He started the recording at a truck stop, camera turned toward the drivers going by, the day already long behind him. We made it, barely. By this hour on a normal run he would have been done. He pulled out anyway, back onto two-lane highway, and somewhere in the next few miles a sign told him he was at the border — a small town straddling the line, Missouri or Kansas, he couldn't say which. Then the marker: We have now reached Kansas. He said yay to no one, with the flatness of a man who has been driving all day and still notices the threshold.
The road did not let him sit with it. Cars came around him on blind corners, one after another, cutting back in — a couple of them, he noted, came within inches of oncoming traffic. He kept the camera up and spoke to them as they went past, as though the windshield were a channel. From his point of view it was not his problem; they were putting their own lives and other people's lives at risk to gain two or three minutes, and they weren't even far ahead of him — he could see every one of them right there in front of him. He named the cause as he saw it: phones, digital lives, brains scrambled past the point of patience. He was going fifty-five with a Jeep on the back. Relax, people. Another one passed and something came out of the truck's bed as it went.
Then the land changed, almost immediately, and his register changed with it. Fields opened on both sides — wheat or corn, he wasn't sure which, and he wondered aloud whether the sun had gotten to them, whether that was even how it worked. He didn't know what most of what he was seeing was called, and said so each time, and each time called it cool anyway. A building on a Main Street somewhere in Neosho County with a metal star on top, an association of some kind, something satellite-shaped: that is a cool building. Big giant silo thingies. A tree he called amazing, and behind it the memory of a better one a few miles back — one shaped like a giant bonsai, all fractal, that he told himself he had to go find out about. Flowers everywhere, unnamed. Long stretches of open highway with hills in them, and the hills were eating his gas mileage, which made him curious what the mountains would do. Wide open sky, blue and clouded. Something about the vibe, he said. As soon as he got here it felt like Kansas, and he didn't know much about the place at all.
Somewhere in the open stretch he said the thing the drive had been circling. This is why I do this. I don't want to be stuck in a house — such a stagnant way to live. Later, still rolling, he built it out: when you're stuck in a house or a traditional life, the relationships you have — and he was clear he did not only mean the human ones, everything is a relationship to everything else — settle into static patterns, and static patterns are not conducive to a good life. He had been thinking about it as he drove. He would never want to live that life.
The GPS sent him down a dirt road right as he reached the park. Wrong way. He got lucky — there was somewhere to turn around — but the Jeep took the dust and would need a wash now, and he made a note about the truck bay he'd seen at the fuel stop that day, the kind he'd learned about from AI just recently, maybe a Pilot somewhere down the route where he could do the RV and the Jeep both. The gate was unstaffed. The park was big and the loops were numbered and each loop was called a campground, which struck him as weird lingo he supposed he'd get used to. The dump stations were color-coded, which he liked. The listing photo had shown a lake behind his site; there was no lake here. There was a lake somewhere. Misleading, he said, and let it go, because the site was pull-through — no detaching the Jeep in the road before he could park, just pull in, hook up, unhook, and have the day and a half. Ninety-something degrees, midday, insufferable. He said he was looking forward to October. The neighbors were there and the sites were good ones, screened from each other with bushes, and he noted that his own park should do that.
Then he went under the rig. I swear, there's always something. Two different things leaking, or what looked like two — a pipe, something dripping, hard to see even with the camera held up into the underbelly. Water, he assumed; he had the hoses hooked up. AI told him it was flexible tubing, that there were probably electrical wires or water pipes inside it, and that he would need to cut the broken section out, inspect it, and seal it — several ways to do that. He said he'd have to learn what these were and how to fix them properly. Life of a nomad. He had known this would be a shakedown trip: here to the Pacific Northwest, things were going to happen, and he was going to learn some new skills. So he scheduled it — tomorrow. He started to think out loud about whether it was one spot or two, then stopped himself: he would have reasoned it through on video, he said, but people always misunderstand him when he does. Tonight was inside work, organizing, small things. Kansas Friday, another campground Sunday, west across the state, Nebraska Tuesday. He wasn't worried about the leak yet, but he would deal with it. Bailey was outside with him the whole time, crying out his frustration at the boundary of a place he wanted to go explore and couldn't. He will learn. You will learn, Bailey.