Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (15 page)

In nearly every civilization, turtles were considered sacred, appearing in cave drawings, Egyptian petroglyphs, and Native American totems. Mayans saw the earth as a giant turtle afloat in a circular sea. Hindus believe a sea turtle carries the entire universe on its back.

Many cultures worldwide have arrived at similar turtle-centered origin stories. In each version, the world begins covered in water. Only a few animals inhabit the flooded earth, and one of them is a sea turtle, the only animal that can swim down to the bottom and retrieve mud. The turtle dries the mud on its back, providing the first solid earth. More mud is added until it forms Turtle Island. The turtle eventually bears the weight of the entire world on its shell. Many indigenous cultures still refer to the earth as Turtle Island.

For centuries, sea turtles have aided people, especially those lost at sea. Japanese fishermen etched markings on the shells of turtles crawling ashore to nest, so that marked turtles could guide them back home. Sea turtles were even credited with the success of the European colonization of America: because sea turtles can live for years without eating, thousands were stored alive in the holds of explorers’ ships in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The turtle meat sustained them on their long voyages to the new world.

The Seri people in the Gulf of California still sing the sea turtles home to their nesting beaches. Dr. Jeff Seminoff, a marine biologist at the National Marine Fisheries Service, was skeptical of the singing ceremonies until he accompanied two elder Seri fishermen in the late 1990s: “It was a gray, windy day on the water, and our boats nearly capsized. I was wondering what the hell we were doing out there. Then the two elders start singing. It was a low, steady, guttural chant. Instantly, the rain stopped, the wind calmed, and the clouds parted. And—I’m not kidding you—turtles started surfacing around our boats. I was astonished. But the Seri were just matter of fact about it: ‘This is how we sing in the turtles.’ As a scientist, I couldn’t explain it. But there they were.”

Turtles may have even altered the course of science and history in 1835, when Charles Darwin landed in the Galápagos Islands and met the world’s largest living species of turtle, the Galápagos giant tortoise, which weighs nearly nine hundred pounds. Most intriguing to Darwin were the tortoises’ shells. Turtles from each island had slightly different shells, an observation that helped him formulate his theory of evolution.

Today, the turtle is one of the most ancient animals on the planet. It is an unexpected evolutionary star. Instead of taking center stage, it has watched stoically from the sidelines. It hid in the shadows as dinosaurs dominated the planet, settling for durability over dominance. When the lights went out on the dinosaurs, the turtle pensively pondered the furry mammals that stepped forward to shine and, later, the hairless hominids that swarmed across the savanna.

For 230 million years, the humble turtle has plodded onward, enduring drought, volcanic eruptions, million-year glaciations, and meteor impacts. It survived at least three mass extinction events that wiped out 95 percent of the species that ever lived on earth. T-rex and the saber-toothed tiger were far stronger and faster, but in the evolutionary race, the slow and steady turtle won.

Turtles aren’t quite as sluggish as Aesop’s famous fable made them out to be. A softshell turtle can outrun a human on flat land, and sea turtles can swim up to thirty-five miles per hour. But turtles have definitely earned their long-lived reputation. The oldest turtle known to science, Adwaita, lived 255 years. He was born in 1750 in India and, like Gandhi, he was a vegetarian. Adwaita ate the same meal for all ninety-three thousand days of his life—a plentiful mix of lettuce, carrots, wheat, and salt that fueled his stout 550-pound frame. A lifelong bachelor, Adwaita died in 2006 after his shell cracked and infected wounds developed.

Jonathan, a 180-year-old turtle, is the oldest known turtle alive today and the oldest land animal on the planet. He resides in a preserve on the British colonial island of St. Helena, and despite his age, he continues to mate regularly with three younger females.

In 2012, a pair of giant turtles at an Austrian zoo broke up after 115 years together, marking the end of the world’s longest known animal partnership. And in 2013, a pet turtle in a cardboard box was discovered after being accidentally locked in a storage closet for 31 years. It had survived by eating insects and drinking drips of condensation.

No other animals consistently live as long as turtles. They are one of the creatures closest to immortality. Don’t be fooled by their wrinkles and slow pace: turtles don’t really die of old age. Turtles’ organs do not break down over time, and older turtles are actually more fertile than juveniles. Turtles even have the power to stop the ticking of their personal clock. Their heart isn’t exclusively stimulated by nerves, so it doesn’t need to beat constantly, and they can turn it on and off at will. Deep-diving turtles can slow their heartbeat to conserve oxygen: nine minutes can elapse between beats.

