| "I have really lived" |  |
| 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. |
|
| -Poem by Everett Ruess |
A belated hats off to you, Everett, wherever you are. Old desert rats bet you're still out there somewhere, holed up at Keet Seel, Grand Gulch or Betatakin. Or perhaps you're crossing Monument Valley with your mules, Pericles and Pegasus. Didn't a Navajo medicine man have a vision of you at the foot of Navajo Mountain?
This would have been Everett Ruess's 78th year, had not this singular artist and writer vanished into the loving and lonely reaches of the Arizona-Utah borderlands when he was not yet 21.
For us, in this latest age of anxiety, Everett left behind a gift, a story more alive than ever, a spirit that burns as radiantly as the sun above the Painted Desert where he camped so often. Through his legacy of letters and block prints, we have rare glimpses into ancient Indian cultures and the development of the Southwest. Everett believed that life on Earth is precious and beautiful to its core, and that we should cherish it always.
A fragment of each of us is out there with him in those inner voices whispering that our lives can be different, that we should dare to be true to ourselves, and that we postpone our dreams at our peril.
On his solitary travels, Ev made many friends: outlaws who envied him his intuition, Indians who showed him ancient ruins and herbal medicines, and legendary guides like the Wetherills, who introduced him to secret trails. And there were also archaeologists who were spooked by his daring climbs up steep escarpments to Anasazi ruins, and ranchers on the Mogollon Rim like the late Clay Lockett, who camped with him in Oak Creek Canyon.
Just before he vanished, his letter began to reflect a kind of futility: "I have loved the red rocks, the twisted trees, the red sand blowing in the wind, the slow sunny clouds crossing the sky, the shafts of moonlight on my bed at night...I have really lived...I have been flirting pretty heavily with death, the old clown."
Unless he returns to tell it himself, we'll never know his fate for certain, but it appears that he began to realize that his love of wilderness, his quest for oneness with nature, had him trapped. He knew he could never go back. "Often as I wander," he wrote his brother Waldo, "there are dreamlike tinges when life seems impossibly strange and unreal. I think it is, too, only most people have so dulled their sense, they don't realize it."
A guide found his mules at the bottom of a canyon near the Colorado River in 1935, and some footprints that fit his boot size. A year later, a trapper saw the inscription NEMO on Indian ruins. (Jules Verne's Captain Nemo cruised the world trying to escape the frustrations of civilization.) In 1957, some rusted cooking gear was dug up during the Glen Canyon Archaeological Survey prior to the filling of Lake Powell, along with a boy: of rusty razor blades from the Owl Drug Company of Los Angeles-always his favorite brand. The last known sign of him was in 1983 when a boatman spotted another "NEMO" carved into the chinking of an Anasazi ruin by the San Juan River. The lack of leads hasn't stopped some people from searching, but all they've found is his spirit.
"Hunter, brother, companion of our days," wrote the late Edward Abbey. "That blessing which you hunted, hunted too, what your were seeking, this is what found you." ---by James Bishop Jr, Sedona