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Our 29-foot rented motor home rested precariously on the shoulder of a county road in the low rolling hills of southern Alabama, just outside the town of Prattville. It was midday in June, and the sun was beating down through a cloudless sky. The view from the motor home's "family room" window: thousands of makeshift wooden crosses leaning this way and that. Some were only a couple feet high, hastily slapped together from scrap wood. Others, towering from a crumbling bluff above the road, were taller than telephone poles. Most of them bore messages, brushed on in red or black or white capital letters:
YOU WILL DIE
HELL IS HOT HOT HOT
Among the crosses were scrap wood and rusty metal boxes bearing similar proclamations and warnings:
GOD SAID THE WORLD COMING TO A END
RICH MAN IN HELL REPENT
A few yards farther up the road, a makeshift row of old metal housings from air-conditioning window units lined a dirt driveway like junkyard luminarias, each cleverly conveying a message with a refrigeration theme:
NO ICE WATER IN HELL! FIRE HOT!
TOO LATE IN HELL FIRE WATER
These AC luminarias led the way to the tiny ranch-style home of Bill and Marzell Rice, creators and proprietors of this 11-acre collage of shouting crosses and junked appliances that they call Cross Garden.
My wife, Clover, and our two kids, Sophie, 11, and Seth, 7, had decided to wait in the motor home while I talked with Bill and Marzell about their unusual horticulture. Although we'd been on the road for less than two weeks at that point, our voyage into the strange and sometimes wonderful religious worlds of roadside America had really begun several months earlier, on another road trip. We were driving from Washington to Cleveland through the Appalachian highlands of northwestern Maryland on Interstate 68. As we crested a rolling hill just outside the quaint old town of Frostburg, we saw what initially looked like a steel-girder framework for a four- floor parking garage standing alone in a grassy field about 50 yards from the highway. In front of it was a large blue sign:
NOAH'S ARK BEING REBUILT HERE!
A multilevel parking garage in such a place as this would have been...