Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

California is a place apart.

Gold chasers went west until the ocean stopped them, and there in that remote and beautiful land, separated from the rest of the world by desert and mountain, prairie and ocean, they saw there could be no more moving on. They would have to stop and make a life here.

Civil society, post Civil War. A motley of argonauts, infused with Manifest Destiny and gold fever, also with Emerson and Thoreau, Lincoln and Twain, their own John Muir. They said to each other, Here at the end of the road it had better be different, or else world history has come to naught.

So they did many things, good and bad. In the end it turned out the same as everywhere else, maybe a little more so.

p. 155

I love it - California as the end of the road, the end of the world. But them I am an unabashed Californian.