The drive was four hours and rswfire did not check the weather before making it. He had wanted a break from the RV, and so he took one — spontaneously, on no one's authorization but his own — and arrived at a small rented cabin in the Red River Gorge with Bailey and the Jeep and three nights booked ahead of him. Thunderstorms were running the whole stay. He noted this without adjusting anything about the plan. The land he had wanted to buy, the land in the picture that hangs on his RV wall, sat within miles of where he was standing. He called that a coincidence and moved on.
Inside, the light was low enough that he apologized for it. The cabin was small — a normal bed, a kitchen area, a little stacked washer and dryer tucked into the bathroom, running water that came from a municipal line and simply kept coming. He started a load of laundry. He turned the tap to wash his hands and watched the water go down the drain, and something in his body flinched at it: months of managing tank levels had built a reflex that the cabin did not require. He named the sensation as weird, then reframed it — in a place like this, it was possible to treat ordinary things as luxuries. He had brought everything he needed to clean himself up. A shower he said he desperately needed. A shave, and the sides of his hair, which he had been wanting to do for a while. He said he was going to go all out.
He went outside to vape, having asked the property owners first and been told please, outside, and showed the back area of the place — pleasant, mosquito-ridden, his while he was there. Then back in to find Bailey, who was into something, and told not to run out there, and who was happy, and who was eating treats on the floor while rswfire kept talking. The dog was the constant across every part of the recording. Just the two of us for a while, he said.
The terrain itself came out in geography he narrated with his uncertainty attached. The Natural Bridge, the arch that draws people — nice to look at, though not what draws him. What draws him is the area. He knows it from a life where he hiked a four-mile trail near his house Monday through Friday, sometimes six miles, and then gave a whole Saturday or Sunday to the Sand Gap trail here. He thought the Natural Bridge might be part of the Gorge, thought it might be federal land given over to the state, thought these might be the Blue Ridge Mountains, maybe the beginning of the Appalachians, and said outright not to quote him. He has lived in Kentucky twenty years, maybe longer — he was not certain of the year either. Not dramatic mountains, he said, but mountains for hiking.
The measurement he did trust was the one taken in his own body. Six days running on the trail with the forty-seven bridges and he was not very sore; it had not felt very challenging. He held that against what the Sand Gap trail would ask of him, a trail he had not walked in years and whose length he no longer remembered. The conclusion was not a question. He was fairly confident he was doing it — tomorrow or the day after, regardless of weather — because he was here, so he was going to end up doing it. He said he hoped he was prepared.
He thought he might be saying goodbye to the place. Unlikely he would be back soon, unless the autumn colors arrived while he was still working through the dentist, which they might, right at the start of the season — and then he would probably return, because it is that beautiful, and because this part of Kentucky drops its leaves fast and the window is a couple of weeks at most. Saturday he would drive back to the RV and its accumulated problems, so he would be ready for the tire shop Monday. He was not giving up on any of it. He had simply needed a break, and said so twice.
What he had come to do, besides walk, was plan. He recognized the pattern as he described it: in his old life, when work was pressing on him, he would go to the lodge at the Natural Bridge and spend time there thinking through his life and making plans. So there was a cyclical aspect to this. He was, he said, happy. This was a liminal state even more liminal than his normal liminal state, and he said he totally embraced it, and then said he did not know what he was saying, that it was hard to talk about. The plan itself came out plainly enough: land and a cabin of his own, not to retire into but as a home base, the RV kept but no longer the whole of the platform. That would take savings rebuilt, which would take freelance programming again — the instrument he knows. He said he did not know any other way, and that he wished he did, that he would like to do something else, and then arrived where he arrived: he would draw on his strengths and do the things he is good at, so he could build the life he wants.
He would keep the channel going. There was, he said, a whole lot more to the journey. And then the last thing, offered without elaboration and without being asked for: he embraces the name rswfire, that it is who he has been his whole life more than any other name he could have, and that he feels he has outgrown Sam — he did not know how to explain it, but he thinks he has. Bailey came into frame right then. He said he knew that was coming, and ended it there.