The Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jimenez wandered over the province of Huelva with his burro Platero, and Platero y Yo became a modern classic. Everett’s burro was named Chocolatero. He rode into the town of Escalante, Utah, his clothes tattered and dusty, his dangling feet nearly touching the ground. It could have been a scene from Don Quixote in a god-forsaken village of La Mancha. Everett himself saw the picaresque humor of this entry: ”Do you remember that Sancho Panza rode an ass? [...] Christ once rode a donkey. So I am not the only one.”

Here is Everett’s essence. Appearing to his dull and spite-filled fellow men as a young buffoon (as Jimenez was considered el loco), he was in truth a holy man filled with light. A twentieth-century poet-prophet like Isaiah, he felt modern cities to be ”big mistakes,” and ultimately fulfilled his ”pledge to the wind” that he had made as a fifteen-year-old:

Onward from vast uncharted spaces,

Forward through timeless voids,

Into all of us surges and races

The measureless might of the wind. [...]

In the steep silence of thin blue air

High on a lonely cliff-ledge,

Where the air has a clear, clean rarity,

I give to the wind...my pledge:

”By the strength of my arm, by the sight of my eyes,

By the skill of my fingers, I swear,

As long as life dwells in me, never will I

Follow any way but the sweeping way of the wind.”

__________

(published in On Desert Trails with Everett Ruess,

with introduction by Hugh Lacy and foreword by

Randall Henderson, Desert Magazine Press, Palm Desert, California, 1950.)

Resting in the town of Escalante before his final trek into the desert to fulfill this pledge, Everett let the children ride his burros. Before leaving town, never to be seen again, he wrote to his father and mother. These are his last preserved written words: ”So, tomorrow I take to the trail again, to the canyons south.”

Everett found the deserts of the Southwest by far a better school for the poet than UCLA, where his father was a professor: ”How could a lofty, unconquerable soul like mine remain imprisoned in that academic backwater?” Everett detested Los Angeles like Horace detested Rome. A teeming metropolis is no place to cultivate the serenity needed for spiritual flowering.

When he was absolutely alone in the wilderness, Everett exulted, writing to his family in Los Angeles: ”Here I wander in beauty and perfection. There one walks in the midst of ugliness and mistakes.” In the cramped environment of Europe, Arthur Rimbaud, who is reminiscent of Everett, did not have the awesome space of the Southwest wilderness to get lost in, so he shipped off to Ethiopia and became a renegade from civilization, where he, like Everett Ruess in ”Wilderness Song”, also ”swaggered and softly crept between the mountain peaks.”

Sitting in Monument Valley in midsummer under the shade of a gnarled juniper tree, with the nearest water many miles away, Everett wrote to ”X” in the last year of his life: ”As a child I used to dream of such a life as this.” In Le Poète de Sept Ans the child Rimbaud dreamt of ”le grand desert” which he too eventually found in Africa.

Everett Ruess was a blossoming ”total artist”, to use Kenneth Patchen's term – a gifted painter and printmaker at a precociously early age, who sang and wrote poetry naturally. He possessed the balance (deemed essential by Horace) between natural genius and artistic savoir-faire, trained at an early age by his mother, the gifted Los Angeles artist Stella Knight Ruess. His instincts led him to see music as a major force in poetry, whistling Frank’s Symphony on a Mountain Air in the High Sierras, or listening to the enchanting melodies of nature. He drew, painted and engraved linoleum blocks on his long treks.



Watercolor of the Grand Canyon

courtesy Waldo Ruess

linoleum print of the same motif

I once did some housepainting for his brother Waldo in Santa Barbara, who kindly showed me watercolor paintings Everett had done from the age of eleven until he left home. They reveal a budding mastery that was, alas, never able to blossom into full maturity. But his mind was strangely mature even in his teens. His withdrawal from the insanity intrinsic to southern California (Los Angeles is exceptionally insane) was uncompromising. Had he lived, he could have been remembered as a major twentieth-century American artist.

At seventeen, alone in the Grand Canyon, he wrote: ”The world does not want Art – only artists do.” Byron, Keats and Shelley also left society with the same uncompromising rejection of its false idols and unclean strivings. Although only a boy, Everett Ruess beheld our downfall with mature steadiness like that of Robinson Jeffers: