McPhee’s California book, and the fourth of the Annals volumes. He drove I-80 across the state with Eldridge Moores, a Davis geologist who read ancient seafloor for a living, and the story they told is that California isn’t one place. It’s a wreck pile. Islands, seamounts, and slabs of ocean crust rafted in on moving plates over millions of years, jammed against the edge of the continent, and stuck there. Moores could stand on a ridge in the Coast Range and point at rock that used to be the bottom of an ocean nobody has a name for. There’s a long stretch on the Gold Rush, where the gold came from and what hydraulic mining did to the rivers, and McPhee happened to be in the Bay Area when Loma Prieta hit in 1989, so the earthquake lands in the middle of the book with the ground still moving.