“You are undertaking the first experience,
not of the place, but of yourself in that place.”
“Exploring” Wendell Berry
Obviously, I’ve never been able to fill my Everett Ruess bucket to overflow. Time has proven that! Over and over, whenever a gathering is announced relating to the all-too-brief life and times of the boy wanderer who disappeared in the Escalante canyon country back in 1934, I continue to show up. Certainly, it’s an obsession. I cop to that.
Upon reflection, however, I’ve seemed, over the past few years, to get somewhat of a grip on it. Not that my Everett addiction no longer nestles comfortably somewhere between fixation and fetish, but it’s been quite a spell since, say, I’ve felt compelled to map out a vacation wherein each stop was one of his previous campsites.
Of course, there is something to be said for waking up to the whoosh of a raven’s wings between the narrow walls of Davis Gulch, high up on the Kaiparowits, overlooking the Tribal Park of Monument Valley, deep within Grand Gulch, or along the Kaibab on the north rim of the Grand Canyon.
So, not unlike Pavlov’s dog, when word came that a work-in-progress screening of the new film “Everett Ruess Wilderness Song” was scheduled last week at the Tower Theater in Salt Lake, I, somewhat messily, salivated. Although I couldn’t imagine that much new ground would be covered, I felt the siren’s call.
An obvious labor of love by native-Utah filmmaker Lindsay Jaeger, who previously produced and developed projects for Academy Award-winning director Jonathan Demme, the film, as it screened, was indeed in its formative stages. That is a good thing. We can see it again once it is released and brag that we knew it when.
Much of the beautifully-raw footage tended, as documentaries are wont to do, toward the biographical, with interviews, at times, unhurried to the point of humor. Therein often rests the joy of viewing a print prior to serious editing, with its assorted baggage of time and narrative, entering the picture, so to speak.
In particular, a long rambling interview with Randolph “Pat” Jenks contained many heretofore veiled jewels of the Ruess legend. Most notably, details of the iconic photographs of when, in June of 1931, Jenks and classmate Tad Nichols had happened upon a sunburned, starved, and dehydrated Everett and his burro Pegasus along the then-unpaved Highway 89 between Cameron and Flagstaff in Arizona.
What followed was the capturing of one of my favorite photographic images of the legendary encounter, one that Tad took of Jenks and Everett attempting to coax the hesitant Pegasus into the back of Jenks’ pickup truck.
In the film, Jenks speaks of the bonding the three underwent on their subsequent trip to his ranch near the San Francisco Peaks where Everett would rejuvenate while resting and painting the local aspen trees. Being a lifelong “vagabond for beauty,” however, before too long he would once again light out for the next horizon.
They kept in touch through letters, however, and a few years later, following his disappearance and the newspaper accounts of the resultant search activity, Jenks and Nichols, along with many others who had run into Everett as he trekked the West, sent his parents photographs and anecdotes of their encounters, including copies of letters he had sent them.
Also included in the work-in-progress footage are interviews with bookseller Ken Sanders, climate activist Tim DeChristopher, publisher Gibbs Smith, and outdoor writer Dave Roberts, whose disproved account of “finding” the remains of Everett within a crevice in Comb Ridge had caused such a stir a few years back.
Possibly, along with the Jenks interview, the favorite element I took away from the film was the soundtrack, a brilliant adaptation of Everett’s poetry and prose set to music and performed by singer-songwriter Dan Berg with a level of exuberance reminiscent of a young Bob Dylan.
Currently utilizing “Kickstarter,” the popular funding platform for creative projects, the filmmakers are attempting to acquire pledges totaling at least $10,000 by Saturday, April 28. It’s the sole scenario whereby the project will be funded. As of Monday, April 9, $7,336 had been pledged by 68 donors.
And that would be the motivation behind them attempting to generate interest and contributions via their work-in-progress screenings and post-film Q&A sessions at various locations around the state. Their “Kickstarter” web site is: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wildernesssong/everett-ruess-wilderness-song?ref=email .
Everett Ruess’ journeys, especially those through the desert and canyon country of the American Southwest, are both intoxicating and inspiring. They tug not only at the vagabond-for-beauty within us but also at our capacity to properly process the eloquence of the various landscapes in question.
Even for Everett, bliss came at a cost: “Say that I was tired and weary/Burned and blinded by the desert sun/Footsore, thirsty sick with strange diseases, lonely/And wet and cold/But that I kept my dream.” Both an ascetic and a holy goof, Everett, as few others, somehow captured both our imaginations and hearts.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social scenes for the past 40 years.