The rain was already falling when rswfire left the RV, camera up, walking the campground loops on the second of his two days off. ATVs carried across from the dunes — someone out there having a blast in the wet — and the tent campers had staked their sites for the weekend. He opened with the joke that wasn't entirely a joke: he was out here hunting his first boyfriend on the coast, the founding member of a Coastal Boyfriend Network that did not yet exist. He's out here somewhere. He's got to be. He said he was ready for him. Then, in the same breath and the same register: I know that I am fucking gravity. People are just orbiting around me, nobody knows how to make contact, so I've got to do the work. Not a complaint. A statement of physics, and an acceptance of the labor that follows from it.
He pulled out his earbuds — the wired backups, because the wireless pair had died on arrival day six weeks earlier, one of them dropping into the Jeep's bumper while he was hooking up, gone somewhere unreachable inside the vehicle. He'd been using the wired ones ever since. He decided he liked how they looked. Six weeks at this site, he said, was such a long time. Never doing that again — then immediately amended it, because he'd already committed to places ahead. Never doing it again after this. The correction was as quick as the declaration, both true, neither contradicted.
He walked through standing water toward the service road trail, past a site he'd apparently mislabeled in his head — the only pull-through in the loop, and he hadn't realized it. The cute guys were gone. He'd walked all the way up here for them and they'd cleared out. So: the bridge instead, and maybe down to the lake after. I'm gravity. Somebody's going to get propelled into my orbit. It's time.
The trail toward the Highway 101 bridge is a distance, and he narrated the walk the way he narrates a system — moving through the ledger as the ground rose. Tomorrow is Sunday, which is when his week starts; the restrooms all need cleaning and the sites are probably full, since most people leave on weekends. Laundry was done that morning. He'd gone into town, bought Pine-Sol, because the coastal trees were trying to kill him — or the season was, he wasn't sure which. Then the RV: the leak he'd taped back in Brookings that never gave him trouble until here, where the wind and rain come off the dunes at an angle that finds the crack at the top of the slide-out. A crack he couldn't see, because he had no ladder, because the Rangers at the prior site wouldn't let him use theirs — liability rules, he said, and also the homophobic one. So he'd parked the Jeep as close to the RV as it would go, climbed the tire, climbed the hood, and sealed what he could reach. It didn't work. He tried again. It didn't work. He tried again today, and was walking toward the bridge not knowing yet whether it had held.
He'd since learned the slide-out motor probably burned out under the weight of the solar array mounted on that side. Cheap to replace. Easy to do himself. He might, at some point. But he said he'd keep the slide retracted regardless — he likes it that way, it's how his lifestyle works, he gets extra storage, and he is not trying to turn his mobile home into some kind of stationary object. The repair was never about restoring the room. It was about having the option and declining it.
The solar itself was gone — eight thousand dollars of equipment sold for twenty-five hundred. That money went to the Jeep and RV payments, mostly caught up now, still a little behind but not by much, with something left over for food and gas and whatever comes up. He said he felt a lot better about it. He also said it wasn't enough, that he needed more money and needed to buy the solar back before he needs it, and that selling it was a risk — a necessary one. This is how it works. I did it, I don't regret it. The sale left a void space inside the RV, so he'd moved his computer, done some cleaning, not finished. The floor still needed doing. Both freelance profiles were live on Upwork and Guru; the work itself was the next thing to go find. And his back was dying from the sleeping platform, which needed rebuilding.
Then the bathroom, and the part he said he'd never mentioned on camera: since January he's stopped using the campground shower entirely. He cleared his own out of storage and has been using it, and built a routine around it — moisturizers, hydration, the water he's trying to drink instead of the Mountain Dew and the papaya soda he actually drinks. He turned the camera on his own face and called the wrinkles unacceptable, said he hoped it was reversible, said yes he's getting older, and said in the same run of sentences that he doesn't feel his age, doesn't look his age, and looks fucking beautiful. Some command strips had let go and his shelves had fallen down over time; he'd put those back up. Little tasks. That's where he is, that's what he's doing.
He was being playful and said so. He didn't really expect to find anybody out here in the rain, but he was open to it — you never know. It had happened once before, at Cape Blanco, some random guy who turned out to be crazy, though they'd had some fun first. He walked on toward the vantage over 101, where you can look north and look south, and said he had no clue whether he'd post this.