Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (27 page)

For the next five minutes, Bob stood behind the alligator, summoning the courage to mount it. Carol stood in front, waiting.

“Go ahead,” Carol said.

“Okay.” Bob was paralyzed. The gator dug his claws deeper into the sand and lifted his snout toward them.

“I am utterly unable to bring myself to do this,” Bob said finally.

“What happened to all that bar talk about big powerful males?” Carol said, shaking her head. “You’re sperm donors and nothing more.”

She walked behind the gator and pinned his mouth shut with a stick. Then she straddled the gator and, in one quick motion, sat squarely on his scaled back and began wrapping rope around his jaws. The gator tried to roll her, but Carol held him in place, squeezing him between her knees. She cinched the rope around his jaws until he was muzzled.

They loaded the gator onto a trailer behind the jeep and drove him to a small freshwater pond deep in the wilderness. Once they set him beside the pond, Carol straddled the gator again and unfastened all but the final loop of rope around his jaws.

“Here’s the hard part,” she said.

She was crouched, spring-loaded, on the balls of her feet. She yanked off the rope and jumped away in the same motion. The gator lunged blindly and snapped his jaws in the air. His teeth nearly nipped the back of her jeans.

“Whoa! He almost took a bite out of your ass!” Bob shouted.

“Good thing I ate a light breakfast.”

That evening, they sat beside the pond on the hood of Carol’s jeep and drank White Peggies—a special drink Bob concocted from moonshine, triple sec, grapefruit, and lime. The alligator hovered on the pond’s surface. They listened to the gator’s deep, guttural bellows, rolling like rumbles of thunder across the water.

“He’s got a good voice,” Bob said.

“And he’s blind, too,” said Carol. “Let’s name him Ray.”

As dusk settled over the forest, a patch of stars glittered through the canopy. Bob sipped his Peggy and then said, “I heard about the shooting.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Carol said, slurping the last stringy pulp from her glass.

“If you hadn’t shot him, you’d be dead yourself,” he said.

“That’s true. But it doesn’t make it any easier.”

“Think of all the women who didn’t do what you did and got killed instead. You chose not to be one of them. You fought back against a dangerous drunk. You’ve got some big ovaries.”

“That’s not how most folks see it.”

“You’re not the villain. To millions of women getting banged up and battered, you’re a goddamn hero.”

After another day of observing frogs with Bob, Carol served up an armadillo quiche on the half shell topped with figs, ginger, and pecans. They stayed up late swigging bourbon and swapping stories on her porch.

Bob told her about a recent prank he had pulled at the University of Rhode Island, where he was a tenured professor. He had enrolled a fictitious student named Steven Koranda in a fellow professor’s class. Bob swiped copies of the professor’s tests, completed them himself, and then snuck them back onto the professor’s desk. Koranda aced every exam despite never attending a lecture, and his essay responses cited obscure studies that not even the professor had read. The bewildered professor expressed his exasperation at Friday faculty meetings: “Who the hell is this Koranda kid? He’s either a cheat or a fucking genius.” The other professors shrugged their shoulders and choked back laughter. Bob was poker faced.

Bob also inaugurated a long-standing tradition at Friday seminars: mystery meat. Each week, he brought a different specimen from the field. Every grad student and professor tasted the meat and guessed its origin. Wagers were placed, potlucks ensued, and seminar attendance soared.

Often the meat came from turtles or snakes he was studying, but Bob also had a fondness for roadkill: sautéed otter, roasted mink, fried porcupine. Carol had never before met another roadkill connoisseur.

She couldn’t make sense of it all. In her darkest, loneliest hour, a handsome turtle biologist who ate roadkill had shown up on her porch. Carol didn’t want to admit it, but she liked having him around. She didn’t need him—or anyone, she kept reminding herself. But it sure was nice to have someone to talk to.

Bob stayed for a full week. Carol lived like a hermit, but she didn’t act like one, he quickly realized. She was gregarious, animated —hell, she was downright chatty—and she laughed often, especially at herself. She was playfully prankish, too: she hid a garter snake beneath his pillow and swiped his clothes and towel while he was in the outdoor bathtub.

On Bob’s last day, they rode horses bareback on the beach. The horses brayed and whinnied, tossing their heads as they galloped through the surf, hooves splashing, nostrils flaring. Finally, Bob’s horse threw him into the soft sand. Carol was barely holding on to her horse by its mane. She dropped into the sand near Bob.