Turtles may be able to stop their hearts and live for centuries, but they can’t avoid shrimp trawls, longlines, drift nets, dredges, pollution, disease, oil spills, boat propellers, garbage patches, ocean acidification, dead zones, and beachfront development. On land, crime syndicates sell turtles as food, medicine, pets, and collector’s items on a global black market, where some endangered turtles fetch as much as $60,000. Half of the world’s three hundred species of turtles are headed for extinction—including all seven species of sea turtles. The turtles’ supreme longevity hasn’t spared them from becoming the most endangered reptile on the planet.

Near the end of the summer in 1974, Carol was crouched in the dunes watching a turtle nest near Long Point. It was a cool, breezy September evening around midnight when she saw bright lights moving across the water. Two motorboats bounced along Christmas Creek and landed on Cumberland. When the fishermen’s spotlights flashed across the beach like strobes, the turtle aborted her nest, dribbling eggs behind her as she scampered back to the sea.

Fuming mad, Carol marched up the beach toward the pack of fishermen, who were unloading coolers and lawn chairs. A radio garbled a football game’s play-by-play from their brightly lit beachfront encampment. Carol stood in the shadows.

“Howdy, fellas!” she shouted. One startled angler fell out of his lawn chair. The radio cut off. A scruffy-bearded man wearing a blaze-orange cap and camouflage jacket walked toward her, drawing on a cigarette. A crowd gathered behind their camo-clad leader.

“It’s awfully dark and dangerous for a purty gal like you to be out here alone,” he said.

“I’m sorry, guys, but you can’t fish here,” Carol said. “The beach is closed at night for turtle nesting.”

There was a long silence. Carol stood her ground. The fisherman crushed his cigarette on the beach and blew the last puffs of smoke in her face. “Little lady, I’ve been fishing here since I was a boy. My granddaddy brought me here, long before there was any law telling me where I can and cannot fish.”

Carol’s pulse raced. “I like to fish, too. But this beach is protected at night. There’s plenty of fine fishing back in the creeks.”

The fishermen snickered and crowded closer. Their spokesman tugged on his cap. “No tree hugger is gonna chase me off, especially one with tits.”

The anglers erupted in guffaws and catcalls. Carol casually pulled back the flaps of her unzipped jacket by resting her hands on her hips, revealing the nickelplated .45 pistol tucked in her belt.

“Now listen, fellas, I don’t want any trouble.”

The chew-spitting fisherman stumbled backward over his cooler. The others hurriedly packed up their tackle and loaded up the boats.

The next morning, Sam Candler stopped in to visit Carol, who was changing the oil in the Candler boat.

“Word has spread across the island: there’s a pistol-packin’ mama patrolling the beach.” He grinned. “Any idea who they’re talking about?”

11

Despite Carol’s sleepless summer of all-night turtle patrols, feral hogs had destroyed nearly all of the island’s sea turtle nests. Formerly domesticated pigs released for sport hunting had overrun the island, digging up nests and devouring turtle eggs. To guard the few remaining nests, Carol shot fifty hogs on the beach in one weekend.

Lucy found out and was furious. All of the island hogs belonged to her, Lucy claimed. But Carol continued shooting hogs. An old, crotchety Carnegie heir wasn’t going to stop Carol from hunting feral swine, especially to protect primordial sea turtles.

Lucy had other reasons for not liking Carol. She was an island newcomer and outspoken outsider who didn’t play by the rules. She didn’t obey Lucy’s commands or bow down to Carnegie prestige. Carol thought endangered animals deserved the same rights and protections as people. She was even promoting the idea of a federal wilderness designation on Cumberland Island, a level of environmental protection greater than that provided by the national park.

Worst of all, though, was Carol’s party foul: she had brought a black man, Jesse Bailey, to the Greyfield Christmas festivities one year. Jesse was Carol’s best friend, and she didn’t think anyone would mind him tagging along. But Lucy didn’t like “Negroes” at her private parties. For months afterward, Lucy fumed that Carrion Carol shot all of her hogs, ate ticks, and “kissed Niggermen right in the mouth.”

“I have shot some hogs, and I do smash ticks between my teeth. It’s the fastest and easiest way to kill them,” Carol admitted. “But the only black man I have kissed is Jesse, and only on the cheek. I suppose kissing a black guy was the most shocking thing she could think of, so she gave it a run.”

Lucy and Carol crossed paths one evening at twilight. Carol was riding a wild horse bareback, racing as fast as she could back home to beat the darkness. The first stars were already burning through the dusky sky. Flying through the forest, she saw headlights in the sandy road ahead and slowed her horse to a trot. She stopped beside an idling jeep. It was Lucy.

Carol could see jealousy flicker in the old woman’s eyes. All her life, Lucy loved to race horses, but now that she was in her late seventies, she could no longer ride. Carol hopped down from the stallion.

“You shot my hogs,” Lucy said.

“They’re eating your turtle nests.”

Lucy leered sideways at Carol. “You some kind of turtle hugger?”

“Turtles have just as much of a right to be here as us. Maybe more. They’re the true island matriarchs.”

