Work in Progress
Shopping For Eden is now also shopping for a publisher. I’ve been working on this memoir, off and on, for almost ten years – it’s taken so long because I’ve been living the book while writing it. It is the most deeply personal, funniest, most painful and ecstatic book I have written.
The book tells the story of a man (me) who – as usual – finds himself favored by the Seven Gods of Luck and makes a small fortune in the stock market in the late 1990s, then sets out to fulfill a lifelong dream: To buy and preserve a fantastically beautiful wild place, a geographical Eden. My budget: $5 million dollars. I tramp some of North America’s most rapturous real estate, from Montana to Alaska, Belize to rural Virginia to the seacoast of Maine. But in the course of my search – at first completely unbenownst to me — my marriage begins coming unravelled and my wayward son goes down in flames. Ultimately, after divorce, financial setbacks, coming to terms with alcoholism and my failures as a parent, I discover what Dorothy found out: That Eden is not a place on the map, but a country of the heart.
Excerpt
This passage describes a scene in which my brother Larry and I have been dropped off by a float plane on a remote 4,200-acre tract of land on the Kenai penninsula, in Alaska, where we intend to camp for the night while investigating the property, which is for sale for $3.8 million dollars.
“Lar and I take a compass bearing on a pair of dead spruce trees on top of a knoll near the bluffs: 70 degrees NEE. We mark our current position on the lakeshore with a pair of crossed sticks. Then we set off down an imaginary line strung between the two points, heading directly for the spruces, north-east-east. Almost immediately, the pleasant, marshy lakeshore gives way to a dense alder thicket full of whipping branches and a thick understory of ferns, elderberries, wild rose, cow parsnip and something that looks like a wild relative of larkspur.
“This stuff is like the briarpatch that protects the maiden princess,” Lar mutters irritably.
But the plant that quickly makes our lives even more miserable than they already are is a towering bush six to eight feet high with huge palmated leaves, hollow stems that go “pop” when you step on them, and wicked, serrated thorns. It’s called “devil’s club,” because it bears a club- or grape-like cluster of reddish fruits, rather like sumac. As it happens, it is only later that we learn that devil’s club is basically lollipops for bears — that we are walking directly into a snackbar for 900-pound carnivores. That this very sort of thicket is laughingly known by old Alaska hands as “puckerbush,” because of what the presence of raw fear does to a certain sphincter muscle, owing to the fact that bears can charge through this stuff at thirty-five miles an hour while humans merely flounder in it helplessly, awaiting the arrival of their fate.
Actually, though, no old Alaska hand really needs to tell us this. Everywhere we turn, there are places where enormous bodies have knocked down the thicket into shady daybeds — very recently. And everywhere we look, there are heaps of bear scat big as hubcaps, some of it so fresh it almost seems to be steaming. It’s now transparently obvious that we are thrashing our way, unarmed, through Bear Heaven.
Suddenly we both stop and look at each other.
“Actually — this is really spooky, man,” I say to Lar. “I mean, you think it’s a good idea to be doing this?”
“Well, what else are we supposed to do?” he says. “We’ve got no way out until the plane comes back tomorrow. It’s too wet to camp by the lake, and there are probably just as many bears down there, too. Might as well just keep going.”
“Great idea, coming up here,” he adds, helpfully.
We’re tenderfeet in Alaska bear country, and there’s nothing to do but belittle one another…”
