Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (26 page)

Ultimately, the director of the National Park Service, William Whalen, was dispatched to Cumberland to determine the park’s final plan: a vehicle-accessible island enjoyed by the masses or a protected wilderness off-limits to development.

A soft-spoken, curly-headed thirty-six-year-old, Whalen was the youngest director in National Park Service history. Too much emphasis had been placed on iconic parks like the Grand Canyon and Glacier, he believed. In his first two years, he had successfully refocused the agency toward developing more accessible national parks such as the Golden Gate National Recreation Area outside of San Francisco and the Martin Luther King National Historic Site in Atlanta. Whalen created more than thirty new national parks closer to urban centers, and he even coined the agency’s new motto: parks for people.

Cumberland Island was expected to attract throngs of visitors from Atlanta and Jacksonville until Carol’s grassroots gang started throwing around the
W
-word. Wilderness had not been part of the original plan for Cumberland. Whalen braced himself for a bitter feud. He stepped off the ferry onto Cumberland wearing his crisp, ash-gray National Park Service uniform shirt with the trademark arrowhead patch on its sleeve, tight-fitting olive slacks, and a wide-brimmed straw hat.

McCrary drove Whalen all over the island, mapping out plans for tour routes and visitor centers. They discussed budgets and timelines. Then, near the end of his visit, Whalen met with Carol alone. This hike was Carol’s last chance and only hope of saving her wild island.

The forest was alive with chickadees trilling and woodpeckers drilling. They walked a twisting filament of trail beneath mossy oaks out to the beach. Atop the dunes, Carol launched into her laundry list of reasons for protecting wilderness: pharmacy, cathedral, art gallery, life support system. Whalen interrupted her in mid-sentence.

“I’ve heard all this before, Carol,” he said, waving her off. “Here’s what I really want to know: Why bother with protecting all of this just for the animals to enjoy?”

“Animals love life just as much as we do. They deserve some of the last crumbs of wildness we have left.”

“But animals don’t pay taxes to support this park. Don’t get me wrong. I love nature. I’ve devoted my life to it. But there are practical, real-world considerations. Wilderness is pretty and peaceful, but it’s a relic that’s mostly irrelevant to modern life.”

“Then we’re headed for forests without animals and a completely tamed planet of people and their pets. Instead of ‘lions and tigers and bears, oh my!’ we’re reducing our world to poodles and gerbils and goldfish, oh well.”

Whalen gazed out across the glassy ocean, a mirror of the peach skies above. Pink tufts of cloud hugged the horizon.

“The National Park Service is not a charity organization,” he said. “We have to balance our budget. Visitation supports our work. Most Americans will probably never visit a wilderness area. They want something easier and more accessible. Don’t hard-working Americans deserve a scenic drive on the beach? A comfortable place to rest and relax on their few days of vacation from grinding city life? After all, they’re the ones footing the bill for this place.”

Carol felt words crowding at the exit to her brain, all fighting at once to fit through the door. Which ones should she let through the gate? She took a deep breath.

“At our core, we hunger for something deeper. We long for contact with raw wildness, where we can see our connection to the bigger picture. In wilderness, we find something far greater than ourselves. That can’t happen in a tourist playpen.”

“I get that. But my job is to get people into parks, not exclude them from pristine wilderness areas.”

“Wilderness doesn’t exclude people. It just requires that we change our behavior when we’re in it. It’s like going to church. People don’t live there. They just visit once a week. As soon as they enter, they’re more mindful, more respectful. Even if they don’t listen to the preacher’s words, they get the feeling behind them, the feeling of being a part of something larger. Communion. A feeling of belonging.”

“We can get that feeling just as easily from a paved nature trail in a city park. Why do we have to set aside giant swaths of wilderness?”

“We need the whole web, not just a few strands.”

For several minutes, they stood silently, listening to the lilt of the tides, the setting sun throwing sparks across the waves. Then they heard the grumble of a distant motor. McCrary drove up the beach, scattering flocks of shorebirds, and swerved to a stop beside them.

“We better get you back to the dock,” McCrary said. Whalen climbed in the air-conditioned truck and held the door open for Carol.

