Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (13 page)

9

When Carol returned home, John was in his bathrobe pouring a vodka and Coke. A clean sheet of paper hung limply from his type
writer.

“I thought you were driving the boat this morning,” she said.

“Just finishing up this chapter.”

“Buddy will blow a gasket if you’re late.”

John shrugged. Carol sliced a hunk of horse meat into the skillet, along with a couple of eggs from her hens.

“They’ve got George and Audrey on bells,” he mumbled. “They’re too lazy to get up from the table. They gotta ring a goddamn bell so their black servant can lift a fork to their mouth.”

“Easy, John.” He had been drinking heavily since he started writing his novel.

“I’ll drive their boat and buy their groceries, but I’m not gonna be their slave. If they ring a bell at me, I’m gone.”

“They only put the blacks on bells.”

He tossed back the rest of his drink. “I’m a writer, not some peasant.”

“I don’t like it either. But we gotta do something to earn our keep. I can wipe their ass during the day if it buys me nights on the beach.”

Every evening since she had arrived, Carol had been observing loggerhead sea turtles crawling ashore to nest. She walked along the water’s edge until she came across the V-shaped tractor-tire tread of turtle crawls. On moonless nights, she nearly stumbled over giant sea turtles lumbering up the beach.

With their rear flippers, turtles scooped out flask-shaped holes deep in the dunes. Once they finished digging, Carol huddled behind the turtles like a quarterback and counted the eggs as they dropped from her cloacas. The turtles rocked back and forth, grunting and heaving, as over a hundred eggs dropped one by one coating Carol’s bare hands in a viscous ooze. Because sea turtles drink saltwater, they shed excess salt through tears, which dripped from the corners of the nesting turtles’ eyes. Carol’s eyes were wet, too. She was awestruck by the ancient turtles, matriarchs of mother ocean, elders emerging from the coal-dark water like shadows of the earth’s past.

Two months later, the impregnated dunes spilled their secrets. Beneath the stirring sand, one hundred hatchlings broke through their shells, climbed out of the nest, and scampered to the sea. After witnessing her first turtle nest hatch, Carol wrote in her journal: “It was nothing short of soul stirring—the prehistoric turtles, the wild beach, the transparent darkness, the wind, the primeval pounding surf. There was a feeling of being especially close to the undefinable Source.”

Even as a child, Carol had been especially fascinated with turtles. She once had watched a turtle in her backyard thaw and return to life after freezing. Turtles’ blood acts like antifreeze, allowing them to tolerate extremely cold temperatures. They also can thrive in the hottest, driest deserts. Turtles have spread across every continent except Antarctica and have colonized nearly every ecosystem from mountaintop to ocean floor. Sea turtles can collapse their lungs, enabling them to dive a half-mile deep into the dark ocean. They’ve even been to outer space. Turtles orbited the moon before astronauts: in 1968, the Soviet Union launched an unmanned spacecraft carrying a pair of tortoises, who returned safely to earth after a week in space.

Turtles are one of the oldest animal species still on the planet, dating back 230 million years. They are survivors, enduring the eons with unswerving, steadfast stamina. Their longevity is due largely to their shells. No other animal has built such a bony box around itself. It formed over millions of years as turtles’ ribs widened and fused together. Turtles can’t be detached from their shells, just as we can’t be separated from our spine. Their shells also have nerves and veins embedded in them, so if the shells are injured, the turtles bleed and feel pain.

Large birds can scoop up turtles in their beaks, lift them in the air, and then drop them on rocks to break open their shells. The only human known to be killed by a turtle was the Greek tragedian Aeschylus, whose bald head was mistaken for a rock by an eagle flying overhead.

All turtles, tortoises, and terrapins have shells. Tortoises live only on dry land, turtles live mostly in water, and terrapins live in brackish marshes. Sea turtles are among the few turtles who can’t fully retract their head inside their flattened shells, which are streamlined for swimming through the water.

