Cam rentsch

An essay about compost, and moving back to Missoula.

I’m lurching around Missoula’s University District on a big blue e-bike, towing a trailer of trash cans full of food scraps and anxiously waving at the traffic that lets me through, one of the small niceties people can grant you that you don’t realize goes so far in helping you treat others the same way. I’m collecting compost scraps for Soil Cycle, a distinctly Missoulian non-profit where you can pay a small fee to have some granola person like me come by your house on a bike and empty a five-gallon bucket of your food scraps into a trash can that later gets emptied into even bigger trash cans and then various other composting containers where it’s eaten by red wigglers and turned into “worm casings”, which you can put on your garden to supplement the dusty mountain soil. 

I’m doing this because it pays a little and it also helps out my friend Lis, Soil Cycle’s executive director – who herself is helping me out more than she knows by bringing me on. At the end of 2023 my life fell apart in a spectacular way – I got laid off with no notice from a job I loved and hadn’t dreamed of leaving, this about a month after $10,000 in surprise medical and car maintenance bills, and then a month after getting laid off my partner and I broke up – which was for the best for the both of us, but was really shitty timing for me. At the time I was living in Denver, and all I could think about was moving back to Missoula. I sold everything that wouldn’t fit into my Subaru and made the trip back, making a luxurious mid-way stop at the Best Western in North Salt Lake City in order to feel anxious and eat too much Wendy’s in a king size bed. Now, under a February snowstorm, I’m writing this, sleeping on the floor of an apartment I’m not yet sure I’ll be able to afford the rent for. I definitely can’t afford a new bed.  

Lis and I first became close as friends during the summer of 2023, when our various relationship troubles and the fact that I chose to spend that year living in my Subaru had us retreating to the shade of the Soil Cycle office to swat fruit flies and gossip. After my former partner and I finally broke up, Lis made the time at work again to sit with me through the paint mixer of emotions I was stuck in. She did make me help her though, which was the least I could do. So I spun a PVC and chicken wire sifter to separate out worm casings into a uniform size that we packed into brown coffee bean bags. 

I made an old joke in a whiny voice, parroting the movie Holes: 

“I’m tired of this grandpa.” 

“Well that’s just too damn bad!” She replied. 

The worm casings smelled so rich of rot and decay and the sifter tumbled them out in gorgeous black marbles. I moved them around in the wheelbarrow with my hands, and my brain got a little bit quieter.  

“You know, this is what all the dirt smells like where I’m from.” I said. Especially after rain, especially in late fall, when the big orange oak leaves start to sink into the mud and turn into tomorrow’s plants. The cacophony of noise in my head from the recent breakup turns off for a second and all I can do is smell and feel the worm casings, which to my untrained eyes are indistinguishable from actual dirt. 

“You know the fact that you’re making dirt basically makes you God, right?” 

Lis laughed, but the thought felt serious to me. This was all banana peels and kale ribs in some million dollar house in the Upper Rattlesnake not too long ago. A lot of things come out of rot. I don’t know what to make of this thought yet, so when we’re done packing worm casings I go bother Hera, Soil Cycle’s barn cat who keeps mice out of the compost bins. 

Later, on Valentine’s Day, I’m talking to the blue Soil Cycle bike as I get lost on the North Side looking for the blue and white compost buckets. The bike and trailer seem to disarm folks a bit, and they wave more often or stop to talk and say hi, especially other cyclists. We’re talking about nothing – the bike and I, that is – except our mutual quest to save some onion skins and celery roots from the landfill. The bike doesn’t have much to say, but it’s a good listener. I need somebody to listen to me right now. 

The bike is a bit of a disaster to ride, or maybe it’s just taking after me. The trailer grows heavier with each stop, the chain jumping with a clunk when you need to shift, the lack of suspension punishing my wrists with each pothole. I splash rotting vegetables and apple cores and winter road slush onto my barn boots when I miss the trash cans on the trailer, and get sticky used coffee grounds onto the sleeves of my coat when cleaning the buckets out with sawdust. The smell of rotting food sticks to my hair and all this combined with the close by traffic help me stop thinking. When I’m back at the office, I do the extra step of consolidating the bins of compost for Lis, if only because I’m single now and need somebody to go the extra mile for. 

Lis did the tattoo I most often get complimented on – a stick and poke of the unmistakable Mt Sentinel with it’s M on my left forearm. You can hardly ever see it – usually I’ve got it covered by whatever I’m wearing. On that night we also drank tea and gossiped, and she told me I had nice skin for tattooing. Women always compliment me on things I’d never think to be proud of. I got the Mt. Sentinel tattoo because the mountain itself is important to me, if only because it’s always right there, exactly where I left it. I know that it won’t be that way, but there’s this part of me that hopes that’s how things are with Missoula, and with Lis, always right there, exactly where I left them. 

Friendship is a weird thing, and Missoula is a weird place. But I’m really glad I have them both.