Lucy glared. “Why are you on my island anyway?”

“It feeds me.”

“Well don’t feed on my hogs. I’m an old woman, but I’m not getting moldy yet. I’m still full of piss and vinegar.”

Lucy got out of the jeep to examine Carol’s horse. She stroked his withers. “I heard about the fishermen you chased off a while back.”

“You’re not the only woman here who can handle a gun,” Carol said.

“I don’t tolerate poachers on my island.”

“I’m on the beach every night. They won’t come ashore on my watch.”

Lucy nodded. “Stop by and see me some time. I won’t bite.”

Carol began visiting the elder island empress every week with a notepad and tape recorder, collecting Lucy’s aging warehouse of knowledge about the island’s natural history. Lucy knew where the alligators denned and bald eagles nested. She had observed the last pocket gophers on the island and the first armadillos to arrive. Carol scribbled down every detail.

“I wish my kids had turned out like you,” Lucy said one afternoon. “None of them give a damn about the natural world.”

Islands are constantly in motion. So was Carol. She worked all day cleaning house for the Candlers and tracked turtles all night on the beach. Carol was propping her eyes open with toothpicks to stay awake. She drank strong home-brewed tea made from island yaupon holly leaves, ate gingersnaps, and snuck in ten-minute naps between turtle crawls.

One moonless night, while waiting for a turtle to finish nesting, Carol curled up beside the turtle and fell asleep. She dreamed that she was back in her cave beside the river, her dog beside her, warmed by a crackling campfire. Then, to her horror, she looked deeper into the flames and saw the burning skeletons of feral cats.

Suddenly, something bumped her. She opened her eyes and forgot completely where she was. All she saw was a large moving animal right next to her face. She sprang to her feet, fists cocked in fighting position, heart pounding. A hot, tingling flash of adrenaline coursed through her veins as she prepared to defend herself against . . . a nesting sea turtle. She unclenched her fists as her hazy-headed awareness slowly returned.

When the first flush of dawn tinted the horizon, Carol hoped to squeeze in a few hours of shut-eye. That’s when she noticed a small dead turtle on the beach: it was a Kemp’s ridley.

“Shucks,” Carol mumbled.

Kemp’s ridleys were especially rare sea turtles. Until the 1960s, scientists weren’t sure they were a separate species because they had never actually seen a ridley nest. For decades, they had searched the globe for nests and come up empty.

Unbeknownst to science, ridley nesting grounds had already been discovered. In 1947, a young pilot named Andres Herrera was flying over a deserted stretch of beach in northeast Mexico when he was awestruck by a stunning sight: forty thousand sea turtles crawling ashore on a single stretch of coastline. Ridleys blanketed the beach. Waves of turtles climbed out of the ocean and over each other, throwing sand and digging in a frisky, feverish nesting frenzy. Herrera could have walked the entire beach on the backs of ridleys and never stepped foot on the sand. Herrera filmed the scene, showed it to family and friends, and then shelved it.

For thirteen years, the film collected dust while biologists continued to scour the world’s shores for ridley nests. Finally, Archie Carr, the father of sea turtle biology, heard rumors about the footage. He teamed up with another turtle biologist to track down the film, and their sleuthing eventually led them to Herrera. Archie teared up like a sea turtle as he watched the faded, flickering, black-and-white footage, scratched and shaky, panning across a Mexican beach completely covered in ridleys. Archie had spent two decades searching for a single nest, and here were tens of thousands of them crammed into a few miracle miles.

The ridleys’ simultaneous mass nesting was called an
arribada
—arrival in Spanish. Other sea turtle species nest at night across several
months in multiple locations, but nearly all Kemp’s ridley females nest on the same day on a single Mexican beach. They travel thousands of miles from as far north as Canada to converge on the same beach on
the same day. No one knows how they communicate the timing of
their mass nesting migration.

Like a flash mob, they storm the beach without warning. Predators are even more surprised by their daylight arrival: fewer coyotes, feral dogs, jackals, and bears are active on the beach during the hot, dry day, and they fill their bellies quickly, allowing most ridleys to nest unmolested.

But soon after scientists discovered the ridley nesting beaches, locals found them, too, and began digging up the ridley eggs to eat and sell. Turtle eggs are used like Viagra in Latin America. Men drop eggs in their beers and chug them, believing that turtle eggs enhance their virility. Even more ridleys died in the nets of bottom-dragging shrimp trawlers. The ridley population crashed, and by the late twentieth century only three hundred ridleys came ashore.

Carol dissected the dead ridley at dawn, skipping her two hours of sleep between sunrise and work. She couldn’t miss an opportunity to look inside the world’s most endangered sea turtle and search for clues to its ongoing massacre. She found one: bloody lungs, which indicated that this sea turtle went into oxygen-starved shock just before death.

