On the second day of Second Chance, I visit Bayon beach, the home of ten of the season’s returning players. I don’t see Keith Nale immediately — he’s not in the water or on the beach with the rest of his tribe. It’s not until I hit the field behind the camp that I finally see him, walking through the trail, hat turned backwards, his eyes darting around, his steps long and slow. In some ways, seeing Keith in his natural Survivor habitat is almost like seeing a ghost. “Some say Old Man Keith never left Koh Rong,” says some cheesy old-timey voice in my head, as I watch the man walk. “Some say he’s still out there in that jungle, wandering around, sticking to his plans, jumping up and scaring you a bit.” Keith looks a little lost, wandering around Bayon on his lonesome, and that fits with what he tells me when we speak at Ponderosa two days earlier. “I’ve lost track… what have we been here, 10 days? Eight days?” he asks me as he sits down across from me, trying to figure out how long it’s been since he was officially selected for Second Chance. “I’ve been trying to keep a little log in my tent. The only way I can figure it out is to look at what I wrote last. I’ll go in there tonight and I’ll say, ‘Okay, well, I talked to Josh, Joe, and Jim — whoever.'” I’m Josh, he’s not allowed to talk to Joe Anglim, and Jim Rice did not make the Second Chance cut. But I get his point. It’s been a long pre-game, and Keith is not much for waiting around. “I’m ready to get this show on the road,” he tells me. Fast forward to two days later, as I’m watching the Keith show on the road of Bayon, getting an inside look at how the man works, literally. Keith tends to his camp, keeping things organized, laying out clothes, adjusting wood piles — all of the sweat-breaking labor you would expect to see from the 55-year-old retired Louisiana firefighter. But he’s doing it on his own right now, and all I can think about is what he said once during his season, when 20-year-old Baylor Wilson wasn’t working hard enough around camp: “It’s hard to find good help.” Keith got plenty of help a couple of weeks earlier, when he was still on the road toward Second Chance. On the night of the live cast selection, Keith was sitting next to Kelly Wiglesworth, the season one Survivor veteran, and the first person confirmed for the new season. After sending Kelly up on stage, Jeff Probst moved away for a minute or so, and Keith thought his chance was over. “I just said, ‘Oh well, so much for that,'” he says. “I’m from a small pool — I’m not from Chicago or New York. I didn’t have a big pool to pull from. So I didn’t think it was going to happen. But lo and behold, here it is!” Here it is indeed: Keith Nale, back on Survivor, almost exactly one year after the first time he played. But things are quite different now than they were in his Nicaragua days. During his season, San Juan del Sur, Keith was competing against his son Wes, and everyone else entered the game with a loved one as well. Many of his season’s players — maybe even most of them — were unfamiliar with Survivor before hitting the beach, Keith included. He was able to earn a fourth-place finish against that field. This time around, the competition is much stiffer, with the 19 other players all coming into Cambodia with Survivor experience under their buffs. “I don’t know if you would say they’re the best of the rest, but they’re who America wanted,” Keith says of the other players. “They’re the best I know, and I can only go back so far.” He proves how far he can go back when he starts name-checking the Survivors he recognizes: “There’s Spencer, Woo, Kass, Jeremy… uh, shoot… Vytas? Bunch of big guys, and strong guys. Girls, too. I think it’s going to be pretty tough.” Keith knows the names of a couple of people from the earlier seasons, if not exactly the details: “I don’t know much about Savage. I don’t know much about Terry.” He does not know what the others are thinking of him, either. “Maybe they think, ‘Keith’s a solid player. He played with integrity. He kinda did it his own way a little bit.’ But it’s hard to get a read.” If he possessed the superpower of heightened hearing, then perhaps he would have his answer; Keith’s name comes up in a couple of the conversations I have with the other Survivors throughout the day, like Stephen Fishbach, who lists players entering Second Chance looking to overcorrect their first games as one of his many anxieties. “Is Keith going to try to be strategic? That’s deadly!” says Fishbach. “How do you assess Keith if he’s not just being Keith?” From what I can gather over the ten minutes I spend with him on the day before the game, Keith’s still Keith. He’s not sharpening his proverbial knives, or fire-axe, or what have you. But he does have some new ideas about how to play Survivor. ON THE NEXT PAGE: Keith Has A Plan, And He’s Sticking To It

