Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (16 page)

She studied everything from the tiny to the titanic. She kept jars of roaches and kissing bugs on her kitchen table to observe their reproductive habits, and she published a paper on the whales of Georgia based on her dissections of dead carcasses that had washed ashore.

In 1978, Carol discovered a new island species of sundew, a carnivorous plant, and one summer afternoon, she invited John to see it. They bushwhacked through tick-infested palmetto and arrived at the edge of a small pond.

“Where is it?” John asked.

“You’re standing on it,” she said.

Carol bent down to photograph the plant. The viscous fluid on the sundew’s leaves shimmered like diamonds in the filtered sunlight of the forest. “Insects think it’s nectar. Really it’s a trap,” Carol explained.

They watched a fruit fly circle the sundew and land on one of its sparkling drops. The fly’s legs stuck to the glistening glue. It tried to squirm free from the gooey grasp as the sundew’s pink tendrils slowly wrapped its body, stinging it with digestive enzymes that dissolved the bug alive.

Afterward, John and Carol hiked out together to Terrapin Point, an open spread of mudflats along the island’s western rim, and watched the sun sink into the marsh.

“What’s happening with us? I left everything to come here with you,” John said.

“I never asked you to do that. I never asked you for anything.”

“That’s the problem. You think you don’t need anyone.”

“I don’t.”

A clapper rail rattled its lonely call across the marsh.

“This isn’t some fling,” John replied. “I’m looking for someone to share my life with.”

An aching blue silence swallowed the sky. Carol watched a line of pelicans sail across it. “I can’t be that person for you,” she said.

John bit his lip. “You’re like that goddamn sundew! You’re a man trap! You lure guys in and eat them alive.”

John stormed back to the cottage, and eventually Carol followed. She had nowhere else to go. And if the Candlers found out they weren’t together, they’d both get sacked. So she moved all of her belongings—a desk, a mattress, a microscope, and several shelves of books—to the rear room of their cottage, and she came and went through the back door.

She walled herself off emotionally, too. She stopped talking to John, and her silence only amplified his anger, which occasionally fomented into full-blown fury. The tirades were heard by the Candler family, who began asking questions.

John drank heavily for the next few months. He and Jesse liquored up at the Candler dock and went fishing together. He abandoned his novel completely. “I’m just so damn lonesome,” he confided to his friend Robert Coram.

Soon after his breakup with Carol, John began dating a young girl working at one of the Carnegie mansions on Cumberland. She spent weekends with John, and Carol heard them through the thin cottage walls.

Her name was Lum. She was twenty-six years old and had lived on a sailboat for a year before throwing anchor on Cumberland to work at the Greyfield Inn. After a few months, she left her job at the inn and moved in with John.

To escape the noisy cottage, Carol began spending even more time in the wild. She climbed high into trees to watch ospreys nest and waded deep into swampy burrows to count gator eggs. She necropsied every dead sea turtle that washed ashore and befriended the vultures feasting on their carcasses.

She found another new friend unexpectedly one afternoon while examining a dead otter. She lifted the carcass, and wedged beneath it was a baby otter, still clutching his dead mother’s teat. Carol could feel his heart pounding. She stroked his throat with her finger. Then she scooped up the infant otter and carried him in her shirt pocket. The whiskered ball of charcoal gray fur licked her hand with his smooth pink tongue.

She named the otter Gator and bottle-fed him for several months. During the day, Gator splashed in an outdoor bathtub and a shallow pond Carol built for him. Carol had to teach the otter pup how to swim. He clung tightly to Carol’s braids and screamed at first. But after a few days, Gator was rolling and splashing in the water, chirping and grunting playfully. At night, Gator curled up at the foot of Carol’s mattress.

Gator followed Carol everywhere. On land, Gator resembled a dachshund, with his short legs and long, tubular body. He especially loved trips to the creek, where Carol gathered mullet for him. Carol hoped that Gator would eventually swim away on his own. But he always followed Carol back home, bounding behind her, tail held high.

