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!

I have been one who loved the wilderness
     Swaggered and softly crept between the mountain peaks
I listened along to the sea’s brave music;
     I sang my songs above the shriek of desert winds.
-       Everett Ruess

I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wilderness. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. After all the lone trail is the 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.
- Evertt Ruess, 1932

Dear Doris [Myers], August 30 Castle Crags

I have been feeling so happy and filled to overflowing with the beauty of life, that I felt I must write to you. It is all a golden dream, with mysterious, high, rushing winds leaning down to caress me, and warm and perfect colors flowing before my eyes. Time and the need of time have ceased entirely. A gentle, dreamy haze fills my soul, the rustling of the aspens lulls my senses, and the surpassing beauty and perfection of everything fills me with quiet joy and a deep pervading love for my world.

My solitude is unbroken. Above, the white, castellated cliffs glitter fairy-like against the turquoise sky. The wild silences have enfolded me unresisting.

Beauty and peace have been with me, wherever I have gone. At night I have watched pale granite towers in the dim starlight, aspiring to the powdered sky, tremulous and dreamlike, fantastical in the melting darkness.

I have watched white-maned rapids, shaking their crests in wild abandon, surging, roaring, overwhelming the senses with their white fury, only to froth and foam down the current into lucent green pools, quiet and clear in the mellow sunlight.

On the trail, the musical tinkle of the burro bells mingles with the sound of wind and water, and is only heard subconsciously.

On the lake at night, the crescent moon gleams liquidly in the dark water, mists drift and rise like lifting enchantments, and tall, shadowed peaks stand guard in watchful silence.

These living dreams I wish to share with you, and I want you to know that I have not forgotten.

Love from Everett Ruess, from the book A Vagabond For Beauty

Happiness lies in a large measure of self-forgetfulness, either in work . . . or in the love of others.

I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the street car and the star sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities.
I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly. why muck and conceal one's true longings and loves, when by speaking of them one might find someone to understand them, and by acting on them one might discover oneself?

I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wilderness. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. After all, the lone trail is best. I'll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.

But then, I am always being overwhelmed. I require it to sustain life.

I must pack my short life full of interesting events and creative activity. Philosophy and aesthetic contemplation are not enough. I intend to do everything possible to broaden my experiences and allow myself to reach the fullest development. Then, and before physical deterioration obtrudes, I shall go on some last wilderness trip to a place I have known and loved. I shall not return.

I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear.

I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities. Do you blame me then for staying here, where I feel that I belong and am one with the world around me? It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty

While I am alive, I intend to live.

I thought that there were two rules in life — never count the cost,
and never do anything unless you can do it wholeheartedly.
Now is the time to live.

I'm drunk on the fiery elixir of beauty.

Always, I want to live more intensely and richly.

I don't think I could ever settle down. I have known too much of the depths of life already, and I would prefer anything to an anticlimax.

I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time.

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 dreams.

A Sonnet for Everett Ruess

You walked into the radiance of death
through passageways of stillness, stone, and light,
gold coin of cottonwoods, the spangled shade,
cascading song of canyon wrens, the flight
of scarlet dragonflies at pools, the stain
of water on a curve of sand, the art
of roots that crack the monolith of time.

You knew the crazy lust to probe the heart
of that which has no heart that we could know,
toward the source, deep in the core, the maze,
the secret center where there are no bounds.

Hunter, brother, companion of our days:
that blessing which you hunted, hunted too,
what you were seeking, this is what found you.

Ed Abbey
Oracle, Arizona
1983

Books By Or About Everett Ruess:

Everett Ruess
(1914-1934)

The Art Journal

Favorite Everett Ruess Quotes