Nine o'clock on moving day, and the rain that started yesterday was still coming down with a week of itself forecast behind it. rswfire had until three to be off the site and a five o'clock check-in waiting at the other end — the latest window he had encountered so far, which gave the day more slack than it felt like it had. He had already been down to the showers and eaten breakfast, an hour gone, and Bailey met him at the return like the hour had been longer. The cat climbed into his lap, pressed against the phone, walked through the frame of the recording, and stayed. Some light in the camper was doing something strange and rswfire noted it, the way a person notes weather inside a room they are about to leave.
He named the anxiety directly and then named it decreasing. Two reasons, he said: it was the first move with Bailey, and the logistics had been unresolved until that morning. Tanks to dump on the way out. Fuel — not from just any gas station, it had to be a truck stop, and RV Trip Wizard had located one a little out of the way but not badly out of the way. Having the route settled had helped. He said so plainly, and then said the thing underneath it: that he does not prepare well enough, that he had known it would rain today, that he had learned at the last site to break camp the day before and had not done it this time either. He described himself as a spontaneous person and framed that as another area requiring adjustment rather than as a failing to sit inside.
The interior was mostly ready. Shelves, beds with nothing behind or around them, a corner cleared for Bailey's food and water so it stayed out of the traffic of the small space. One bag of cables to go outside, one to stay in. Socks and underwear. Shower things. A rug he had changed. The mattress would come off the bed for transit and Bailey's carrier would ride somewhere against it or under it — he wasn't certain which, and he named the shelves as the reason the carrier was non-negotiable. He called it a test. He said it twice, the way a person does when the outcome is genuinely open.
Outside, the tent was still standing in mud, and there was no version of the day in which it came down dry. He said there was no point putting it off given the forecast, that they would just go and deal with the weather, that he would get muddy the way he had last time, and that he hoped it did not become a trend. Under the sleeve of all this was a spider bite from a few nights back that had looked like nothing and then looked worse — Neosporin, Band-Aids, mentioned last and almost as an afterthought, filed under the category of things you deal with.
He took an accounting of the site he was leaving. Several trails hiked, the ones he wanted; the trails he skipped were the ones with rented horses on them. Dinner at the lodge restaurant. The marina he never got down to. Propane still not acquired after a month and a half, which limited what he could cook and left the convection oven working at partial capacity for want of a rack in the right size — one located on Amazon and now sitting at his parents' house, two and a half hours away, soon to be an hour and a half. Two weeks of tanks managed without a single overflow. He offered that one as a straightforward win.
The next site was booked for a month and a week with the option to extend, one to three months depending on whether he liked the place and whether a site existed there that could hold him longer. Then west. He stated it as obligation rather than desire — that he would never know whether this lifestyle was for him unless he got on the road and got better at it, that the more he was forced to move the more he would know. And he said the rest of it without softening: he could not say he loved this. There were things he loved and things he did not, breaking camp chief among the second group, and the open question was whether the things he did not love were things he could live alongside. Trade-offs, he said. There are trade-offs in everything, and the comparison was to a house and the life he had there.
He was building a taxonomy while he sat there with the cat on him. Three stages on the channel so far: the transition, then this one, then the pilgrimage to Nevada, which he identified as the pivotal thing. At some point, when settled enough to sit down for a very long time, he would go back and relabel every thumbnail to mark the divisions. But this middle stage had no name yet. Limbo or something, he offered, and left it there unresolved rather than force it. He said he wondered whether the initial spark that produced all these changes was still alive in him, that he did not want it to stall, that he was watching for the negative frame where a person decides they hate the lifestyle and stops trying and just stays miserable — and that he did not think that was the right approach, and would keep reminding himself if he had to.
Mostly things were fine, he said. Bailey was a happy cat. Then the rain, the tent, the mud, the tanks, the truck stop a little out of the way, and five o'clock at the other end.