At one in the afternoon on a November day that had no business being this warm, rswfire turned the camera around so it faced the trail instead of his face, and let his voice carry the record. He was near Driftwood, walking a path whose name he could not immediately retrieve — not lost, he made that clear, just momentarily without the label. I know where I am. I just can't remember the name of the trail. The sun was full. The air was warm enough to be called a blessing this late in the year. He had already taken Buddy out to the ocean that morning, and Bill had gone up to the work center with the laundry, which is also where rswfire lives, a fact he noted with some amusement. He had been invited back. He declined. He wanted to be outside, and he wanted a different route than the one he already knew by heart.
Day six. He said it early and returned to it repeatedly, the way a person checks a fixed point while moving. Six days without nicotine — no vaping, no smoking, none of it. Thirty-two years since he started, and this was the furthest he had ever gotten. He described the discomfort accurately and without weight: a few moments that felt uncomfortable, that was the word he settled on, and then the correction — I totally got this. His body was getting better. He was starting to feel more centered. He estimated a couple more days before centered became the baseline rather than the direction. Then he moved on, because the walk was the thing, and because he had decided to give this its focus and let the rest wait.
The name came back to him mid-stride. Stagecoach. He said it twice, once in discovery and once in confirmation, and then crossed the street toward Waxmyrtle. Along the way his attention drifted forward into the material — a bicycle, a ten-speed, the first thing he would buy when he could buy something purely for himself. A mattress after that, since he had been sleeping on air. He set the thought down almost as soon as he picked it up. Not now. Six days. This first.
The squirrels were audible in the trees before the bridge came into view. The bridge crosses the Siuslaw and delivers you into Waxmyrtle, which rswfire named as his favorite place here, unqualified, by far. Lagoon sat second, and Lagoon had a trail, and at the junction he stood with the ocean behind him and admitted he was almost tempted. Waxmyrtle would be busy — he would have to keep pausing the camera. So he chose the peaceful one, walking in the opposite direction of the beach he had set out for, on the understanding that he would come back to this spot and go there later.
What followed was a survey conducted by someone who administers the ground. He read the site boards and worked the numbering out loud — 35 here, so this is probably 34 or 33, numbers descending in this direction, then confirmation: 34. A good spot, he judged, one of the perfect ones if you wanted to be beside the trail and the lagoon. He passed a bathroom and identified it as his, part of his territory, though he had not yet had to do anything here. He remembered the secondary bathrooms he had forgotten. He tested whether a loop was closed for the winter season and found that it was. He checked whether the water still worked. It did. He noted the pull-out sites, remembered seeing them eight months ago when he first arrived, and mentioned his own back-in site that runs the opposite direction from the one you'd expect, which made it hard, and which he managed, and which he was proud of.
Then he arrived at 131. He had lived at this site for two weeks, off grid, immediately after Honeyman removed him and immediately before he started volunteering for the Forest Service. He called it sacred, and then corrected himself slightly — honestly — as if to mark that the word was not decoration. He noticed he did not think he had ever run a campfire here, and found that mildly surprising given how many he has had since. He said he had been trying to get his light back together in this spot.
He gave the sequence plainly, standing on the ground where it began. The Forest Service took him in. He served them well. They promoted him, gave him his own campground, then made him a caretaker with his own routes and a truck to drive them in. Pretty remarkable life I've built. And then the origin, stated as fact and as cause rather than as injury: it all started right here, because Honeyman threw him out. That wasn't easy. He survived it. He is starting to thrive now.
People were approaching, so he ended it there. The last stretch went unrecorded except for music over the footage — the trail continuing toward the ocean he had turned away from and would come back to, the river behind him, the campground he administers laid out in loops and numbers on ground he can name in full.