I can articulate it, surely as I can convince myself I can articulate anything, but I know I cannot understand it...

If I could have...If.

[He exhales, but pushes through.

He smiles wanly.]

Charlotte was guarded about what seemed to me the most trifling things. Never would she tell me what we were to eat for supper; never would she tell me where she walked when she went off on her own or even what she did all day when I was working—she simply promised she would provide on her end and could say nothing more about it. Even when she took me on one of her walks, which she did quite frequently, I somehow knew that it was never the trail she followed on her own, but something created especially for her husband.

Of course, this drove me mad!

Some men might have been keen to have something invented for them so, but not I! How could she deny me the pleasures she knew! How could she keep from me her quiet fervor for quiet routines that somehow centered her better than anyone had the right to be centered, let alone someone with her upbringing? More fundamentally still, how could she keep from me what made her the lovely creature that she was? How could she deny me that understanding?

More perversely still: how could she put me in a position to be jealous of a walk in the woods?

[He laughs.]

Charlotte was never competitive or cruel in the slightest, but I am positive she was as thrilled by that as many married women are thrilled when younger men take the time to flirt with them (to achieve any number of ends): Lansford was jealous of an Indian trail!

[He drinks, making an association he'd rather not admit to, but does:]

Of course, before I had any of Charlotte's trails, there was the matter of my shortcut. Suspicion clouded my arrival back at Sutter's fort and it seemed as though The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California would be doomed as little more than a favored pamphlet or mere bestseller of 1845 until—of all dei ex machina—the Federal Government came along! By some glorious accident of Fate, my shortcut would be included in a mapping project.

Oh, happy day! Victory looked like it might be mine again, but not just yet. As it turned out, Sutter did employ me on a few surveying projects, so my crises calmed a bit. I tried to stay as relevant as possible while not overstepping my bounds, a difficult—if not impossible—task. I accepted that I was a social failure at the fort for the Winter of '46, but hope yet flickered for the Spring!

By March, we had heard the news: it worked! The shortcut—although only tried on horseback and only to the Floating Island, an obscure, lone butte on the Great Salt Flats—definitively existed! I had gambled and I had won! I looked for a chance to step into the limelight just a bit before I soon departed, but the War broke out.