The day had been long enough that the tiredness had settled into his voice before he began recording. rswfire sat on the bed inside the camper — his camper, his home now — with the wooded dark pressed up against the windows and the campground quiet around him. He had told people he would let them know when he arrived, and so he was recording, late, in the low-quality setting because cellular was all he had. The fixed internet setup was still packed. That was one of the projects still on the list.
The arrival itself had opened with terror. The second the rig came to rest, the cats went out the front window of the cab — a window he hadn't realized was down. Bailey and Oliver, who had ridden the whole way in their carriers with his mother, gone into unfamiliar woods in the space of a breath. He got them back. He said it twice on camera, the fear still live in him hours later: that was terrifying, that was stressful, that will never happen again. He named what the moment had shown him — that you find out what you value when something like that happens. By the time he was recording, Bailey was on the bed working herself into a field day across his lap, and Oliver had already claimed the cab area and settled. An hour in, they were fine. He was the one still carrying the charge.
The site was not good and he said so plainly. Short. No way to get level — super not level, level enough that he expected to roll off the bed. Placing the Jeep had been difficult and the solution he'd arrived at was, in his own assessment, not great. He had booked two weeks because two-week blocks were what he could find on the timeline he'd given himself, and he hadn't planned far enough ahead to have his pick. He would ask about moving. If they couldn't accommodate him, he didn't know yet what he'd do. He was surprised RVs parked here at all — there was a van on the street, and he registered that as the kind of detail he should have read differently. The research method needed work. That was the finding, filed as a finding.
The drive, by contrast, he graded well. He had done a great job driving. He had felt comfortable towing the Jeep, had not been afraid at any point along the way. The single real problem was visibility — the Jeep sits smaller than the camper and simply disappears behind it. The dash cam company had promised a cable long enough to reach the back window, but it was shipping from China and would take roughly a month. The rear camera, re-angled, would make a large difference on its own. He laid these out one after another as items on a list, each with a known fix and a known timeline. Pulling the slide in and out was inconvenient, but only because he wasn't organized yet, and organization was a project, not a fault. Once the little things were handled, he said, this would be easier than the version of it he'd been carrying in his head for the past month.
The one thing he could not convert into a parameter was the woman. She had been on them the second they arrived — talking to him, talking to his mother, talking to his father, telling him he should get on TikTok, before he had even pulled into his space, before he had said a word about the channel. Friendly, he allowed, twice. But it didn't bring him joy, and it wasn't the right time, and it felt intrusive. He would see her again in the morning and didn't know how that would go. People don't come out into the woods to make friends — that was his read, and he stated it as his read. He was clear that there were times he might welcome exactly that interaction. This had not been one of them.
And then, with the unlevel bed under him and the cats needing their water and food and the two weeks stretching ahead in a spot he already wanted out of, he made the declaration anyway: my life, my new life starts right now, with my cats. Ninety percent happy. A few details to work out. He was in a great spot — trails everywhere, Mammoth Cave close by, more to do than he could get to. He knew already that he was going to love this. And he couldn't imagine two weeks tilted like this, and said so in the same breath, and left it there.
That was something he would think about tomorrow.