“Marry me,” Bob said.

“Maybe next week.”

Bob returned to Rhode Island for the semester, but he visited Carol every other weekend, flying his single-engine plane down to the island. He helped her publish scientific papers, necropsy turtles, and track gators. More importantly, he helped her heal.

“Whenever I slipped into a funk, Bob pulled me out of the ditch,” Carol wrote in her journal. “He brought me back to life.”

In between visits, she started to miss Bob. He had untied the knot that was her body. But her feelings scared the hell out of her. She was forty-one years old and comfortable in her solitude. She enjoyed the ease of her everyday routines. Life was safe and steady in her island seclusion.

In 1983, Bob finished his spring semester of teaching and planned to stay the summer doing research with Carol. Carol met him at the island’s grassy runway. As soon as he swung open the plane door, she held up her hand to stop him.

“Before you step foot on this island again, let’s get a few things straight: I can go it alone. I don’t need anyone.”

“Okay.”

“So you gotta play by my rules when you’re here, or you can fly right back home.”

“And what are your rules?”

“Give me space. Expect nothing from me. No more than two drinks a day—I can’t deal with another raging drunk. Get along with my animals. And no jazz music when I’m around. I know you’re from New Orleans, but damn, it’s just acoustic masturbation to me.”

Bob smiled, hopped down from the plane, and kissed her. “Agreed.”

After years of being feral, it was hard for Carol to take the bit again. She wasn’t used to sharing her space. She had to cook twice as much food and wash twice as many dishes. Bob’s dirty laundry festered on the floor for weeks. He farted and belched and read scientific journals in his underwear.

But Bob and Carol soon became two of the world’s most renowned sea turtle biologists. For the next twenty years, they lived and worked together, publishing dozens of sea turtle studies in leading scientific journals. Carol and Bob also wrote two widely celebrated sea turtle books. They spoke at symposiums and presented papers to policy makers. And they were the only turtle biologists in the country to openly criticize the National Marine Fisheries Service, which was responsible for protecting sea turtles. Carol believed the agency cared more about protecting shrimpers’ profits than endangered species.

Carol’s favorite sea turtle research came in the summer of 1984, when she and Bob flew the entire Southern coast from North Carolina’s Outer Banks to the Texas border conducting aerial surveys of nesting sea turtles. Bob flew his plane low over the beaches while Carol counted crawls and turtles out the window. It was the largest turtle survey ever conducted, and it confirmed that the Southeast was critically important and imperiled turtle habitat. The largest nesting site in the world for loggerhead turtles was also swarming with commercial shrimp boats. Dead sea turtles were washing ashore in record numbers.

Near the end of the aerial survey, they stopped in New Orleans. Bob was bubbling with excitement to show off his old stomping grounds. At the airport, Bob bragged about the city’s public transportation system. “You don’t need taxis in New Orleans,” he assured her. “A bus runs every five minutes.”

An hour later, the bus finally arrived. It was dark by the time they stepped off at their stop. Bob had reserved a room at a nearby motel, but it was nowhere in sight. After calling for directions, they circled through parking lots and walked across a six-lane interstate to get to the motel, which was nestled beneath criss-crossing highway ramps and bridges.

“It might be a bit noisy trying to sleep,” Carol pointed out.

“Sound rises, so we should be okay,” Bob replied.

The motel was small, two-storied, and clean. It was on no obvious street. The only vehicle access was from a potholed road between the interstate bridge pillars. Carol waited outside while Bob went in to register. Faces peered at her from behind the curtains of dark rooms. A large black man, bedecked in gold chains, emerged from one room, folded his arms across his chest, and stared at Carol.

Just then, Bob came out to explain the situation.

“It turns out that it’s an all-black motel. But that’s okay. We can still stay here.”

“There’s something else not right. I’m getting the jitters.”

“You haven’t been in the big city for a while. You’ll get over it.”

Carol waited outside again while Bob went in to pay. Shadowed figures appeared behind the gold-chained man staring at her. Then she noticed that each room had a blue light on the door. Carol stepped inside and whispered in Bob’s ear: “This is a brothel.”

His cheeks flushed. He smiled sheepishly. “Oops,” he said.

