Cam rentsch

an essay I wrote when I moved back to Missoula after a few months in Denver // TW: suicidal ideation

On the phone Wesley tells me I should treat myself with more grace – I tell him that I feel like I need to be punished. That suffering is good – and that I’m good at it. Driving through the desert feels as good as anything else I could do right now, short of falling of the face of the earth. 

The sun is reflecting hot through my car’s windows even though the air is still cold with the high mountain chill. I head north off of I-70 through Rifle and into the White River Valley. Rifle, Colorado – what a name for a town where the police cars have Henry repeaters emblazoned on the side and street signs written in Spanish recommend that I consider a career in nursing. For this drive I’ve managed to fit everything I currently own into my Subaru – and by that I mean that I sold everything that couldn’t fit. After years of cross-country moves lugging a bed and desk and even more behind me, this time I’m headed to Missoula with the grand dream of sleeping on the bare wooden floor of Wesley and I’s new apartment. I still have a few things that I thought might not make the cut, but I managed to fit somehow – a bedside table and a pull up bar and a kettlebell, all things that I feel as though I need for a life, even if I no longer need a bed. Around me the hillsides are a mess of clumping desert sand and snowmelt mud. When I’m not talking to Wesley on the phone, I’m listening to Blood Meridian and trying to make sense of the life that I’ve been handed. I haven’t slept well for a long time and I’m soothing that discomfort by scratching at a pimple on my left cheekbone that isn’t quite ready to pop but keeps growing.

A stop for gas in Dinosaur, Colorado – a town where there are statues of exactly that scattered all about. There are old men yelling at each other at the post office across the street and I struggle to explain to my best friend why I feel the need to continue to make my life harder than it already is. My Subaru drinks thirstily at the gas station, gas that costs a dollar more per gallon than it did in Denver when I started my morning.

I’m on a new psych medication now. This is the first time in my life that psych medicine has done anything seemingly close to work for me. And I think the big discovery of this whole experience has been not that I am suddenly happy, but rather that I’m just finally able to take care of myself without great effort. And it is with some not insignificant amount of shame that I say that in this January of my life that I have never washed my face or flossed my teeth this consistently. And while Lamotrigine might not have fully prevented me from falling down still into those very dark places, at least I make it out of bed on those days now. But even if my breath is fresh things are far from okay. The years of abuse from my mother had convinced me that inherent human goodness was a quality that I alone lacked – and that, by God, I’d have to make up for it. And now with my continued struggles with relationships and friendships and connections, with just feeling like I belong in whatever place it is that I live, unemployed and buried in debt, it sometimes feels as if suicide is a rational option. Because while people might miss the things that I did for them, they won’t miss me. 

The loneliness has been the main thing driving all the moving I’ve done in my twenties, far from just different apartments in the same city, but thousands of miles all at once. I’ve driven 40,000 miles since I bought my car in 2021; if there’s one thing I can do, it’s move. But this move feels different, somehow more significant, and not just because I’m on the losing side of twenty-five. Selling so many of the things that I owned and had put off selling during my other moves, I’m confronted by that loneliness differently. There are things that I’m giving up that have become these totemic objects from my past. I’ve unfortunately gone beyond my station and often now interact only with people who assume I’m just like any other twenty-something Missoulian, that I must be white and from some Midwestern suburb with some job in the natural sciences or some past on a trail crew somewhere, some adventurous ski bum lifestyle, when instead I’m running from something, from a town where none of the teachers would care when the other kids called me a wetback, where my mom threw pots and pans at my head because one of her boyfriends decided that maybe he shouldn’t actually leave his wife. All this conspired to teach me that there is not a place in the world that existed where any kind of human quality within me would be respected. It’s odd that back then I learned I was only safe when I was alone in my car, and now spending my adult years wanting to feel safe has left me feeling so alone I see visions of turning my car across the median into every oncoming eighteen-wheeler. 

