vagabond for beauty.

In between shooting on location and working back at the hotel editing along with plane trips, I started and finished a book that will take me some time to fully grasp. It was perhaps the singularly most powerful prose I have ever read, and the fact it was actually just a collection of letters never intended to be read by anyone other than their recipient I believe perhaps led to their honesty. The author felt no inhibitions. No need to impress. But impress he did, no doubt not only me in such a way but surely countless others. He – like Abbey – writes of the desert in all its beauty and immenseness. I try feebly without intention to write of the mountains in theirs.

Everett Ruess was merely sixteen years old when he first left his home in Los Angeles in the summer of 1930, bound for the northern California coast. After a life lived all too shortly but incredibly deeply, he disappeared in 1934 – last seen in the Escalante River region of southern Utah. No trace was ever found, and the question remains wherever he may be?

It has been said his reactions to the wonders of Nature went beyond what we would assume to be normal experience, to the point where he could almost resonate to the light waves that struck him from all points in the landscape. We do not fully understand him. Probably the most intriguing paradox in Ruess' personality was the balance between the inwardly-directed, intensely-sensitive visionary and the outgoing, courageous adventurer. His self-confidence was massive, but his doubts all the same ever-present. What he was after was beauty – so much that it seemed to consume his very being.

I've ended up underlining the majority of the book, scrawling notes in the margins next to those lines that I found particularly incredible or fitting. I will be revisiting this book as I decompress what I read, but wanted to post this one letter that struck me in its entirety perhaps stronger than any other ~

Dear Bill,

Once more I am roaring drunk with the lust of life and adventure and unbearable beauty. Adventure seems to beset me on all quarters without my even searching for it; I lead the wild, free life wherever I am. And yet, there is always an undercurrent of restlessness and wild longing; "the wind is in my hair, there's a fire in my heels," and I shall always be a rover, I know. Always I'll be able to scorn the worlds I've known like half-burnt candles when the sun is rising, and sally forth to others now unknown. I'm game; I've passed my own rigorous tests, and I know I can take it. And I'm lucky too, or have been. Time and again, my life or all my possessions have swung on the far side of the balance, and always thus far I've come out on top and unharmed, even toughened by the chances I've taken.

"Live blindly upon the hour; the Lord, who was the future, died long ago." Among others, I've tried that way, and found it good, too. Finality does not appall me, and I seem always to enjoy things the more intensely because of the certainty that they will not last. Oh, it's a wild, gay time! Life can be rich to overflowing. I've been so happy that I can't think of containing myself. I've no complaints to make, and time and the world are my own, to do with as I please. And I've had it up and down; no tedious, humdrum middle course has been mine, but a riotously  plunging and soaring existence.

Again I say, it's a wild gay time. I've slept under hundreds of roofs, and shall know others yet. I've carved a way for myself, turned hostile strangers into staunch friends, swaggered and sung through surplus of delight where nothing and no one cared whether I lived or died.

The things I've loved and given up without complaint have returned to me doubled. There's no one in the world I envy.

Around me stretches the illimitable desert, and far off and nearby are the outposts of suffering, struggling, greedy, grumbling humanity. But I don't choose to join on that footing. I'm sorry for it and I help it when I can, but I'll not shoulder its woes. To live is to be happy; to be carefree, to be overwhelmed by the glory of it all. Not to be happy is a living death.

Alone I shoulder the sky and hurl my defiance and shout the song of the conqueror to the four winds, earth, sea, sun, moon and stars. I live!

May

Northeast Arizona

He was twenty years old.  Seven months later he disappeared forever. His message he left behind was simple: life on this earth is very precious and very beautiful.

We must learn to heed the pure and delicate voices of those who cherish it. Without intention, Everett Ruess was one of those voices.