Wednesday morning, nine o'clock, and rswfire has most of the route behind him. He stops back at Carter Lake — not because the stop requires it, but because he decides to hike a little way in and turn the camera on. He is in Forest Service uniform, jacket over it, and he angles himself so the logo stays out of frame. He says why: he could get them in trouble. He doesn't, and so the recording can be marked for the sanctum when the system takes it in. He notes, in the same breath, that he doesn't know when he'll upload it, because he still has to build the technology that receives it.
That is where the plan comes out. A fresh repository when he gets back from rounds. Laravel and Livewire, Alpine — which he has never used, but which keeps coming up and looks interesting — and Tailwind. Built locally, deliberately, so that what is already live stays untouched until he is ready to replace it on his own timing. Inside one installation he describes three domains as one architecture: builtwithautonomy.com as the API and documentation layer, autonomyrealms.com as the user service where the signals live, and rswfire.com transitioned in as a consumer that pulls signal data through the API — his own homepage standing as the working demonstration of how something gets built on top of Autonomy. He says he's excited about it. He says it's a lot of work, and that the work isn't the part he minds.
The part he names as difficult arrives without transition, in the same continuous track: financially he is not doing well, and he does not know how to maintain the momentum he is trying to build. He states it, states that it sucks, states that it is what it is, and says he's going to keep pushing forward as best he can. Then the trail keeps going and so does he.
There is something else he decides he should probably talk about. A couple of weeks earlier, hiking at Tahkenitch Creek trailhead, he passed a man jogging in the forest. White truck, state plates, no agency marked, nothing on it at all — he had seen the man there before, seen the truck there before. He said hi. He describes hearing the sound of his own voice as it left him: surprise in it, interest, something close to invitation, and he says he was surprised at himself, because that is not his normal reaction to someone. The man did not say hi back. He looked at him — angry, uncomfortable, rswfire says, reaching for the word. At the time he read it as a state employee who had heard about what happened to him at Oregon State Parks and was reacting to that.
This morning, on this trail, the facts converge. That was the man who confronted him at Oregon State Parks while he was cleaning the earth alone and every ranger was away at a regional event. He states he can't know with certainty and won't unless he encounters him again and can ask, but that his instincts tell him that's who it was — Katie Baker got a local guy to question him, and nine months later the same local guy was jogging his route and didn't have the courage to say hello. He describes how this works for him: not deduction across an afternoon, but sudden convergence, and then the knowing. I just fucking know. He registers the attraction openly and without apology in the same sentence as the identification — the cute fucking man, the hot motherfucker — and says, still laughing, that if the man had spoken, if he had recognized him in the moment, he would have laughed, because that's the kind of person he is. He notes what he understands them to say about him: unstable, volatile, something like that, he doesn't fully know how they paint him. He says it is so far from the truth, and moves on.
The conditions are their own thread and get the same attention. He would have gone down to the beach, but the access from Carter Lake is flooded, impassable — and it hasn't rained in weeks, and the forecast shows another week without it, which he calls wonderful and immediately reads forward into a dry summer. Everything is wet without raining. His sinuses have been acting up for days; he attributes it to the coast, then revises to the dunes. He is hiking back toward the truck.
Three stops left. Five or six trash bags already in the truck bed, a heavy day for it. He'll finish the route, go home, and start the project — built in a framework he knows, PHP, which he has used all his life, Laravel from the client he worked with for five to ten years, Livewire new to him but reading as blade templates with reactive markup, modern front-end behavior without leaving the language. He says he's going to build something cool. Then, closing, he says he's doing pretty good, and that he wishes money weren't so tight. He lists what he has tried: the gas station, 7-Eleven, Upwork where clients don't look, Guru which is dead. He states what he actually wants, which is for Autonomy Realms to succeed, and what that requires, which is runway. He lists what is in the trailer: eggs, potatoes, rice and beans. No meat. He says that sucks. He says it is what it is. And the recording ends with him still on the trail, walking back to the truck to go finish the route.