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Everett Ruess: A Vagabond For Beauty (2000)

by W.L. Rusho(Favorite Author)

4.2 of 5 Votes: 3

languge

English

genre

review 1: This was a good book in that it allows you to draw your own conclusions about Everett Ruess, who left home at the age of 16 to wander, explore, and seek inspiration in the south-west desert. It is primarily a chronology of letters, poems, and artwork produced by Everett over a 4 year period that was mostly spent wandering alone or intermittently with locals and native americans. The author only fills in gaps where necessary. This biggest gap is obviously his unexplained disappearance at the age of 20. Many theories are presented to explain his disappearance, but no conclusions are drawn and it remains a mystery. The letters would not be very interesting to read if it weren't for the fact that Everett was a very talented writer with artistic sensibilities. His letters... more to his parents and friends back home about what he saw and what he experienced are very vivid, descriptive, and self-reflective. His written experience is quite similar to that of Thoreau during his time in Walden. I am familiar with many of the areas that Everett described in his letters because I love to go hiking and backpacking in that region, so for me this book was a form of escapism - reading his meandering thoughts on the region is the next best thing to being there when life, work, and responsibilities prevent me from doing so. He was precocious in his writing and artistic abilities and fearless in his desire to explore on his own and be as independent as possible. Here are some thought-provoking things I highlighted from my read:"I need no timepiece, knowing that now is the time to live.""Don't leave your problems to be solved by Time - the solution might be adverse.""I'll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is."
review 2: This is a hard book to sum up in a few words. Fascinating and compelling, yes; heartbreaking, often; hair-raising sometimes; exasperating, occasionally. Mostly, it is a vivid reminder of what it is to be still very young, naive, and adventuresome. It's also a book that's very hard to put down.The reader, of course, knows from the start that Everett Ruess disappears at the age of 21 while on a walkabout somewhere near the Colorado River, in the remote 1930s wilderness of southern Utah. Gifted, bright, and almost painfully sensitive, he writes letters home that are sweetly poignant, thoughtful, opinionated, and rapturously descriptive of the natural environment he loves. Starting at the age of 16, while still a high school student in Hollywood, California, he journeys to Carmel, Arizona, and the Sierras. Leaving UCLA after one unhappy semester, he returns to the Four Corners region of Arizona and drifts northward into Utah where he follows the Escalante down to the Colorado and then vanishes.A lover of classical music, a reader of books, poet, writer, water colorist, and block print maker, he considers himself very much a misfit in a world of conformity, where people live lives of quiet desperation, pursuing material goals that make them unhappy and unfulfilled. Torn between his desire for companionship and his love of wilderness solitude, he appreciates warm and welcoming company wherever he happens upon it, and seeks it out when he can, sometimes introducing himself to established artists, such as photographers Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. During visits to the home of painter Maynard Dixon, in San Francisco, he is befriended and photographed by Dixon's wife, Dorothea Lange. One of these photographs eventually appears in a missing persons report in a publication of the Los Angeles Police Department.It's easy to go on and on about this book. The letters provide such a rich psychological portrait of this young man, full of interesting contradictions and curious prophecies of his eventual fate. Meanwhile, there is the mystery of his disappearance and the various theories and speculation about what may have happened to him, which are also included by the book's author.I am happy to recommend this book to anyone interested in the West, stories about coming of age and self-reliance, rhapsodic descriptions of nature, personal adventures, the desert, Native Americans, and unsolved mysteries. As companion volumes, I'd also suggest Edward Abbey's "Desert Solitaire" and Eliot Porter's excellent collection of photographs, "The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado." less

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