The eleventh morning arrived cold, or read as cold, and rswfire noted the discrepancy before he noted anything else. The thermostat said 68.8. His body said otherwise. He sat with that gap for a moment — the number and the sensation refusing to reconcile — and let it stand rather than resolving it, offering only the windows as a possible culprit, those flat cold panes doing nothing to hold the morning out.
Carl had made a video about the four things he hated most about RV life. rswfire said he wasn't much for lists, then named one anyway: cold mornings. From there the inventory unspooled without ceremony — the insulation he wished he'd done back at the house, the windows he still had to solve, the underside of the bathroom he could probably reach, the storage bays he probably could not. He said it the way a person says a thing they already know, walking the perimeter of an unfinished system out loud, marking what was done and what remained open. The rig worked. The gaps were named. He did not treat the gaps as failure.
Through the window there was Kevin, breaking camp. rswfire watched him do it and said so — spying on my neighbor — and then immediately drew the line around the watching, saying he wasn't trying to put the man on YouTube. He had gone over a few days earlier to ask about triple towing, because Kevin was doing it and rswfire kept turning over the idea of hanging something off the back of the Jeep for the extra space, though it seemed like a lot. He'd asked about propane too. Kevin hadn't had a good answer, and had been on his way to fishing, and rswfire suspected he'd annoyed him. The advice channel had returned little. The observation channel was returning more.
What he could see was efficiency. A charcoal cooker he'd never once watched Kevin use but which had come out full of ash when dumped. A cylinder with the unmistakable interior of something that held fire, purpose unknown — a smoker, maybe, the man being a fisherman. rswfire didn't resolve it. He held the object as an open question and kept watching, learning the mode the way it was actually available to him: by the sequence, not the explanation. Fifth wheel onto the truck. Boat onto the fifth wheel. The stairs folding up. That's the moment, he said, when the stairs went. The moment has come.
Around all of this was the populated field. Both neighboring sites taken. Kids everywhere the day before, a mad house of them, and rswfire granting them the right to it — let kids be kids, he said, and meant it — while still counting the hours until the sites emptied. He named his own preference plainly and without apology, then flagged it himself: I just want to be by myself. Oh, I'm so weird. He said both halves. Neither cancelled the other.
Kevin pulled out and rswfire registered immediately that Kevin had a neighbor too, which meant the vacancy wouldn't hold, which meant he would still have a neighbor. From that the boondocking question surfaced — the pull toward empty land, the drag of spending all day hunting for it, and then the honest counterweight: he loved the electricity. The desktop was running. You can't beat that. He wished his heater ran on electric instead of propane, garbled the sentence, corrected himself mid-air, and let the whole tradeoff sit unresolved on the table where he'd put it.
Then he said he'd just woken up, ended the transmission, and promised to report on the day later.