Copyright 2011 by Brook Wilensky-Lanford
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Prologue
In the beginning, I was just following a family rumor. Sometime in 2004, my father told me that my great-uncle William had been looking for the Garden of Eden. William had died in 1971, before I was born, and all I knew about him was that he had lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and was a highly regarded allergist at Columbia Universitys medical center, where his father, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, had discovered the structure of vitamin B1. Most of my fathers relatives were practicing scientists. If they really thought they could find a Biblical place on the rational Earth, the news was surprising, to say the least.
I had to know more. Was it all a joke? Where was the Garden of Eden supposed to be? How were they going to get there? Did they make the trip? What did they find? Dad didnt know, so I tracked down Williams daughter Phoebe, my second cousin, who told me that the rumors were true: her father had been looking for the Garden of Eden. Phoebes parents had both been interested in archaeology and frequently visited the collections of antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sometime in the 1950s, when Phoebe was a young girl, William and his cousin Dallas Sherman, a dashing Pan Am pilot, had hatched a plan to go to Eden, to fly around the suspected area and look for signs of the site.
Phoebe didnt remember where the suspected area was, or what the signs of the site were supposed to be, and anyway the plan never materialized. Needless to say, Phoebe wrote to me, nothing happened beyond what I would have called cocktail chatter.
I admit my heart sank when I heard they never flew to Eden. But something had happened: they believed that there was a place to search for. This was a mystery. If Id thought about it at all, Id assumed that people had stopped believing the Garden of Eden was a real place somewhere back in the Middle Ages, or certainly once the theory of evolution began to show that man had not been created, all at once, in a place mentioned in the Bible. Apparently not.
William and his family had belonged to the venerable Brick Presbyterian Church, and Dallas to St. Bartholomews Episcopal, both of them on Park Avenue. These were surely not the kind of churches that required belief in a literal, six-day creation. And yet my great-uncle still believed in the Garden of Eden. I tried to find Dallas Sherman to see if he could help me understand how this was possible. I did find another elderly airplane pilot named Dallas Sherman who told me wonderful mistaken-identity stories about my great-uncles cousin who, hed just heard, had recently passed away. The trail seemed to have gone cold. But I couldnt get the story out of my head.
I imagined the two of them, William and Dallas, sitting down with a martini at the Union Club, loosening their ties, and mapping the Book of Genesis on a cocktail napkin. Perhaps an olive reminded them of the forbidden fruit and the Tree of Knowledge. Sticklers for scientific accuracy, they might have noticed that the Bible never says apple, just fruit. I could almost hear William discussing what species of fruit Adam and Eve might have eaten, in the same matter-of-fact tone he would have used to discuss hypersensitivity mechanisms and management.
My hyperrational relatives still held out the possibility that science could find the Garden of Eden in the 1950s. Proving that the appleor fruitdoes not fall far from the tree, I, too, looked first to science. There must be some reasonable explanation. Some archaeological find must have been uncovered, some new scroll translated; it must have been in all the newspapers; it must have been huge. Maybe with a little digging of my own I could figure out what this major discovery wasand where. Maybe then I could imagine William and Dallas out of the Union Club and onto a plane.
I began with a subject search in the library catalog for Garden of Eden. There were far too many titles to skim quickly. So I narrowed it down to books published after Darwins On the Origin of Species in 1859 and before Williams death in 1971. That didnt help.
Lo and behold, the Garden of Eden had been found in Iraq, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Mongolia, the Seychelles, Florida, California, Missouri, and Ohio; at the North Pole; under the Mediterranean near Crete; in Sweden, the Persian Gulf, and Egypt. And that list only goes back to the late nineteenth century. No sooner did one authoritative account come along than another popped up to supplant it.
Archaeologists did have theories. But so did college presidents, military officials, country preachers, and ordinary citizens. And every single one of them claimed he could provescientificallythat his was the one perfect spot described in the Book of Genesis. How could I tell whom to believe?
I kept readingbooks, pamphlets, academic journals, and newspaper articles: Want to Get into Garden of Eden for Buck, Ten Cents? Garden of Eden: Its Position on the Globe Definitely Located. Were There Two Gardens of Eden, or Only One? And of course: Paradise Found!
Most of these works, I noticed, belonged only to the local library of their author. I found myself calling manifestos out of cold storage in Ohio and asking the University of Hong Kong to digitize crumbling memoirs for me. Columbia University had a noncirculating copy of the British engineer Sir William Willcockss 1919 book on Eden, but it was still classified as an engineering title, so I was required to read From the Garden of Eden to the Crossing of the Jordan in the engineering library, next to exhausted undergraduates studying biomedicine or atomic energy.
I wished I could have heard the theories out loud from their authors the way their first audiences did, in grand theaters, elite clubs, and tiny churches. Some books arrived still bearing the literal marks of their creators, the next best thing. There was a dedication from the Floridian Elvy E. Callaway to his Baptist alma mater in Jacksonville; a greeting typed on letterhead from Boston University President William Warren to his colleague at Union Theological Seminary, requesting two dollars payment for this copy of
