The Search for the Garden of Eden

But the well-studied Elder Poll is unavailable, so I leave.

I return their call a day later.

"What church do you go to?" Sister Hackett asks.

"I don't go to church," I say.

"Oh, you don't? I'm sorry."

"It's OK."

"Do you believe in Jesus Christ?" she asks.

"I'm trying to figure out my beliefs in Jesus Christ," I say. "To be honest with you, I've always fluctuated between believing and being agnostic."

She tells me to keep praying, to keep reading The Book of Mormon.

"Do you pray?" Sister Hackett asks.

"It's very flexible," I say.

"Do you ever feel that you get answers to your prayers?"

"Sometimes," I say.

The truth is, I pray most during Iowa State University football and basketball games. The answer I usually get is that God hates the Cyclones.

I tell her that I'm a writer with the Pitch.

"We don't read the newspapers, but that's cool," she says.

We set up a meeting for the following Monday, but when Monday comes, the sisters cancel. They're chasing souls at an apartment complex at the east side of town at 23rd Street and Wheeling. I convince them to meet me there.

In the parking lot, on a suffocating Kansas City afternoon, Sister Hackett, a longhaired brunette from Utah, and Sister Morris, a mountain-loving blonde from Nevada, ask me the same questions posed during that phone call. They want to know if I believe in God.

"Some days," I tell them.

They seem innocent and incorruptible. Sister Hackett is a year into her mission. Sister Morris still has 15 months to go.

I explain my own mission: to find the Garden of Eden.

They say the Garden is definitely in Independence, but each echoes Sister Mendoza's suggestion that I speak with Elder Poll. My hopes for the Garden now lie with him.

While I wait for a meeting with Elder Poll, missionaries continue to stop by my apartment building, leaving business card versions of billboards posted around the city: "The truth about life's great questions is now restored." One card includes a phone number written on the back with the inscription "Justin, call us." Church telemarketers also call me repeatedly to see if I've received a copy of The Book of Mormon.

Clearly, a full-scale marketing campaign is under way for my soul.

Finally, I decide to see if one of the church's telemarketers can answer my great question: Where is the Garden of Eden? Reed, an unsure-sounding college kid, goes through the formalities: Had I received a book? What did I think?

"I hope that you will continue to read The Book of Mormon," Reed stumbles. "Um, I love to read The Book of Mormon. It's a great retreat from the many other things that aren't so church-related."

"Missouri has a couple of sacred sites, right?" I ask. "Like Adam-ondi-Ahman and the Garden of Eden?"

Reed laughs uncomfortably. "Those are sacred sites," he says. "If I knew where those were, I'd probably try and live there."

"Well, the Garden of Eden is supposed to be in Independence, right?"

"That is where it's supposed to be, right. That's not like one of those hardcore, like, you know, Ten Commandment things, you know," he says. "We don't teach a lot about it."

"No?"

"We teach that that's where Adam and Eve came from and that someday it will be revealed to us where those sites were. But I don't know that those have been revealed or put into stone."

"I'd read some stuff that said Joseph Smith said the Garden of Eden is in Jackson County, Missouri, which is where I live," I explain.

"Well, if Joseph Smith said that, then it must be right. But it's not something that comes up a lot. So I'm sorry, I can't tell you more." A week later, I meet Elder Robert Poll at the Independence visitors' center. He turns out to be a grandfatherly fellow who likes to punctuate his points by slapping my knees. He and his wife left their home in Morgan, Utah, for this voluntary two-year mission. Elder Poll is supposed to be the answer man. Sister Morris and Sister Hackett listen intently as Elder Poll gives me an overview of their church's beliefs.

"If you look on the map and such, Justin, from New York to California, this is kind of the center place," he says of Independence. "It's also to be the place where special things have happened and will happen."

In 1831, Smith dedicated 63 -1/2 acres for a yet-to-be-erected temple — the spot where I found the volleyball net. But by 1833, hostile Missourians drove the Mormons from Jackson County and, by the spring of 1839, the state.

"But it does not release the mandate that the temple of Our Father in Heaven will be built here," Elder Poll says. "Just before his coming, the Second Coming, he will build his temple here in Independence."