Cam rentsch

An essay I wrote about a road trip I took in 2022.

I was laid off from what my friends lovingly and I hatefully called “my fake email job” on January 14th, 2022. At first, as cajoled by all of my friends, I tried to rest. I turned off the alarm on my phone, drank a beer or three with dinner, sat down to watch a TV show and actually paid attention instead of using it as background noise for scrolling on my phone. Even still, I woke up the next morning before my alarms would even have went off. I make it barely a day in the new apartment Wesley and I have just moved into before needing something to do, something other than reading LinkedIn descriptions for entry-level jobs looking for five years of experience. We go to Walmart and buy a beer pong table – little do I know we’ll be living out our college years again, except this time without Pawpurr’s or Broney’s. By this point I was already getting emails and calls from companies that would have me standing on my head but wouldn’t offer me a job despite five rounds of interviews and what felt like meeting the whole damn office over Zoom. Each night, I head out after dark to run just to keep an arbitrary streak alive.  

On these runs I spend most of the time staring up at Mt Jumbo and Mt Sentinel, lit up purple by the light of the moon reflecting off the city and the snow. I end up daydreaming about the elk that I know live on Mt Jumbo in the winter, and a time in the late summer when I could sit by my lonesome on a hill somewhere and watch elk through my binoculars and drink too much coffee – but the day would be so nice I’d never get anxious or restless the way I normally do. Later on, under the full heat of the day, I’d stretch out right there on the dirt and cover my face with the cowboy hat my sister bought me in order to take a nap that would feel restful for generations. 

Time passes, and things do not get better, daydreams of summer and elk bugles aside. The world’s getting slippery without routine, without purpose beyond hobbies and endless zoom calls wearing a tie and sweatpants below the view of my webcam. I run hard up the Smokejumper trail around Mt Sentinel’s backside, tasting pennies the whole time, and still, I wake up the very next day feeling the exact same dread I have been since this whole mess started. 

I can tell I’m really losing it when, about two months into this whole ordeal, I find myself reaching for beer in the fridge the minute I finish my morning coffee. There’s only so many jobs you can apply for in a day, and frankly, only so much porn and YouTube you can watch before getting bored of even the cheapest and easiest dopamine our world can offer you. My friends insist we’re all having great fun but each night I feel like a train off the tracks, drinking too much and doing what feels like nothing with my life after twenty-four years in an American culture that worshipped at the holy altar of employment. I’ve applied for more than two-hundred and fifty jobs and had dozens of interviews. Still, nothing. 

Don’t get confused – I’m far from a capitalist, and my meager unemployment checks keep the lights on and my rent paid. But the days are too long and my friends don’t respond to texts when they’re busy at their jobs; I grow to be so lonely I feel like throwing my phone off the roof and myself shortly after. 

You know that feeling when you want to get in the car and just drive? That one where each day feels different in only a worse way and nothing excites you, where it feels like your body is crawling out from underneath your own skin? Still, I don’t change anything. Rachel’s mom is in town to visit, so we all head out. Mar Bar, Red’s, everything you’d expect, and Wesley knowing I’m broke so he’s picking up my tab and feeding me endless Rum and Cokes like the wonderful friend he is. But I’m depressed and barely able to get out of bed, so I sit there and drink for lack of ability to join the conversation and end up blacked out, barely getting my socks off before falling into bed that night. There’s a picture of me on the corner of the whole group, unable to keep my head up and eyes open long enough to look at the camera.

