Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Kevin M. Kearney writes about How To Keep Time from Thirty West.
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I don’t remember why I started running in the Pine Barrens. Yes, I was sick of the few trails in the city and, yes, I needed something to quell the unending anxiety that came with being alive in the summer of 2020, but there were other more convenient trails, ones that weren’t out-of-state, I never even considered. Looking back now, I think I mostly just needed to kill time. I was home alone, off from work, and dreading the headlines on my phone. Driving two hours to run through the brutal July humidity seemed like a perfectly reasonable distraction.
If you’re not from New Jersey, you’re probably not familiar with the Pines. That’s a shame. Even though they’re under an hour from Philadelphia, the Shore, and New York, they feel like a different world. They’re a stunning, mystifying, ecological oddity, with over a million acres of pitch pine and soft white sugar sand, located in the middle of a state most people assume is one big strip mall. In his landmark book about the Pines, John McPhee called them “as incongruous as they are beautiful.”
The Pines have a long, storied history as the home of the Leni Lenape people, early American settlers, and colonial industry. They also have an elaborate mythology, which includes the Jersey Devil, Captain Kidd, and the Atco Ghost. In high school, my bored friends and I would drive through the Pines on weekends after reading about it in Weird NJ, turning down random sand roads and exploring abandoned mental asylums. The Pines were haunting and foreign and mesmerizing. They scared the shit out of us. We couldn’t get enough.
Before I started running in the Pines, calling myself a “runner” was somewhat inaccurate: I was primarily concerned with racing. I didn’t jog. I rolled my eyes when people walked marathons. I signed up for “Fun Runs” but wasn’t concerned with having “fun.” There was a gun and a finish line. I didn’t care if my closest competition was a 16 year old; I was there to win.
In college, my teammates and I kept logs of our mileage and followed our coach’s training plan with religious devotion. We defined ourselves by our times. That was what we loved most about our sport. Normal people cared about football or basketball and Canadians cared about hockey, but the success in those games was all relative. My teammates and I had objectivity. When we ran a mile on a track, we knew where we stood against every other runner in the world.
I kept racing long after my college teammates had moved on to cycling and golf and fatherhood. And I even managed to post some decent times for my age, objectively speaking. But as the pandemic continued, races were cancelled for the foreseeable future. I kept running, even though there was no clear goal. I didn’t know what else to do.
There was no system for selecting where I was headed on those excursionsーI just drove to a trailhead in the Pines and started running. The mile markers were inconsistent, so I just followed the colored blazes on the trees and hoped they eventually looped around. Sometimes they did, but often not for 10 miles or more, so I’d round each thicket hoping to see a familiar sight. Sometimes they didn’t, so I’d eventually double back and hope the dehydration didn’t incapacitate me. I was often disoriented and always without a shirt, a phone, a water bottle, or my ID. I suppose this was reckless. It was also exhilarating.
Around the same time, I finally decided to give up on the first manuscript I’d ever completed. I spent a year writing it, six months pestering friends to read it, another six months rewriting it, and then a year querying it. No one cared. And they shouldn’t have. It was over-plotted and overwrought. It was a worldview posing as a story. It was the kind of book I would’ve hated if I’d found it in a library, yet I’d seen it through the whole process because, well, this was what you did.
In the afternoons, after I’d driven back from my long runs in the Pines, I read books by Henry Charlton Beck and M.R. Harrington, which detailed the land’s history and evolution. I was fascinated, in particular, by the stories that’d been passed down through the centuries—bizarre, haunting tales about natural healers and wizards and chance encounters with the Devil.
On one of those afternoons, I started writing a different story, one that was nothing like the older manuscript. I wasn’t concerned with plot or structure or any other formal elements. I wasn’t concerned with much of anything. I just wanted to write about the Pine Barrens.
Soon enough, some characters began to emerge. Eventually, they seemed to encounter some problems. I was writing in fragments, embracing the disorganized mess and ignoring my natural impulse to find a destination. I was having an absolute blast.
When I went out for those runs in the Pines, I took in deep breaths of the still air. I allowed myself to be entranced by the subtle sound of my trainers pushing down on the damp moss. I marveled at the fact that actual wilderness, land and life that had avoided the dirty shadow of the Northeast, was so accessible to someone like me. I wondered why I’d ever decided to live in a city.
I couldn’t remember how I’d grown obsessed with racing. I couldn’t remember why I’d turned something natural and beautiful into something numerical. When I abandoned my expectations, when I stopped quantifying the experience or my supposed progress, I remembered why I had fallen in love decades earlier. I remembered what it was like to briefly exist outside of myself. I remembered how much fun it is to get lost.
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Kevin M. Kearney is a writer from Philadelphia whose work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. How to Keep Time is his first novel. More at kevinmkearney.com.