Quotes by David Everett

“As I hiked out on the third day, I was convinced for the first time that if Everett had died in Davis Gulch, it was not in a natural accident.””

“Except for the stock trail and that headwaters slot, in the whole length of Davis Gulch, I could find only three routes out. These were “Moqui steps””

“There was no hope of visiting the two NEMO inscriptions, which I knew the waters of Lake Powell had long since swallowed.””

“Of all the myths that pervade the American landscape, none is more pervasive than that of the solitary man whose destiny it is to achieve a communion with nature so nearly absolute as to be irrevocable. It is the act of dying into the wilderness, actually or metaphorically. When Everett Ruess disappeared in the Escalante wilderness of Utah in November 1934, he succeeded to that mythic ideal; he became one with the wild earth.””

“His love of wilderness, his sense of kinship with the living earth, his acute sensitivity to every facet of nature’s displays”

“It is just possible that the loss of identity is the price of immortality. Because Everett Ruess is immortal, as all romantic and adventurous dreams are immortal. He is, and will be for a long time, Artist in Residence in the San Juan country.””

“Deliberately he punished his body, strained his endurance, tested his capacity for strenuousness. He took out deliberately over trails that Indians and old timers warned him against. He tackled cliffs that more than once left him dangling halfway between talus and rim. With his burros he disappeared into the wild canyons and emerged weeks later, hundreds of miles away, with a new pack of sketches and paintings and a whole new section in his journal and a new batch of poems.””

“What Everett was after was beauty, and he conceived beauty in pretty romantic terms. We might be inclined to laugh at the extravagance of his beauty-worship if there was not something almost magnificent in his single-minded dedication to it. Esthetics as a parlor affectation is ludicrous and sometimes a little obscene; as a way of life it sometimes attains dignity. If we laugh at Everett Ruess we shall have to laugh at John Muir, because there was little difference between them except age.””

“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 dream.””

“One way and another, I have been flirting pretty heavily with Death, the old clown.””

“There was indeed the potential for a John Muir in Everett Ruess, a nature and adventure writer who could at once sing the glory of the natural world and yet keep a sense of proportion about the limits of human endeavor in the wilderness.””

“I was sorry, though, that our intimacy, like many things that are and will be, had to die with a dying fall.””

“There is nothing permanent in the world except change, which is inevitable and omnipresent,” Everett wrote, veering dangerously astray, before he closed the essay with a lame pronouncement: “If we believe in evolution, then we must believe that the English reformation was fated, and that Henry was only the tool, if a good tool, to bring it about.””

“I write by firelight. The crest of the sandstone cliffs is bathed in moonlight. I know it is beautiful, but I can’t feel the beauty.””

“Irwin says he heard there’s an operation that can fix lips like Vera’s, but that her parents feel the thing’s a special cross God gave her to bear. Everett says it’s the parents who deserve the cross: somebody should nail their upper lips to one, he says.””