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Forget what they taught you in Sunday school. The Garden of Eden isn’t in Mesopotamia. It’s off Highway 20, in northern Florida.

Drive 43 miles west of the state capital Tallahassee and you’ll reach Bristol, Liberty County. It’s a small, dusty town of dirt roads, shabby bungalows and yawning caravans. Paltry clapboard houses sit back from the highway. No building is higher than a single storey, apart from the red brick jail. When I was last in town two prisoners were hosing down a patrol car in a caged recreation yard. The deputy sheriff leaned against the razor wire, under a basketball hoop, chewing gum.

I’d heard about a Baptist minister, Elvy E. Callaway, who claimed that mankind had been created on the banks of the Florida’s Apalachicola River. Callaway studied the matter for 75 years and, as proof, quoted from Genesis that ‘a river went out of Eden to water the Garden and parted and became four heads.’ He maintained that the Apalachicola was the only four-headed river system in the world. He also noted that the rare gopher wood tree, the Torreya taxifolia, grew only in two places: the Panhandle...and Eden.

I aimed for the utilitarian City Hall. The single face of the town clock glared at a vacant lot. Red hibiscus bloomed around it, tended by more prisoners in striped trousers. I cut across the coarse grass to the bare entrance. A forgotten note - ‘Gone to sawmill. Back shortly’ - clung to the wall on a curl of Scotch tape. I tried the door. It opened.

Behind the glass partition was a Confederate patriarch; ash white skin, shadow thin, sitting bolt upright in the straight hard chair. He wore a crisp, tie-less Sunday shirt buttoned to the collar.

“Now I can’t say that I recognise you, son,” he said to me without looking up. He was at once amicable, courteous and guarded. “You payin’ the water bill for a relative?”

“I’m looking for the mayor,” I said.

“Mayor’s gone up to Sink to catch bullheads. Won’t be back ‘til Friday.”

“Then I wonder if you know a Mr. E. E. Callaway?” I asked.

“Sure do,” he replied, easing himself up from his chair, his movements stiff. “But he won’t be much use to you. Elvy’s been dead near on twenty years.”

“Can you...?” I started to say, then hesitated. Bristol was as much Eden as Dunblane is Gomorrah. I didn’t want his laughter to chase me back onto the hot, weary street. “Can you direct me to the Garden of Eden?”

“The Garden of Eden?” repeated the old man.

I waited for the guffaw, or at least a chuckle. Instead he joined his hands together as if in prayer.

“They say it was here,” he told me, “but it’s only the whisper of a claim.”

“Here in town?” I asked. “In Bristol?”

“Just up the road a few miles. Turn left off Highway 270. It’s real near to the spot where the ark was built.”

“Noah’s ark?”

“None other.” I wasn’t prepared for the Ark.

“I’m no oceanographer,” he said in his honeyed drawl, “but they say if you check the tides and currents of the oceans that was probable at that time, you’ll find that they’d carry a vessel without a rudder straight from Bristol to Mount Ararat.”
The notion stuck me as preposterous.

“Why don’t you come inside and sit down?” he suggested. “I hate talking through this glass thing.”
I did. And he offered to take me to Eden.

On the drive out to the Garden I saw no cherubim with flaming sword guarding the way to the Tree of Life. More surprisingly, there were no roadside restaurants called Adam’s Ribs or grocery stores selling Eden apples. The patriarch, whose name was Willy Prophet, remembered that there had been once a kiosk at the end of Garden of Eden Road, but the building was now derelict and for sale.

“Is this it?” I asked him, both excited and sceptical, as he turned onto a dirt track. We parked at the edge of the sandhill forest and followed a drifting trail through the sparse, longleaf pines. It was hot in the sun and Willy hurried ahead, anxious to reach the cool cover of beech and evergreen.

“Not good for anything much except to hold the world together,” he said, pointing at the odd clumps of wire grass, tufted like a punk’s hair. “Near extinct too.”

His pace slowed when we entered the pale shade of the slope forest. The green canopy darkened the path as it angled down to the edge of the steephead ravine. Over the lip, one hundred feet below, were the leafy tops of magnolias, sweetbay and oaks, Cicadas buzzed in the trees beneath us. Black-winged dragonflies darted into the valley.

“Is that it?” We plunged into the deep, narrow ravine, grasping for handholds on the sheer sidewalls, disturbing spiders’ silk strands strung across the path. The treetops rose up to meet us and we slid down beside their thick trunks. We twisted through the snarled barrier of dense evergreen shrub, tangled with laurel and holly. The temperature dropped again. I heard running water, smelt sweet rotting leaves and fell into the humid embrace of the valley floor.

I didn’t ask again if we’ve arrived.

Over millennia a crystal clear creek had undercut the slope to create the hidden canyon. At the place where it sprang from the toe of the valley wall I crouched down to dip my fingers in the fresh water. There were newts and dusky salamanders in its sandy shallows. Water beetles pushed against its current. Underfoot were soft mosses and minute, delicate ferns.

I whispered thanks to Willy for bringing me here.

The ravine was shaped like a natural amphitheatre, the tiers of lush vegetation rising above us on all sides. A chestnut-brown wren flew off from its feeding. We walked on through the fragile valley watching for diamondbacks and indigo snakes, maybe even for a serpent. The track rose out of the basin of sweet air and toward the Apalachicola, climbing up between the hickory and the oaks, back into the sultry afternoon. I tried to stay in the shade, ducking beneath the delicate brown flower heads of the Spanish moss.

The Garden - or Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve - supports a remarkable range of plant life. Conservationists classify it as a ‘paleorefugia’, a refuge of ancient flora and fauna stranded during the retreat of glaciers and unchanged for millions of years. There are subtropical pines on its sandy uplands, mountain laurel on the steepheads and northern hydrangea in the depths of the primeval ravines. Its river system sustains the greatest variety of amphibians and reptiles in North America. As far back as the 1830s, botanists puzzled over the valley’s strange mix of native, northern and alien plant species, many of which were extinct elsewhere.

I wondered again why the site hadn’t been developed into a tourist destination. The sanctity of the ravines could have been defiled by a Genesis Walk and kids’ Serpent Slide. The last few gopher wood trees could have been uprooted to make a replica Ark (‘Meet Mr. & Mrs. Noah! Count the animals, two by two!’). The park shop would do a steady trade in ‘Like Naked’ Fig Leaf swimwear. The Reserve could be transformed into a homely, family attraction that would be simplistic and idiotic. It might still happen, of course.

Willy led me the last few steps through the upland forest and out onto the crest of the bluff. There were gopher tortoises here and above us swallow-tailed kites. One hundred feet below the broad, khaki Apalachicola meandered from the southern Appalachians to the Gulf of Mexico.

Man may not have been formed of the dust of this ground, the breath of life puffed into his nostrils. There may not have been hereabouts every beast of the field and fowl of the air. But the Panhandle’s Garden did fill me with a sense of awe. I felt at once tranquil and emotional. Under the sun it occurred to me that what was special was not whether Eden was here, but that locals believed in its existence. Or wanted to believe in it.

“So where is the apple tree?” I asked Willy.

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