The road down from the mountain took a while. rswfire had spent the night somewhere between seven and ten thousand feet — no campground, no hookups, nothing established, just a site he had chosen on top of a mountain in Nevada — and now the truck was pointed toward Elko with a load of laundry and a bag of trash riding in the back, because there was nowhere on the mountain to leave it. He started recording while he drove. Normal Nomad stuff, he called it. The camera got the daylight and the movement and his voice, and not much else, which was the point.
The first thing he told the people watching was what he was not going to give them. He couldn't reveal his location until he left. He would post intermittently, when he had something to share that was a little less direct about where he was at, and the rest would come later — he said he had all kinds of video already, the mountain, the altitude, the whole of it, held back until departure made it safe to release. The transmission continued; the coordinates did not. He set that boundary early in the recording and then moved on from it without argument, the way a person states a standing condition rather than defends a choice.
What he did give them was the report from the night before. It had been cold, in the 30s. He has a propane furnace in the camper and he ran it low, deliberately, and still went through a fair amount of fuel. October was arriving at elevation. He described the rest of the stack plainly: solar power for electricity, the propane grill outside for cooking, the camper carrying its own utilities because nothing on the mountain was going to supply them. He said he was completely off grid, and then said he was adapting, and the two statements sat next to each other as a single fact.
The gaps were part of the report too. There was no shower. He turned the problem over out loud while driving — maybe a bucket, he said, or maybe there was a truck stop, he wasn't sure yet. Nothing in the voice treated this as a difficulty to be solved before the day could proceed. The trash was in the back because trash has to go somewhere. The laundry was the reason for the drive. Elko was the service layer, visited on his terms and at his interval, and everything in between was handled directly.
He said he loved Nevada. He said he loved where he was staying, that it was just wonderful, that the altitude was amazing. He was staying the next week. He might stay two — he stated that he wasn't really sure, and left it there, unresolved by design. He wanted to see how he'd fare in it. Then he wished the people watching a good week, and kept driving toward town, carrying the week's laundry and the week's trash and a location he wasn't going to name yet.