“One fast move or I’m gone.” pops into my throbbing head, hungover on the couch the next morning. A quote from Kerouac’s Big Sur, when he in the continuous hangover of his life decides to escape to the “wilderness”, the religious aesthetic wanderer he thinks he is, except as far as I can tell, this wilderness is really just a bougie writer’s cabin owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. But I chew my lip and wonder; I talk to Wesley and Megan and my therapist and formulate half of a plan, an escape, something to do with my days so I don’t waste more of them just wandering around the apartment in a myopic haze. The map opens up to me, Missoula to the Columbia River Gorge and the Pacific Crest Trail, a rainy spring in the PNW, then down into California and Big Sur, a place I’d dreamed about since I was a teenager and first saw pictures. Along the way a stop at my friend Kade’s Stanford place – he’s a Physics PhD student who with any luck will let a stinky dirtbag shower and do laundry at his place. Then back into Montana through Nevada and Idaho, lonely interstate ramblings under a desert sun. I plan to bring my laptop and a shirt and tie to take job interviews from coffee shops, if needed. Where will I sleep each night? Unsure. But there’s got to be Forest Service land and other campgrounds around, and I’ll bring my bear spray and find places where I can loiter, hopefully ignored by others. I spend my REI dividend on freeze-dried meals and a silly insulated blanket you can also wear as a hoodie, and start to feel a little winter sunlight come in my window. 

I don’t know this yet, but it’s going to be a trip where I’ll wake up in my sleeping bag with my breath frosting over me under the shadow of Wy’east or California Redwoods with the sound of the Pacific Ocean surf. With something aching or sore from sleeping on the folded down seats of my Subaru, I’ll turn on my headlamp and make coffee with my little camp stove without getting out of my sleeping bag – something many have promised will kill me and each time I do it I’m reminded of that. But life has few deep pleasures like morning coffee without getting out of bed so I still make it this way, cramped in the backseat with all the things I need for a life and books up in the passenger seat, mostly cause nobody’s gonna make the coffee for me same as nobody’s gonna come rescue me from these doldrums, so I finally fall asleep knowing that I’m going to rescue myself.

A few days later, I take my half-finished plans, my retirement plan from the fake email job (unlike Kerouac, I can’t go to my mom for money to fuel my cross-country ramblings), and fill my Subaru with running shoes and books and get on the highway. I can tell I was burning on the edges of the boundaries against me, restless and pulling against the chains of my life, of the beautiful little Missoula snow globe I live in. I’ve been drinking too much and I know cause I can tell I’m looking at women and my eyes are asking them to fall in love with me, but it’s just a Hinge date, there’s no need to take it so seriously. Each day it feels like I run on some kind of sick yet sweet, maple syrup melancholy, confused and full of grief for the man I was supposed to be and how he’d never know the one I’ve actually become. My unemployment routine has become a parody of the job I was working at; a frantic burst of actual work for about an hour in the morning, and then, with nothing left to do for the day, spending it all chewing on my knuckles, staring at my phone, and dreaming of driving with no direction or place in mind. I know that I’ll know where I’m going once I get there. Before leaving, Rachel and Marla give me hugs and tell me they’ll miss me, which honestly shocks me. I don’t know when I’ll grow out of being surprised that people I know are my friends actually care about me. 

Immediately after leaving I feel better, better even just from the mere promise of something new to come and not another day spent scrolling LinkedIn, even when driving in freezing rain over Lookout Pass and down into Idaho, teeth clenched and worried about the turns. A stop for gas and a call to friends in Sprague, Washington – population 446. Then further west into the sunset, smiling on my own again for  the first time in a while, my Subaru hums until I make it to Hood River, where I get off the highway and head up into the Mt. Hood National Forest in a surreal darkness and sleep at the first trailhead I can find, hoping nobody will bother me. My nostrils are filled with the memory of a thousand woodsmoke fires and more to come as I settle into my sleeping bag and turn off the dome light to get some sleep. 

I begin having strange dreams immediately. I’m taking penalty kicks in a high school gym to win a baby buffalo for the Salish and my mom and older brother won’t get out of my goddamn way. I’m talking to my friend Megan on a rotary landline and we’re making plans for a date to go catch frogs. Mike Foote is trying to hand me his son to hold, but the baby clearly was born premature and with some combination of intense birth defects just moments ago and needs to be in an incubator. I’m running the Barkley Marathons with Courtney Dawaulter, but instead of Frozen Head, we’re on the ridgeline leading to University Mountain, and the whole thing is covered in astroturf. I wake up far too cold, and finally decide to stop stretching my sleeping bag to it’s lower limit and go buy a new one down the river in Portland. You’d think I’d have done this after waking up two nights in a row with the bag covered in ice in Bryce Canyon, but I made it almost another whole year, cold damn near every time I slept outside except for camping with my ex at Strouds Run in Ohio and AJ on the Sheltowee Trace in Kentucky. 

