The heat came first. rswfire walked the eighth of a mile from the campground he caretakes at Siltcoos out to the open beach, phone in hand, and the day met him with heat and an ocean he greeted out loud before he had finished saying where he had come from. Fog stood offshore in a bank thick enough to blur the horizon. Dark clouds sat behind it. He wondered aloud whether rain would come and said that it would be nice. The tide was moving in. He announced his intention to trace some waves and called it a perfect day for it.
He walked in the direction where ATVs are permitted. The other stretch was open too, but a bird the state protects has closed much of it, and so he takes this way by habit. He noted, as he walked, that the camera mic had been failing on recent videos and that there was nothing to be done — the phone dropped too many times, gotten wet, the same fate his phones tend to meet, and the external mics sold months ago to keep his operation running. The tide interrupted him. A wave came up and he moved higher on the beach, said again that he loved this ocean, and kept walking. It was only noon.
The beach was unusually full. rswfire paused his narration when people passed, describing the reluctance not as concern about their judgment but as something that felt false in him — he did not want to look like a man lost in a phone rather than in the world, though he stated plainly that he was experiencing it. A loose dog ran the sand. He mentioned he had almost brought his neighbor's dog along but that the animal pulls him the whole way, and he had wanted the beach on its own terms. The fog to one side was too heavy to trace the water through, so he turned and went the other direction. He spoke about the mist that cascades through the campground on strong wind, how it must be water and yet nothing gets wet, and said the curiosity of it stayed with him. Then, in passing and without weight: maybe there was a cute man out here somewhere, though he was not counting on it. He kept walking.
He had already had a full day and he laid it out as he went. He had woken and done his paperwork. He had checked the thing running on his website — a local model he had configured for recursive processing, which he stated these models do not do well by default, and which took him time to work out before he got it working. It was live now, moving through his transmissions oldest to newest, generating titles and summaries on the listings and a whole layer of structure on the transmission pages themselves, built from the transcripts of nearly two years of his life on video. He described this as the first step. Then he stepped aside to let a group of people pass, and pointed the camera back at the water.
Toward the river mouth he expected quieter ground. He said he was glad people were out enjoying the beach, that this was a wonderful stretch of land, that the ocean here is completely open. He spoke of wanting to return to Cape Blanco, of missing it, of wanting to see Humbug Mountain and wondering whether he could climb it — deciding that he could, that he was all healed up. He said he was feeling his age lately and named the likely cause as compression, from a whole lot of things. Another wave came up. He moved again.
Then he named the pressure directly. He is under stress. He is going to lose the RV and has to figure out how to replace it before that happens. He has been applying to freelance work on Upwork for months and the proposals are not read — not rejected, not looked at — and he said he has thoughts about that but that the point is he cannot find freelance work, and that this has never been a problem in his life. He pursued a gas station job for two months of stopgap income; a man hired him and then was not there on the day he was to start and never called back. It felt, he said, like the world was trying very hard to keep him where he is, and that it sucks. And then, in the same breath, without pivot or resolution: he is navigating, because that is what he does.
He circled back to where he had started the account and filled in the rest of it — five loops around the campground with the neighbor's dog, time on the roof with his shirt off in the sun, rounds still to do in the evening because it was early yet. Mondays and Tuesdays are his days off, which makes Wednesday the head of his week, a little more to carry, split between morning and afternoon. There was a lot going on. He said he just needed to see the ocean, that he feels it is the one thing that truly receives him. He tried to switch the camera to show the birds working the water in front of him, and the switch failed. He let it go, said that was all right, and closed: that was his update for now.