The igniter failed on the first try. rswfire stood at the grill in the wind with the lid up, thumbing the button on a piece of equipment he had just bought, and nothing happened. He looked closer and named what he saw — corroded, already, on something new. So he went for a match, and the wind took that too, and the little strike-panel on the side of the box turned out to be its own small failure. What he did next he narrated as he did it: he stopped negotiating with the design and just put the flame in there directly, by hand. Screw it. And then the burner caught, and the whole operation was live.
He had never grilled anything in his life. He said it plainly, twice, the way a person says a fact they find funny rather than shameful. The burgers were his mother's, out of the freezer, small. There were no buns. There were no proper utensils — he flagged that as something to work on, filed it, kept cooking. The smell came up off the grate and he said it out loud, that it smelled good, that he loved this. He was filming one-handed the entire time and made a point of it, asking the camera whether that counted for something.
The burgers dropped the grill temperature when they went on, and he watched that happen and adjusted his estimate of the time. One side came out a little burnt. He located the cause immediately — he had forgotten to turn the temperature down — and stated it without any accompanying penalty. I don't care. This is so fun. I'm going to do this all the time. Two little burgers, done. He shut the propane off and then paused on a genuine open question: how do you get the grease off before the pads, and do you leave the lid open while it powers down? He said he'd get the answer from the internet, and then made a joke about being old enough that saying so was itself the joke.
The verdict came later, after the food was gone. Not the best burgers of his life, but close. They would get better. What stayed was the day around them — outside, warm, peaceful, and the bugs, which he hated, and the insect repellent he refused to use because applying it constantly was worse than the bites. There was a 10x10 tent structure sitting at the site, purchased on the claim that one person could assemble it, unpacked far enough for him to look at it once, judge it, and leave it for later. Maybe it would work. He figured he'd try.
Then the reservation tag went up on a nearby site, and the field changed shape. There was already an RV in his view. Now there would be one closer. He named the arithmetic of it without complaint — this is what boondocking is, sometimes people just show up, and there is no way around that. He said twice that he would try to embrace it.
And then he stated the actual terms. He didn't like living in a house for the same reason: neighbors, proximity, other people that close. He wanted to be himself outside, and he said he understood that most people watching would wonder why he couldn't simply do that anyway. His answer was that he feels judged — every movement, everything he does — and he named where that comes from, a certain kind of upbringing, and left it there without excavating it. What he wanted was to be by himself. That, he said, was why he had loved hiking: deep enough into the woods that a whole day could pass without a person in it. If not for his cats, he'd be out there now.
He closed the day by rating it. A good day. Better than his previous life — he was specific about the comparison, and specific that the bar being cleared was the one he had walked away from. Could it get better? He hoped so. But the measurement had already been taken, and it held: still better than what he had going on before. Behind him the grill cooled with the lid up, an unresolved question, and the tent stayed in its box.