“I think I’ll walk,” she said.

She trudged back to the dock, flat as a deflated beach ball. Her words had not been convincing. Her wilderness campaign had fallen short. Whalen seemed set on a people-centered park instead of a nature-centered one.

Carol arrived back at the dock just as Whalen was boarding the ferry to leave. She walked to the end of the creaking wooden pier to say goodbye. The ferry captain blasted his horn, and his deckhands untied the boat from the dock.

“Wait—” Carol said to Whalen. “I think you’re making a big mistake. You already have dozens of populated parks and not a single island wilderness—”

“I’ve already made my decision,” Whalen said, cutting her off again. The boat began to pull away from the dock. “I made it this afternoon, when you finally stopped talking, and we stood silently on the dunes, hearing only the wind and the waves.”

The following week, newspaper headlines announced: “Park nixes development plans for Cumberland.” Instead of one million annual visitors, the park would maintain a limit of three hundred visitors per day. Instead of nonstop, round-the-clock ferry service to the island, the park would offer only two trips a day. No new buildings or accommodations would be constructed on the island. No vehicle tours would be offered. Most importantly, the National Park Service would support wilderness for the northern half of the island.

According to one editorial, “Carol Ruckdeschel almost singlehandedly stopped the development and vehicle shuttle plans for Cumberland Island. . . . Superintendent McCrary must have an extreme case of chapped rear.” He was transferred to another park soon after.

The public had rallied, and the leaders had listened. For once, the system had worked. They had defeated the park’s development plan.

But the wilderness war had yet to be won. The Cumberland Island Wilderness bill still remained hopelessly stalled in Congress, mainly due to pushback from locals. So the wilderness purists rolled up their sleeves and got muddy rolling around in down-and-dirty south Georgia politics.

Bill Mankin met with legislators to push forward the wilderness bill, sleeping in his car and brushing his teeth in McDonald’s bathrooms. Hans Neuhauser garnered key political support from Georgia representatives and spoke before congressional committees about the wilderness bill that he and Carol had basically written. Carol continued rallying grassroots support for wilderness.

The Carnegies initially went along with the wilderness proposal. Only later, after skirmishes over Plum Orchard’s restoration and Greyfield’s vehicle tours, did they object to the wilderness designation.

Other wilderness opponents—mainly from Camden County—argued that wilderness was elitist and anti-American. It outlawed motorized access, including ATVs and motorboats, two favorite toys of Camden County hunters and anglers. Fit, healthy hikers vacationing from the city could enjoy the wilderness while locals could not even land their boats on the beach to fish. Camden County commissioner Jack Sutton called the National Park Service “a private-property-consuming monster” and led a boat-in protest against the wilderness.

He and other commissioners also decried the loss of revenue from wilderness designation and claimed that wilderness discriminated against the elderly and disabled. How were people in wheelchairs supposed to reach the island’s remote north end?

Without local support, it seemed the wilderness bill was dead. Cumberland Island needed the help of yet another strong woman: Lady Luck.

Carol’s calls and letters to President Carter had not been returned. It seemed that the Oval Office was a lot harder to reach than Governor Jimmy’s office down the hall. The president already had a full plate of problems. He was busy dealing with a national oil shortage, a nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island, and a hostage crisis in Iran. But if the Cumberland Island wilderness bill languished much longer, it would be dropped by Congress.

So Carol penned a heartfelt letter to the
Washington Post
: “Wilderness is more than tents, backpacks, gorp, rattlesnakes, mosquitoes, and ticks. It is also darkness, silence, and simplicity in a natural setting. It is a chance to shed daily responsibilities and expose our bodies and minds to natural stress, to assume a new role with quite different values, to re-create ourselves. Wilderness is a touchstone of reality.”

Remarkably, the
Post
published her op-ed, and President Carter read the editorial. He placed a handwritten note on his press secretary’s desk that read: “I agree with Carol, and I would like to see the north end of Cumberland Island preserved as wilderness.”

Carter’s support for wilderness on Cumberland Island provided the political muscle to move the bill forward. However, it was Carter’s successor Ronald Reagan who grudgingly signed it into law in 1982.

