Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (29 page)

Carol was drinking a tumbler of scotch and listening to the dripping forest—when Pal’s ears perked up. A low-flying plane buzzed just over the cabin. Carol leaped up to look: a pilot was scud running below a tattered veil of clouds when suddenly he clipped the trees and crashed. She saw an orange flash on the horizon.

The plane had skidded across the island and burst into flames, leaving a smoldering trail of shrapnel. Carol dashed across the marsh and was the first one on the scene. She climbed into the blazing wreckage to search for the pilot. Smoke burned her throat as she crawled through the twisted tube of melting metal, the plane popping and groaning. Finally, she found the pilot, dead in the blood-splattered cockpit. Carol tried to remove his charred body, but his intestines spilled out onto the seat.

For weeks afterward, the grim images replayed in her mind. What astonished her most, she realized, was not the gore or bloodshed. It was that human guts looked shockingly like a turtle’s. Inside, we were made of exactly the same stuff.

Carol witnessed more carnage later that summer. One sweltering afternoon, Carnegie handyman Roger Daniels went skinny-dipping in Lake Whitney overflow creek, a deep channel that emptied into the ocean. Though the creek was only a few feet deep, an alligator had holed up at the bottom of it. Roger was sitting in the water when the gator swam up from beneath him. His bare white butt looked like a floating carcass from below, and the gator hit it. The alligator bit hard, ripping open Roger’s left testicle and a chunk of ass cheek. Then it let go and swam away. Roger dragged himself out of the water, and blood dripped into the sand. A little while later, Carol arrived.

“Are you okay, Roger?”

His face was pale. He covered himself with his jeans and mopped up blood with his T-shirt.

“I’m all right,” he said.

“What happened?”

“I just got gator bit.”

Roger tried to stand. Blood leaked down his leg. His left testicle was hanging out of his scrotum.

Remarkably, Roger never went to the hospital. He was too embarrassed even to get stitches. More remarkably, he fully recovered and eventually fathered a child. He is the only person on Cumberland in recorded history ever to be attacked by an alligator.

The National Park Service wanted to keep it that way. Two rangers were sent to kill the gator that had bitten Roger. When Carol heard about it, she raced down to the Whitney overflow and arrived just as the rangers were loading their rifles.

“Howdy, fellas. What’s going on?” Carol said.

“We gotta put down this alligator,” said the chief ranger. “It’s endangering public safety.”

“All alligators endanger public safety. This alligator is just being an alligator.”

“Carol, this is park business. You need to leave.” The men raised their rifles to their shoulders.

“No, fellas. You need to leave.” Carol stepped out into the knee-deep blackwater and stood between the rifles and the gator. She felt the water stirring beneath her.

“Come on, Carol. Don’t pick a fight with us.”

“You’re in a wilderness. You can’t shoot the animals that live here.”

The men looked to the chief ranger. They lowered their rifles and returned to their trucks.

The next day, an island resident shot the gator instead.

A few months later, the park took aim at another alligator: a ten-foot male living in the swamps near Willow Pond. On her Park Service walkie-talkie, Carol heard the chief ranger dispatch a crew to kill it.

Carol knew the Willow Pond gator well. She had been studying him for years. Once she had accidentally stuck her head down into his burrow and found herself face-to-face with him. Instead of attacking her, the alligator backed deeper into his hole.

Carol hustled down to Willow Pond and once again put herself between the guns and the gator.

“Dammit, Carol. I’m getting tired of this. Get the hell out of the way,” said the chief ranger.

“This alligator is a protected species in a wilderness area. You boys oughta know the law by now.”

“This alligator is a nuisance to the public.”

“How is it a nuisance?”

The rangers glanced sideways at the chief ranger.

“We’re building a boardwalk to the beach through here. We can’t have hikers strolling past a gator den.”

“Then move your boardwalk. You’re in a wilderness. You can’t kill animals just because they’re in your way.”

“We’ll just come back later and shoot it,” the chief ranger grumbled, lowering his gun.

