On his last day at the lake, rswfire walked a short way to a different spot on the same water — not far, he noted, since he had just come from the other one, but different enough to sit with for a minute before the day turned into logistics. He had seen this lake in nearly every condition it could offer. Three in the morning. Ten at night. Pitch black with no light at all, moving by memory and a flashlight, out there because the sky was clear and worth standing under. He said goodbye to it the way a person says goodbye to a place they have actually inhabited rather than passed through. It was not Cape Blanco — he missed that place — but it had been wonderful, and he said so plainly, without weighing one against the other.
Tomorrow he would move on. Two months at the next site, then a month at a place near a lighthouse again, and then it would be May and he would be driving to Kentucky. The route was already planned. Six weeks, he figured, instead of the three it might otherwise take, because he intended to revisit places he had stopped at on the way west and add a stack of new ones, moving casually, spending real time. A month in Kentucky. Then back, because two more campgrounds were waiting and he had to be here by September, and then three months further up the coast on a beach, managing a Welcome Center. He described this the way a person describes something already built rather than something hoped for. Life, he said, is working out really well.
Standing there with the camera running, he was still deciding whether the video would exist for anyone but himself. His entire archive — nearly six hundred videos — now sat behind a paywall, so this one would be the only thing publicly up, if he posted it. He had been sharing his life since sometime around March. He had been through a lot, grown a lot, changed a lot. He said that phrase three times, circling it. He was not in the same space he had been in. The drive to share had gone quiet, and he named the reason directly: he did not want to hand his life to a random crowd that would dissect it and criticize it and judge it, because that is how people are.
So he walled it. Two tiers — three dollars a month for anything ninety days or older, which meant, as of that day, everything before Oregon; ten dollars for all of it, and higher amounts above that for anyone who simply wanted to support him. Nobody had subscribed. He stated that without heat. It's basically just there for me, he said. It's there if people want to watch it. The archive had stopped being a performance and become storage — his own record, kept on his own terms, indifferent to whether the gate was ever opened from the outside. He mentioned that he had never really felt supported on the platform financially, and then let it go: it's okay, there's a distance between us, there's this camera, and people aren't the way they used to be.
Some things he had deliberately kept out of that stream entirely. That day was also the last day of his first month volunteering with the state parks. It had been quite an experience, he said, and he had not put it on social media — he had been navigating how he would approach it at all, thinking it through behind the paywall instead of in front of a crowd. The month before that had been Loeb State Park, also quite an experience, and he named what happened there without ornament: his heart had gotten woken up, flirted with by a gatekeeper, and it changed everything. That footage would cross the ninety-day line soon and become visible to the cheaper tier. He noted the timing the way he noted campground dates.
The rest of the structure held steady around the shift. He had gone back to work with his ex-boss, doing AI work, as he had planned; he intended to keep doing it for as long as that was possible. He was still expecting things to get bad — he did not say when, only that he hoped there was time, and what he wanted to do with that time was travel, get to Kentucky, do the things he wanted to do there, and take the long way home. On the journey back he thought he would finally get to Great Basin in Nevada, timed to arrive right as a meteor shower was happening. He did not know how to pronounce its name. That would be awesome, he said. That's the plan.
And then it was time to go. Spring cleaning. Tanks to clean before the move. Laundry. Some friends to say goodbye to. He said he was doing very well, hoped everybody else was too, and left the lake behind him — the trip to Kentucky already mapped, the archive already sealed, the camera still running on the one thing he might let out through the wall.