The night before, rswfire was on his bed with headphones on, music running, deep in a conversation with an AI about whether he would stay in Nevada or continue on to Oregon. Then Bailey launched off the bed and tore across the RV, and the deliberation ended. A field mouse had gotten in. He spent an hour or two after it — the thing tiny and fast, the rig small and full of places to disappear into — and never caught it. Sleep came thin after that. He had been anticipating this particular day since he bought the RV, and he noted, without much drama, that he thought he'd had the place really sealed up. He had been insulating it. Something found a way in anyway.
Morning meant a supply run, so he took the mountain grade down — the seventh time driving it — with a returned battery charger in the rig and a plan to buy humane traps. He passed another camper set up on the mountain, a full setup out in the middle of nowhere, and remarked on how people do that, camp out here, who even knows where this is. Fencing appeared along the route. He worked out aloud that they were on BLM land, outside the forest, and that this — a fence, a fourteen-day clock, a stranger's rig on a ridge — is what it means to camp on BLM lands. In town he got Starbucks, returned the charger, and bought the humane trap, noting that he'd almost picked up the kind that kills by accident, and that peanut butter would have worked but he'd use the bait he had.
The Nevada question ran underneath the whole drive. Nevada was where he had wanted to come originally; he had thought he would survive his first winter here, and somehow ended up choosing Oregon instead, by a route he can no longer reconstruct. And yet he arrived on top of this mountain and the second he got here felt he might never leave. The views spoke to him. That was exactly the problem. He held the criterion out where he could see it: staying in Nevada would refine rather than transform. He needed to know he wasn't staying because he was declining to push his comfort zones. Oregon would do that. So he would not let the pull of the place decide it. He would stay a second week — the fourteen-day limit permits it — and let the answer unfold, because he did not yet know what it was.
Somewhere on that road the recording turned, and he said it was going to be a little difficult to talk about, that he had been contemplating whether he wanted to or should, and that it wasn't something he was choosing — it was chosen for him. Back in Kentucky, a woman who followed the channel developed what he described as an unhealthy attachment. He tried to remain open, which he now considers a mistake. She told him she loved him; he said he does not know how you love someone you have never met. Things got weird. There was a falling out. He asked her to stop contacting him. She did anyway. He said it a second time. Then he opened comments on the channel and she left comments there.
He was careful with the words on camera. He is empathetic, he said, but he does not care about this person — his empathy toward her extends to any human, and that is the whole of it. If she was watching, she needed to get help. He said making the clip did not make him happy. What he could understand was emotional investment in the content. What he could not was love, or why anyone would say those things to him at all. He named the terms of the channel plainly: he is not talking to anybody in particular, he is talking to humanity in general, this is his message in a bottle. That is why comments stayed off so long. The witnessing he welcomes — he likes that people witness the journey. But that is all it can ever be. He said he was tired of having his boundaries violated by people, that he moved into an RV and detached from society because he was that tired of it.
Then the road opened again and so did he. Music came up under the wide-open spaces, and he circled back — these spaces in the West, Kansas, Wyoming, all different, all his. And the practical case for Nevada assembled itself out of the same sky: open horizon means solar, means line-of-sight internet, means he could work. He needs to rebuild his savings. He suspects Nevada is the place he could actually do that, and Oregon in the spring might follow, except he wants to see Oregon in winter. Back and forth. Unresolved on purpose.
He drove the grade back up, the seventh ascent, and it went well. He said he was beginning to understand the things that trigger him and how to work with them. Behind him in the rig, the trap waited for a mouse the size of a dime, and the second week on the mountain was already decided.