“When you do, make sure to bring a waiver from the Endangered Species Act that allows you to kill this alligator, along with a permit from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and a NEPA study that authorizes building a boardwalk through endangered species habitat.”

This time, Carol prevailed. The boardwalk was rerouted, and the Willow Pond gator still lives today.

Alligators are the largest land reptiles in North America. Hunted for their hides, alligators were nearly wiped out in the twentieth century. They’ve made a comeback in recent decades, but they remain a threatened species. On Cumberland, gator populations continued to crash.

With more dead gators and turtle carcasses each year, Carol was running out of storage space. So she decided to turn her garage into a museum to house all of her specimen collections. Bob helped her construct it using driftwood that Carol dragged in from the beach. It was a research facility, not an
ooh-aah
display museum. But scientists from around the world began hiking up the island to explore Carol’s collections, which included everything from skinks and salamanders to spinner dolphins and sperm whales.

Visitors to the museum were often shocked by the surroundings. At first glance, Carol’s quarter-acre compound resembled a shoddy Southern farm: a cluster of weathered buildings and a yard full of washtubs, rusty tools, dilapidated wheelbarrows, and piles of waterbuckled boards. Then there was the smell: the stench of rotting flesh wafted from dozens of water-filled plastic buckets scattered about the yard.

“Macerating is the best way to skeletonize marine animals,” Carol explained to visitors. “You just put them in water and forget them. The flesh dissolves away, and a week later, even the biggest turtle skull is shiny clean. I bleach it in the sun for another day or two, and it’s ready to go.”

For some carcasses, she employed an army of carnivorous beetles to break down rotted flesh. Her flesh-devouring beetles and maggots were so valued that Carol scooped them into jars and brought them indoors on cold nights. Black vultures lining her cabin roof also assisted her in working the carcasses and picking the bones clean.

Carol’s yard was a jumble, but her inner organization was meticulous. Thousands of museum specimens were neatly arranged, labeled, and cross-indexed. Also lining the shelves were decades of painstakingly precise field notes, with drawings of plants and animals that were detailed and almost photographic in their technical perfection. The windowless museum was lined floor to ceiling with handmade wooden shelves carefully arranged with skulls and specimens of nearly every critter on Cumberland Island, each with a handwritten label of its common and scientific names. In the back of the museum, dozens of heart-shaped loggerhead shells were stacked neatly like Russian dolls.

It was one of the world’s largest sea turtle and marine mammal collections. In 1990, curators at the Smithsonian National Museum in Washington, D.C., heard about Carol’s collections and asked Carol if she would share her specimens so they could be studied by the world’s top scientists. Carol was thrilled. She began providing them with specimens from the creatures that washed up on her eighteen-mile Atlantic doorstep.

“The whole point of my work is to make their deaths useful,” Carol said. “Preserving and studying the carcasses at least provides some purpose to the carnage.”

Helping Carol with the museum was a twenty-nine-year-old biology grad student named Creighton Cutts. He had been waiting his whole life to meet Carol. As a nine-year-old boy living in Atlanta, he had read about her in magazines: a wild woman fighting to protect a wild island. He visited Cumberland Island every year with his family, but he never met the reclusive wilderness woman. On a summer camping trip to Cumberland with his middle school buddies, he bravely waded out into a tidal creek to swim with a pod of dolphins. Afterward, he ran back to camp tell his friends, but he had already been trumped: a few minutes earlier, Carol Ruckdeschel had stopped by their camp with a rescued sea turtle hatchling.

Years later, Creighton returned to Cumberland to track bobcats for a University of Georgia research project. Bushwhacking through the forest late at night, he finally crossed paths with his lifelong hero beside Lake Whitney.

“Howdy, Creighton,” Carol said nonchalantly as they passed each other on an alligator trail in the midnight darkness. He stood slackjawed: she already knew his name!

