Category Archives: Essay spotlights

Solving Everett Ruess

Ruess

On November 12, 1934, a peripatetic young artist named Everett Ruess loaded up his pack burros, said goodbye to the friends he’d made in the remote Mormon settlement of Escalante, Utah, and resumed a journey of exploration – both cartographic and spiritual – that had come to define his young life.  His intention, as expressed in letters he’d posted to his family in California, was to travel south – either across the Colorado River at Lee’s Ferry and back onto the Navajo reservation from which he’d come, or else into the maze of side canyons marking the Escalante River’s confluence with the Colorado, and thence eastward, crossing the latter somewhere above its junction with the San Juan River gorge.

He was never heard from again. Continue reading →

The Summer of Jack

Jack Kirby  (1917-1994)

For most Americans of a certain age, the summer of 1968 is viewed as a kind of dark chasm that yawned between the Summer of Love and the Summer of Woodstock.  It was, after all, the summer of Martin, the summer of Bobby.  Of My Lai and Biafra.  It marked the rise of Nixon and the fall of Prague Spring.  It hosted the Chicago Convention.

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Hitting the Restart Button

In case we haven’t met, my name is Charles Joseph Greaves, and I’m a novelist.

Such was not always the case.  If you’d asked me in junior high, I’d have told you that my goal in life was to play guard for the Knicks.  By high school, I’d lowered my sights to brain surgery.  This I’d actually pursued, until I encountered a pre-med college course called Inorganic Chemistry.  By the time I’d hit graduate school, it was law, not medicine, that glowed like a new dawn on my life’s horizon.

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