I drive into Portland and am reminded by the city streets that I’m more wired for Montana solitude than anything else. Almost immediately I’m anxious from the buildings and traffic around me; I think I’m cursed to be forever parochial. I get vertigo in skyscrapers and the elevators required to get around in them – how do they make them move so fast? As a child I was amazed by the one five-story building in Canton, Ohio, a trip from Uhrichsville that to me seemed to take years. It convinced me I wanted to be an architect. 

Back now in the Gorge, I’m looking up at Multnomah Falls and feeling the spray come off it like the sea onto a rocky beach, like that scene from Titanic I only know from memes and jokes, having never seen the actual movie. Here in Oregon, without Montana’s ice, there’s shattered window glass in every trailhead parking lot and dogs wearing backpacks sitting pretty for Instagram photos. I’m still sleeping at the same trailhead as the first night, loitering at others after my daily run on fragrant dirt amongst cedars and ferns, the charred remnants of the Eagle Creek Fire. One day, bored and waiting for night, I meander around slowly picking up all the litter to throw away. Tourists who stop watch me cautiously, eyebrows raised, while I stoop around in my stinky clothes to find cigarette butts on the wet, spring snowmelt concrete off the Mt Hood highway. I haven’t been so happy in I don’t know how long. 

After four days, the time has come to head south; in fact I woke up each day still wanting just simply to drive. By now my hair has become so greasy that I can hand comb it to an almost respectable side part. Almost. The sides are too long and shaggy, and with my glasses and beard I look like Allen Ginsberg dressed up trying to impress Don Draper. 

I take off across Oregon, Warm Springs, Madras, into Bend and a ponderosa desert where I’ll marvel under stars and trees tall beyond my boyhood imagination for a single night before pushing further south, past Crater Lake and finally into California, where the sun shifts closer to earth and warms my skin immensely. A planned camping spot in Six Rivers doesn’t feel quite right, so I push further to Redwoods and get one of the last spots right there on the beach, and for the first time in my life see the Pacific Ocean, which I wade into cold up around my ankles. I’d go further, but like my grandmother nobody has ever taught me how to swim. 

And lucky beyond imagination, this campsite has a shower where the water comes out boiling in a sputtering stream, naked except for my Crocs and without a care in the world. The surf brings a chill to the cliffs and Redwoods and I sleep for the first time in a long time without needing white noise from a TV show or movie. 

It can’t all be joy – I wake up to a deflated sleeping pad, a leak sprung somewhere in the night, my hip aching from how it sat on the joint where my rear seats fold down to make room for the world’s smallest studio apartment. My run after breakfast has none of the grandiose freedom of Oregon and the gorge with it’s endless cascades, instead I’m clomping around in mud, somehow under and overdressed for the weather and feeling something awful, somehow even worse and still somehow missing two exes at once. I eat and try to recenter myself and go look for the Roosevelt Elk park signs promise me are around. I don’t find any, and the sea spray and humidity keeps the clothes I hand-washed and hung up to dry damp and salty, if clean of the sweat and dirt they held before. Two days later, each with a magnificent shower though, and I’m driving south again on the winding road out of the park and onto the highway headed for the bay. 

The drive from Eureka down through Marin feels at once endless and short, then the longest bridge of my life across the Bay towards Palo Alto where I’m starstruck at the Golden Gate and San Francisco, anxiously darting back and forth between paying attention to the road and the traffic and to sights I never dreamed I’d see in person. Little did I know Kade lives in a dorm room, the Bay’s late-capitalism housing crisis dressed up for some of the US’s best paid graduate students who still can’t afford studio apartments. After a shower and trip to a dorm laundry room – something I thought I’d be done doing at the big age of twenty-four – we head to the basement and play ping pong while two other young men discuss a coding problem across a foosball table. It’s jarring and strange but we catch up after far too long. We walk to a ramen place in California’s now familiar cool dark where we’re crammed into a corner and I pay extra for us to each get chicken katsu. Another bit of hosting opulence, tonight I’m sleeping on Kade’s camping mattress near the foot of his dorm bed instead of my own now leaky one. 

