The recording had already failed once. rswfire began the second half by naming it plainly — the thing just stopped, probably the SD card, a terabyte card, a good one, though something he'd read while Googling suggested that might be exactly the problem. He told the camera the post would come in two parts. Then he moved on. The GoPro was new terrain, one more piece of equipment being evaluated in the same way as everything else in front of him: does it do the job, and if not, what do I need to find out.
What was in front of him was paper. Several sheets of handwritten notes, accumulated over time from YouTube videos and scattered thoughts, held in his hands and worked through page by page, turning them over when a side ran out. There was no index, no order to defend. He read what was there, in the sequence he had written it, and let the list reveal its own shape as he went. A place to store important documents — not in the RV, he decided aloud, but a bag kept on his body, carried to the laundry, carried into the Jeep, carried wherever he went. Then, a beat later: maybe digitize them. Scan them all ahead of time. The decision refining itself in real time, on camera, without ceremony.
The list moved through the systems his life would run on once the address dissolved. A new budget, because life on the road is a different arithmetic. Services to cancel — a whole bunch of stuff he said none of us should really even have. Dash cams for the Jeep and the RV. A towing unit. Wheel bearings, which his father would help him with, because he didn't know how, and there was a grease gun involved that he learned about from that same conversation. Tire age — five years — noted as a hazard he hadn't previously known to track. Power needs of everything, and then the next line beneath it: discover power limitations, make a plan about that. He described the moment the battery problem occurred to him, thinking through the tire pressure monitoring system and realizing there would need to be a separate list, batteries alone, kept stocked always.
The cats appeared where any other item might have — collars with name plates, because they would be on the road and would need to get used to them; carriers, already bought; vet records, carried with him; a tent for them, already acquired. First-order infrastructure, enumerated in the same register as fuses and water regulators, with no shift in tone to mark the difference.
And throughout, the question marks. rswfire read them aloud rather than skipping them. Brake controller, question mark — he didn't remember what that was about. Backup generator, question mark — and then reasoning it through on camera, out loud: he was getting solar, so wasn't that the backup. Eternal Bond tape, question mark, no memory of why. Extra motor oil, question mark. Nada.com, which he thought might be the inspection people, though he wasn't sure. Twice he hit his own handwriting and couldn't read it — multimeter, amp, amp, something tester; RV something protector — and said so directly, that's crazy man, what does that say. Spare tire: I don't even know if it has one. I just don't know. Nothing smoothed over, nothing quietly dropped. The gaps stayed on the list as gaps.
Then the other side of the page opened into land. Dispersed camping, all the categories he had learned so far — BLM, wildlife refuge, national parks, Army Corps of Engineers, fish and wildlife, utility districts. Motor vehicle use maps, which he had recently learned about. Ranger stations. Internet from Nomad and from Starlink, already acquired. Geocaching, which he'd always found fascinating and intended to do. Rubicon Trail, El Dorado County — a place he'd seen somewhere and wanted to check out, prompting the note to himself that he needed a list of places he'd like to go see. The infrastructure list had become, without transition, an itinerary.
He closed by naming the document for what it was: him writing down what other people suggested, not super organized, probably not as detail-oriented as some people can be, it's just not me, but I'm working on it. Him getting ready for a long-term, full-time RV adventure with his cats. Glad people were following along. And then back to the equipment — he thought he liked the GoPro, really thought he did, but the recording stopping was an issue, and he was going to have to look into why that happens.