Sunday morning, 6:30, and the light had not yet arrived. rswfire was awake inside the RV with coffee in hand, the day's first shift still ahead of him. He had woken around three, stayed up a while talking with Claude, then slept another hour and gotten up near five. The song was already playing — Just A Cloud by Lusine, which he had found the day before and had not stopped playing since. He noted that he had listened through the rest of their catalog and did not like it. This one track he described as perfect.
The work waiting for him was yurt cleaning, and he named the feeling plainly: dread, the specific dread of a boring awful work thing, a feeling he stated he had not had to feel in a very long time. He did not argue with it or dissolve it. He counted it. Twenty days — that was the number standing between this campground and the next one. Not consecutive: five on, Fridays and Saturdays off. So the immediate horizon was five days, and the full horizon was twenty, and both were finite quantities with an exit at the end. He said he would get through it. He also said he did not know what to expect at all.
What he did know was the shower houses. He had a full year of watching how people treat public spaces, and he was direct about what that year had taught him — I know how humans are. He had seen those buildings. He carried no illusion about what the inside of them would be. Against that, he set the reports of everyone he had asked, all of whom told him it takes about twenty minutes. He held both without resolving them.
Then, sitting there with the coffee, he began working the terms rather than the task. The deep cleans on the yurts were indoor work, and daylight was the resource he was unwilling to spend on indoor work — we only get so many. A yurt being deep-cleaned is a yurt that cannot be registered, so it simply sits there, unoccupied, at any hour. He would propose to his supervisor that he do those cleans at night. He assessed it as a thing he could probably get away with, and made it an item for the conversation ahead.
That conversation would be the first real time he had spent with her. He described the read as undetermined — his first impression had been that it would be a totally natural fit, and then he found himself unsure, and he could not resolve it from where he stood. He left it open and marked the day as the place where it would be answered. The golf cart he treated the same way: he intended to ask whether he could drive it around the campground for a while first, and he was explicit that this had nothing to do with having fun. He wanted to understand how the thing worked before he operated it.
The evening before, around six, he had walked out to the lake and onto the dock in complete dark, carrying the song with him. He said it was a little bit scary out there — the noises, the question of what was in the water, the way a mind can get carried away. He made a clip about it. Now, in the morning, he was measuring that same walk as an asset: it had been totally manageable, the distance was nothing, and he could do it before the shower houses, before the shift, maybe before it was even light. First a bagel. Possibly a smoothie, though he had only made one once and it still felt like a lot of work, and there were frozen fruits to experiment with.
The day would answer several open questions. Beyond it, twenty days out, was the next campground — which he stated, without elaborating on why, was exactly where he needed to be.