# Chapter Six: February

**UNREVISED.** Published in the testimony and flagged for iteration. It has not
had a full rewrite pass yet, and it will change.

**Author:** Robert Samuel White
**Source:** Testimony of Robert Samuel White, v1.8

## What this is

This is the Testimony of Robert Samuel White. He wrote it to correct an epistemic
violation. A year into his journey he volunteered for Oregon State Parks. He was
mistreated and dismissed without notice, because he documented it, and then
permanently expelled from the program for sharing it publicly. This is his
response.

## The document

- [Chapter One: The Shedding](https://rswfire.com/library/signal/01M2SEQT20Y05JTX2JWMSXN929) (1-29)
- [Chapter Two: The Crossing](https://rswfire.com/library/signal/01M2SFA400GB9JQTDEEH7PNSN0) (30-108)
- [Chapter Three: The Coast](https://rswfire.com/library/signal/01M2SRR7Z0A4W67H9MFDPAV2X3) (109-140)
- [Chapter Four: Why He Volunteered](https://rswfire.com/library/signal/01M2STRAR0JB3GGKVEP9T1BV67) (141-154)
- [Chapter Five: He Went and Looked at Honeyman First](https://rswfire.com/library/signal/01M2STT5B0XN5W0ESFJDSNEFXZ) (155-166)
- Chapter Six: February (167-180)  ← this document
- [Chapter Seven: The Picnic Table](https://rswfire.com/library/signal/01M2STXTH09YSYCYZ87D3JZ6WJ) (181-199)
- [Chapter Eight: Nineteen Days](https://rswfire.com/library/signal/01M2STZN40XH0AMJM4VCDKRVA5) (200-210)
- [Chapter Nine: The Week He Told It](https://rswfire.com/library/signal/01M2SV1FQ0M1RSKR8BV8QSF3WC) (211-226)
- [Chapter Ten: Displaced](https://rswfire.com/library/signal/01M2SV3AA01F84J25703XP9FKD) (227-234)
- [Chapter Eleven: The Director and Her Deputy](https://rswfire.com/library/signal/01M2SV8T30YCV4TQ0N73DTM9JQ) (235-257)
- [Chapter Twelve: Three Men with Guns](https://rswfire.com/library/signal/01M2SV6ZG0D8KZ0KHD29BDJ8W3) (258-266)
- [Addendum: On the End of the World](https://rswfire.com/library/signal/01M2SCEJA06F5CBG4JWX9Q56PR) (267-275)

**167.** He arrived on January 31. That day started at four in the morning in a dark RV with a flashlight, the tanks full of sanitizer since the day before, his own shower and restroom suspended while the system ran its cycle (1:16). He put fresh water in the black tank and deodorizer after it (1:34), and for the first time he trusted the water and the tanks (3:33), which he had not when he got the RV and the water smelled and the previous owner had never cleaned it and he did not know how. Thirty-one minutes of it is on camera (0:01). The walls of that home carry a map of the Oregon coast lighthouses, a map of the dunes, a state park guide his supervisor had given him, and a sticker map of the United States with the crossing he had already made on it, state by state (8:51, 10:02). That map will never be complete. It will be his version of complete (12:43). He walked out to the Eel Lake dock at Tugman in the rain one last time (15:41), the ducks that migrate in for winter still on the water (16:06), hitched the Jeep, and drove twenty-three miles north up the 101 (15:20). The drive in, then finding site 383 in H Loop at Honeyman: no cell service, partial sky for Starlink (24:54), a transmission problem in the Jeep he had been cautious with for a month (19:06). It is always about adaptation (30:46). You make the best of the situation, and he was not down about it (30:51). On his first full day he wrote: Thank you for today. I feel good about my time here.

**168.** That night he watched someone cut across the landscape with a flashlight to close the park gate, and offered to keep the gate through March as well, if he could keep his site, even on his days off. He was negotiating. The host site came with a role attached and the role changed every month, so keeping the site meant finding a reason for them to leave him in it. The gate was directly across from where he lived, and he wanted the site, and he wanted to take that walk off whoever had been making it. He put all of that in the email. He had done the same thing days earlier with the yurts, proposing the deep cleans at night on the grounds that a yurt booked for a deep clean cannot be rented anyway and his daylight was worth more, and that one was approved. The one piece of equipment he asked for was a box of rubber gloves. Medium. Black. The chain was rusty. He never got them.

**169.** He specified the colour. For a chain. In the dark. Alone. Where the only witness was a gate. Black, obviously. He was not going to be seen in a beige nitrile. He asked how to handle the edge cases: a guest arriving after ten, someone needing out before seven.

**170.** He also told them what the email volume was: this is part of my integration process, it is how I navigate new experiences, and as my rhythm establishes you will rarely field items from me. He was two weeks in. He communicates in writing, and has his whole life. It was never a problem for him. It is for some people, and he could already sense it was a problem with this institution.

**171.** The rest of that month went like this. On February 5 he told the Tugman lead he had landed Humbug Mountain for May and June, one of the parks where a ranger had first told him to apply. Excellent! Congrats! she wrote back.

**172.** Then, for three days, he tried to decide whether to go home. On one hand I want to establish a reliable relationship with you, he wrote to her about the September assignment, and on the other he needed to see Kentucky, probably for the last time. If this would hurt me in any way, I will stay. Cancelling well in advance doesn’t cause any problems, she answered. Then another park offered him October through December, and he wrote the sentence that decided it: I don’t think I’m allowed to go home. If I stay, I may never see my mom again. She tells me to stay. He stayed. Oregon State Parks dismissed him six weeks later.

