Only Pack What You Can Carry by Janice Holly Booth

Author:Janice Holly Booth
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: National Geographic Society
Published: 2011-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

By the strength of my arm, by the sight of my eyes

By the skill of my fingers, I swear,

As long as life dwells in me, never will I

Follow any way but the sweeping way of the wind.

He felt such a strong need to get away that he embraced an extreme form of solitude, leaving behind his friends, family, and worldly possessions to discover himself in the wilderness of the American Southwest.

Ruess was a light-haired, slender, somewhat androgynous-looking 20-year-old artist and adventurer known for his simple and vivid Japanese-like woodcuts and paintings when he set out in 1934 for what would be his last wandering into the wild. Riding into town on a burro, legs dangling almost to the ground and pulling behind him two overpacked mules, he must have been quite a sight to the residents, who were accustomed to seeing nothing on the horizon but the sun in the morning. Alone with his animals in the labyrinth of the backcountry, Ruess thought about life, the state of humanity, and his own purpose. His writings reveal a depth of reflection unusual for someone so young but perhaps not so surprising given the extraordinary amount of time he spent alone in the solitude of nature. One letter home proclaimed, “I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear”—reminiscent of Basho’s encounter with the cherry blossoms.

Ruess had not been so much seduced by nature as abducted by her. “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…it is enough that I am surrounded by beauty.”

One of Ruess’s happiest journeys was hiking the John Muir Trail, which begins in Yosemite National Park and continues 215 miles through the Ansel Adams Wilderness, Sequoia National Park, and Kings Canyon National Park, ending at the highest peak in the continental United States, 14,496-foot Mount Whitney.

Despite his youth, Ruess became friends with, and was admired by, the photographers Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange. Adams and Lange were mature artists, secure in their craft, so it’s noteworthy that they recognized the depth of Ruess’s love affair with nature.

He didn’t always have an easy time of it, though, having to endure the difficulties inherent in living a vagabond life, eking out a meager living off the land. But Ruess stuck fast to the pledge he’d made to the wind, the promise to only and always follow nature to where she would lead him. “Say that I starved, that I was lost and weary, that I was burned and blinded by the desert sun, foot-sore, thirsty, sick with strange diseases, lonely and wet and cold, but that I kept my dream!”

Ruess was 20 when he disappeared, and that disappearance has become the stuff of legend, a mystery never definitively solved. Ironically, his death, far from being a deterrent to those romantic souls who long to shed the bit and bridle of daily life, has become an inspiration, an invitation to run free, in beauty.

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