Carol made new human friends, too. Louie and Betty McKee, a wealthy couple from Jacksonville, built a vacation house on the north end of Cumberland Island. When they came over to the island on weekends, Carol often joined them for drinks and fiddle music on their front porch.

She also began hanging out with Gogo Ferguson, the raven-haired Carnegie heiress who helped her grandmother Lucy Ferguson run the Greyfield Inn on the island’s south end. Gogo was disarmingly beautiful, with olive skin, a petite, chiseled frame, and flashing eyes like Carol.

Gogo’s real name was Janet. She had earned her nickname as a baby when her first words were not
ga-ga
but
go-go.
She was born in 1951 and lived in Massachusetts most of her life, but beginning at age four, when her parents divorced, she and her two brothers got shipped down to Cumberland for the summers to stay with Grandma Lucy at Greyfield.

“We’d go looking for turtles at night,” Gogo recalled. “Back then before the park was here we were allowed to, I think, in the ’60s we had dirt bikes, motorcyles . . . It was like
The Lord of the Flies.
We had the run of the island.”

While her parents were having cocktails at Greyfield, Gogo and her cousins frolicked on the beach and motored from mansion to mansion. Gogo especially enjoyed swinging the big bell for dinner at Plum Orchard mansion and swimming in its indoor pool. At Dungeness, they played games of “murder mansion” in the spooky, abandoned manor.

Gogo attended boarding school in New England and majored in art at Southeastern Massachusetts University. After college, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. She bounced around and traveled, and she worked for a year making candy sculptures for a confectionery shop. Then, at age twenty-eight, Gogo came back to the island to help Lucy manage the Greyfield Inn, one of the most exclusive bed and breakfasts in the country and the only commercial establishment on Cumberland Island. Rooms at the inn boast emerald velvet Chesterfield couches, wing chairs, four-poster beds, and sturdy clawfoot tubs. Guests spend the day hiking, reading, bicycling, kayaking, fishing, relaxing on the beach, and going on naturalist-led vehicle tours of the island. In the evenings, they gather in the dining room, feasting on fresh seafood, oatmeal molasses bread, and mocha torte.

“When my dad opened the inn it was black tie,” Gogo recalled. “It was very formal. I remember women always in long skirts, evening skirts or evening dresses. . . . I loved that.” In the late 1970s, when Gogo first managed the inn with Lucy, men still wore sport coat and tie to dinner.

“My grandmother was my inspiration and teacher as a child,” says Gogo. But later on, as manager of Greyfield, Gogo found that her grandmother had strong opinions about how the inn, and the island, should be managed. “It was her home and if she wanted people up at 6:30, she wanted ‘em up at 6:30. She could care less whether it was an inn. It was her home and we were not allowed to change any of the bedspreads. ” Committed to the inn, Gogo worked long hard hours for her imperious grandmother.

Both Gogo and Carol were young women mending broken hearts and trying to find their place in the world. Both had married and divorced at a young age. They even resembled each other: both were slim, strong, dark-haired, and as beautiful as the island that they loved. Though Gogo now denies it, Carol remembers that she and Gogo hiked together to Lake Whitney to watch the gators, strolled the beach collecting seashells, and waded knee-deep in the mudflats near Hush Your Mouth in search of delectable bivalves.

Carol persuaded Gogo to join her on the island’s volunteer fire crew, where they wrestled with heavy hoses and learned how to cut firebreaks. Gogo and Carol took flying lessons together—along with Gogo’s brother and others. Carol got woozy on their maiden voyages, but soon the sickness subsided, and she relished soaring over the island with the pilot instructor. Below them, the island came into view: a green forested gem sparkling with the sunflash of lake and tidal creek. They marveled at the vastness and vulnerability of Cumberland. Its emerald forest, marshy labyrinths, and yellow ribbon of beach seemed even more precious from the air.

Both women hoped to protect the island, though they had different ideas about how it should be accomplished.
Gogo and her family supported the park, but they also placed a high value on their private stewardship of Cumberland. Carol felt public management and stronger wilderness protections were best for the island.