In the morning while Kade is at the gym I run the Stanford Dish Loop with it’s many walkers all wearing some form of UV protection; I’m shirtless and enjoying the breeze. The red roofs of the campus from above a spitting image of views of CU Boulder from the Flatirons, but I don’t know that yet. Down below, when you’re in them, they carry a Brave New World psych-drug opulence, abundance next to the unhoused in RVs parked on every street they can without being ticketed. I treat Kade to lunch again and then I’m gone as soon as I’ve arrived, the sun all so warm from the reckless concrete highway traffic headed towards Monterey and Big Sur, final campsites before I stop paying six dollars a gallon for gas next to roadside stands offering avocados for a dollar and head back towards the snow of the Bitterroots. There’s a dream sometimes in frantic wandering and frenetic days, all to reconnect with friends. Somehow I’ve got this far-flung and deeply loved group to call my own scattered across the country. Most days I don’t think about it directly, but when I do, I’m reminded that I’m the luckiest guy in the world. 

I see fields of hemp from the road and stop at REI in Monterey for a new sleeping pad, where a Green Vest who looks like me in my REI days tells me to make sure to check out Gorda and Goldbug Beach, the budget of this trip exploding in front of me. Slowly I wind down the coast on Highway 1, every new bend demanding I stop to take everything in, a second or hours being too much time for the miles I have yet to drive and not enough to really enjoy it. The highway winds away from the coast, from beaches and into the forest where I find my campsite behind a ranger-run gate. 

I sit next to my fire and just listen for a while under the warm sun, park rangers and tourists wandering by, maybe wondering why I’m just sitting here, maybe not noticing me at all. But I take my time and I sit and feel the warmth of the fire and the sunlight through the trees, the babbling of Big Sur River and gobbling of the two jake turkeys that have been strutting around camp all morning. In my books Jack Kerouac is at Big Sur too, trying to dry out and failing like always and making an ass of himself the whole time. It’s a deeply human book, meaning a portrait of a deeply-flawed human, and all of his friends are trying and failing to save him from himself. I’m reminded of reading him for the first time at seventeen – of the adventure and music in the language and the utter confusion at his inability to see his own problems as he wrote them out on benzedrine. Maybe the whole point of reading Kerouac is what Thomas McGuane says – he teaches you that when you’re a kid that “you don’t necessarily have to take it in Dipstick, Ohio forever”. When I was in high school I wrote a novel draft where the main character was from “Nowhere, Ohio”, a place that he could never imagine escaping. The places he could escape were into his best friends Honda Civic, and down into his own mind with the help of whatever drugs he could find. I’ve spent a not insignificant portion of my life and student loan debt being educated in Chicago, feeling the whole while like one of Carl Sandburg’s farm boys – when I was younger Chicago was as far west as I could run away too, but now with more degrees and bravery I’ve seen both coasts and Rocky Mountain peaks in between, not once waking with a longing for that City of the Big Shoulders or Eastern Ohio. 

Jack Kerouac turns one-hundred on this trip, even though he’s been dead since the year my dad was born. In him, something I didn’t recognize when I found his work, is all my worst qualities turned up to eleven and written into a rhythm that mirrors the voice in my head when I can’t shut my goddamn brain off. Full of longing and a grand restless desire to run away into the mountains and never be seen again. A million think pieces are spawned from this birthday, which I read hungover on the couch of my Missoula apartment when my trip is over. Here I am, self-identified Chicano Feminist, nearly twenty-five, still enamored with problematic writers from my boyhood. But between his ghost and I there’s an unknown communion, dark-haired young men longing deeply at the corners of bars decades apart, sleeping sometimes wherever they can, always flinging themselves into self-improvement to explode in failure spectacularly like the so oft-discussed fireworks. We want so badly of all the same things – to be loved, to be known, to create in the ways we understand, to control our appetites for self-immolation, to belong in a country where we are always on the outskirts, outspoken, and often deeply alone. We, for the most part, react differently to the continued failure of those wants. Kerouac runs to substance and excess, I drive until my eyes can’t see straight and wake up under the shadow of new mountains in a place where only the deer will know my name. There’s the men we were supposed to be, and the men that we are. And the pain in that distance is the most American thing about the both of us. 