Bob called a taxi, which showed up an hour later. The driver was a young college kid who laughed when he arrived: “How drunk were you guys when you showed up at a whorehouse?”

“We haven’t been drinking actually,” Bob said. “Though we would like to be.”

On the interstate, Carol shouted suddenly, “Stop the cab—D.O.R. possum!” Carol shouted. “Let’s grab it for breakfast tomorrow.”

“I’ve already got coon packed in the cooler,” Bob said.

The driver noted Carol’s braided pigtails, men’s button-down shirt, deerskin pullover vest, and giant knife sheathed to her horse-leather belt.

“Are you guys some kind of act?” he asked.

They flew back to Cumberland the next day in Bob’s plane. As soon as they landed, Carol dashed out to the beach and splashed saltwater on the back of her neck. Then she stood in the surf, soaking in the island with her senses wide open, until the rise and fall of her breath synchronized with the tides. After flying the entire Southern coast, there still was no place like home.

But home was about to have a new neighbor.

In the Cold War 1980s, a new naval base was built on the mainland directly across from Cumberland Island for submarines armed with nuclear missiles. Kings Bay was the largest peacetime construction project ever undertaken by the U.S. Navy. Sea turtles would be dodging nuclear submarines on their way to nest on Cumberland. Carol would soon have another fight on her hands—this time, with the world’s mightiest military.

18

Lucy stepped to the microphone, and the crowd fell silent. In the summer of 1987, hundreds of people from across Georgia had gathered in St. Marys for Lucy Ferguson Day, honoring the eccentric millionaire who had fought for years to protect her island, especially from the National Park Service. “It’s hard having a name like Carnegie,” she said. “They always want to take everything away from you. But I guess even Cumberland can’t be one person’s private garden forever.” Lucy reminisced about her days riding horses on the beach and exploring the pathless woods with her children. Near the end of her speech, she said, “There are too many people on Cumberland, too many cars going up and down the road.”

A few months later, Lucy fell and broke her shoulder. She became a shadow of her former self. Her sight faded. She lost weight and the will to fight. She sat quietly and placidly for hours, gazing across the fields of her island estate.

“Even though we clashed,” Gogo said in
Cumberland: Island in Time,
a 2000 documentary, “as we grew older, I certainly understand now. She was just a feisty woman right to the end.” Carol, meanwhile, continued to visit Lucy regularly, collecting scraps of island lore.

Near the end of her life, Lucy was interviewed by the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
. Sitting on the veranda of Plum Orchard, she reflected, “I sometimes think about life on Cumberland, when everything was high and handsome, and wonder if we were snobs. I remember thinking the lowest thing in life was to be a servant. I thought the rich played together. The lines were very strict. Now there are no lines.”

On a rainy September evening in 1989, Lucy ate a bowl of ice cream, then closed her eyes. Just three days shy of her ninetieth birthday, she died in her sleep. Her ashes were interred in the Carnegie family cemetery near Dungeness.

With Lucy gone, Gogo became a more important voice for the Carnegie family. Though not as rugged as her grandmother, she was every bit as gritty when it came to defending her family’s heritage. “Cumberland has been our home for seven generations. We feel a strong sense of responsibility for its future,” Gogo said. “There are too few places like Cumberland, with all of its diverse assets, left in the world.” But she never anticipated that a former custodian who dissected dead turtles might have such an influential voice in shaping the island’s future.

It was unclear who would become the next matriarch of Cumberland, the bejeweled Carnegie heiress or the renegade turtle biologist. Both women loved and drew upon the wild creatures of Cumberland, one for her art, the other for her science. But they disagreed sharply on how best to protect the island.

Carol envisioned an evolving island wilderness whose human impact would gradually diminish as lifetime rights expired. Gogo worried that the Carnegies’ legacy would be lost beneath an overgrown forest, that an expansive wilderness would interfere with preservation of the island’s historic buildings, including Plum Orchard mansion.

Gogo argued that Cumberland didn’t even qualify as wilderness, under a strict definition of the term: it had already had a network of roads and people living in it. Twenty-one families still lived on the island—eight of them in the wilderness, including Carol. How could she advocate for an uninhabited wilderness that she herself violated.

