Two in the morning, day twelve. rswfire had been lying awake in the camper long enough to decide that sleep was not going to arrive on its own terms, so he got up. Not to wait it out, not to force it — to work. The interior of the camper is still new to him, a space acquired recently enough that its dimensions have not yet become automatic. He sat down with the camera rolling and began the night's actual task, which was to figure out where he was going.
He had not known. He says so plainly at the start — didn't really know where I wanted to go, how I wanted to start, none of that. The route did not exist yet. He had put the question to ChatGPT and the machine had returned nothing that landed. That input did not produce the destination; he states he ended up finding it on his own. Great Basin National Park, Nevada. Not recommended to him, not surfaced by a system. Recognized.
What he wants there is the sky. He describes it directly: to look up at the universe and see what looks back at me. He marks the frame around that statement in the same breath — that's coming from someone who's agnostic — and then marks that this was not always the case, and then sets that aside. A story for another day. The belief history is named and left where it stands, unopened, not because it is unavailable but because tonight is about the route. On the destination itself he offers only that it feels right. He notes that stargazing is not something he has done much of, that he has looked up and been inspired, but that this place is apparently the place for it. He is considering acquiring a telescope before he goes.
The distance is not an obstacle in his framing of it — it is the method. He is still getting used to the camper, and he expects the drive itself, probably a couple of weeks, to do that work. He has a precedent for this: he drove his most recent Jeep to Phoenix and back, and by the time he reached Phoenix he was in love with it and knew it like the back of his hand. The distances, he notes, are similar. The camper will be learned the way the Jeep was learned — through mileage, in motion, not through study beforehand.
By the time he finishes, the shape of it is there. He leaves Thursday. A week first on a beach in Tennessee, at a place he thinks is called Salt Lick Creek, and from there he keeps moving west toward the park. The route document is still in progress — I'm working on the route now — the middle stretch not yet drawn. He ends where he began, awake at two in the morning in a vehicle he is still learning, with an unmapped destination chosen and a departure date fixed: I'm excited.