Sea turtles also have flippers instead of feet, and they’re much larger than other turtles. All seven species of sea turtles are endangered, and five of them nest on Cumberland Island.
Leatherbacks
are the largest, and they have a peculiar third eye—a sensitive, signal-receiving pink splotch on their forehead—that may act as a compass in their ocean navigations.
Kemp’s ridleys
are the smallest and most endangered.
Hawksbill
turtles have shells that change colors—from amber to chocolate—depending on water temperature.
Tortoiseshell—harvested primarily from hawksbill sea turtles—was one of the most popularly traded items in the world for most of human history. It was used to make elegant jewelry, combs, brushes, and ornaments until it was banned in 1973 by the Endangered Species Act.
Green
sea turtles are one of the ocean’s largest vegetarians.
Loggerheads
are the most common turtle to nest on Cumberland and make the longest migrations across the Atlantic.

Loggerhead sea turtles are so named for their broad, block-like head, which is covered in thick mahogany scales with canary yellow borders. The world’s largest loggerhead nesting ground is the Southeastern United States, home to over twenty-five thousand nests each summer, more than half of all loggerhead nests worldwide.

At first, Carol watched the nesting sea turtles from a distance. But her scientific curiosity soon got the best of her. Before long, she was counting eggs, measuring shell lengths, and flagging the buried nests so she could watch them hatch a few months later.

She stayed all night on the beach with the turtles. She slept only a couple of hours, between sunrise and 8
A.M.
, when she had to report for work at the Candler compound. Usually she crashed in the dunes just before dawn and let the sun wake her. When she opened her eyes after the black-and-white night, she was swallowed up in color: the sapphire sky, the golden sea oats along the dunes, the clouds hanging like pink fluffs of cotton candy above the water. The island iridescence invigorated her every morning, helping her slog through the day’s housekeeping and maintenance, so she could do it all over again the next night.

Carol soon joined the island’s turtle tagging project, one of the first in the country, which the University of Georgia had launched in the late 1960s. Her friend Rebecca Bell, who worked for the university and lived on Little Cumberland Island, taught Carol how to staple the metal identification tags into nesting turtles’ front flippers. Later, Cumberland was the first place to use satellite tags, which enabled researchers to follow sea turtles after they left the beach. Turtles tagged on Cumberland were found feeding along the coasts of Africa, South America, and northern Europe.

Research on Cumberland also showed that sea turtles return to nest on the same beaches where they were born. Biologists used genetics and tagging to confirm that turtles who hatched on Cumberland traveled across the Atlantic, and then thirty years later swam back to their birthplace to nest. It was an astounding—and puzzling—discovery of one of nature’s longest and most remarkable migrations: a creature returning to a pinpoint target after three decades at sea. How could turtles find their way back to their home beaches from thousands of miles away? Was it millions of years of patterned instinct, or was it observational clues that they followed? How did their grape-sized brain guide them back to the exact beach where they had hatched thirty years earlier?

Carol published her first scientific paper on sea turtle migration patterns in the mid-1970s. She believed that the turtles likely used a variety of tools, including scent markings on the beach, underwater topography, positions of the sun and stars, and motions of the currents and tides. However, Carol suspected that the earth’s magnetic field was their primary map, and the iron compounds in the turtles’ brains were their compass needles.

Carol was deeply intrigued by the turtle navigational mystery, but she also worried about the impacts of tagging. To tag a turtle, Carol grabbed the rim of the turtle’s shell and flipped her onto her back. It was no easy feat: a 120-pound woman hoisting a 300-pound turtle upside down. The turtles snapped their razor-sharp jaws, flailing and groaning. Quickly, Carol stapled metal tags into the turtle’s cartilaginous front flippers. Then she rolled the turtle back onto her belly. Turtles often flung sand at her as they crawled away.

“I could tell a tagged turtle just by reaching for her flipper,” Carol said. “If she had been tagged before, she jumped as soon as I touched her. Untagged turtles didn’t jump. That taught me two things: turtles feel pain, and turtles remember.”

