A Song For Everett Ruess

July 30th  2003

Just home now from three weeks away and my desk is like the lawn outside: overgrown, and difficult to mow through. Papers, receipts and random notes lay choked like the grass is wet and thick. The mower stalls, just like my brain that doesn’t quite know how to prioritize. A few days, I figure, and things’ll begin to look normal again. My desk clear, the garden weeded, and the lockers at the YMCA familiar again. Just in time to leave for the next tour.

This month’s gift was a song that was a year and a half in the making: a song about Everett Ruess. In March of 2002, touring in Utah, I was given a book called “Everett Ruess – A Vagabond For Beauty”. I knew there was a song in it somewhere. So I waited.  (See Notes From The Road March 2002) One evening, looking at the book with my guitar in my lap, I read a poem he wrote and heard a melody in the words, “Here in the utter stillness, high on a lonely cliffs edge…”. I knew I had found a door, and spent the next three weeks pouring myself into it. Many of the best lyrics are Everett’s own words from his letters and journals, so in effect he deserves co-authorship.

Something about reading Everett Ruess is that you can’t help but come under the influence of how he saw the world. Everett was continually intoxicated with the beauty of the landscape. He wouldn’t settle for anything less. One can shift perspective in their eyes in order to intensify the contrasts and colors of their surroundings. It's a practice of focus and appreciation of the shapes of things. I believe this is the way a painter sees the world. It’s a delight to travel with Everett in your head.

Everett chose the most inhospitable places to be the subject of his attention, and he became drawn ever deeper into them. In his mid to late teens he learned how to travel unassisted into the most remote parts of the southwestern desert.  In his mind he became so removed from society, so absorbed in the fabric of what surrounded him, so on the edge of what we call reality, that he simply slipped away. The strongest of many theories about his disappearance, was that cattle rustlers shot him. I think it doesn’t ultimately matter how he went. In my mind I see his body dissolving into the “rending flames” and “overwhelming beauty” he felt around him.

I finished writing “Everett” in a state park north of Racine, Wisconsin. The location is interesting, I think, because that’s near where I finished “What Would Woody Do”. That part of the Midwest seems to be good for songwriting.  The endorphins of this new song promptly kicked in and Sue began applying a banjo and harmony part to it. Now it’s a joy to tell folks about who Everett Ruess was.  You could say that if Everett hadn’t died so young he could have become one of America’s great and well-known artists. He never aspired to any fame. Yet his particular gift of perception and passion live on in his words.

Everett Ruess 

In the spring of nineteen-thirty, at sixteen years of age
With a restlessness inside, I hitched out of L.A.
I hiked upon the coastline, and under lofty pines
By the mournful crash of breakers, my sleep was deep and fine
I wondered and I wandered, out to Yosemite
Shoe leather on the mountains, I vagabond for beauty, for beauty 

In the year of thirty-one, I turned seventeen
And heard the desert calling me, from Monument Valley
I tramped behind my burros, Pegasus and Pericles
With my pencils and my paintbrush, I went where I pleased
Oh the warm and perfect colors, my eyes did behold
And the wild raging silence, my heart did enfold, unresisting 

From Kayenta east to Shiprock, the scarlet cactus blooms
And the smell of sage is sweet, by the Mesa Verde moon
My solitude unbroken, I’m roaring drunk with life
All the world a riot of sensual delight
Here in the utter stillness high on a lonely cliffs edge
Where the air trembles with lightning I give the wind my pledge, my pledge

I shall sing my song above the shriek of desert winds
Burned and starved and weary, I’ll sing out again
I’ll never leave the grace that haunts me everyday
On the canyon trail I have found my way, my way 

November thirty-four I left Escalante town
Something in me knows that I am glory bound
Across the Colorado River to the Arizona side
All that you will know was that I found my ride
My body will expire in the golden burning light
A moth into the flame of a starry, starry night 

Here in the utter stillness high on a lonely cliffs edge
Where the air trembles with lightning I give the wind my pledge, my pledge

July 19^th 2003

Thanks for reading. Sue and I leave for England and Scotland on Monday. I’ll look forward to sharing our experiences with you in August and September’s “Notes”.

Keep in touch!

Dana