Cam rentsch

I’m running in northwest Montana’s Six Mile Valley and I’m thinking a little bit too hard. I’ve been reading the sensory delight that is Michelle McNamara’s Crying in H Mart and the thundering tome that is Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. These two books are an awkward combination and I’m taking all of this far too seriously because these books are too serious. 

I’m on a dirt road in a pitter patter of mud and in front of me a bachelorette group of whitetail does flit about and watch me with tails flicking a taunting warning. Under my breath, I chant to myself: eight miles, eight strides – as though it’s a monk’s tome. In Six Mile there are rolling hills and pine duff forests and trodden funky pastures and everything smells of diesel and manure and set back from the road the ranch gates are adorned with sun-bleached antlers. Horses shimmy and cows chew their cud dumbly as I run past while the house dogs bark and the livestock guardian dogs eye me warily with some vague notion of a threat. After the first mile or so, one that is mostly uphill, I generate a simian heat inside my coat and my bare legs turn blush red from pushing heat out against the cold December air. Outside of my head floats a cloud of stochastic and unremarkable thoughts; I daydream of carrying a heavy .308 rifle and leading a leftist insurgency in these selfsame hills and forests. This daydream is too serious and for that it is all the more boyish and fleeting and impossible. 

These books bring one memory to mind – when earlier this year I was camping in the Seeley-Swan Valley with a hotshot firefighter I was dating at the time. When she went to start our campfire, touching a match to the gasoline soaked teepee of logs, the resulting whoosh of flame lit her eyes up with a kind of primordial and feminine delight that I doubt I’ll ever truly understand. On my run now I stomp in the dirt road’s tractor ruts and splash the mud up my calves; the cows wait for no weather or holiday and the staggering smell of rural life reminds me that the ancestors are close at hand. 

McNamara’s book is filled with a richness of description and detail and about the hidden wonders of food and life and living and dying and being and McCarthy’s is scriptural historiography where the primate man attempts to bend God to the firmament through violence and references to primordial Christianity and Greek myth. Of course, this in turn ends up being mostly about men and their horses who navigate under austere skies through the desolate and yet wondrous Southwest. There are no Mexicans like me in H-Mart, but there is a certain John McGill who dies in the group of subhuman men that history and the ephebophile McCarthy call the Glanton gang. 

One thing both of these books – and running – reckon with is an ethereal understanding that the greater world lies truly beyond science, beyond reason, beyond wonder and knowing. Through the cold camp mornings without a fire and special care of painting cabbage leaves for kimchi, humans practice drawing the warp as close to the earth as we can bring it. Reckoning with the unnatural to the natural, the historical to the mythological. This is what I want out of running – I want to be able to exceed sinew and bone and cold winter reality and draw through a transcendence of my physical being a kind of knowing and a kind of experience where I can reach out and grab gnosis itself in a clenched fist and look it right in the eyes.

Like I said, these books are too serious – so I’m taking this all to seriously. It’s just a jog on dirt roads circling some ranches and old ranger cabins. But isn’t that sometimes the point?