Finding Everett Ruess Quotes

“Everett was a loner, but he liked people too damn much to stay down there and live the rest of his life in secret. A lot of us are like that [...]: We like companionship, see, but we can't stand to be around people for very long. So we get ourselves lost, come back for a while, then get the hell out again. Everett was strange. Kind of strange. But him and [Christopher] McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. They tried. Not many do. (Ken Sleight)”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“As I hiked out on the third day, I was convinced for the first time that if Everett had died in Davis Gulch, it was not in a natural accident.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“Except for the stock trail and that headwaters slot, in the whole length of Davis Gulch, I could find only three routes out. These were “Moqui steps”—ladders of hand- and toeholds gouged by some Anasazi daredevil with a quartzite pounding stone. I switched to rock-climbing shoes and started up one of these trails. Sixty feet up, I lost my nerve: yet above me, the holds continued on a parabolic wall that grew steeper every step, then made a wild traverse left before topping out on a vertical headwall. I thought of Everett’s boast: “Many times … I trusted my life to crumbling sandstone and angles little short of the perpendicular.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“There was no hope of visiting the two NEMO inscriptions, which I knew the waters of Lake Powell had long since swallowed.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“Everett was a loner, but he liked people too damn much to stay down there and live in secret the rest of his life. A lot of us are like that—I’m like that, Ed Abbey was like that, and it sounds like this McCandless kid was like that: We like companionship, see, but we can’t stand to be around people for very long. So we go get ourselves lost, come back for a while, then get the hell out again. And that’s what Everett was doing. “Everett was strange,” Sleight concedes. “Kind of different. But him and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That’s what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“Of all the myths that pervade the American landscape, none is more pervasive than that of the solitary man whose destiny it is to achieve a communion with nature so nearly absolute as to be irrevocable. It is the act of dying into the wilderness, actually or metaphorically. When Everett Ruess disappeared in the Escalante wilderness of Utah in November 1934, he succeeded to that mythic ideal; he became one with the wild earth.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“His love of wilderness, his sense of kinship with the living earth, his acute sensitivity to every facet of nature’s displays—all of these, because of their intensity in one young man, gave Everett rare qualities.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“It is just possible that the loss of identity is the price of immortality. Because Everett Ruess is immortal, as all romantic and adventurous dreams are immortal. He is, and will be for a long time, Artist in Residence in the San Juan country.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“Deliberately he punished his body, strained his endurance, tested his capacity for strenuousness. He took out deliberately over trails that Indians and old timers warned him against. He tackled cliffs that more than once left him dangling halfway between talus and rim. With his burros he disappeared into the wild canyons and emerged weeks later, hundreds of miles away, with a new pack of sketches and paintings and a whole new section in his journal and a new batch of poems.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“What Everett was after was beauty, and he conceived beauty in pretty romantic terms. We might be inclined to laugh at the extravagance of his beauty-worship if there was not something almost magnificent in his single-minded dedication to it. Esthetics as a parlor affectation is ludicrous and sometimes a little obscene; as a way of life it sometimes attains dignity. If we laugh at Everett Ruess we shall have to laugh at John Muir, because there was little difference between them except age.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“Say that I starved; that I was lost and weary; That I was burned and blinded by the desert sun; Footsore, thirsty, sick with strange diseases; Lonely and wet and cold … but that I kept my dream.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“One way and another, I have been flirting pretty heavily with Death, the old clown.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“There was indeed the potential for a John Muir in Everett Ruess, a nature and adventure writer who could at once sing the glory of the natural world and yet keep a sense of proportion about the limits of human endeavor in the wilderness.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“I was sorry, though, that our intimacy, like many things that are and will be, had to die with a dying fall.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“There is nothing permanent in the world except change, which is inevitable and omnipresent,” Everett wrote, veering dangerously astray, before he closed the essay with a lame pronouncement: “If we believe in evolution, then we must believe that the English reformation was fated, and that Henry was only the tool, if a good tool, to bring it about.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“I think I have seen too much and known too much—” he wrote, “so much that it has put me in a dream from which I cannot waken and be like other people. I love beauty but have no longer the desire to recreate it.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“I don’t have much trouble getting along with people, but I have the greatest difficulty in finding the sort of companionship I want.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“None of Everett’s predecessors or potential role models, however, launched their wandering careers at anything like the early age of sixteen. And we are left to speculate whether, had he lived as long as Muir, Everett Ruess might be acclaimed today as the artist and writer who, more than any other American, championed the quest for beauty for its own sake as he pursued an insatiable solo vagabondage through the landscapes of his heart’s content.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“IN THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICAN HISTORY, a quest such as the one Everett Ruess had launched in the Southwest in 1931 was virtually unique. Few vagabonds before him had attempted anything comparable.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“Yet he had behind him an exploratory adventure the likes of which few Americans so young had ever accomplished. In ten months he had traveled perhaps a thousand miles on foot, most of it solo, and seen more obscure and beautiful corners of the wilderness than other devotees of the canyon country do in a lifetime.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“Whatever I have suffered in the months past has been nothing compared with the beauty in which I have steeped my soul, so to speak. It has been a priceless experience—and I am glad it is not over. What I would have missed if I had ended everything last summer!”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“In any event, this letter marks the first unambiguous expression of the longing for a soul mate that would plague Everett throughout his short life. He never acknowledged the kind of terrible loneliness that the extraordinary solo journeys he was undertaking would have inflicted on a normal seventeen-year-old. But he would return now and again to the lament that he could not find that “true companion”—whether or not he meant lover, mentor, or partner in the wilderness.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“My friends have been few because I’m a freakish person and few share my interests. My solitary tramps have been made alone because I couldn’t find anyone congenial—you know it’s better to go alone than with a person one wearies of soon. I’ve done things alone chiefly because I never found people who cared about the things I’ve cared for enough to suffer the attendant hardships. But a true companion halves the misery and doubles the joys.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“I write by firelight. The crest of the sandstone cliffs is bathed in moonlight. I know it is beautiful, but I can’t feel the beauty.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“Here in the utter stillness, High on a lonely cliff-ledge, Where the air is trembling with lightning,   I have given the wind my pledge.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“Once more I am roaring drunk with the lust of life and adventure and unbearable beauty,” he wrote to one friend his own age. And to another, “I am overwhelmed by the appalling strangeness and intricacy of the curiously tangled knot of life.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wildernesses. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. After all the lone trail is best. I hope I’ll be able to buy good horses and a better saddle. I’ll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I’ll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“Say that I starved; that I was lost and weary; That I was burned and blinded by the desert sun; Footsore, thirsty, sick with strange diseases; Lonely and wet and cold … but that I kept my dream!”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

“Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty,”
― David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer