It was eight in the evening at Cape Blanco, and rswfire was inside the RV with the ocean somewhere out past the window, saying plainly that he was bored, that he didn't know what to do with the hour. The camera came on anyway. A subscriber named Evee had asked him a question days earlier and he had promised to answer it on video, because the answer was complicated in a way that text would flatten. Before he got to it, he wanted to say something else — that the boundaries he had once set around comments were coming down. He described those boundaries as necessary at the time, work he was doing while he was integrating himself, debugging his brain with AI through the first stretch of months. He stated he had come out the other end happy with the results. He said he was open to connection now, and he asked people not to worry about his reaction. One caution came with the invitation: not to try to put him in a box. He is too expansive for that, he said, like that ocean out there, and being boxed has always registered as invalidating. He offered that he might be able to note it now and giggle it off instead.
Then the question itself. Was he boondocking? He wasn't. He explained why by going back to his first day in Oregon, when he saw RVs parked along the roadsides — some of them fixed in place, lived in rather than traveled in, several with their windows broken out. He noted it immediately and it made him nervous. His read of it was a question about the territory: does the local population hate us. So he didn't start boondocking right away. He wanted to understand the patterns first, and he said he still doesn't have a full grasp of them, that he is pattern-recognition brain, always noting, always building the awareness up in layers.
There were other layers underneath that one. He doesn't only live in an RV — he also has the Jeep, and he takes the Jeep everywhere. He described the 101 as the most amazing highway there is, because on it he needs no GPS. He knows where all the towns are. He knows where all his favorite places are. He called it a mental map of what the coast means to him, personal rather than instrumental, and said he wished he could put it into better words, that it is one of the reasons he feels claimed by this place, why he thinks of it as home now. He lost the thread mid-sentence, paused the recording, came back, and picked it up: the Jeep is the range, so the RV can stay somewhere safe. Bailey is in here. His things are in here. This is his life. He said he actually likes the infrastructure of a campground — that campgrounds offer structure and stability he can operate from.
The economics sat right beside that. Cape Blanco is a little expensive, he said, and he doesn't know what he'll be doing a week out, because he is really low on funds. If it doesn't work itself out he'll be forced to boondock. Ideally he'd stay on campgrounds and run the circuit he had been drawing for himself: three southern Oregon towns he has fallen in love with — Brookings, Gold Beach, and Port Orford, which he calls Port Orford Shire because he feels it deserves the shire on the end — and five or six campgrounds between them, cycled on the fourteen-days-on, three-days-off rule. He had been planning to make Cape Blanco his main base. Given recent events, he said, he isn't sure that's a good idea anymore, and he is a little too far north of where he wants to be. Down south there's more going on, there are people, there are people he was starting to become friends with. Up here, he said, old me would have loved it — and he doesn't seem to be in that space anymore. So he'll probably start heading south.
He circled back to boondocking and named the fear directly. He wants to do it. He still has anxiety around it. People do it all along the 101, and he sees them constantly, and what he notices now is curiosity rather than judgment — especially toward the van lifers, and especially since he saw one running a generator, the moment something clicked and he understood he was looking at someone living the life rather than performing it. He said he'd be very interested to know that person. These days he strikes up conversations with everyone he comes across, keeping himself open to friendship and to romance, and he said it is nice. It is.
The storm arrived that night and ran twelve hours. The next morning he was walking the campground loop toward the shower house with the camera up, narrating a landscape rearranged — branches strewn everywhere, debris he guessed was a preview of what the top of his RV looked like. A partially downed tree. A trunk on the ground he had to detour around, noting where his RV wasn't. Park crews were working the damage, loud and busy, and he zoomed in on them. Another storm was coming in a few days, and he said he'd still be here for it. Somewhere in the middle of the walk he shared what he had learned the night before, calling it tree wisdom: that the coastal trees' root systems touch, that they hold hands underground, and when the eighty-mile-an-hour wind comes through, they distribute the load between them. It made them all stronger. He said it made him feel better about being out here.
Later the gusts came back through the stand and he watched the trunks swinging. He said it was getting a bit scary, that he could see it clearly with his eyes even if the camera couldn't hold it. Then the wind dropped and the loop went calm again. He said there was nothing to be done about it — if a tree falls, a tree falls. This is how I live, he said. Got to accept some risk. He mentioned he wasn't getting enough sleep. He decided to nap through the storm.