Status Updates From Finding Everett Ruess: The ...

Lots of subway time equals a big jump in pages read.

What a strange, STRANGE man!

Yet it is impossible to disentangle Everett's vanishing from the legend that clings to him.

it is not the mystery of Everett's disappearance and final fate that makes him so interesting, but his achievements by the age of twenty. As a precocious artist, a writer of promise, a romantic visionary verging on the mystical, a bold and resourceful solo explorer of the wilderness, and in some sense the first true celebrator of the beauty of the Southwest for its own sake, ...

I've wanted to read about Everett Ruess for a long time.

Had he lived longer, the melodrama might well have been tempered by wisdom. There was indeed the potential for a John Muir in Everett Ruess ...

Whenever Everett tried most earnestly to express the rapture that solitude in the wilderness brought him, he tended to lapse into melodrama. Beneath the passion pulses a vein of self-pity, as he casts himself as a martyr to his own obsession. BUT this is the writing of a 20 year old.

"The absorbing passion of any highly sensitive person is to forget himself, whether by drinking or by agonized love, by furious work or play, or by submerging himself in the creative arts." "But the pretense cannot endure, and unless he can find another as highly strung as himself with whom to share the murderous pain of living, he will surely go insane."

"I don't wish to withdraw from life to college, and I have a notion, conceited or not, that I know what I want from life, and can act upon it."

"As to the million-dollar endowment of going through the college mill, I have three million dollar endowments already, that I am sure of, and I don't have to go begging. I have my very deep sensitivities to beauty, to music, and to nature."

"... I have continued to seek beauty and friendship, and I think that I have really brought some beauty and delight into the lives of others, and that is at least something."

"They [his friends] have been wallowing in the shallows of life this past year -- not growing or having new or enlarging experiences."

... the stalking, landing, and devouring of trout sound like the play of a boy at summer camp, not the quest of an artist.

... Everett's wandering seemed rather aimless. There was little true exploration about it, for throughout his four and a half months in national forests and parks, Everett almost never strayed from a well-maintained trail.