Morning, eight o'clock, Friday. rswfire begins recording inside the rig and Bailey comes toward him almost immediately — drawn, as she reliably is, by the sound of him talking. He greets her mid-sentence, absorbs the interruption into the recording, and keeps going. The day before had been spent entirely inside with every window covered, temperatures over ninety, the interior kept dark and closed against the heat. He calls it his cave. He spent it at the computer, working on Nevada.
It was not until sometime around nine that night, when the sun finally dropped and the heat began to release, that he opened a single window and looked out. People everywhere. He describes the moment plainly: it was Thursday, and the campground had filled. He asked ChatGPT why, and got the answer — a federal holiday midweek for Juneteenth, the summer solstice the day before. Extra days off, arriving a day early. He registered it, accepted it, and moved on to what it meant for his own week: he has a site move scheduled for Sunday, into partial shade. Not the woods yet, but shade.
The morning has a task list attached to it. The covering for his cab windows arrived at the camper place and needs picking up. A Walmart order placed the day before — products safe to use on the musty smell coming from the air conditioner vents — will be ready in a couple hours. There is stuff everywhere in the rig, and the weekend before the move is for getting ready. Beyond that, his plan for the weekend is to stay inside, away from the crowd density outside, and work.
The work is Nevada. He has Gaia GPS open, maps spread across the state, and he names the condition he is in without softening it: too many choices and you don't make any. He is trying to plan five hundred days and finding that he cannot build a route because every point on the map is viable. What he does have is a governing parameter — highs in the sixty-to-seventy-five range, lows around forty, nothing extreme on either end. Elevation is the instrument. In Nevada, he states, you can move around and hold that band if you place yourself right. The route is indexed to temperature, not to destinations. And he holds it deliberately loose. He says he does not want to plan it to a tee, because he does not know what the future has in store, and he wants to be able to change it.
He catches himself saying Vegas and corrects it twice on the recording — not Vegas, Nevada, let's be clear about that. The shape that has emerged so far: Great Basin National Park as the first stop, roughly a year in the state, and Burning Man as the closing beat. Not this year. This year's departure is gated by getting his teeth, still about two months out, and the tickets would likely have been unavailable by now regardless. He describes having been judgmental of Burning Man for years without knowing anything about it — the thing humans do when they don't know about a thing and form an opinion anyway — and then watching videos of it and wanting to go. Next year, then. And after Burning Man, maybe another state. Three hundred sixty-five instead of five hundred. He leaves it there.
Nevada is a lot of desert, he says, a whole lot of desert, and he is not a fan of deserts. But he returns to a judgment he made at the beginning of all this, when he was preparing: if you want to boondock, if you want to learn this lifestyle, go west. He thinks he was right. He thinks doing it here would be harder. So the desert becomes training ground. Ghost towns and abandoned buildings interest him; caves and old mine shafts do not, and he says so flatly. Hot springs, maybe — though you never know what's in there, bacteria, who knows. He frames it as broadening his horizon, taking on some risk he would not normally take, embracing all of it, becoming a master of off-grid living.
The last thread of the morning runs toward foraging. He wants to learn it, and he names why: if society collapses, and it could, he needs to be prepared. He does not think he could hunt. Fishing, maybe — though in Nevada, probably not much of that. Trapping came to him the night before, unbidden, and he turns it over out loud: he could probably do the trapping, but then you'd have to kill the animal, and he does not think he could do that either. Then the counter-thought, arriving in the same breath — once you get hungry enough you can, and if society collapses there's nothing else to do, so you probably will. He leaves the question open, notes that he just woke up and is rambling, and goes to start his day.