Are you tired of hearing about this yet? I’m saying he’s the friend you love but know you have to cut off and never see again. I don’t really have anything new or exciting to say, other than it’s all a mess of wants and imagination and reality and, just like him, I’m failing to get it down into words right, all a near miss of the idea I still carry of some essay towards unreality. 

My actual real reality now is that I sit in the forest on the tailgate of my Subaru and sob into my hands; I’m a clay pot with a million thumbprints in me that won’t be removed even when I’m fired. Kerouac’s is large and sloppy, along with so many others. Influence and legacy. I study a map of the park and through my tears promise myself to summit Mt. Manuel in the Los Padres National Forest tomorrow, a peak about five miles away from where I’m camped. Still like Kerouac, I’m seeking meaningless significance from ordinary signs. I’m one of a million Mexicans in California right now with a father named Manuel. 

My running vest loaded heavy with water and snacks, I gain the ridge climbing from the watershed into the desert, from the Redwoods and Cedars and ferns into a whole new ecosystem as the sun begins to remind me that warm weather comes with a cost. There’s a new kind of stinging and scraping and scratching desert plant with each footstep, small thirsty flowers adorned on their thorns. March is spring in California – who woulda thought? We still have two months of winter left in Montana. Either way, it’s no blame to the plants; they’re just doing what it is that they do – protecting the birds and lizards and coyotes from the stinky dirtbag clomping up their mountain. Two weeks unshaven, around the same time without a shower. Scrambling up loose rocks and sandy desert soil stirred up by my feet that sticks to the sweat on my calves, I stand on the peak and the breeze carries my mind from all it’s internal ramblings out to the sea. Rolling away from me, the fog and clouds and the grand calm blue beyond the forests and mountains. The places my feet have taken me – a momentary and yet utter freedom from the blackberry brambles of an Appalachian boyhood and all the baggage that comes from being born.  

I catch my breath and start running again, more scrapes and thorns along the ridgeline into the Ventana Wilderness, to my left the sea and fragrant pines, to my right the arid rolling peaks. The trail disappears into thickets and loose rocks, and later I’m descending back towards the coast and out of the wilderness area, sixteen miles and I hadn’t seen a single other person yet. Bleeding and dirty, sweaty and happy, I start bumping into day hikers on their way up the slope. The juxtaposition in these things feels insane – from one moment hyper-alone, feeling wild, on some kind of aesthetic journey, on some windswept mountain ridge to scrambling down into the polite world again, smiling day-hikers not a mile or so from the car. I can smell the sea and their sunscreen and I climb towards the beach on heavy feet, out of food and water. Turned around and marginally lost near Andrew Molera Park, I head back towards camp on the road, my feet landing on the fading white shoulder line of the left lane, feral smile and all; the traffic slows down as I approach without flinching. 

After all of this, a dunk in the shock-cold creek and a change of clothes, I’m sitting at the state park’s restaurant writing this in a shirt-pocket sized Rite-in-the-Rain notebook and trying to become human again through the power of a cold beer and greasy meal. The RV campers are surprised there’s no wifi, and I can feel how intensely different things are for me and them, an escape compared to a slow-moving lifestyle, the binary of rubber tramps. The waiter brings my burger, but forgot my beer; he seems surprised when I remind him and say please. But the beer, when he brings it, is golden and cold and wonderful, which reminds me that I should buy Wesley some beer before I leave here to remind him that I appreciate him and how he puts up with all my fits and starts and how I’m liable to take flight to new mountains at any time. The women at the table next to me are drunk and laughing about how the waiter is “fun” – “That smirk!”. A cascade of knee slapping giggles. Maybe that’s why he forgot my beer.

