Oh, to be so sure again! Oh, would that it had been a perpetual season! When you're young, all you know is spring! When I first saw California, it was July, but I was young, so all the world was April on the threshold of May! All of life was about to bloom—and there I was in California, so sure she'd be my June bride, mission bells pealing and wild lupine dotting her strawberry-blond hair! Bluebonnets to match her turquoise eyes.

Much as the horizon had resolved itself into the Pacific on my journey West, I thought time was but another thing I'd meet halfway. I thought for sure my future was in those fogs, the morning mists that would settle in my hair and mat it the faster I rode. I would press on those newly cut trails through fields and meadows faster and faster, determined to come out soaked one day, determined to feel my fate palpably on prickled, shivering skin—to be somehow psychically certain that the place was mine.

My morning rides grew longer and longer and, somehow, the more determined I grew to hold onto those low-lying clouds, the more paradoxically aimless those rides became, until, one day, the mists finally resolved themselves into something.

[The fiddler commences some barroom fiddling, such as "Loop #4, Spirits".]

I passed so many an evening with Sutter beside the great fire that splashed the whole fort orange. Sutter, I'll allow was usually across the room. I had another long day of riding—where or why I could not tell you now—but the simple velocity of my thoughts was exhausting. I got myself a drink and settled in at a table by myself. The warm lip of the clean glass and the hot glow of the whiskey therein burned my nostrils like the tantalizing pressure of a woman's fingernails upon my thigh. The whiskers I had grown against the winter so nearly grazed the cheek of my fair liquid mistress when someone tapped me on the shoulder—and informed me that my presence was requested across the room.

Sutter—Sutter winked my way! He winked with all the globe of a great gas-blue eye! I did not make my way across the room so much as float! Sutter, of course, had already made my acquaintance. I held out for the hope that he might employ me in some surveying work, but he caught me off-guard: it had come to his attention—he announced to no one in particular and everyone within an earshot—that I intended to write a book.

An entire row of conspicuously multinational, grizzled faces arrayed along the bar snapped around toward me; the heat of their gazes hit me harder than the whiskey. Sutter smirked. I'm sure a fur trapper whistled and a Mexican did whatever it is that Mexicans do.

"Vas this true?"

I took but a second to marvel—how did he know? Had some spy seen me writing? Was I deemed worth spying upon?—before a certain showman's instinct seized me, as it never had before in my life. I had the great man's ear and I would be damned if I let it slip away!

I laughed humbly (to stall a moment) and then commenced to inform him it was to be...a memoir \—of sorts. It would be a memoir but one that encouraged others to follow my example and make better lives out West!