At the tender age of twenty,
Everett Reuss disappeared into thin air in the wilderness of Utah in 1934. His burros were found by the search party corraled and starving in a box canyon along with his gear. No trace was ever found of this boy-poet who walked bodily across the desert into legend. The clarity of his young thoughts astonishes me to this day.
He graduated high school in the city of self-delusion – Hollywood – and quickly became disgusted with it, finding consolation in the wilderness. Everett crossed and recrossed the wilderness of the Southwest on foot, sending letters home to his family in Los Angeles that are filled with precocious wisdom. He was resigned to ruin like a sage, sweet and at the same time ruthless.
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.)
Such exuberance as this poem reveals emerged from a young soul wandering alone in wild places, camping and reading Shakespeare, Rabelais and One Thousand and One Nights by the campfire, awakening with cheerful humor: “Early up. I flipped pancakes of my own inimitable mix with surpassing dexterity and gusto.” “I packed with surpassing adroitness and celerity.” “I stuffed my pockets with cookies and went on.” “I creased my hat and thought about the future.” (Wilderness Journal)
thank to KP
via/ continued
At the tender age of twenty, Everett Reuss disappeared into thin air in the wilderness of Utah in 1934. His burros were found by the search party corraled and starving in a box canyon along with his gear. No trace was ever found of this boy-poet who walked bodily across the desert into legend. The clarity of his young thoughts astonishes me to this day.
He graduated high school in the city of self-delusion – Hollywood – and quickly became disgusted with it, finding consolation in the wilderness. Everett crossed and recrossed the wilderness of the Southwest on foot, sending letters home to his family in Los Angeles that are filled with precocious wisdom. He was resigned to ruin like a sage, sweet and at the same time ruthless.
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.)
Such exuberance as this poem reveals emerged from a young soul wandering alone in wild places, camping and reading Shakespeare, Rabelais and One Thousand and One Nights by the campfire, awakening with cheerful humor: “Early up. I flipped pancakes of my own inimitable mix with surpassing dexterity and gusto.” “I packed with surpassing adroitness and celerity.” “I stuffed my pockets with cookies and went on.” “I creased my hat and thought about the future.” (Wilderness Journal)
thank to KP
via/ continued