After the bobcat project ended, Creighton asked Carol if he could stick around to help her with research. Bob was leery of the handsome young apprentice at first, but he liked Creighton’s wild and mischievous instincts. Once, when he overheard the chief ranger threatening to revoke Carol’s collection permits, Creighton stealthily unhooked the fuel line from the ranger’s four-wheeler. Another time, he caught a juvenile alligator near Lake Whitney and wrapped its jaws closed with shoestring from his boots.

When Bob returned to Rhode Island for the semester, Creighton worked elbow-to-elbow with Carol in the museum. With Bob gone, he also began accompanying Carol on turtle necropsies and all-day gator tromps. At night, he drank cocktails with her on the porch.

“Are you and Bob married?” he asked one night, doe-eyed and drunk.

“No—although he proposes to me every week,” Carol said. “It doesn’t matter. I’m a serial monogamist.”

“I didn’t think you were into monogamy.”

“Monogamy is certainly fragile. But maybe that’s why there’s love: to override our instincts and hold us together.”

One afternoon, Carol brought in a dead alligator she had found near Table Point. Creighton helped her necropsy it. When they opened up his stomach, they found that a plastic balloon had clogged its stomach. In the gator’s gut they also found a spark plug, rusty fish hooks, and the collar of a dog. The leather collar had mostly disintegrated, but the metal tag still had the dog owner’s phone number on it. Creighton called the owner from the mainland the next day. “I’ve got good news, and I’ve got bad news,” he said. It turned out that the dog had gone missing years earlier on a hunting trip near Dover Bluff, ten miles away on the mainland.

Creighton was a fun-loving, adventurous entertainer who hit it off with everyone he met. At an island party, he quickly became chummy with Gogo’s third husband, David Sayre. Creighton helped him build a house for Gogo on her Greyfield property. They constructed an airy, light-filled cottage with open rafters and turquoise floors. According to Creighton, Gogo wanted to use the crown molding from the Plum Orchard carriage house in her new home, so David and Creighton went to swipe it. First, they went in with a crowbar and loosened the nails so they could take it out more quickly at night.

A few nights later under a full moon, Creighton and David motored up to Plum Orchard, pulled out the molding, and loaded it onto their truck. Suddenly, a bright spotlight shone in their faces.

“Hold it right there, guys!” shouted a deputy park ranger, stepping out from the shadows. He handcuffed David and Creighton facedown against the warm hood of the truck.

“You know, fellas, it’s a felony with a $5,000 fine and jail time for stealing historic materials on federal lands,” he said.

Creighton was sweating blood. The deputy called in the incident to the chief ranger, and Creighton heard the chief ranger’s garbled response.

“You gotta let them go,” he said.

“I caught them red-handed swiping a truckload of federal property.”

“That’s Gogo’s husband.”

David smirked. The ranger bit his lip while his deputy unlocked their handcuffs.

According to David, he and Creighton had parked next to the dilapidated Plum Orchard carriage house and were simply noting the high quality of the lumber when a ranger pulled up and accused them of desecrating a historic monument. According to David, there were no handcuffs.

David and Creighton walked free that night. But the next day, the chief ranger drove up with a deputy to arrest Creighton separately.

“Sorry, Creighton,” he said. “No free pass for you.” The deputy ranger reached for his cuffs again.

Creighton cleared his throat. “Exposed nails. Rotted wood. Plum Orchard’s carriage house could fall any day. It’s a danger to the public. And you’re allowing visitors in there? Without any warning signs? That’s something the media oughta know about.”

The chief ranger glared at Creighton, then walked back to his truck. Once more, the deputy clipped his cuffs back onto his belt.

Later, the National Park Service tried to seize Carol’s museum
s
pecimens, claiming that they belonged to the park. “The Park Service didn’t really want the collections—they were just pushing thumbtacks into Carol,” Creighton said.

But before Park Service rangers could get their hands on them, Creighton was able to sneak Carol’s collections to the Smithsonian. Had he been caught, he could have faced jail time and $25,000 in fines for transporting the bones of endangered species across state lines. For Creighton, it was a risk worth taking.