The Garden of Swampy Eden

In the beginning Yahweh God planted a swampy garden in Eden, and it was good, with fecund soil for every kind of tree: Royal Bald Cypresses, Red and Black Mangroves, and the Torreya Tree, that stinking yew which is a holy relic of an ancient time, even before the Ice Age, which Noah cut for gopher wood.

A river flowed from Eden to water the sawgrass marshes, and from there it diverged into four streams:  The Pishon – which is called the Fish Pond Creek – that gurgles all through the land.  The second is the Gishon, which is the Flint River, flowing through the red hills of Georgia.  The third is named the Tigris, but everyone around here calls it the Chattahoochee, and the fourth is the Spring Creek Euphrates, which empties into the Gulf of Mexico.

Yahweh God took the man and settled him in the steephead ravines of Eden to cultivate and exploit it, giving him this command: “You are free to consume all that you desire.  Devour it all, until it is gone.”

Then the man said, “It is not good that this land should go unused.  What good is it?  What benefit can be derived from it?  What profit earned?”  So he dug deep into the earth and from the soil he extracted dark coal and oil.  But still there was no energy, no power, no profit.  So in a deep and oblivious sleep the man cut down the trees and damned the rivers.  Then he built refineries and a coal fired power plant and, at last, he had power for power and wealth.  

This is why a man will leave his father and his mother and become attached to the control of affluence, and they will become one polluted flesh.

Now the man had electricity for his many electronic devices and fuel for his multiplied automobiles, and he felt no shame.  No shame at all. But the blue-black Indigo snake was subtle, the most subtle of all the animals that Yahweh God had made, but his habitat was destroyed and he died without any descendants.  He is extinct among the animals wild and tame, going down into the dust of history.

Photos from Florida Memory of the "Garden of Eden" tourist attraction and Biblical site built by E.E. Callaway.