At the campsite to my right, a young couple are snickering and laughing cuddled together in a hammock and making little in-jokes I wonder if they know I can overhear. To my left, a father instructs his son on selecting a camp and they pitch a tent together. Their truck has Texas license plates; a long adventure from home for them here in Big Sur. I wonder if they’ve noticed me; all I’ve been doing since they arrived is reading and drinking tea here next to my little campfire. The melancholy of leaving is packed into the whole scene and tomorrow I’ll begin the long drive back to Montana, but with the sun burn and briar cuts and woodsy loneliness I’d come to the coast for in the first place. I set my alarm for four AM, knowing that I’ll make my coffee right there in the back with the seats folded down, without getting out of my sleeping bag. 

& 

On my first foray back into civilization after this trip, I immediately come back undone. I drive too far, too fast, on too little sleep, strung out on black coffee, no water, fast food. It feels like my brain is trying to vibrate out of my skull and the hair from my arms. I have a million things to do and all at once the oil light is on in my Subaru. And when, thank God, they have a dealership in Twin Falls, Idaho they have locked the doors ten minutes before close and even after I knock they are of no help; apparently the parts guy has already left. Twin Falls is like any other Idaho town; a sprawling suburb of cookie-cutter manifest destiny homes and churches without an actual city nearby to necessitate suburbia. I solve my fear of all this by locking myself in a hotel room to binge eat Panda Express before realizing that I forgot to breathe, I think somewhere during the start of the day on Highway 1, just north of the Big Sur campsite I started the day at. A whole lot of good undone in moments thanks to the interstate, a mind-altering stop for gas in Winnemucca, Nevada, hundreds of miles left between you and the bed you finally woke up missing. 

&

Back now in Montana, I’m once again chasing validation or the love of my life (who’s to say?) on dating apps and crammed into a table at bingo at the Thomas Meager bar, a Wednesday night tradition for my friends. I just bought a biography of the man, since I’ve drank so much in a bar that’s his namesake and figured I should learn what I can about him. I win a round, one-hundred and forty dollars or so, and at the screaming insistence of my friends I sheepishly go to collect the money; I was too drunk and not sure I’d even won. With the cash in hand, I buy the whole table a round of drinks and make everybody do a shot of bourbon. Wesley slips away from our table for a date he has planned, and I get the poor waitress who actually patiently listens to me slur my words to send them two White Claws and tell them the guy sending the drinks thinks they’re the most beautiful couple in the whole world – a prank I’ll come to regret when he shows up to all my first dates to return the favor for the next few months. When the check comes, I count out all twenties in my wallet, and, unable to do the math on the tip, just add on some more until it feels right. I mean, I might as well give them all that money back tonight; I’d have done it any way in the coming weeks.

It’s spring now, or so they say, a week back in Missoula and I’m dog-sitting in order to pick up extra money to pay my bar tabs. My bingo winnings barely lasted the night I won them. I’m rereading On The Road, hoping to learn about myself when I first read and loved this book, and, well, there’s nothing. No music to the prose, no melancholy ache to see and understand the world that I first felt all those lonely years ago in Uhrichsville, Ohio, back when I was convinced my friend Reilly could be Neal Cassidy reincarnate, mostly just because of how handsome they both are. I sit on the couch next to a snoring pug I have to help on and off the furniture and chew my thumbnail, wondering what all has happened to me since then. To be fair not quite enjoying On The Road at the grand old age of twenty-four might very well be a good sign. Half the damn book is just men on drugs convincing themselves they are having the most important conversation of all time – which, to be fair, I did a hell of a lot of as a teenager on Ohio dirt roads with Mitchell and Cody. I wonder if they’ve moved past all of this too, or if they’re even thinking about it at all. 

Maybe I shouldn’t be.