rswfire sat in front of the river with the camera running and the rain not yet started. He said hello to fellow humans. The water was low enough that he could imagine it otherwise — he said he was waiting to watch the thing grow once the rain came, and that he was looking forward to it, that it had to be close. Southern Oregon in mid-October, the Rogue River–Siskiyou pressing in on all sides, the sky holding its weather in reserve.
He had forgotten his teeth. He noticed this and then noticed something underneath it: he described feeling a little embarrassed, and named the strangeness of that directly — nine months on camera without teeth and no embarrassment until today, out in the woods, with people walking past. He did not resolve the observation. He set it beside another fact and let the two sit adjacent: he stated he was feeling particularly vulnerable that day. He had come out because of bad news. The client he worked with for ten years, the one he stopped working with when he began this life, owed him money and was not paying it. He had two hundred dollars to his name. He was restarting his freelancing business, which he said was all he could do, and he stated he had no reason to believe it wouldn't work. Then he named the bills in order, the way a person names things that are true: car insurance, no groceries, car payment, satellite internet — that one due, and the one he needed for the work itself.
He got up and started walking toward the Oregon Redwoods Trail, which he had found a few days before and said was not far. On the way he described the thought he had given himself out here: that he had been here before, that he was an old man now, that he had experienced it all, that this was nothing new. What he named as the hurt was narrower than the money. The client was blaming him. And rswfire had seen the shape of that before — hundreds of developers across a decade, each of them blamed in turn when the projects failed to leave the ground. He stated the diagnosis plainly: the client is the common denominator, and the missing thing is execution.
A camera pointing at a man walking down a road. He stopped talking about it and started talking about that — how recording around other people made him feel weird, how silly it looked to him, how he watched other people do the same thing and registered an incongruence in it. He said this is how modern life works now and that certain facets of it struck him as ridiculous, and that his pride wouldn't let him. Then, arriving: okay, so we're here, it's right over here.
He returned to the ten years. He described putting every ounce of energy he had into the projects, managing hundreds of programmers, carrying every decision because the client was disconnected from the work — the man who paid, and not always on time. One project finished. It was never marketed. He said he became burnt out, exhausted, that he couldn't take it anymore, and that the client was now using this as the explanation: that programmers simply burn out, that this is how they are. rswfire relabeled it in a single line — that is what happens under poor management. Then: it is what it is, he would push forward, two hundred dollars to his name, and the audience would get to watch him do what he wanted to call the impossible, because that was what it felt like. Let's go hike this trail.
There were children on the trail already. He said he would pause if he had to. He hadn't worn his contacts either. The trail was marked; you just kind of end up on it. And then the redwoods — two of them growing next to each other and almost merged into one, which he found curious and said he needed to look up. Here's one right here. Those two. A dead-looking tree that was only partly dead, that read to him like a hybrid, multiple trees fused. Rock paths that reminded him of the Natural Bridge in Kentucky — the first thing he noticed when he got here, that he felt at home, that even the shrubs looked like the ones out on the Sand Gap Trail. A giant with its whole inside carved out somehow, still alive, still going just fine. He said this was only the start of the national forest he was in.
He talked about GaiaGPS and another app whose name he was sure he was mispronouncing, about downloading forest maps and road maps, about how many there were and how much exploring he had ahead of him. Then he ended it there — said this was what you'd see on the trail, that he needed some time to himself, that he needed to center himself. He said what the client was doing was heartbreaking, that the labeling hurt, and that all he could do was move forward, which is all any of us can ever do. The rain still hadn't started.