It was gold, the possibility that any lucky knucklehead could get rich overnight, that first sucked people to California and allowed America to fulfill its manifest destiny. But the remarkable climate and fecundity were also part of the original appeal, a dream-come-true whether or not you’d hit pay dirt (yet). The place might as well have been the Garden of Eden—warm, fertile, soft, fragrant. Anything could grow there, and California after the Gold Rush, filled with hundreds of thousands of uprooted seekers, became a place for cultivating every sort of wishful fantasy. Maybe it wasn’t
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