At a series of island meetings in the mid-1990s, Gogo and Carol’s conflicting views came to a head. At one island showdown with the park superintendent, Gogo was dressed in a black blouse and slacks, with silver-plated coral cuffs and scallop shell earrings cast in fourteen-karat gold. Carol wore loose-fitting jeans and a khaki button-down with the sleeves rolled. The air-conditioning had broken in the meeting room. Tensions rose and tempers flared in the stifling midsummer heat.

All Americans deserve access to the island—not just rugged backpackers, Gogo argued, with a nasal, northern intonation. Not everyone can hike long distances, she pointed out. It was unfair to lock up wilderness for an elite few.

“Should we run vans down to the Grand Canyon, or jeeps to the top of Denali?” Carol replied in her spry Southern cadence.

Cumberland Island is more than a nature preserve, Gogo replied. More people tour the island’s historic structures than hiked in the wilderness.

“There’s plenty of room on the island for both wilderness and history,” Carol said. “Run all the vehicle tours you want on the south end, but keep the northern half wild.”

What about Plum Orchard? asked Gogo. She didn’t want her family’s heritage to rot into the ground just because it was north of an arbitrary wilderness boundary.

“Which is more valuable: a mansion built for Andrew Carnegie’s brother’s fifth son, or the largest barrier island wilderness in the country? Wilderness is the ultimate historic resource. It’s far more precious than another big wooden house.”

That big wooden house is where my family grew up, Gogo bristled. She accused Carol of trampling her family’s heritage to preserve a wilderness that didn’t even exist. Wilderness wasn’t supposed to have roads or residents, but Cumberland had both.

“Both will gradually fade away as lifetime rights expire. It’s an evolving wilderness, sure, but those wounds will heal with time.”

The exchange grew more heated. Gogo contended that Carol just wanted to protect her privacy and keep people away from her cabin in the woods.

“This is not Carnegie National Monument. It’s the Cumberland Island Wilderness,” Carol fired back.

Gogo pointed her finger at Carol. The Carnegie family had lived on Cumberland for five generations, Gogo reminded her. Carol showed up in her muddy boots just a few years ago. Who was she to tell her family how the island should be managed?

The clash on Cumberland between Carol and Gogo soon escalated into all-out turf war, pitting nature against history, with the National Park Service caught in the middle.

The island boasted a world-class wilderness and global biosphere reserve that protected eighteen miles of pristine seashore, wild dunes where endangered sea turtles nested, and the largest old-growth maritime forest in the country. Cumberland Island also had mansions, archaeological sites, cemeteries, slave chimneys, and Indian burial grounds. Which should the National Park Service prioritize?

Wilderness meant allowing nature to rule, which cost essentially nothing. Nature did all the work for free. Historic development was the exact opposite: it was fundamentally about combating the forces of nature. The only way to preserve historic structures was to prevent nature from destroying them. And that cost money—a lot of it.

The public had spoken years earlier: people wanted wilderness on Cumberland Island. But the Carnegies wanted to preserve their family’s historic legacy—along with their commercial uses of the island. Carol still believed that a world-class wilderness and historic structures could coexist on Cumberland. Nearly all of the island’s historic sites and structures were located south of the wilderness boundary, but a few historic hot spots—like Plum Orchard mansion —were farther north, surrounded by wilderness.

Plum Orchard became the battleground for Carol and Gogo’s epic tug-of-war between wilderness protection and historic preservation. The forty-two-room mansion was adorned with marble-faced fireplaces, grand pianos, mahogany tables, and parquet floors. Call buttons in each room once summoned maids and butlers. An elevator in the west wing, just past the library and gun room, led upstairs to bedrooms with handpainted wallpaper, walk-in closets lined with walnut cabinets, and steam-heated racks to warm bath towels. In the east wing, leading off the piazza, was a white-tiled, twelve-foot-deep indoor swimming pool flanked by indoor squash courts.

Plum was one of over one hundred structures on Cumberland Island listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Since the National Park Service could never afford to preserve all of them, it evaluated the historical significance of each: the Stafford Chimneys were rated “one of the most important black history sites in the country,” while the Plum Orchard mansion was deemed “of limited local significance.”

Despite the National Register’s assessment, Gogo believed that Plum Orchard should be fully renovated. She felt that the National Park Service was shirking its responsibility to preserve the historic structures that had been entrusted to them.

