The parking lot was ordinary in the way mountain-town parking lots are ordinary — a strip of asphalt with groceries in the back seat and steep country standing just past the edge of it. rswfire sat in his vehicle with the camera up and noticed, before anything else, the Jeep beside him. Someone had set a duck on the dash. He turned the lens toward it, gave it a moment on the record, said see the duck ponds, and let the small absurdity of it open the frame. The flash came on. He hunted for the setting, found it, turned it off. There we go. The recording began properly at the second attempt, as recordings often do.
He turned the camera on his own skin next. A spider bite, months old now, faint enough that it barely read through the lens — he narrated it anyway, the thing that had been sucking on me all night long, kept in the record not as injury but as a mark the terrain had left and time had partly taken back. Then the newer ones, the fresh accumulation from hiking again. He said he was getting eaten alive out here. He had gone into the store and come out with hydrocortisone cream, which he would put on in a little while. The bites were logged the way a person logs weather or mileage: this is what the ground does to a body that walks on it, and here is the countermeasure, purchased, in the bag.
Then the actual matter of the day, stated plainly and without ceremony. He had made a proposal to the people whose property he was staying on — a cabin at an Airbnb owned, he explained, by a group of young guys who had partnered to build the thing. He had asked to stay through autumn and possibly winter with his RV. Someone had replied that they would contemplate it. He corrected himself mid-sentence — contemp — landed on consider. The word mattered enough to get right. His proposal was out and under consideration, and that was the whole of what he knew.
The reasoning behind the proposal came out in the same breath, unhurried. He wanted time to adapt to this life. The cabin would let him get a feel for cabin life while he kept working on the RV, kept turning it into a space he could actually live in — a fixed structure held for a season while the mobile one became habitable. And the siting was not incidental: he was very close to the Natural Bridge, which he named as his favorite place on Earth, a place he had been coming to for twenty years. Two decades of return, and now the possibility of a home base within reach of it for a little while.
He mentioned the footage he had shot on the drive in, said he would append it to the end of this one. And then he stopped to register something that had bothered him about it. Those are very very tall mountains. He had been looking at the screen and then looking at what he was actually seeing, and the two would not reconcile. The phone flattened them into little hills. He said he didn't know why. He didn't resolve it — just marked the gap between the capture and the sight, and left it standing as its own observation. Those were the mountains he would be hiking, if the proposal came back the way he hoped.
He closed without closing. He hoped they would be receptive. He hoped he could afford it. He had no idea what they would come back with. The terms were his, offered outward, and the answer belonged to someone else. I guess we'll find out. Then the footage he had promised: the drive, the steep forested slopes running past, scored with music — fire get higher — and the mountains going by at their true scale, unrepresented, on the far side of the glass.