This is a continuation of the series entitled “Get A Life!” I admire brave, bold, determined individuals who throw caution to the winds and set forth on grand adventures.
One of my favorites is the painter, Everett Ruess, who wrote in one of his voluminous journals, “What time is it? It’s time to live!” Isn’t that a wonderful insight? He had very little time left when he set out on his journey through life..” He was only 20 — really not much more than a boy — when he disappeared in the wilderness of southern Utah in 1934 during a painting trip. There have been many theories as to what became of him, but no solution
As many of the great adventurers and explorers were, he was single minded and determined to live his life his way. He has been called “a vagabond for beauty.” He was obsessed with experiencing and capturing the beauty of nature, and tramped from his family’s Los Angeles home up the coast to Carmel when he was only 16. He became a wanderer who was befriended by the likes of the famous photographer, Ansel Adams, Indians and Mormon farmers.
He travelled alone with a burro or a horse. Except when people whom he met took him in, he slept outside with a bedroll in spite of rain, hail or freezing weather and cooked his solitary meals in a Dutch oven. These were the years of the Great Depression, and he never had more than a few dollars to his name. Those who knew him said that he was absolutely fearless.
Above me it is beautiful.
Below me it is beautiful.
Behind me it is beautiful.
All around me it is beautiful.
Listen to the quiet power
of beauty.
— Navajo chant that I saw at
Canyon de Chelly that Ruess
also visited.
His journals and letters to family and friends resonate with me because Bill and I have seen many of the places that he visited, and I fell in love with the West.
California’s Big Sur is surely one of the most beautiful places in the world. The Pacific Coast Highway snakes along cliffs, high above the ocean. Blue, blue, blue! Surely the blue of the combined sky and ocean is the ultimate definition of blue. It’s as if we floated in a bubble of blue. The Grand Canyon is so grand, so vast, that one cannot take it in and hold pictures of it in one’s mental photograph album. My keenest memory of it is when I walked out onto a promontory on the South Rim through wild roses whose scent rose up all around me, enhancing the canyon’s sublimity.
Ruess disappeared after he left Escalante which is the gateway to Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks. The first time we drove through that country between Escalante and the Grand Canyon, the map was marked “unexplored.” Once when Bill stopped the car there was absolutely no sound — not even a bird’s cry or a bee’s buzzing. We have driven across Devil’s Backbone which is a razorback across the tops of rocky pinnacles. As far as the eye could see below us, were other sharp spires, making me feel as if we were in another world.
As Ruess said, “What time is it? It’s time to live!” Even though I’m 79, I sense that I’m still learning to live. I must put aside thoughts of what I can no longer do and, as Thoreau put it, explore my own higher latitudes and be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within me, opening new channels of thought.
I cannot have too much beauty in my life. Even though I may never return to those places, the images of their wild, pure beauty are preserved in my innermost soul. Also, as long as I still have my five senses, I shall always be able to access beauty — no matter where I am. I am so rich! wclarke@comcast.net
