Callaway wasn't the first to pursue the lost garden. Columbus went inspecting for it in Venezuela. Dr. Livingstone presumed it was in Zambia. John Calvin preached that it lay hidden in Iraq. William Warren, the president of Boston University, took a sabbatical Arctic cruise to confirm its location at the pole. The Garden has been the illusory dream of scientists, kings, writers, and at least one contrarian Southern lawyer. It is a story so compelling they’ve sometimes abandoned gold, tenure, country, and family. I see it as a Puritanism streak to get back to a flawless existence. A natural heaven repopulated. As the thinking goes, we pulled stakes during the Genesis flood. If we could only find our way home, across time and evolution,
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I stare at the ground to spy snakes, conjure a hole in space with my stick to catch the weavers’ nests, one foot in front of the other, singing “And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard rain that’s gonnnna fall!” because singing alerts bears, panthers, and maybe ‘squatch. All this to say, combined with the blanketing humidity, I have a hellacious experience searching for stinking cedars in Eden.
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Upon receiving his mission from Dr. Landone’s Teleois key, Callaway divorced his wife, quit his practice, and left his children. Why he suddenly abandoned the family is unclear. Was his purpose too singular? Could not a twentieth century Eve follow an Adam to reclaim Paradisium? Or maybe she had grown tired of his contrarian back. Perhaps she and the children saw an exit and jumped ship. Calaway’s new property was just south of what would become Torreya State Park. He transformed the land into a road trip attraction. He painted large signs declaring the Garden of Eden to the highways. Tickets went on sale from a kiosk for $1.10. Callaway would refund your money if it rained or if you got lost coming down. …show more content…
The old roots must sprout trunks because the trees do not live long enough to seed. Eventually the stock will rot as the young progeny, before they have time to set out descendants. It strikes me as an irony for the species itself, an ancient tree kept perpetually immature. Like our species, perhaps, stunted by fantasies of innocence. The stinking cedars do not seem at-home amidst all this aggression, crowded by gargantuan beech, ash, palm and short leaf pine. They look shrunken, emancipated, out-of-part, everything else in Florida so robust and deadly. It is only until the sixth torreya that I think so. The sixth is enveloped in a slope where stands of hickories and magnolia and needle palms circle around. At this torreya, all the mosquitoes stop whining, and a sun beam breaks the canopy. This biblical ray, I do not beguile, beholds a twenty-foot evergreen that smells like turpentine and raw sewage. The tree appears as it should in its habitat — a mid-canopy species that is finally again a mid-canopy species. Not riffled and crippled as its cousins crowded by hardwoods, not meek nor
I stare at the ground to spy snakes, conjure a hole in space with my stick to catch the weavers’ nests, one foot in front of the other, singing “And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard rain that’s gonnnna fall!” because singing alerts bears, panthers, and maybe ‘squatch. All this to say, combined with the blanketing humidity, I have a hellacious experience searching for stinking cedars in Eden.
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Upon receiving his mission from Dr. Landone’s Teleois key, Callaway divorced his wife, quit his practice, and left his children. Why he suddenly abandoned the family is unclear. Was his purpose too singular? Could not a twentieth century Eve follow an Adam to reclaim Paradisium? Or maybe she had grown tired of his contrarian back. Perhaps she and the children saw an exit and jumped ship. Calaway’s new property was just south of what would become Torreya State Park. He transformed the land into a road trip attraction. He painted large signs declaring the Garden of Eden to the highways. Tickets went on sale from a kiosk for $1.10. Callaway would refund your money if it rained or if you got lost coming down. …show more content…
The old roots must sprout trunks because the trees do not live long enough to seed. Eventually the stock will rot as the young progeny, before they have time to set out descendants. It strikes me as an irony for the species itself, an ancient tree kept perpetually immature. Like our species, perhaps, stunted by fantasies of innocence. The stinking cedars do not seem at-home amidst all this aggression, crowded by gargantuan beech, ash, palm and short leaf pine. They look shrunken, emancipated, out-of-part, everything else in Florida so robust and deadly. It is only until the sixth torreya that I think so. The sixth is enveloped in a slope where stands of hickories and magnolia and needle palms circle around. At this torreya, all the mosquitoes stop whining, and a sun beam breaks the canopy. This biblical ray, I do not beguile, beholds a twenty-foot evergreen that smells like turpentine and raw sewage. The tree appears as it should in its habitat — a mid-canopy species that is finally again a mid-canopy species. Not riffled and crippled as its cousins crowded by hardwoods, not meek nor