Carol thought the mansion should be minimally preserved as a museum, but that the National Park Service should not waste millions trying to restore it. “People can go lots of other places to see old mansions,” Carol said. Jekyll Island, immediately north of Cumberland, boasts a dozen millionaire manors from the robbor-baron era. But there was no other place in America as spectacularly wild and biologically diverse as Cumberland. Retta Richards, daughter of the Carnegie heir who donated Plum Orchard to the National Park Service, agreed with Carol. Retta’s recommendation went even further: Let it rot. “Plum Orchard should die a natural death,” she said of the aging mansion.

By the mid-1990s, Plum Orchard mansion was starting to deteriorate. Its porch eaves sagged, the paint was peeling, and the roof leaked. Carnegie history was crumbling into the sand. That didn’t sit well with Gogo. She couldn’t bear to watch her family’s heritage fall apart. So she hatched a plan to restore the mansion by establishing a private artist retreat at Plum. “I watched Plum Orchard . . . deteriorate as a result of park underfunding and neglect,” Gogo explained. “My vision was to . . . put it to an appropriate and worthwhile use. We sought the advice of many artist retreats, such as the McDowell Colony, to create a retreat where . . . artists could work on projects within the solitude and beauty Cumberland provides.” It would be an ideal way to wed her love for the arts and the island. She hoped the arts center would help preserve the fading mansion by bringing artists and patrons to Cumberland. The plans originally included a performance center, galleries, and artists’ workshops adjacent to the mansion. Gogo assembled a board of influential friends to support her artists’ retreat. There was discussion of how to accommodate visitors to the artists’ retreat given the three-hundred-visitor limit Cumberland Island.

However, Plum Orchard was surrounded by federally designated wilderness, which prohibited vehicle traffic and placed stringent protections on activities surrounding the mansion. In 1995, the Plum Orchard Center for the Arts, of which Gogo was the president met with park superintendent Rolland Swain to negotiate a deal. The park agreed to lease Plum Orchard mansion for an artist resort.

The ink had barely dried on an undisclosed memorandum of understanding, a tentative deal, when Carol stumbled upon it.

Once a week, Carol waited until the maintenance crew had left before rummaging through the island garbage, her unofficial shopping mall. Over the years, she had scored some great finds in the trash. She had rebuilt her chicken coop with scrapped wood and collected an entire castoff wardrobe. On this day, however, Carol unearthed her most valuable find: several boxes of discarded correspondence including a memo between Superintendent Rolland Swain and the organizers of the planned artists’ retreat.

Carol was torn. Gogo was once a close friend, but this deal was even more rotten than the moldy food scraps festering beneath her. Millions of dollars, both private and public money, would be spent renovating the mansion for an artists’ colony, whose visitors would have to be driven through the island wilderness. The last thing Cumberland Island needed was more vehicles and development.

So Carol alerted the press. Newspaper editors, public interest watchdogs, and conservation organizations immediately expressed concerns about development in the middle of the island, surrounded by wilderness.

The suggestion that the Carnegie heirs could favor anything inappropriate to the island clearly annoyed Gogo. “Some people think this is some kind of grandiose plan for the rich,” Gogo told
Preservation
magazine, “but Plum represents five generations of my family. The critics should be glad they’re not looking at another Hilton Head.”

Environmental groups filed a lawsuit over the Plum Orchard Center for the Arts proposal on April 17, 1996, and two months later the National Park Service quashed the tentative agreement. Rolland Swain left his post as superintendent soon after.

Gogo was devastated. She had a lifelong love of the arts, and the island had been the inspiration and source of her jewelry business. There was no better place for artists than the solitude, scenery, and serenity of Cumberland.

Carol wrote to Gogo, “It saddens me to lose your friendship over what amounts to a political issue, but I respect your ideals and goals and your right to fight for them, as I hope you respect mine. . . . You and I share a deep love for Cumberland Island, if it is expressed in different ways, and I hope that our differences of opinion will melt into the past and we can again be friends.”

Carol never received a response.

“Carol was . . . part of the community at the time,” explains Gogo, but then “all the families of private land closed their gates to her.”

So she drove down to Gogo’s house one evening to apologize. Though she denies it, according to Carol, Gogo swung open the door and called her a backstabbing bitch.

“I’m sorry, Gogo. I love you like a sister, but you know how deeply I feel about wilderness. It’s not personal. We disagree politically, but I still consider you a friend.”