Just as Keith haunts the beach of Bayon, four words haunt the man himself: “Stick to the plan.” It’s the phrase he made famous during San Juan del Sur, in the middle of a critical Tribal Council where he was about to blindside one of the season’s power players, Jon Misch. The plan involved Broadway actor Reed Kelly throwing Keith under the bus to establish his cover with Jon’s dominant alliance. Reed’s acting was too convincing for Keith’s liking. “All the sudden it’s bam, idols are everywhere, idols are everywhere,” Keith said, in response to one of Reed’s feigned accusations. “I say stick to the plan.” The four-word phrase went off like a bomb, destroying Reed and Keith’s scheme to take down Jon, and resulting in Keith’s son Wes getting voted out of the tribe. From that moment forward, Keith played without any real allies to speak of, beyond his partnership with Roger That. “I went into my season, like everybody else, not knowing hardly nothing,” he tells me. “I didn’t have an alliance. I kinda winged it on my own and made it to number four. That wasn’t too bad for not knowing what the heck’s going on. But I think I’m going to try and hook up with some people here. Maybe make an alliance.” Keith thinks he could have some luck out in Cambodia with his former San Juan del Sur cast mates, Jeremy Collins and Kelley Wentworth. When I ask if he’s happy to see them back here, Keith responds enthusiastically. “Oh, yeah! Yeah!” But he wonders if they’re as happy to see him, considering his working relationship with both Jeremy and Kelley was tenuous at best. “We got off on the wrong foot a little bit,” he says. “Not too bad. That might be a plus somewhere down the road.” A few minutes after Keith leaves my cabana, Jeremy walks in — and when I ask him how he feels about Keith and Kelley being back for Second Chance, he says it’s “horrible.” So, there’s that. If he can’t get the ball rolling with Jeremy and Kelley, at least Keith has another person from his past season to look at as an example: Natalie Anderson, the winner of San Juan del Sur. “She was a good player,” he says. “She made big moves. That might be what it takes.” But making “big moves” does not seem to be Keith’s preferred speed. At least, it wasn’t when he played the last time. There are countless reasons why Keith felt the need to say “stick to the plan,” from reacting to Reed’s way-too-convincing performance, to his own natural nervousness. But a lot of it seemingly came down to Keith’s discomfort with deception, too. “No more lying,” he told Missy Payne on Day 16 of San Juan del Sur, the morning after a Tribal Council where she wrote his name down, despite the fact that they were aligned. “We don’t have to lie with every other breath. We don’t have to lie.” It’s an aspect of the game that Keith couldn’t master his first time around, and honestly, as we’re talking in Cambodia, I wonder if he has it in him for round two. I also wonder if he needs it. After all, Keith finished his first season in fourth place largely because he was able to win some critical challenges. “I just hit something I was good at,” he says about all that. “Balance, hand-eye… maybe we’ll hit a little something again this season.” But Keith knows that he’s up against stiffer competition on Second Chance, playing alongside some of the most legendary challenge performers in Survivor history. “Every single one of ’em has five, four, three,” he says, trying to count the amount of times his rivals have won immunity. “My three? I’m in the hunt with all the rest of ’em. Like I say, maybe we’ll just find something I’m good at.” Whether or not Keith finds that something this season, there’s little doubt that he’ll be looking. Say what you will about the man, but this is not a Survivor who is afraid to roll up his sleeves and get to work — especially since he feels he has unfinished business. ON THE FINAL PAGE: This Is Why Keith Came Out Of Retirement