The 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 to rule the earth.
I parked in a lot beside two other cars, both of which had Utah plates, and followed a path to a posted overlook. I had been here before, as a devout 14-year-old on a church-led bus tour. Now, a more skeptical adult, I wanted to follow the Mormon trail again, traveling (in the order of settlement) from Missouri, Joseph Smith's abortive Zion, back east to Nauvoo, Ill., the first true Mormon city, then west along the route of exile to Salt Lake City, Utah. Preserving and highlighting the past is a Mormon priority--witness the re-enactment of the wagon train. Leaders of the church seem to understand that its vivid history, as much as its sometimes cloudy theology, is what attracts the potential convert.
Standing beside a clean-cut young couple dressed rather formally for the summer weather, I looked out over Adam's home, a broad green valley that is currently planted in corn. Smith planned a town here that never took hold, just one among several Mormon promised lands, from Kirtland, Ohio, to Independence, Mo., that he and his flock were violently driven from. The public did not like Mormons in those days (segments of it still don't) and charged them with a host of crimes ranging from fraternizing with native "savages" to advocating the abolition of slavery. Smith's early church was a radical institution. It preached communitarian economics, the brotherhood of man and polygamy. But perhaps Smith's deepest break from orthodoxy had to do with geography, not theology: he taught that the New Jerusalem was here, smack dab in the middle of America.
I 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.