Carol and her crew had permanently protected the entire northern half of Cumberland Island as wilderness. Soon after, the United Nations designated the island a Global Biosphere Reserve, one of only 384 in the world—joining the ranks of Yellowstone, Patagonia, Denali, and the Serengeti.

Carol had wagered on wilderness—and won. But by holding her ground she would lose a friend in Gogo.

17

Carol soon lost another friend, too.

In 1982, island families had big parties planned for the Fourth of July weekend, and they asked Jesse to fetch oysters for their guests. Jesse headed out into the marshes, steering his johnboat through the twisting tidal creeks. His dog, Jessico, sat in the bow, jowls flapping, ears blown back by the wind. Jesse harvested a boatload of oysters, then motored back to Half Moon Bluff. But the outgoing tide was too low to reach the dock, so he tied his boat to a tree about a hundred yards below it. He sloshed through knee-deep water and hauled his catch up the bluff, Jessico trotting beside him.

One of the big bashes was at the home of Laurence “Laurie” Miller, who lived along Half Moon Bluff, not far from Louie’s old house. Jesse delivered a heaping sack of oysters to Laurie, who invited him to stay until high tide. Jesse couldn’t get his boat home anyway with the water so low. At the party, the liquor flowed freely.

Jesse also brought oysters to a gathering hosted by Grover Henderson, who was already deep into his drinks. Grover handed Jesse a tumbler of scotch and began ribbing him.

“So let me get this straight—that dirty dog of yours dines on pork chops and spare ribs, while you eat mullet and whatever else you can drag out of the water.”

“Dats right,” Jesse said. “Carol gives me pork from da hogs she shoots.”

“Why the hell do you feed your dog pork chops?”

“My dog likes pork chops.”

“Your mangy mutt eats better than you, Bailey.”

“I eat all right.”

The tide had risen high enough for Jesse to get back home. Loaded to the gills, Jesse wobbled back down the bluff with Jessico.

The next morning, Jesse didn’t show up at Carol’s for his morning drink. She assumed he was still hungover. Then a few hours later, Jessico came charging onto Carol’s porch, barking frantically.

“Where’s Jess?” she asked. She looked into the dog’s panicked eyes and knew the answer.

Carol dashed down to the bluff, Jessico nipping at her heels. Jesse’s boat was still tied to the tree. Jessico barked at the edge of the deep high-tide pool where the boat floated. Carol threw a handful of sand in the pool, and Jessico jumped out after it. She knew right then: Jesse was out there.

Carol walked the entire creek, feeling for Jesse’s body with her bare feet. Meanwhile, Laurie Miller trawled the braided tidal tributaries with his boat. Carol searched for hours, swarmed by bugs, caked in mud, cooked by the hot summer sun. Crabs pinched her toes as she scoured the soft, squishy bottom.

By midday, the tide began to ebb. Carol was wading chest-deep in the creek when she came around a sharp bend. Suddenly, there was Jesse’s body, beached on an oyster bed, left behind by the receding tide. He was lying facedown, his arms shredded by the sharp oysters. The blood was red and fresh.

Waves of emotion swept over Carol. Laurie soon arrived in his skiff beside the oyster bed.

“We should probably leave the body for the authorities,” Laurie said.

“I’m not leaving Jesse out here,” Carol replied.

She lifted his waterlogged body from the oyster bar and into Laurie’s skiff.

The sheriff and coroner arrived, and they pieced together what had happened. It was low tide when Jesse had tied up his oyster-filled boat. Jesse drank too much and stayed too long at the parties. By the time he stumbled back down the bluff, the high tide had lifted his boat almost seven feet. Jesse tried to wade out to his boat, but he didn’t know how to swim. He drowned in the deep hole beside his boat.

Nearly everyone on the island showed up for his funeral. Hundreds crammed the clapboard church on Sapelo Island to remember the humble sixty-four-year-old Gullah fisherman. Jimmy Carter, whom Jesse had taken fishing in Cumberland’s creeks, sent his deepest sympathies in a handwritten card, along with a photo of the two of them tossing a cast net off the Candler dock. The letter and photo rested proudly atop his pine box casket.

