Meditation: Happy Trails, Everett

I first read about Everett Ruess in Into the Wild, but things didn't click until my journalist friend wrote a column about him for the Durango Herald. It interested me enough that I purchased A Vagabond for Beauty, a book of Everett's collected letters and his Wilderness Journals, mostly penned while he was exploring the high country of California and the deserts of the American southwest. His mysterious disappearance in this same desert in 1934 at the age of twenty has led to much discussion about his fate. Some claimed he had been murdered, some that he had married a Navajo woman and entered a sort of self-exile from the modern world. His story certainly has provided ample fodder for fantasy.

In June of this year, however, it seems the mystery was solved. I'll leave the debate alone, but suffice it to say that I am reasonably convinced that he was murdered and his body has been found tucked away under an alcove in the Utah desert. (An excellent article can be found on the National Geographic website.)

Much has been written about him and I can add but little to the conversation. However, over the years I have been deeply moved by this misunderstood young man who left the safety of his life in California in pursuit of beauty and solitude with only some camping gear, burros, and an unslakable thirst for adventure. In 1932 he writes:

Adventure is for the adventurous. My face is set. I go to make my destiny. May many another youth be by me inspired to leave the snug safety of his rut, and follow fortune to other lands.

Yes, some can dismiss (and have dismissed) this as a youthful, grandiose weltanschauung, an impractical ideology that only the young and immortal can afford. But I wonder if it is easier to minimize such a creed when one is heavily invested in the status quo of modern society. He writes in 1934:

Beauty isolated is terrible and unbearable, and the unclouded site of her kills the beholder. His only refuge is in insignificant things, in labor that keeps the mind from thought, and in companionship that gives back to the ego some of its former virility. ¶But he who has looked long on naked beauty may never return to the world, and though he should try, he will find its occupation empty and vain...

Everett's short life is a challenge to me. In some ways I am sorry that the mystery of his final days has been solved. In other ways it brings a poignancy and urgency to the words he wrote 75 years ago.

So, Everett, as you liked to say, "Happy Trails". There were--and are--few like you.