Cam rentsch

My favorite painting in the world is at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. Don’t ask me how a Mexican national museum can be in Chicago without expecting a lecture in return – and I’ll expect you to take notes. The paining is called gente primitiva by Carlos Almaraz. It’s brushy with thick reds and blues and greens and pinks and in it figures peer around trees in a curious and inviting way. They’re looking, and they know you – at least that’s what I felt when first seeing it. The painting feels like solidified example of my belief that there is something more out there that will never be captured by a painting of an old white man from a period of time when Europeans thought piss was medicinal. 

Unfortunately, running is such a big part of my life that everything I try to write becomes a running story – but when I first saw gente primitiva, it did make me think of running. I’ve ran everywhere – high alpine, coastal rainforest, scrub brush desert, rolling shortgrass plains, everywhere that’s worth running – and this painting makes me think of those moments. I think that, when I’m running and things feel good, when my body feels light and my feet feel musical that the genre primitive are there, the ancestors, watching me. But I wonder too if they see me in the low moments that come with running – walking with my hands on my hips and kicking a rock down the trail in self-pity. Do they see the insecurity that in many ways I’m still worried other people do? That I don’t look like a runner or just don’t look like them, don’t have their same experiences, don’t sound the same, don’t have the same background, and that, because of these things, can never have the same depth of experience they think they are having? 

My sister, an art historian, says that “almaraz was a pioneer of the chicano art movement which was a lovely kind of mish mash of a lot of influences. there’s definitely pieces of modernism with the color palette and shapes but some pulls from impressionism with the brushwork // he produced a lot of great work but wasn’t active very long because he unfortunately passed from aids in his 40s”. 

My college degrees are in Anthropology, a supposed science in many ways devoted to the study of “primitive people” – and lots of it devoted to why you shouldn’t actually use that phrase. It’s been a while since I pretended to be an academic, but I’d be lying if I told you the idea wasn’t becoming more and more appealing to go back and spend time in a rickety chair and spill coffee on books that the library will admonish me about damaging. But don’t they know I’m playing an aesthetic game, here in my climbing pants and Blundstones, the granola chicano using his class mobility and privilege in a way he hopes will make the world a bit of a better place? 

I think as I’ve gotten older I’ve become more attracted to trail running for aesthetic reasons – because you can make it as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. You can carry only the things you need and yet still find all manner of products designed just for you; at races I’m often amazed by the amount of things people seem to be carrying. At the recommendation of my friend Jamie I spend too much money on a belt that slips up over your legs that holds, in a miraculous way, everything I think I need to go safely alone into the high country. A packed up wind jacket, water bottle and filter for drinking from creeks and springs, room for snacks, gloves, my cell phone, a GPS beacon. I can even attach a bear spray holster to it. The belt doesn’t bounce, it’s marketing promise fulfilled, and there have been times I have felt like I was naked and flying, wearing only this belt and split shorts and shoes, that I was nothing but an equal piece of the scenery and the never-ending moment that is the natural world.  

Thus attired I can go meet the mountains and climb through fragrant pine duff, hooting to warn the bears I’m on my way and stepping daintily between rocks, climbing higher until the gente primitiva emerge from the trees and watch, my breathing growing harder and heavier until I can’t run anymore and push forward, hunched like the campesino I am with my hands pushing down on my knees. The pines slowly fade to twisted scrub and the beginning of alpine grass, and I climb further into a field of quaking and creaking gray slate, my breath now all but ragged hot gasps into cooler and thinner air, away from the place the gente primitiva are watching and towards something greater where none but the alpine mammals live with curious eyes. 

These are the moments when I most want the gente primitiva to see me, when I’m out there seeking. In those moments they’re looking forward into the future, into a world so alien from their own with problems beyond their comprehension. But I think they see me, insecurities and all, because I’m searching for the same feeling they must have had in a world where the other side still laid much closer to our own.