never returned.
Edward Abbey beautifully remembered Ruess by penning a sonnet for him as an afterward in W.L. Rusho’s Everett Ruess, A Vagabond For Beauty:
A Sonnet for Everett Ruess
You walked into the radiance of death
through passageways of stillness, stone, and light,
gold coin of cottonwoods, the spangled shade,
cascading song of canyon wrens, the flight
of scarlet dragonflies at pools, the stain
of water on a curve of sand, the art
of roots that crack the monolith of time.
You knew the crazy lust to probe the heart
of that which has no heart that we could know,
toward the source, deep in the core, the maze,
the secret center where there are no bounds.
Hunter, brother, companion of our days:
that blessing which you hunted, hunted too,
what you were seeking, this is what found you.
Edward Abbey
Oracle, Arizona
1983
He’s back in the news this month, as what I would term an “enthusiast” claims to have found human remains in the area where Ruess supposedly disappeared in 1934.
The first story reported by the The San Juan record concerns a witness to an old murder, one of a young man supposedly matching Reuss’ description and having two mules.
But there’s now follow up story indicating the man was a 19th century Native American in his late 50′s to 60′s, and therefore not Reuss.
Good news, I say. Since Ruess spent a significant amount of time trying to escape civilization, finding his body strikes me as somehow “bringing him back” to what he was trying to leave behind. He’d surely be gathered up into a box and shipped to some cold, sterile lab, to be picked at, photographed and x-rayed. Is that what he’d want?
Ruess belongs to the canyonlands. To the land he loved, and there, he should rest in peace.