Word: eden
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Eden Jacobowitz, who garnered national attention in 1993 when he faced racial-harassment charges for yelling, "Shut up, you water buffalo," to a group of African American women outside his high-rise window, has settled his 1996 lawsuit against the University...
...best way to reach the garden of Eden, I found, was to fly into Kansas City, Mo., rent a car and drive north on Interstate 35 for two hours, exiting at a town named Cameron and following the signs to Adam-ondi-Ahman. The place was marked on my atlas merely as a "Mormon shrine," but having grown up as a Mormon, I knew better. According to Joseph Smith, the farm-boy prophet who at 14 felt his first heavenly inklings and by 30 had attracted thousands of followers, this was where God created humankind and where Christ would return...
...drove east out of Eden across the Mississippi, reflecting that perhaps Smith's prophecies were not so wacky after all. Even Mark Twain (a notorious Mormon mocker who famously dissed the Book of Mormon as "chloroform in print") set his own idyllic fables along the riverway. Indeed, if God had planted Eden in America, he could not have found better soil or growing weather. Even the air smells fertile in northern Missouri--humid, rich and fertile--almost malted...
...around me devout believers watered horses, repaired bent wagon wheels, fed bottles to crying infants. In just a few days, to quote their ancestors, they would cross the mountains and be "safe in Zion." I could not help wishing them well. In their epic trek across Smith's American Eden, they have lost more paradises than they've found...
...poet often berates himself for not having hymned the "unrelenting mercy of light" and the "shallows' scriptures" of his native St. Lucia as he should. In the end, however, he realizes that what has sustained him all along are the "immortelle" and "wild mammy-apple" of his "generous Eden." As the waves of his melodious argument wash up at last on the shores of thanksgiving and affirmation, one realizes that there is no more serious, or more sonorous, writer living...