The Jeep was ready. That was the first thing rswfire said, filming it on New Year's Day with the rain already coming down — ready for the next chapter of my life — and in the same breath, the qualifier: excited, but tired. Feeling all the feelings today. The drive north was uneventful in the way drives are uneventful when the only friction is other drivers, aggressive and ignorant, which he named as the norm rather than the exception. Then the bridge at North Bend. He said he loved it twice, once before and once during the crossing, the RV moving over the span with the Jeep in tow behind it, water and gray on every side. Somewhere under the excitement he was tracking the sleep he hadn't had, the bed platform he still needed to fix, the not-remembering when a decent night's rest had last happened.
He arrived at the day use area at Tugman and did the thing he had already worked out in advance: detached the Jeep, drove it over to the campground to confirm the site was actually there and actually his, then walked back in the rain. A fair distance, he noted, not complaining, just measuring. He had been here on Christmas Eve — hiked the trail, shot video he never uploaded — so the ground was not entirely unfamiliar. The volunteer who held his site before him had moved that same day to another campground within the same management unit, which is the mechanism: three months at one campground, six within a unit, then you move. He ran the math out loud. He could go from here to Umpqua Lighthouse. He decided that would probably be too long in one area. Three months first, and then he would see how he felt about being that stationary.
Parked. Leveled — and he said it twice, because leveling blocks were not something he normally bothered with. I never do that. He put them down because this time he would be here for one to three months, and that duration changed what the site was. It came out not quite level, over-adjusted on one side by a single block, and he let that stand. Then the exposure arrived all at once: neighbors right there, a picnic table right there, day use sites across the road he would probably have to clean. I feel so exposed here. He was an official Park host now. He said official like he was testing the weight of the word, and immediately after found the free campfire wood — soaked through, but with maybe some dry material underneath, and a tarp could fix that. Free campfire wood. How cool is that. Then the tire that looked like it was going flat, and the hookups still to run, and the sewer connection he did not yet understand, the black thing or maybe the tube-looking thing, he wasn't sure.
Then he met his supervisor, and something opened. She was young. She had three colors in her hair — like me — and a pierced nose, and rswfire had been worried about piercing his eyebrow. He was not worried anymore. He said he would definitely do it soon. He circled back to her three separate times in the recording, still not over it: the youngest park ranger on Earth, tricolored hair, nose ring, I have a cool boss. He briefly wanted to be a park ranger himself and then talked himself out of it in the same sentence — you'd be stuck somewhere, never able to move. Orientation was tomorrow. There would be waving, probably constant waving, which he flagged as awkward for him and left there. Only afterward did he realize neither of them had said happy New Year.
The processing came in the parking lot, phone dying, battery charger going. The vape cartridge wasn't working; he needed a store, a grocery store, all kinds of stuff. He noted you're not supposed to vape or smoke on park property, allowed that vaping might be a gray area, and then, honest with himself, allowed that it probably wasn't. And then he said the thing the whole day had been building toward: I'm a sovereign being, I'm not used to this. I am not. And after it: what have I got myself into. And after that: processing this. He did not resolve it. He named the money underneath it instead — the RV and the Jeep both behind, both needing to be paid as soon as possible, and the structural trap he could see clearly, that if he lost the RV he would lose the job, because the job requires you to have a place to live inside your campsite. He stated it plainly and kept walking.
The lake absorbed the rest of the hour. Half past three, maybe an hour of light left. He noticed the odd charging station in the lot and set it aside for later. He noticed a man walking fast toward the water — he used to walk like that, before his core gave out — and noticed the man was attractive, and noticed the net, a basket net, probably for crabs, and thought he could learn fishing from him. Ducks, which he hadn't seen since Kentucky. Then the boat ramp, partially submerged. Then the picnic table, submerged. Between Christmas Eve and now, the lake had come up over its edges. They put those picnic tables in a very bad spot. He found the trail he had walked before, recognized the tree that marks where it ends, about a mile out, and said again that he was tired.
He stayed a little longer. The man had a small boat, or a kayak — rswfire admitted he did not actually know what a kayak looked like but suspected that was one — and pushed it out alone onto the water. Rain came across the lake in sheets of mist, moving with the wind over everything, and rswfire stopped narrating the logistics long enough to watch it. Wow. That is so cool. The picnic table still under water, the light going, the site leveled behind him with one extra block on the low side, the tire he needed to check in the morning, orientation at some hour tomorrow he hadn't mentioned. The last thing he said was the simplest thing he said all day. I like it here.