Everett Ruess

The prompt for today is to write a portrait poem. I’ve posted Everett Ruess for the third year. The Ruess family accepted the DNA results proving the remains thought to be Everett were in fact another body but for some time it was exciting to think Everett had been found. The search continues.


Everett Ruess


Everett Ruess was found last year;
Seventy-five years after he went
Missing.
It has been concluded that
Everett found death
(Not at all what he was looking for)
At the hands of youthful Utes,
Whose luck would be to find
A white man and two mules
In the high desert, traveling with no other company but
Lofty ideals.
Everett was
Seeking gentleness,
Detaching himself from
An absolutely perfect life
(Or so some might think).
Everett wanted simply to be immersed in beauty
(Or so he said).
Everett Ruess lay dead,
At the age of twenty,
Buried by a stranger.
His saddle settled on a ledge
Above his head
For seventy-five years;
Killed for
Having gone too far alone.



Ruess was raised in Los Angeles and moved to San Francisco during the Depression. He tried to make a living with his art — cutting wood block prints and writing poetry. But even as artists like Ansel Adams and Maynard Dixon reached out to him, Ruess turned his back on city life. It drained him and left him uninspired causing him to ride off alone into the Utah wilderness, never to return.
"The beauty of this country is becoming a part of me," he once wrote in a letter, while on a trek. "I feel more detached from life and somehow gentler. I have good friends here, but no one understands why I am here and what I do. I've gone too far alone."

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