Conspicuously missing from the funeral service was Carol. She didn’t want to grieve amid the public parade of islanders, and her sorrow was still too raw. But her absence fueled rumors that Carol had killed Jesse, too.

She waited until after the ceremony to visit Jesse’s grave alone. Sapelo Island’s Gullah community had mostly been replaced by high-end vacation estates, but the cemetery was still there. All of the deceased, including Jesse, faced east toward Africa.

Carol brushed away a gnat and knelt beside his freshly dug grave, the sound of the sea trickling through the trees. Jesse had taught her more than anyone in her life—not just how to fish or find oysters, but how to observe, how to listen, how to be present.

“You knew so much, without even knowing that you knew so much,” she whispered. “I could sit with you on the dock, watch the water, and not say a word, and that was good enough.”

Beside his grave she placed a sprig of pennywort, his favorite garnish. “You died in the creek. That was where you always wanted to be.”

Back home the next morning, Carol stood on the dock at Half Moon Bluff and threw Jesse’s old cast net out in the creek. The net came alive on her first toss. She could barely lift it out of the water. It was filled with flopping mullet, more than she had ever caught.

Jesse’s empty glass still sits on the pine stoop near her porch.

Before long, Carol had another friend waiting on her porch steps. She returned from a turtle necropsy one morning to find Bob Shoop, the ocean-eyed biologist from the turtle conference, leaning against her gate.

“I’m working on a study of frogs,” he said. “I was hoping you could help me find a few island specimens.”

Carol walked over to the chicken coop and scattered scratch for her hens.

“You’re looking for more than frogs.”

Bob flashed his wide, floppy-lipped grin. “I brought my tent—although I think last time we met, we ended up sharing a room.”

“You can sleep in the lab,” she said, throwing him a blanket. “It’s behind the chicken coop. The roosters wake up at 3
A.M.
with me.”

Early the next morning, Carol and a bleary-eyed Bob bushwhacked across the island searching for frogs and other critters. They spotted an endangered diamondback terrapin foraging in the marsh. They grabbed the elephant-like legs of a giant gopher tortoise just before it scrambled into its burrow, a long underground tunnel nearly ten feet deep. Near Lake Whitney, Bob caught a corn snake slithering across the trail, pinning its head with a stick. He held it behind its jaws and examined its stout, coiled body. “This fella just gorged himself,” he said, pointing to the bulge in his belly.

Carol was impressed—but not to be outdone. Later that morning, she spotted turkeys strutting across the forest. She crawled out toward them, clucking like a female turkey. It got the attention of the males, whose heads turn blue when sexually aroused. One blue-headed tom pounced on Carol’s back, his velociraptor claws kneading her shirt. Carol quickly reached up and grabbed him by the legs.

“Men are so predictable,” she said.

Together they caught leopard frogs beside Lake Retta. Carol had a live frog in each hand when she saw another one hopping nearby. So she held one frog in her mouth while she grabbed the third.

Around noon, they came upon two small, steep-sided ponds, which looked more like puddles at first glance. Carol thought she might find mud turtles burrowed on the bottom. She removed her boots and waded out into the waist-deep water, searching the bottom with her bare feet, until she kicked something hard hunkered down in the muck.

“Here’s one!” she said. Bob waited at the pond’s edge while Carol grunted in the mud.

“Golly, it’s heavy. I can’t pry it up. Can I use your stick?”

She wedged the stick down into the mire.

“There,” she said, handing the stick back to Bob. “It feels bigger than a mud turtle.” She lifted it to the surface.

It wasn’t a turtle—it was the back leg of a giant alligator.

Carol froze. Bob ran. He didn’t even realize he was running until he found himself fifty feet away, hiding behind an oak.

