chapter-eight-nineteen-days.md
# Chapter Eight: Nineteen Days
**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](https://rswfire.com/library/signal/01M2STVZY0D588KDSBF6ZEKRHR) (167-180) - [Chapter Seven: The Picnic Table](https://rswfire.com/library/signal/01M2STXTH09YSYCYZ87D3JZ6WJ) (181-199) - Chapter Eight: Nineteen Days (200-210) ← this document - [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)
**200.** Between the picnic table and the dismissal he did the job and kept asking about the next one. On March 6 he put himself forward to gain experience as a relief host at Umpqua, and was happy to keep cleaning yurts if that was what they needed. On March 14 he cleared his departure for the 31st, a day he was scheduled to work, and was told it was fine.
**201.** Four days after the picnic table, in a Saturday night update from inside the RV, he named the shift off the welcome center desk and onto yurts and campsites. He reached for the word for what it was, discarded fun, and landed on rewarding (3:36). The 28th had been his last day at the welcome center. He worked a double and stayed an hour past it for a woman from Canada until she had a campsite (3:58), and she found him the next day to thank him (4:36).
**202.** On March 15, his day off, he walked the service road in the rain out to the vantage over the 101 bridge, taking the ledger with him (1:03). The slide-out on the RV had been broken for eight months (4:28), and the wind off the dunes came at the angle that found the crack at the top of it (4:42). He had asked the rangers for a ladder and been refused, so he parked the Jeep as close as it would go, climbed the tire, climbed the hood, and sealed what he could reach (5:19). It did not hold (5:26). He did it again (4:14).
**203.** On March 20 he learned the other volunteers had been talking among themselves about his broken slide and his bed platform, working out between them how to fix it for him (0:01). It amused him. They were doing what a campground does, and they had it the wrong way round. He filmed the alcove he sleeps in, the one he had crossed the country in, and called it what he has always called it, a Navy barracks, and himself a man in a submarine (1:07). The slide stays retracted on purpose (1:21). Extended, it throws the weight to one side and the tires start losing pressure (1:43); retracted, the void above it is the storage he had been short of. Adaptation, as he uses the word, is removing what is inefficient and continuing to move, not chasing comfort (4:21). This is not a problem to solve (5:14).
**204.** On March 16 the tent structure on his golf cart would not zip shut on the driver’s side, and he reported it. On March 17 he put two other volunteers at Honeyman forward for a position at another park, unasked, because they are awesome people and very hard working. On March 18, while the rangers were all away at meetings, a man walked into his work area, claimed the park service, and began photographing yurts that were still dirty because he was in the middle of cleaning them. No name, no uniform, no visible identification. Then the questions: how I like the park, how I’m being treated here . He wrote it up to the supervisor the same afternoon, flagged the timing, and asked whether it was an official visit. Her answer, fifty-six minutes later, was that I.T. staff were getting updated photos of sites all over the state, that it was not unusual for people to want to look inside a yurt, and that she could follow up with I.T. to see if anyone had been out that day. I think you handled it wonderfully, she wrote.
**205.** The same evening he made a video about the man, and he was amused. It had happened again, he announced: a man had fled from him and failed spectacularly, because he knows he is not the problem (0:01). This was the one who had walked into his work area out of nowhere, no name and no badge, to ask how he was being treated, and he had found him cute and tall and sexy, with an assertive streak he actually liked, since few men are assertive with him (0:12). The man kept asking his questions; he smirked and answered none of them, so the man came at it another way, and another, never leaving room for the answer he was never going to get (0:31), until he blew up and left (0:53). A shame, because the man was quite keen, and he would have done some things to that man (2:02). What ruins these moments, he said, is the posturing: the connection is right there if a man will just be real instead of running a script (1:10). He does not present as someone who will play the power games, and that is not his problem, it is theirs (1:49). He had lost nothing. Maybe some shadow sex (3:38).
**206.** The one thing he kept back was himself. The man had made a point of being in I.T., talking down to a little volunteer at a park cleaning the yurts. He had been programming since the sixth grade and could have ended the flex in a sentence. He kept it, and let the misread stand, and watched the man fail a test the man never knew he was taking. *You’re very small, like you really are. Somebody who is truly confident, who has earned the right to have the attitude this man had, wouldn’t have that attitude. I don’t have that attitude.* (3:07)
**207.** Their file covers these same days differently. On March 21 it records another host reporting that he was expressing dissatisfaction with the rangers and saying concerning things about the end of the world, and a ranger reporting that he had found a journal and said the rangers were unhelpful. No one put either claim to him. The journal belonged to a homeless veteran and had been left in a yurt. He had logged it at lost-and-found, written the incident report, and put a note in the box underlining please try, because he had been homeless himself and knew what a journal weighs.
**208.** On March 23, a week before he was due to leave anyway, he wrote to settle what to do with the keys, the binder and the golf cart at the end of his last shift. They dismissed him the next day, for cause they never wrote down.
**209.** At 8:45 on the morning of March 24 the Tugman lead wrote about his next assignment: cancellations had moved his April placement to Tugman, into site A42, and did he want September moved too. He was sitting at A42 at that moment, visiting his friend John, and answered that he was there to make her life easier. An hour later: let’s keep September the same too. Tugman feels like home. See you next week. A year of scheduled assignments across the park system, six days from a clean completion.
**210.** The park manager called that afternoon, while he was doing his job, to set up a third meeting (13:59). The second meeting was the picnic table, and the picnic table was on video. Their file says he kept talking over the park manager and the conversation was no longer productive. His own account is on the record: *Wow. This man never stops. I’ve got a video of you abusing me. There’s no way that you could be doing this right now* (14:25). As the manager turned a homeless veteran’s journal that he had turned in into the pretext and would not stop, he named what he was doing, *you’re a bully*, and did not raise his voice to say it. The manager dismissed him then and there, on the phone. One hour later he was at the RV, taking the keys, the binder and the cart. The removal was built to be verbal and private. He set a camera at the site, kept it running through the handover, announced that he was recording, and asked twice what paperwork existed. There was none: just the conversation we had. Occupying the site came with host duties, the manager told him, and since the duties had ceased the expectation was that he vacate. Asked for the deadline, the manager gave him twenty-four hours to leave the site he lived on, a reasonable amount of time, the manager said. He thanked him and told him to have a good day (16:40).