And...Charlotte...Charlotte sensed this as she sensed all; Charlotte so much as told me told me that she smelled it—her sense of smell seemed to sharpen keenly, hideously, now 200 miles removed from the Pacific Ocean. I asked her about this once and she replied rather flatly that there was nothing much else to smell in Yuma.

So, yes, I moved us all Yuma and yes I found comfort in what I can only now call a mirage! I made a mirage of myself and surely as I made myself a thousand other things I hate! I settled into hell unwittingly, but let me ask you this, Dear Reader: do you suppose California was ever more real? Lansford and his young bride roaming meadows no man owned—least of all Lansford? Is there such a thing as a greater reality? Go West as I did—if ever you can—and only then shall you learn.

You shall not like the answer, Dear Reader, you shall in fact hate it much as I hated...much as I hated...

[Somewhat paradoxically, resigns himself to his panic, at this point his mileu:]

Charlotte was known for her indifference to her beauty and I suppose had grown indifferent as that beauty—and the beauty of California itself! Who can beg a beach's forgiveness? Who can cry to a Monterey Cypress? I had betrayed Charlotte, California, my love...I had broken the simplest of promises...Succeeding in something as simple, something as ludicrous and something even as silly as vowing to protect my young fiancée from the State of California as we looked out to sea, all those years before: I had taken away Charlotte's ocean.

† December 16, 1846

But by the onset of December 1846, the Donner Party's own mirage of normalcy revealed itself as a gothic horror—only more real in its powers of oppression. The snows in the Sierra Nevadas were already half a dozen feet deep after a couple of blizzards and multiple smaller storms. John Breen had begun to keep a diary, wherein he noted, "Fine clear day beautiful sunshine thawing a little looks delightful after the long snow storm...Stanton & Graves manufacturing [sic] snow shoes for another mountain scrabble."

This attempt would fail in yet another blizzard.