The storm had come through and gone, and what it left behind was a park full of wet wood. rswfire crouched at the fire ring beside his rig, working the only tool the conditions had not soaked. It took a lot of breath. He said so out loud, into the camera, while the small flame he had coaxed out of saturated kindling held its shape long enough to be believed. It's the only way to light a fire, in his opinion — and then, unbroken, the extension: all you need is breath and you can do anything. He offered it as a philosophy while it was still literally true in his hands.
Beyond the ring, the park sat mostly empty. A vehicle idled somewhere further down with people in it, doing whatever people do in a parked car at night, and he registered them plainly — they were doing their thing, he was doing his. He said he loved the solitude, truly did. He mentioned he wished he'd gone to the store, that he'd like to cook something out here tonight, that there were hot dogs but probably not for the fire. He remembered, mid-tending, that he had forgotten to tell them about the outage: the whole park had lost power during the storm. Not for long. He thought that was cool.
The kindling was wet and it was only kindling. What he was actually after were the logs from a previous fire, the ones already half-spent, and getting those to catch was going to take a while. Rain was possible later. He didn't think it would come, and if it did, it would be much later. So he stayed with it — the small flame, the wet fuel, the residual logs, the stick he admitted was probably not the right stick.
Then, with the fire still unfinished, he said the thing he had not yet said on the channel. He hadn't explained why he'd done any of this. He named the boundary first: he doesn't consider himself part of the RV Life Community, though he acknowledged he sort of is, and he wanted it clear he wasn't dismissing anyone — it simply wasn't the goal. The goal was different. He did this for himself. He needed to reconnect with nature; he stated he had lost that connection. Three and a half years holed up in a house by himself. Two years in an apartment before that. Fifteen years, he said, isolated from everybody except his parents.
He said it took a lot to get him onto this channel, and that it was scary — the exposure, the vulnerability he has to keep handing over. He named the specific cost without softening it: doing it without teeth. He is self-conscious about it. This isn't how he wanted to see himself, and nobody would want to. But he knew that if he was going to do this, he had to, because he wasn't going to have decent teeth in time, and this is who he is now. He said it the way he was tending the fire — steadily, without stopping to make it prettier.
The Jeep sat in frame. He said he'd always loved Jeeps, that he loves this one, that this one started it and sparked it — everything sparking everything, leading to this, leading to that campfire over there, leading to the gradual quitting of the cigarettes he gestured toward. It'll happen, guys. I believe in myself. I really do. He nodded at the quote posted with him. Quite a life, he said, that he created for himself, almost spontaneously.
Then back down to the wood. He was trying to look at the camera and work the fire at the same time and struggling with it. This will burn, he said. He knew it would. He warned himself out loud that he was about to suffocate it if he wasn't careful — too much breath, the same breath, in the wrong measure. He pulled back. All it takes is breath to start a fire. That's a metaphor, he said. Right.