Someone had told rswfire about Tacken Creek, and so the day had a destination in it before it had a shape. He hiked it with a friend — the whole day given over to trail and beach — and at the place where the trail runs out, the land stops in the way the Oregon Coast tends to stop: not gradually, but at an edge, with a fixed rope left there by whoever had come before. He had done this once already at Brookings, and that descent had been amazing. Standing above this one, camera up, he sized it against the memory and found it different. Not as steep. The rope was the way down. He took it.
By the time he was filming he was alone in the frame, his friend elsewhere on the beach, wind and surf running under everything he said. It was almost five o'clock. He worked the date out aloud — the last day of August, right, August, yeah — and then placed it: tomorrow was Labor Day, the end of summer, basically a new chapter starting. He said life was going to get better.
He named what had come before without lingering in it. He had gone through something difficult and unexpected and, he stated, honestly difficult to understand — why he would ever be targeted by anybody, when he is not a bad person. He described the effect in structural terms: the experience caused him to put a wall up for a while. Six months of not feeling safe. And then the present tense, which was the point of saying it at all — he is learning to metabolize that experience, getting back to what he named his true core self, and that, he said, is important.
The decision had arrived earlier, out on the beach, in the hours before the camera came up. He had decided he wants to live on a boat and travel the ocean. He stated plainly that this was not something he had ever done or even thought about. But he loves this ocean, and it felt to him like his path had led him there. He said his life had felt on pause for a while, that he had been trying to figure out what he wanted to do — and then: this is it. Once he made the decision, things started falling in place.
Then came the logistics, which he took up in the same breath and in the same voice, as work belonging to him. It will take time. He has a lot to learn. He needs to buy a boat. He needs to find a place for the Jeep, because he loves that Jeep and can't give it up. He won't have the RV forever, and he has no idea for how long. And he already had the shape of the training sequence: go down the coast first, see all the lighthouses, learn the way of living from inside it the same way he had learned the RV. Eventually cross that ocean. Hawaii. He said he knows it's possible.
Something moved behind him in the frame. He registered it — there's a, behind me, I don't like that — and then returned to the thread without ceremony. Excited, he said. A little bit scary. Not like when he moved into the RV; he couldn't explain the difference. He was already thinking about writing it: a whole section on the website called the ocean. The Pacific is right there and there is a lot to learn. He could learn to fish. He could learn to live off the water. He talked about freedom — the places you could go, the things you could see, the way you could live, because we have the technology for it. Then the wind, the surf, the rope behind him up the bank, and the last thing he said before the summer ended: feels aligned.