The process of selling all my shit before this move wasn’t actually that difficult logistically. But I didn’t want to get rid of these things because they soothed my insecurities – look, I’d say. There’s a molcajete and Tajin in the kitchen, that means I’m a Mexican. There’s a pile of shoes by the door, those tell you I’m a trail runner. The toolbox tells you I was raised blue-collar, and the bow and arrow that I grew up in the woods hunting deer. A full bookshelf lets you know that I’m well-educated – even if it does’t tell you how hard I had to work for it. I can’t imagine in many ways not being this person, and it’s hard to think about not owning these things that could show you that I was this person, not tell you.

But they all didn’t fit in my car – and so now I have to trust that you’ll believe me when I say these things about me. 

I know this isn’t true, but the story I keep telling myself is that all these groups speaking around me with happy loud voices all have a shared history – they’re from these Rust Belt suburbs and they seem to have these nice family homes, happy little suburban dreams of new car smell and letterman’s jackets, despite the fact that I know that all people have their struggles. And while I know that my friends do care about me, I go to bars with them and anxiously turn cans of Rainer in my hands that I barely drink from and feel like nobody in the room really knows anything about me. I know the opposite is true – that I do have friends and that I do have people that care about me, but I hardly ever feel that way, and I spend time debating myself in my head about it instead of just living. 

Stuck in my head, I’m a boy again, stomping in a creek flipping rocks and searching for crawdads, but instead all I’m doing is talking to my therapist and finding some new grand shame by accident just trying to remember middle school. And even after years I still have yet to discover something that will make it seem like there’s less than years of more work ahead of me. But at the same time, I’m just overwhelmed with the thought of being known, despite how hard I try to seek that out. And I hope in some way that this year, without many of the things that I carried across the country on all of these other trips and these other moves, that I’ll be able to to go out and seek that kind of vulnerability, form these connections I’ve so long wanted, if only because it is now uncomfortable to lock myself in my bedroom and hide because I’m scared.

This is all bouncing around in my skull and I stop at Skinwalker Ranch for a run – a reason to pass through the Uintas, to satisfy some curiosity that I often feel afraid to bring up to the people around me for fear further feeling alone. How do Mormon cattle ranchers living on the Rez admit to having seen every kind of UFO dozens of times over? And what does it mean that they truly believe these things – not just in Joseph Smith, but in these Fortean Phenomena? What does it mean for them, for this community, for people in general? I don’t have any answers, but I’m curious, so I drive down a red dirt gravel road until I’m stopped by a large “No Trespassing” sign and an imposing gate. At the other houses along the road, shiny-haired Ute children totter off a school bus and up to typical country front doors. Nobody has ever mentioned them on the paranormal podcasts. This is far from the remote grazing land you probably imagined – you can see all the neighbors houses here. Have they seen the glowing lights, the bulletproof ghost wolves, have their cattle been mutilated? What does this all mean for them? 

I run with some slight fear tingling in my body, with my hair standing up just a bit – but really the only thing I’ve got to worry about is the pit-mix ranch dog eyeing me up. There’s no alien grays or Men in Black telling me that nothing behind this gate is worth learning about. Merely the red dirt, the rocks, the dust, the dry air, what I’ve come to expect from the Utah desert. I don’t know what I wanted by stopping here on this trip, but I know I definitely didn’t get it. As I climb back into my car, I feel as though I was cursed to be the only man like me who has ever existed.

Sweaty, I return to the highway and pass though marvelous high-mountain snowfields near the Strawberry Reservoir, bright city lights through Park City after the Heber Valley and down into the towering interchanges of Salt Lake City, the low-hung smog and acrid sulfur smell of the drying lake and commuter traffic, my car no different from all the others. I’m a little nervous about the prospect of leaving this car parked at a hotel overnight, but I’m trusting my luck to the people of the Wasatch and just my general good luck, because I feel as though I’m due for some.

After anxious night of sleep in a Best Western, I wake up feeling sick to my stomach from worry and the continental breakfast smell from the lobby alone makes me gag. I start driving on I-15, a well-worn groove north from the Wasatch to the scrubland plains of southern Idaho. Shooting towards Butte past Dubois and Monida, small towns with history I feel is just as remote as my own. And then west, finally, back to Missoula, to a place where I’m hoping I’ll get to finally feel like is home. To a place where I’m hoping I’ll get to feel like I belong there as naturally as I feel like everyone else does.