Carol wanted to run, too. But she was waist-deep in murky water, holding the gigantic foot of a primordial beast. On the other side of the pond, the alligator lifted its head above the water and locked eyes with Carol. She slowly, slowly eased the leg back under water. She took a full minute to move a millimeter. Sweat dripped down her forehead, off her chin, and into the water, rippling the surface tension of the still, coffee-brown pond. She gently lowered the clawed toes, the webbed feet, the scaled leg. After ten minutes, she had finally dropped the leg all the way down in the mud. Then she began her painstakingly gradual crawl out of the pond, not even fluttering the water with her imperceptibly slow motion. Bob watched through the trees as Carol ponderously pulled herself up the steep bank, her eyes fixed on the gator. Its yellow, unblinking eyes hovered just above the surface. Finally, after a half hour, she was completely out of the water.

As she backed away, the twelve-foot gator suddenly leaped into the larger pond beside it, revealing its enormous size and explosive speed in less than a second.

Carol leaned back on her elbows and breathed for the first time. How did a twelve-foot alligator curl into that mud puddle, she wondered. How did she hold hands with it and not get chomped? And where the hell was Bob?

That night, they replayed the day’s adventures over popcorn and margaritas on Carol’s porch. Between their rocking chairs, an orb weaver spider had stretched an enormous silk web, an architectural work that rivaled a Carnegie mansion in its intricacy and Carnegie steel in strength. Carol wedged shims beneath the rockers to prevent them from disturbing the web. She and Bob sat in the unmoving rocking chairs and watched a straw-yellow moon rise over the trees.

She learned that Bob was recently divorced, flew airplanes, rode horses, and loved snakes and turtles as much as she did. He recounted near-death adventures catching venomous cottonmouths and rattlesnakes in Louisiana swamps. He once tracked endangered diamondback terrapins through marshes so thick with mud that one grad student sank up to his hips. Bob had to pull him out by his arms, yanking him out of his boots and jeans. The student hiked back in his underwear. Another time, Bob discovered a rare salamander on private property, and when he went to photograph it, his camera flash gave him away. The shotgun-wielding landowner chased him through the forest. Bob climbed a tree and waited him out.

“Clearly you’re good at hiding,” Carol said.

“And waiting.”

“How long do you plan on staying anyway?”

“Somewhere between a week and a lifetime.”

They listened to the footfall of the deer in the forest and watched bats flicker across the dusky sky. As night swallowed the island, they sat side by side, soundless and still, the silk threads of the spiderweb stretched between them.

Bob may have run from the alligator, but he stuck by Carol. He didn’t leave the next day, or the next.

He was still feeling the previous night’s drinks when Carol’s roosters roused him at 3
A.M.
Carol was already at her microscope.

“Goddamn roosters,” Bob mumbled.

“One of them—Willy—is impotent. Not many folks have an impotent rooster, but I can’t bring myself to kill him.”

“I can help you with that.”

“How about you help me catch the chicken snake instead?”

A six-foot snake had coiled in the rafters of Carol’s coop. Bob held open a cloth sack while Carol coaxed it down, talking softly and reassuringly to the snake: “Easy now, big guy. This dingy coop is no place for such a handsome fella. There you go. Good boy.”

“That’s real sweet,” Bob said. “Too bad snakes are deaf.”

She eased the snake into the sack. They released it at Lake Whitney on their way out to the beach.

Bob was stunned by the number of dead turtles littering the seashore. They necropsied five loggerheads together that morning. Carol was thrilled to have help from someone who didn’t mind getting his hands dirty. While heaving the turtle carcasses into the dunes for the vultures to clean, they spotted a sixth stranded animal just down the beach.

“Another one?” Bob asked. They walked closer.

“That’s not a turtle,” Carol said. A ten-foot alligator was stumbling through the surf.

“What’s he doing out here? Gators can’t tolerate saltwater for very long.”

Then Carol noticed: his eyes had been shot out. Some islanders’ favorite evening activity was shining spotlights across Lake Whitney and shooting at the glowing red eyes that surfaced.

“Look how emaciated he is. He probably hasn’t eaten in a few months,” Bob said.

“We’ve gotta catch him,” Carol said, grabbing a coil of rope from her jeep.

“Are you serious?”

“We can’t leave him out here to die.”

The alligator couldn’t see, but he sensed their approach and snapped his jaws at them.

“If you straddle his body to prevent him from rolling, I’ll rope his mouth shut,” Carol said.

“Okay,” Bob replied.