It’s surprisingly difficult to write about running. Of all the books I’ve devoured on the subject, only a handful stick out as being truly great works in and of themselves – Askwith’s Feet in the Clouds, McDougall’s Born to Run, and Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running are the three that spring to mind.
I think this has something to do with the fact that running is hard to describe. It’s like trying to explain a smell or a colour to someone who’s never smelt or seen it. It’s so far removed from language that often the best way to write about running is to write something else entirely, whether that’s a historical investigation (Askwith), an account of human evolution (McDougall), or a personal memoir (Murakami).
What Rickey Gates has done so wonderfully in Cross Country is take what is ostensibly an account of a very long run across the USA (3700 miles from Folly Beach to San Francisco), and turn it into a rich, profound, and often very funny glimpse into the beating heart of the country at a particular moment in history.
Each chapter is broken into two halves – the first a written account of a section of Gates’ run, the second a series of large portraits with captions offering a brief account of an interaction on the road. Gates’ knack for crystal clear prose and a zen-like ability to describe things as they are brings these photos to life, and I found myself staring into the hypnotic eyes of stranger after stranger, hearing their voices, and feeling almost tearfully overwhelmed by the reality of their humanity.
Though Gates’ run took place back in 2017 (in the wake of Trump’s election) reading it in the midst of a global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement’s eruption felt timely. As a liberal who has felt increasingly disenfranchised by the left’s ceaseless attempt to swallow itself, reading Cross Country was, in many ways, cathartic, as Gates consistently sought out the humanity in those he met, irrespective of their politics. Indeed, one of his most frustrating encounters was not with a MAGA cap-wearing Texan but a brittle Californian boomer unwilling to look away from her phone as she spoke to him.
Gates’ route of choice compounds this subtext – he deliberately ran through the heart of the South, crossing North Carolina, Tennessee, the Ozarks, and Arkansas. The people he met were not gun-toting rednecks or toothless cowboys. Or at least, they weren’t just that. Gates’ accounts of his interactions, whilst brief, offer glimmering insight into the historical and social context that his subjects find themselves enmeshed in, without ever losing sight of their individuality, informed as they were by his insistence upon talking openly, honestly, and without fear or prejudice to anyone he encountered.
I spent five months travelling around America with a musical production in 2017/18, and I more or less fell in love with the country. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, this trail running nerd felt particularly enthusiastic about Gates’ home state of Colorado, where I spent one action-packed day in the shadow of Pikes Peak.) Liberal Americans I’ve spoken to find this hard to believe, and I understand why – America is not a paradise, and at this point in history it feels like the country is approaching a cross roads.
Reading Cross Country, though, gave me a sense that the ever-widening gulf between America’s disparate ‘bubbles’ – and similar bubbles around the world – is, in fact, an illusion; a product, perhaps, of the technological revolutions which have occurred over the past few decades, encouraging us to remain more and more isolated from our communities. By adopting a position of openness and vulnerability, Gates embodies a principle of faith – faith in the goodness of strangers. Time after time, he is proved right.