He had been awake since six. By ten-thirty the outside of the site was mostly gone — the gear stowed, the small accumulations of two months' hosting folded back into the rig — and rswfire stood inside the RV with a camera and no script, deciding in real time what he wanted to say. Two and a half hours remained before the one o'clock departure. He talked the way a person talks when the hands are still busy and the mouth is catching up, pausing to think it through, circling back.
The first thing he named was the help. Someone had done something kind, and he acknowledged it without describing it, holding the shape of another person's privacy while marking that it would make a difference for him. Then the call. The volunteer coordinator for the whole program was reviewing the matter, and he would hear by Friday whether he could stay. A holding pattern, he called it, and left it there for a moment while the packing continued.
The tent structure was still standing — the last thing he would take down, deliberately last. He explained its history to the camera: a first one he had gotten rid of because he couldn't fold it, and then a second, smaller, bought a couple of months ago when hosting started to feel like it warranted one, on the urging of another volunteer. The smaller one looked just as hard. He said he would play with it. That was the whole plan. Once he figured something out, it became second nature.
The tanks were empty. That single fact reorganized everything downstream: he would be a normal visitor now, running on his own tanks, which meant the months of showering inside were over and the shower bag had to come back out and the campground showers had to come back into the routine. He walked through the reconfiguration out loud — little things like that — and then said he liked it. He liked being adaptable. He liked his life, his lifestyle. He was feeling pretty good.
He did not know what would happen. The call had been hard to read. He credited it where credit was due: he had felt listened to. He also felt the institutional impulse to protect, and named the good chance that he would be removed from the entire program. Against that he set what he knew — that he was a valuable member of the volunteer community, that the guests told him so constantly, that he was always helping people because that is what he does, that most of the rangers were very cool and the issues had been local to this place. The past two months here had largely been wonderful. Awesome, he said.
Then he tracked the mechanics. He could see how certain things that had happened were being reframed, rearranged into a narrative, because that is what they do. The story being assembled was that this was really about his communication style. He named what that phrase was standing in for: his clarity, his depth, his presence. And he said he was not apologizing for those things anymore — that arriving at the point where he no longer let other people make him small, no longer accepted being treated as a problem when he was not one, had been part of his journey. Unfair treatment on the basis of who someone is, he said, is ethically wrong, and not something he would ever accept. If he was removed, he was removed for being himself. That was the reason. And that reason, he said, would say everything about them and nothing about him. Then he left it there.
What remained was the drive. Two months since the rig had moved, and he noted a little bit of nerves over that. The park was very, very full, so it would mean careful navigation out of the loop, then finding a place to pull over and hook up the Jeep. After that, a campground south of here, and the work of figuring out what he was doing with his life — because it seemed he was in another liminal state, where that becomes necessary. He wished everyone a good week and said he would keep them posted.