During a series of trips over the next year and a half, I put several thousand miles on various rental cars and stayed at more cheap motels than I care to remember. I waded through waist-high prairie grass crawling with ticks, struggled on foot up dusty inclines in the Rockies, walked the salt flats of Utah in withering heat, tromped through snow up to my hips in the Sierra, following Sarah’s footsteps as closely as I reasonably could wherever she went. In all of this, I saw and felt many things that have enriched my understanding of her story and I hope have enriched my telling of it. Every step of the way, though, it has never been far from my mind that I have not experienced a fraction of the discomfort and hardship that Sarah experienced on any given day during her extraordinary journey toward the ever-declining western sun.

在接下来的一年半的一系列旅行中，我租了几千英里的车，住的汽车旅馆比我想起来的便宜多了。我涉水穿过齐腰高的草原，草地上爬满了虱子；我徒步艰难地爬上落基山脉上尘土飞扬的斜坡；我在酷热中漫步在犹他州的盐碱地；我在雪地里踩到了我的臀部；无论萨拉走到哪里，我都尽可能地紧跟着她的脚步。在这一切中，我看到和感受到了许多东西，这些东西丰富了我对她的故事的理解，我希望也丰富了我对她的讲述。然而，每一步，我都在想，在莎拉走向夕阳的非凡旅程中，我从未经历过任何一天所经历的不适和困苦。