The driveway climbs the whole way, road to house, and it does not stop climbing anywhere along its length. That was the constraint rswfire started from on March 9th, phone in hand, walking the length of a trailer he had owned for a matter of days. He apologized to the camera for the phone — the GoPro was coming, he said, a better camera soon — but he was not waiting for better equipment before he started transmitting. He wanted the viewers to have his authentic experience. If you're new like me, he told them, you're going to go through this.
He walked them through what he had settled on. The slides were out. One of them had pushed back into a bush, and he named that before anyone else could: he knew it would happen, it was on purpose, he had left himself clearance, and somebody was probably going to tell him otherwise or criticize him. He said it plainly and kept walking. Further back and the slide wouldn't clear at all. This is the best I can do where I'm living, he said — the incline was not a problem to be solved but a fixed feature of the site, and the work was arranging a level plane on top of a surface that offered none.
Under the tires were the interlocking blocks he had chosen after trying the other kind and finding they didn't work for him. He needed another inch. Maybe more. He had ordered more of them and stated directly that they were not cheap and he was not happy about it, and then moved on: it is what it is. He panned the camera along the trailer, registered how close he had come to the house, corrected himself mid-sentence — wait, my slides are out, never mind — and narrated the correction rather than editing it out. I'm learning, he said. This is tough. This is a new experience.
Then he arrived at the geometry, which was the part the reference material did not cover. He was not level left to right. Leveling left to right meant more blocks on one side than the other, and more blocks meant a longer base on that side, and every YouTube video he had watched showed identical stacks on both sides. Nobody was doing what his driveway required. So he reasoned it out on camera: what matters is that the tire ends up centered on the stack, even if the base is longer — pull forward, reverse, one side makes contact before the other, and when the trailer reaches position both tires sit at the center of their own uneven stacks. He worked it aloud, tested it against the videos, found the gap, and closed it himself.
Toward the back he stopped at two components he could not name with confidence. Stabilizers, he thought. He had seen people putting bricks under them in the videos and he did not understand why. He said so without hedging — I'm just trying to understand it, I'm just going to keep researching it — and let the unanswered question stand in the recording as an unanswered question. Earlier that day, before the blocks went under the tires, he and his mother had been inside the unit and both had gotten motion sick, badly. He offered that as data and asked whether other people had that problem too.
He closed the way he had opened it, addressed outward. He hoped he didn't sound too negative. He stated he wasn't too stressed, that this was just a way new experience and he was doing his best. If anyone had advice, he'd love to hear it; otherwise he would keep researching and figure it out. He might camp out in it that night — he thought he probably would — though that meant bringing the cats over from the house, because the cats would not forgive being left. He was not level yet, front to back. He said so, said he'd talk to them later, and stopped recording.