Cam rentsch

An essay I wrote shortly after starting grad school at the University of Chicago

My roommate puts up with the fact that I’m up early and gone early most mornings, gone before I even remember why I’m running out the door, coffee still on my breath and teeth 

This is what it all must have been for I think, sweaty body in motion, a blur of sandstone and ivy that disappears quickly in the morning humidity. I’m counting leaves the way my grandfather taught me to until I realize how stupid it would be for them to let these buildings be covered in poison ivy, which I’ve ran through so many times it hardly affects me anymore. This is what it was all for, all that work, every sleepless night and caffeine-induced chest pain, every trip to the library with too many books to fit in my backpack, all just to take some more classes in more buildings in a different part of the Midwest. 

I count leaves anyways, and then before I know it, I’ve ran all the way across campus. 

Wait, that’s all this campus is?

In Ohio, I’m a boy from the foothills and the cornfields, but here in Chicago, I’m a man from Ohio

The Ohio campus feels like a city unto itself, the constant construction racket as I’m out again, dodging the students living their own lives with the happy loud drunk voices as I fit in miles around work and class, and more work usually later that night. When I first moved to the Ohio campus, I had to learn that there were no more country roads to dart out on to under the cover of dark and count the stars to the rhythm of your feet. 

This was after what came before the last before, nineteen years, cut leaf springs with a couple valium up the nose, found the edges and all, manhood rituals gutshot and left for dead

There are no deer here, here meaning Chicago, or, if there are, they are hiding from me and doing a good job of it. There were always deer in Ohio, at least 

I think all I’m doing is pouring salt in my wounds and letting the flesh cure over time. 

In the car, at the corner of 101st and S Stony Island Ave, I want to cry as I drive towards an uncertain future, a new apartment where I’ll sleep on the floor for a week because I can’t afford a bed yet. I’m scared, and I feel very alone, and when I get to my building the woman working at the front desk seems concerned when I, obviously a student, say that I’m alone and moving in by myself, but she only seems concerned for a moment. Later, she’ll touch my hair without asking for my permission, and I’ll let her, because why not?

I now sleep almost eight hours a night, almost every night, and I haven’t had a job (unless you count being a student, which no one has ever counted) in almost a month. 

The name Chicago is an anglicization of an indigenous word that meant “the place where wild onions grow”. Some people call wild onions spring onions or ramps. They’re smaller than garlic cloves. 

Most mornings, I run along the lakefront and think about what it means to be a place where wild onions grew – past tense – and remember things I don’t want to, like being alone in the quiet woods to pick wild onions while my grandmother waited on me to come back to make lunch. I was wearing knee-high rubber work boots then, and those boots are in my closet now because I’m afraid of the snow and ice, because I’m afraid of no longer being able to say that 

I might have to work with my hands again.  

if wild onions still grow here, they are hiding from me and doing a good job of it. 

This morning, after I couldn’t find enough miles of sandstone and ivy, I’m back along the lakeshore. There are men in fluorescent shirts who look like my dad standing next to landscaping equipment alongside the trail, and as I pass by I make out one word in their conversation: “vuelva” 

That’s when I remember a tohono o’odham proverb about running: one footstep a prayer, and the other a blessing. 

With the first step I pray to belong to the land, and on the next am blessed to be reminded that I always have.