Though Gogo denies it, she and Carol strolled the beach together one afternoon talking about men, marriage, and mistakes. Carol confided in Gogo about her troubles with John. (Gogo denies that this took place.)

“He is a mess right now,” Carol said. “I’m not going to let him pull me down the drain with him.”

Gogo, Carol recalled, suggested that perhaps she was just scared of having real feelings for anyone.

“No guy is worth it,” Carol said. “I have more important things to do than get caught up in emotional drama.”

Gogo was having relationship issues of her own. She had fallen for a handsome park ranger, but Lucy disapproved of the relationship. According to Carol, Lucy asked the Park Service to transfer him from the island.

Gogo left Greyfield for a two-month vacation in Scotland, but when she returned, Lucy had replaced her as manager of the inn. “I was just devastated,” Gogo said.

So she left the island and moved to D.C. Ben Fuller, an art dealer she had met at the Greyfield Inn, asked her to work in his gallery. He was fond of wearing a double-breasted suit with his long hair tied back in ponytail. After six weeks together, they married. Ben ended up embarrassing Gogo and her family by using the Carnegie name to sell his paintings. Gogo had a daughter with him, but they divorced a year later.

“It was a mistake, but we have an incredible child and so it wasn’t that much of a mistake,” Gogo said.

Gogo still returned to Cumberland for vacations, and she met up with Carol for long walks and talks. On their hikes together, Carol often pointed out bones and skeletons of island wildlife: the rib of a rattlesnake, the femur of a bobcat, the vertebra of an alligator.

Like her grandmother, Gogo had always been interested in animal bones. But Gogo’s interest was less scientific and more artistic. She saw a bare beauty in the curve of a horse skull or the shell of an armadillo. Gogo eventually decided to make jewelry out of her Cumberland collections. She later opened a shop in Martha’s Vineyard, where she spent part of the year, and fashioned pendants and earrings out of bone and shell mixed with turquoise, jade, and onyx and cast in silver and gold. Her jewelry was earthy and elegant, raw and refined, and it soon dangled from the ears and wrists of high-end clients such as Goldie Hawn and Carly Simon.

In the summer of 1978, Carol stopped by one of Louie McKee’s parties before heading out to the beach. Louie had connected his radio to a car battery and was blasting Johnny Cash tunes. A group of Greyfield gals were already drunk and singing loudly. Carol tossed back a tumbler of gin and joined them. They used spoons as pretend microphones and sang “Ring of Fire” until their throats hurt.

Louie watched Carol singing from the porch steps while his wife cavorted with the fiddle player. John and Lum were at the party, too, tangled up together on the porch swing. Just before Carol left for the beach, John sauntered over.

“Howdy stranger,” he said. “I wanted to let you know: Lum and I are getting married.”

Carol caught her breath and tried to smile. “That’s great, John. I’m really happy for you.”

“We’re gonna leave the Candlers. I’m done working like a slave.”

“Jesse will miss you,” Carol said. “I will, too.”

He smiled at her one last time. The light in his eyes had returned and, inside, she felt a flicker of the lost feelings she once had for him. But the man she had loved was long gone—and so was the woman who had once fallen for him. All she could do was walk away.

That night, she found herself alone once again on a dark beach. The wash of the tides soothed her sadness.

The turtles crawled ashore in record numbers that night: she tagged ten turtles and marked as many nests. Just before sunrise, Carol waded into the ocean and rinsed off her forearms, caked in guts and goo. Ten yards away, a pod of dolphins arced across the water. Sleek and silver, they talked to each other with whistles, clicks, and buzzes that sounded like zippers ripping open. Carol felt a light vibration in her chest as one dolphin rolled past her. Its wet, unblinking eyes met hers.

Carol watched the sun climb out of the ocean before returning home. The glowing apricot painted the clouds with streaks of salmon and lilac. It was a soft, tender sky that hurt her heart. Fatigue had peeled back her skin, and every sensation touched a raw nerve. Her knees felt weak, and she longed for someone to lean against.