The camp at Siltcoos was still new to him — first stay, first stretch of ground under the rig — and the solar panels were already out, angled in the open air where anyone walking past could see them. Inside, the RV was mid-conversion: baskets staged and waiting for the span above the slide, belongings still distributed across every available surface, the shower nearly clear of the things stacked in front of it. rswfire was working through the interior one subsystem at a time, and he was a little stoned, which he named plainly to the camera before naming anything else.
He had gone over to say hello to Kevin. That was the part he flagged as unusual — not the cannabis, not the disorder in the rig, but the fact that he had walked across to a neighboring site and initiated. He had seen Kevin out there earlier and found something in it worth crossing distance for; he told Kevin so directly, said he hoped he'd be him in ten years. They talked the way people talk when they don't know each other yet. Kevin told him about fishing. Then Kevin mentioned the solar panels.
rswfire said he was new here, that he was planning to go boondocking out west, and Kevin said this is a good place to practice. That landed. Kevin had read the setup correctly from the outside — the panels, the newness, the stated destination — and returned it as a single accurate sentence about what rswfire was already doing. Dude, that's exactly what I'm doing right now. The practice frame was legible to a stranger without explanation.
He also backed away mid-conversation. He noted this about himself with the same evenness he'd used for everything else: he was the one who went over there, and he was the one who left before the exchange had finished. He recorded it, didn't defend it, and came back to the rig and got back to work.
The second thing was the baskets. He held them up to the camera — these are the ones that go up above the slide, all the way across — and the shower was nearly reachable, and he wanted to shower, and he could clear the last of it easily whenever he chose to. There was still stuff everywhere. He said so. But it was getting better, measurably, and the measure was the thing: not how it looked but how much of it was done. I love embracing this as a home. It's just an amazing feeling. It's a good day.
Then he shifted register — let me get serious for a moment — and stated the pharmacological piece with the boundaries drawn in advance. The cannabis was legal, bought in a store. He was using it for the withdrawal from Tramadol. He did not want it to be his whole future. It was scoped to a period he had to get through, and he said so in exactly those terms.
He left one thing open. He had smoked from his teenage years until twenty-seven, and when he stopped, the worst panic attacks of his life began. He called it a coincidence and then said he always wonders if the two are related — the question posed, turned over, and set down still unanswered, the way he leaves things that haven't earned a conclusion yet.