Afterward, Carol returned to her cottage and collapsed on the threadbare mattress. She was wrung out from long days of work and sleepless nights on the beach. Her head felt like a can of spray paint turned upside down, the little ball slowly sinking. “I can’t keep this up much longer,” she whispered to herself. She closed her eyes. In the soggy summer heat, the bedsheets stuck to her sweat-damp skin.

Moments later, she heard commotion down at the Candler dock. Carol wiped away a puddle of spittle drooling from the corner of her mouth, dragged herself onto her feet, and groggily opened the door. Across the yard was the governor of Georgia.

Jimmy Carter was staying with the Candlers for the weekend. He often brought Rosalynn and his family to Cumberland, and he wrote in his autobiography that Cumberland Island was his favorite place to reconnect with what really mattered.

At the dock
,
Jesse was casting a net for shrimp, and Jimmy asked if he could try a cast.

“Sho,” Jesse said, handing him the net.

Jimmy bunched the weighted edge in his left hand, twisted back, and flung it like a Frisbee out into the creek. The net slapped the water and sank toward the muddy bottom. Jimmy tugged the net and pulled in a catch of minnows, mullet, and a few plump brown shrimp.

“Not bad fo a guvnuh,” Jesse said. “But you pulled the line fore the net reach the bottom. Dats where the good stuff is at.”

Later that afternoon, Carol and Jimmy strolled along the marsh. Carol plucked a stalk of sweetgrass and twiddled it between her teeth. Jimmy paused and looked out across the marsh.

“I’m planning to run for president,” he told her.

Jimmy confided that he was nervous about his chances. He was a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, population six hundred. He had never held a national office. He didn’t have the finance machinery of the other candidates. “Worst of all, I don’t know how to compromise on any principle I believe is right,” he said. “When it comes to principles, I’m as stubborn as a south Georgia turtle.”

“That’s what will make you a great president,” Carol said.

Word spread quickly about Jimmy Carter’s candidacy. When Jesse heard the news, he laughed. “Jimmy run for president? He’ll win. He know how to talk to people. But I can show him somethin about throwin that net.”

Six Candler families used the compound for vacations, including Buddy, Sam’s older brother. Buddy was domineering and browbeat the hired hands. He screamed at Jesse for being late with his oysters and tongue-lashed Audrey for serving lukewarm meals. He even laid into John for using the wrong rope to tie up the boat.

“These richies are so goddamn spoiled and used to getting their way,” John said.

“Not all of them. Sam’s a good guy,” Carol replied.

“I don’t know how he puts up with these goons. They show up, get drunk, shoot up the place, and then leave.”

“That’s the best part,” said Carol. “They never stay for more than a few days. The rest of the time, we have it all to ourselves.”

Sam Candler visited the island most often. Unlike the others, he was quiet, intelligent, and sensitive. He cared deeply about the island, his property, and the people who looked after it. He loaned money to Jesse, and he gave extra vacation time to George and Audrey so they could visit family on the mainland. And he shared Carol’s passion for protecting the wild.

Once, Sam and Carol hiked together to observe the endangered wood storks nesting in a grove of trees near Lake Whitney. Sam looked through the binoculars at their featherless ash heads, white bodies, and long, hooked bills. Carol nodded toward the reptilian eyes watching them from the lake. “The wood storks wouldn’t be nesting here without the gators,” she said, explaining how the gators ate coons and other predators that tried to raid the wood storks’ nests.

“Gators guarding bird nests. Who woulda thunk it?” Sam said.

Gators protected sea turtles, too, Carol told him. With healthy numbers of alligators behind the dunes, there were fewer coons, hogs, and other nest scavengers.

Carol and Sam walked along the lake’s tangled bank, where shards of coon bones were scattered along the water’s edge. Unlucky coons chancing a drink had been chomped by gators waiting silently below the surface.

“How are things with you and John?” Sam asked on the way back home.

“Lousy.”

“Don’t let my family find out.”

“What do you mean?”

“They still think you and John are engaged.”

His brother Buddy was already looking for a reason to fire Carol. Her rooster had been waking him up early every morning, and he’d finally had enough. At sunrise, he marched over to Carol’s chicken coop with his shotgun. Carol returned from the beach just as Buddy was taking aim.

“What are you doing?” she shouted.

“I’m gonna shoot your goddamn rooster.”

“You’re not gonna touch him,” Carol said, standing between the chickens and the barrel of Buddy’s shotgun.

Buddy lowered his gun and scowled. “You get rid of that rooster, or I’ll get rid of you.”

Carol made new discoveries on nearly every island hike. She followed vultures to hidden alligator dens. She observed a white snail in the dunes that had not been seen for over a century, and she found a new island species of millipede in the still-smoldering duff of a wildfire.