At three in the morning the cabin was dark enough that the camera could barely find him. rswfire apologized for the lighting and started talking anyway. He had come here — a rented cabin near the lodge — carrying a hypothesis: that the sleeplessness was the RV's fault, a product of the vehicle, the thin walls, the road. The cabin was the test. He had gone to bed at ten, taken a while to fall under, and then dreamed with his conscious mind still awake inside the dream, aware it was happening. The test had returned its result. Not the RV. He revised the source out loud, assigned it instead to the stage of life he was in, and stated the operative position plainly: tolerate whatever this is, let the process play out, there is nothing else to be done. He had napped between videos the day before. He decided that would have to be enough, and got up.
The kitchen was somebody else's. One packet of sugar left behind by a previous guest, a borrowed bag of Dunkin' Original Blend, a utensil that was the closest thing to a spatula he could find. He put on coffee — one sugar, one Stevia, because he needed a little more sweet in it — and pronounced it good, better than Starbucks, same as the day before. Then he went for the eggs. Four instead of his usual three, because there would be nothing on the trail and no realistic chance of finding anything on the way. He said scrambled, corrected himself to fried, noted he wasn't awake yet. He was cooking one-handed while holding the phone. Bailey got into something and got told to stop. The eggs didn't cook well and he ate them anyway — they are what they are, still basically fried. Ham went on next, then toast, which came out burnt, whoever was here last apparently liking it that way. He had forgotten to set the butter out overnight and there was no microwave to soften it in, so he scraped at it and hoped its essence would transfer, and asked whoever was watching if there was a trick to it — hot water, maybe. Cooking, he said, was never a skill he developed. He would keep trying for however many years it took.
Before he ate, he pasted the day's forecast onto the screen: rain and thunderstorms, all day. He wanted it on the record. The trail he was driving to was already difficult before weather entered it — rugged, poorly marked, climbing up into the mountains toward views he remembered as very beautiful. He used to hike it every weekend. He thought it had been ten years. He had gotten lost on it once with a friend and come out in the dark. He had broken a camera falling into a creek he didn't see. That was the terrain he was choosing, and he named why: he was in a turbulent state, going through an intense evolution, and his external world was going to match his internal world today. He let the sentence stand as a statement of correspondence rather than a complaint, and said, let's see where that takes us.
The equipment decision had already been made. The GoPro rig stayed behind. The new camera stayed behind too — too many buttons, not a point-and-click thing, not something to learn in the rain. Just the phone, and the standing problem of keeping it dry. He said he really wanted to document this. Bailey was playing in the background, which he noted was unusual — not really his style these days — and he stopped to say so, twice, that he was cute.
He turned the camera on himself in the dark and acknowledged he was a little nervous. He hadn't done anything like this in a long time. He needed to know if he could. He located the nervousness precisely: not the trail itself but the thunderstorms, which were forecast for later in the day, possibly late enough that he'd be near the end by then, though the rain would run through all of it. He had never hiked this trail in those conditions. And he was more acutely aware of weather now, since moving into the RV — he had watched branches come down constantly, everywhere, and he didn't need that landing on him. So: real awareness of surroundings. Caution as the method, stated twice. But he was here, and he wanted to do this, and he needed to do this.
The drive was fifteen minutes. Sunrise was an hour out, which made him early, so he took the time and walked the grounds instead. Past the lodge and its rock wall, which he had always loved and said so again — very pretty. Past the guest rooms, nothing special, nothing to write home about, but a place to stay. He went looking for the little lake, admitting he no longer remembered the way down and would have to find it. Natural Bridge was coming up. He said they'd hang out there until the sun came out. The main trail was over that way. It was still dark.