**173.** On February 8 he documented the utility failures in H Loop, including the three guests who came to his site during a water shutoff, one of them aggressive, and asked what the protocol was. At three the next morning the power went out across the loop. He was a new volunteer, it was pitch black, and he had been told at orientation that he could text the supervisor. He waited until six anyway, because he did not want to be the volunteer who woke her. She answered by text, and the quick answer made him feel small. He did what he does. He wrote it down. He followed the text with an email asking who to contact in an emergency. The apology came the next day: it had not been her intent, she wrote, and she sent along the protocols and the outage map. This is exactly what I needed to better serve our guests, he wrote back.

**174.** The institution’s file turns those same weeks into a case. Its entries are its own characterisations, not findings, and they are answered one by one, with the emails themselves, at sunlight . It logs that he mentioned trouble sleeping, which he did, and the reason is in the same file: he had asked for the gate, and he had it, and the gate is a ten o’clock and a seven o’clock every day of the week. It logs that he worked with one of the rangers, that he sent a poem and asked what they thought of it, that he asked for a good review and for help finding assignments elsewhere on the coast, and that he mentioned a video showing a new piercing. Of the conversation in which he withdrew his job application it asserts that he began saying he believed the world was going to end.

**175.** What the file does not record is what those weeks did. On February 11, the day after the apology, the park manager came to the welcome center and spent an hour on his first-week mistakes. The next morning, at 8:22, he wrote to all three of them and asked for a reset: I will conform, I will recalibrate, I will be a model volunteer. A reset sounds good to me, came back ninety minutes later. Then they met at the day use area, and at 9:42 that night he applied for the seasonal ranger assistant job at the park, and said as much the same night in a note to the Tugman lead.

**176.** The reason he withdrew was the park supervisor. She was the hiring manager for the seasonal staff, and the application had gone directly to her. On February 15 she found him at the welcome center and asked what his plans for the summer were, saying nothing about the application, though she had it. He told her he hoped to stay, and, when she asked what he wanted, why he had come to volunteer at all: to become a park ranger, to give the second half of his life to something he believed in. She closed up, looked away, and said nothing for minutes while he kept answering the question she had asked. When nothing came back, he stopped talking and went inside. The next evening he withdrew the application. He gave no reason and said nothing to her.

**177.** He set out the chain himself three weeks afterward, addressed to the ranger he had trusted, in the email he titled Trust. He had confided in him about the situation with the supervisor, and the ranger escalated it instead of protecting him, and then disappeared. When he applied for the job the ranger distanced himself again. The moment he withdrew the application the ranger reappeared, and spent ninety minutes talking about himself. When he finally opened up about why he was there and what he had given up to be there, the ranger tried to manage how he saw it rather than listen, and then went distant a third time. And when he warned the ranger privately, so that the thing with the supervisor would not happen twice, he was promised training from another ranger, and no one had arranged it.

**178.** His traces from that month put him on the beach. On February 25 he walked out to the South Jetty and stood at the water, and the next morning he was on the sand at Siltcoos, ground that would be his to keep two months after they threw him off. That afternoon he walked Beverly Beach. What he was actually doing that month is on camera twice. On February 4 he walked out past the day use area to where a small dune opens onto a pocket of forest with more dunes past it and the ocean somewhere beyond, which he had not reached yet. Turmeric, maca root, whey, frozen chicken breast in the RV and a Ninja Foodi he meant to learn on: two months of work aimed at holding his core together so it could carry the life he was building (1:06). He felt very good. He loved his life. Part of him was sad he had not been living this way twenty years earlier, and part of him did not want it to end, and he wanted to be this age forever (1:58). Mid-stride he did the arithmetic out loud, and got it wrong once and corrected it: he was booking February, March and April at this park for the *following* year (2:27), so that he would be here when the dune season closed, and he would be forty-nine when he came back (2:17). He set the number down without flinching from it and kept walking.

**179.** On February 25, the day the institution’s file records an email about a video showing his new piercing, he drove ninety minutes inland to Eugene on his day off (1:21), to a studio newly opened under a piercer decades into the craft (1:28), and came back with an eyebrow and two helix piercings, the eyebrow already bruising and getting worse while he filmed. He had left the studio giggling, so happy he had finally done it. He had wanted more and would be back for the rest (0:46, 1:17). It was showing, and he was in a public-facing role, and that was fine. Worth it (0:31). The work itself was the good part: the welcome center slow that season and amazing anyway, guests almost always kind, several of them flirting with him in ways he only caught afterward, and the other volunteers bringing him their lives. He listened. He witnessed them (2:57). In the same recording the next twelve months are already drawn along the coastline: one more month here, a month of yurts, his birthday month back with his first supervisor, two months at the mountain, Kentucky and back over the summer to see his mother and his cat, September at Tugman, October through December at a beach welcome center ninety minutes north, the furthest north he had reached (4:29, 5:10).

**180.** What finally made him send it was the training. He had warned the ranger privately, and been promised that another ranger would train him; when he checked, that ranger knew nothing about it. He wrote Trust. at 6:57 the next morning. An hour and a half later he forwarded it to the supervisor himself, telling her he was sending it because he knew she would get a copy anyway, and adding: I am not escalating. I am informing.