Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (3 page)

2

A wave toppled Carol, and she tumbled in a froth of sand and saltwater, her body tossed like seaweed. She couldn’t tell which direction was up. Then the wave flowed away, her toes felt firm ground, and she stood, sputtering and ecstatic. The ocean had grabbed her, and it would hold her for life.

Carol flourished in both the cultural and natural diversity of the island. Porpoises and sea turtles swam in the canal near their rental apartment. Whenever a sea turtle glided past, Carol would follow it in the canal for miles, all the way out to the bay.

“They’re swimming dinosaurs,” she told her band of barefoot Hawaiian boys. “They’re the oldest animals in the ocean.”

“They’re also delicious,” the boys replied.

At school, Carol hung out with the native Hawaiians more than the white kids. Carol’s elementary school was located in the island’s affluent business-class neighborhood, and most of her fifth-grade classmates were white or Japanese. However, a handful of native Hawaiians walked barefoot to her school from their villages miles away. Carol absorbed their music, their language, and especially their knowledge of plants and animals. She started dancing and dressing like her Hawaiian friends and walking barefoot everywhere. She even convinced her parents that it was customary to attend school barefoot.

“Nobody wears shoes at school. It’s just the island way,” she explained.

When the bell rang on the final day of class, a herd of kids thundered out of the building and down the school’s steps. Earl and Anne waited at the bottom of the steps with the other parents. The neatly dressed American and Japanese children emerged first. To Earl and Anne’s surprise, they were all wearing sneakers and dress shoes. Then came a scraggly group of barefoot, disheveled, dark-skinned natives . . . and Carol.

Carol received one of the worst beatings of her childhood.

That night, bruised and banished to her bedroom, Carol listened to her parents talking through the paper-thin walls.

“What did we do wrong?” her father muttered.

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” replied her mother.

“I’ll beat it out of her if I have to. She responds to the belt.”

“That only confuses her. Maybe she’ll grow out of it.”

Carol opened her window, drowning out her parents with the chorus of crickets and the wash of the tides. A salty breath of wind stirred the trees. She rested her head on the sill and watched sea turtles swim silently through the canal. “Someday I’ll have my own island,” she dreamed. “I’ll walk barefoot every day. I’ll always have sand between my toes.”

In 1952, Queen Elizabeth was crowned in England, the Big Bang was proposed, the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb, and Earl Ruckdeschel was offered a promotion to manage the Kodak processing plant in Atlanta, Georgia. After only a year in Hawaii, the Ruckdeschels left island paradise for suburbia. Earl and Anne bought a brick ranch house on the northernmost edge of Atlanta. Although her house faced a well-traveled road, her backyard stretched for miles. She could walk through unbroken forest all the way to the Chattahoochee River. At age eleven, Carol was hiking four miles to the river every weekend, setting crawfish traps, tracking coons, and flipping rocks in search of salamanders.

Her parents had only one rule: be home for the family five o’clock cocktail. Every evening, Earl expected Anne and Carol to join him for a drink—usually martinis or manhattans. Her dad poured Carol her first glass of liquor when she was twelve years old. She felt the beehive tingle on her tongue and was hooked.

In the evenings, Earl polished his guns and gems. Anne knitted while watching television. Neither spent much time with Carol.

“They were traditional, conservative, and walled off,” Carol said. “I got used to being by myself. I didn’t know anything else, so I didn’t know I was lonely. I knew from an early age that I was different. That meant being comfortable with solitude.”

Not finding her place at home, she sought it in nature. In the wild, she found companionship in the creek, friendship in the forest, and a kinship with critters that ran deeper than blood.

“Out in nature is where I belong. I love it so much, and it accepts me,” Carol wrote when she was fourteen.

At night, Carol slept with her window open and her pillow propped on the sill. The night air calmed and restored her, and even in suburban Atlanta she could still see the Milky Way’s soupy river of stars. But as her parents’ fights grew louder, she began sleeping in the basement to be closer to her menagerie of animal companions.

Her pets included turtles, salamanders, black-widow spiders, crayfish, frogs, and several snakes—all caught by hand. Once, a possum was killed on the road in front of her house, and the next day, baby possums had gathered around their mother’s carcass, attempting to suckle from her withered teats. Carol scooped them up and bottle-fed them in her basement.

Carol especially liked snakes. Once, Carol was chest-deep in a pond searching for a muskrat den when she noticed a swirling ripple a few feet away. Suddenly, a snake’s head poked out of the water. It opened its jaws wide, ready to strike Carol’s face. Instinctively, she threw up her hand and felt the hot sting of its bite on her forearm. Fear turned to anger. With her other hand, she grabbed the snake’s body and hurled it out of the water. Then she scrambled onto shore and pinned its head with a stick. She examined the snake closely. It wasn’t a venomous cottonmouth, just a water snake. Blood oozed from puncture wounds on her forearm. She pinched the snake’s head and lifted it to eye level.

