It began with an impulse. After ten at night, inside the RV, rswfire woke from a nap and reached for the camera without a plan for what he'd say. His hair was a mess and he named it as such. The frame was close and handheld — his face filling it, the day's work still visible on him. I did something today.
The something was ninety minutes inland. He had driven to Eugene, off the coast and away from the 101 for the afternoon, to a studio that had only just opened — new doors, but a piercer decades into the craft. He came back with an eyebrow he wasn't sure he liked, already bruised and getting worse as he watched it on camera, and two more through the helix of one ear, which he described as elegant. He had wanted more than that. A hoop stacked between two existing piercings. Hoops finally set into the ones that had been healing six months and, by his read of them, feel done, feel ready. His navel, which he'd pierced once when he was much younger and which had left him a small scar he still carries as record. The money ran out before the list did. He noted this without complaint and then found the other edge of it himself — that six months can be deceptive, that the jewelry could go in and the trouble could start after, and that it was probably good he couldn't. He would be back for the rest.
He mentioned, in passing and without alarm, that he is in a public-facing role right now. Then he set the concern down: worth it, cuz it is. The eyebrow isn't his favorite shape yet. In six months he can turn it into a hoop. Still transforming, he said — the piercings, and the sentence itself doing double duty.
Then the register shifted, and the restraint became explicit. Almost a month into this placement, and one hell of a month, and immediately: got to be careful what I say. He named that he is volunteering for the state park, that something is in motion, that he is navigating a whole new situation and doesn't know where it goes, that this is part of why he hasn't been posting. He said it plainly and then held the line — can't talk about them yet — leaving the shape of the thing on the record without its contents. The withholding was the disclosure.
What he did offer was the texture of the work. The Welcome Center, slow in February and amazing anyway. Guests who were almost always kind. People who flirted with him, which he mostly didn't clock until afterward, still learning to catch it in real time — a fact he reported the way he reports anything else about his own operation. And the other volunteers, who come to him to tell him about their lives. I listen. I witness them. Some of the rangers, he said, are amazing. Some complicated stuff is going on here for real. Both statements stood, unreconciled, because he wasn't there to reconcile them.
Then he laid the year out, month by month, already mapped. Another month here. Yurts next — cleaning them, not nearly as fun, stated and accepted. Then a different park in the same management unit as his first, which means his old boss again, and his birthday month. Two months at Mount Doom. Then a gap: May through August he wanted to stay on the coast, on the 101, and there was no coastal park that needed him for the summer, because summer is when everyone is here and everyone wants in. So he converted the gap into a corridor — Kentucky and back, a few days at most on the far end, enough to see his mother and Oliver, his cat. Three or four weeks each way at a fast pace the first time, and he called that crossing a wonderful adventure and said he'd love to do it again, so he's doing it. September returns him to where he started. October, November, December put him on a beach an hour and a half north of here, the furthest north he's reached, three months in another Welcome Center.
He closed by naming what hadn't changed. Money is tight. The contract work with the boss he spent ten years with continues, but the whole dynamic has shifted and he is making a fraction of what he made, enough to keep him afloat, and he is behind. The RV still has the same issues it had at the last update. The same bills. He said he's starting to get out of his mind a little, and that he's navigating that too, and that he's doing good. Then, with the bruise still darkening above his eye and twelve months already drawn along the coastline: this is where I am today.