Did the turtles remember Carol when they crawled ashore to nest? She certainly remembered them. Hundreds of turtles nested on Cumberland, and by the end of her first summer she could identify dozens of them on sight, even before checking their flipper tags. One of them was the giant loggerhead turtle that Carol later rode bareback. The easiest to recognize was an old female loggerhead whose left rear flipper had been chewed off by sharks. Carol named her Stumpy. Stumpy’s one-flipper tracks in the sand were unmistakable, and she nested seven times in Carol’s first summer.

Stumpy couldn’t dig her nests very easily with only one rear flipper, so Carol helped her scoop out sand. She also vigilantly guarded Stumpy’s nests, shooting scavenging hogs in the dunes nearly every night. Two months later, on a still, sticky midsummer evening, Carol noticed dimples in the sand above one of the nests. The bubbling beach erupted into a boil of hatchlings clambering out of their shells and flapping toward the surface.

Amid the mosh pit madness, the first gritty, gooey hatchlings climbed onto the beach and scrambled down the dunes. Carol chased away ghost crabs scuttling toward an easy feast: over one hundred morsels of turtle meat scraping their way out of a hole. They groped and stumbled over each other, leaving ribbons of sand trails as they made their mad dash to the sea.

Night herons dive-bombed the hatchling parade, grabbing a beakful of fast food. Other hatchlings got stuck in rutted vehicle tracks, where ghost crabs gobbled them up. A raccoon waited at the bottom of the dunes, picking off hatchlings as they skittered past. Emptied hatchling husks were strewn across the sand.

Only a trickle of turtles made it to the ocean, where each sliding pane of water lifted them from the beach like a spatula lifting cookies off a tray. Stalking the surf were hungry crabs, fish, and sharks. But these hundred hatchlings had a shot at life, and they were ready to take their chances in the wild waters.

Carol walked back to the nest. A lone hatchling remained buried in the clutter of broken shells. It raised a front flipper helplessly, mired in goo and sand. In the dunes, the raccoon skulked closer, and the antennae eyes of a ghost crab watched her.

Carol was a practical, matter-of-fact scientist who understood the hard laws of nature. Crabs and coons had to eat, too. But sea turtles were on the brink of extinction. So she scooped up the hatchling and carried her down to the ocean’s edge.

“You’re on your own from here,” she said. Carol set the hatchling onto the wet sand. The baby turtle flapped frantically as the tide washed beneath her and carried her out to sea.

Thanks to satellite tagging technology and genetics, biologists can track turtles on their nine-thousand-mile migrations, and they can chart and even re-create a turtle’s journey from hatchling to adulthood across the open ocean, like the one made by Carol’s rescued hatchling. Her journey began on Cumberland Island. At the ocean’s edge, the hatchling dipped her snout into the wet sand and imprinted the scene on her brain, recording the magnetic energy of wind and wave converging there.

Then the water swept beneath her, and she gasped for air amid the choppy surf. The tides spun her sideways and knocked her upside down. Panicked, she thrashed her flippers and breathed the last of the oxygen in her lungs. Her pebble-sized heart pounded harder. Acid flooded her arteries. Her body went limp. She started to drown.

As she sank, the undertow swept her out beyond the big waves. It was calmer out here—and deeper. Drawn to light, the hatchling instinctively and desperately swam toward the moonlit water above her. She popped to the surface and gulped in the air. For a moment, she rested in the embrace of the ocean, bobbing and rocking in the gentle waves beyond the surf.

Her brothers and sisters were nowhere to be found. Hatchlings face tough odds: only one in ten thousand reaches maturity. Most don’t make it off the beach. Out of the hundreds of nests laid each summer on Cumberland, perhaps one or two hatchlings will survive.

The hatchling was alone and adrift on the ocean, dodging jaws in the dark waters below. She had no teeth, and her shell had not hardened. A bird’s shadow passed overhead. She could not float on the exposed surface much longer. She glanced back at the beach where she was born. Then she dove and began a three-day, nonstop swim.

Underwater, she was built for speed. Her shell was smooth and streamlined. Her blunted rear flippers acted as rudders, while her long front flippers were her oars. Her body—the weight of a triple-A battery—would be powered by these hinged water wings on a journey crossing one-third of the planet.