He had been awake since two in the morning, and by the time the sky over Cape Blanco was only barely beginning to lift, rswfire was walking the dark road toward the shower house with his things gathered and his timing chosen. The timing was strategic. The good shower — the single one, not the tiny shared stalls — went to whoever arrived early enough, and arriving early enough meant the walk in the dark, and the walk in the dark meant thinking about bears. He laid the sequence out on camera as he moved through it: pockets emptied, stuff put away, clothes staged, shower, dress, everything packed back up, walk out the way he walked in. A chore, he said. Every day. He was not complaining. He was showing it because the version of this life that circulates on Instagram and TikTok leaves the procedures out, and the procedures are what make the record true.
He noted the gap between where his eyes went and where the lens sat — that looking at the camera meant not looking at the viewer, and looking at the viewer meant not looking at the camera, a hard place to hold your gaze all day. He noted the shave he needed and would do later. He noted the bags under his eyes, getting pretty bad, and said that one day he would fix the sleep, and that the first time he got eight uninterrupted hours he was going to celebrate it. It always landed somewhere between four and six. He said he showered more now than he had when he lived in a house, because the life was more active, more integrated, everything about it better. He held both of those at once without either one giving way. A van lifer had pulled in overnight; he wondered if they were cute.
Back at the RV, he pulled the laundry together and nearly forgot to change into pajamas, since every pair of jeans he owned was going into the wash. Then the question of whether to see the ocean first, which was not really a question. Normally he would have walked to the cliff edge and stood right on it, looking down at the waves — a wonderful experience, he said, and one he'd take later. Today he drove. The wind was working on the Jeep's soft top hard enough that he said out loud it was trying to tear the thing apart, and he read the wind's shape in the pattern moving across a puddle. The surf below was heavy and wrong-feeling. He told the ocean he loved it and would see it later, then looked again at the water and said it wasn't friendly, that he didn't know what it wanted from him.
Eight miles brought him to Highway 101, which he called the best highway in the world. Rain started. The soft top kept doing the thing he didn't like, and something in the manual transmission gave him a moment's concern. He named the landscape as he passed through it — Humbug Mountain, which he calls Mount Humbug because it has the Mount Doom vibe, and Port Orford sitting close beside it with a matching vibe, the pair of them reading Tolkien to him. Oldest town on the coast, he said, right at the very western edge. Everyone he'd met there had been cool. Someone had once tried to warn him about shady people, on account of him being gay, and he dismissed it flatly: he carries a pocket knife, and if it came to a gun he'd take the person out with him. Already decided. Then a car with one headlight came up behind him and he told it not to tailgate.
In town the plan snagged. He went into the Dollar Store for detergent and intended to take cashback for laundry quarters, but the machine never offered it, so he went looking for a bank and found one right there. Then the laundromat, hair still strange from the spray-in conditioner he'd used and didn't like — almost like hairspray. He got the load going and sat down while it ran. The wind had stopped. It was nine in the morning, and he had been up for seven hours. A peaceful, quiet day.
By nine-thirty the clothes were drying and he was uploading, because the internet was good in town and back at Cape Blanco he had to walk to the edge and stand around to get a video out. He said he didn't know what he was doing for the holidays, that he was kind of bored — then immediately qualified it, because his kind of bored is not the same thing other people mean by the word. It is an abundance of energy needing somewhere to go, a need to move. He genuinely didn't know whether that was what boredom felt like for everyone else. He said he loved his life, that so much was coming in the new year, that he had to take it slow and patient for now, which is hard for him, and that Cape Blanco and Port Orford are the right place to be doing it — something about them lets a person slow down and appreciate whatever moment they're in. Soon he'd be heading north, to places he hadn't been yet.