The Desert Southwest and Everett Ruess

Last winter I spent a month traveling alone on the road buying inventory for the store. My intention was to first head south to Texas and then to head west. Ultimately I wanted to make my way up the California coast before turning east for home. As it happened, I never made California and ended up spending most of the trip driving in the dry lands of west Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Perhaps the revised route was the will of my subconscious, or perhaps it was the result of my reading as I traveled. Perhaps they were intertwined.

As I was traveling alone, and through lonely country, my chosen companions were those who had documented the same experience. Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire was an easy and obvious choice for weeks in the desert. William Least-Heat Moon’s Blue Highways was by my side as well. Abbey made me feel a bit guilty for whistling past so much of the landscape viewing it only through the windshield. He would have preferred me to have a slower and more deliberate experience of the land. Least-Heat Moon admonished me for using the interstate highways, rather than his approach of exploring the backest of backroads searching for diners with lots of wall calendars and surly waitresses. In the end, my excuse for both of them was that I was on a business trip. Neither seemed very satisfied with my excuse – I could tell by their steely silence.

Before I left for the trip I began reading a book on Everett Ruess called A Vagabond for Beauty. I have always had an interest in adventure and exploration lit, but I have a particular fondness for solitary adventurers and travelers. I was unaware of Ruess until I was introduced to him by Jon Krakauer in his book Into the Wild, about another solitary traveler, Christopher McCandless.

Everett Ruess was from an artistic middle class family in California. In the 1930s, his later teenage years, he began wandering California and the desert southwest. He traveled with little money, paying part of his way selling block prints he made of the landscapes he was so enchanted by.

On his very first solo trip, armed with either a simple charm and self-confidence or disarming naiveté (or both), he arrived unannounced at the home of the already famous photographer Edward Weston to introduce himself. Apparently he instantly ingratiated himself with Weston, and this easy way with people was apparently a pattern for Ruess, whether he was meeting artists and musicians in the cities or Indians and desert rats out in the great expanses of the southwest. Eventually he met and befriended Ansel Adams, Maynard Dixon and Dorothea Lange.

Vagabond for Beauty is an edited collection of Ruess’ letters sent to his friends and family while on his travels, the volume was assembled by W.L. Rusho. Ruess was consistently awestruck by the natural beauty of the desert landscape, and he managed to skillfully render into words his own wonder at the scenes he was viewing. In the end, that is the beauty of these letters: in his aesthetic quest, Ruess never seems to find a limit in his capacity for fascination and amazement, and somehow he is able to communicate this sense of awe to his reader.

Everett Ruess wandered the desert, largely in Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico for four years. In 1934, he disappeared at the age of 20, virtually without a trace. His last known camp was in southern Utah, near the Escalante River. There has been some mystery and much speculation about his disappearance. Only just this year were his remains were found, and the mystery of his disappearance unraveled. What he left behind are his letters, journals, poetry, wood-cuts, and a few photographs. Together they are the legacy of his adoration of wild places.

With Vagabond for Beauty fresh in my mind and on the top of my stack of reading, I too was drawn into the desert. One of my only sidetrips completely unrelated to business was to Canyon de Chelly in the remote northeastern corner of Arizona, and deep in the heart of the Navajo Nation. Ruess was there in 1932. It took under two hours of driving to reach the park office once I left the interstate highway (Canyon de Chelly is now part of the National Park system). It would have taken Ruess days of trekking to reach the Canyon from Kayenta, which is something like 40 miles away. Walking the canyon and standing before the Anasazi ruins, I was filled with wonder like Ruess. Still, I would imagine the experience would have been different had I spent weeks hiking into the desert with a burro.

This column is adapted from an entry to The Bookman’s Diary, a journal associated with The Peninsula Bookman Web site. More entries can be found at blog.peninsulabookman.com.