“I oughta chop your head off. But I’m not gonna join that club,” she said, as she recorded later in her journal. “Besides, you’re not worth it, you scrawny thing. If I kill you, I’d have to eat you, and you’re not worth the work for such a little morsel of meat.”

The snake coiled its body around her wrist and flicked its tongue at her.

“We gotta share this pond, fella.” She threw him back in.

Carol skipped church every Sunday. It was all just a bunch of hocus pocus, and she couldn’t buy it: some guy walking on water and raising the dead. All these grown people talking about a holy ghost. It didn’t mesh with the natural world she knew.

One Sunday morning, she headed down to the river, shovel in hand, to dig up some nettles and cress. The meadow beside the river was alive with birdsong. She high-stepped through the swishing grass and gathered a potato sack full of wild greens. On her way back, she stopped abruptly in her tracks. The rank funk of rot wafted in the air. Buzzards circled overhead. She pulled back the head-high sedge: a giant snapping turtle lay on its side, dried blood staining its muzzle. Its shell was riddled with bullet holes, revealing flecks of pink flesh. A vulture had dragged the turtle’s left eyeball out of its socket and was tugging at the long, stringy optic nerve.

Carol used her shovel to flip the carcass. Its skull looked astonishingly human. Beneath the flesh, she and the turtle were the same bag of bones. Someday, she would die and rot like the turtle.

She dropped her sack of greens and, flapping at flies, knelt beside the carcass. Its one remaining eye stared blankly at her. She had clanked her shovel against the bedrock reality of death. Death was not sleeping or even darkness, she realized. It was nothing. Where would she go when she died? Her body would return to the earth. And she would no longer exist. Heavenly sermons suddenly sounded a lot more appealing.

After dinner that evening, Anne washed the dishes while Earl settled in his armchair to clean a gun barrel. A cigarette hung loosely from the corner of his mouth. Carol walked into the living room with an orphaned baby possum hanging by its teeth from her pigtails.

“Take that varmint back to the basement!” Earl growled.

Carol plucked it off her braids and tucked it into her elbow.

“What happens when we die?” she asked.

“If you lived a good life, you go to heaven. If you skip church and lie to your parents, you go to hell.”

She looked down at the possum in the crook of her arm. “Do animals go to heaven?”

“Only people go to heaven.”

“Where do animals go?”

“They decay into the ground.”

“People decay too,” Carol said.

“People have souls. Our souls go to heaven when we die.”

“Are you sure there’s a heaven?”

“That’s what faith is for. Faith makes you sure.”

That night, Carol walked down to the pond. Fish dimpled the surface, scattering reflected moonlight across the water. She lay back in the dewy grass. The baby possum nibbled on her hair. Stars were dusted like freckles across the sky. Carol thought for a long time about heaven and hell and realized, for the first time in her life, that maybe her dad was wrong. Maybe there was just this one life on earth. She felt a pang in her heart. She desperately wanted her dad to be right, so that she could go to heaven and live forever. That would be a lot easier than rotting into the ground and being eaten by worms. But she could no longer pretend that she was different than other animals. She had to face a hard truth: she was a death-bound being like everything else that breathed.

She closed her eyes and let the darkness settle in.
Is this what death will look like?
she wondered. There wouldn’t even be the color black. She felt utterly empty and blank, like the gaze of the turtle carcass in the meadow. She didn’t want to die and become nothing. She loved being alive so much.

Then she opened her eyes and looked up again at the blackness between the stars. Her tiny speck of life was utterly insignificant in the sweep of space. Its vastness left her feeling dizzy and disoriented. But it also made her feel something else, something surprisingly close to . . . free. She was completely, utterly free to live her one and only life until she died. Death was as natural and necessary as life, and both were far older and larger than she had imagined. Each breath connected her to the first algae and the last dinosaur. All the animals that had ever lived and died—they were all part of the same precious matter—and so was she. She belonged to it all, from the stars to the soil. She wasn’t nothing. She was everything.

Carol felt solid ground return beneath her. No heaven could be more wondrous than this raw, rotting earth. She vowed to savor the stench of the dead as much as the musk of the living. They were part of the same deepening mystery.

3

Carol ate her first wild meat on a coon hunt in the north Georgia mountains when she was fourteen. She ran ahead of her dad and the other hunters, tracking their dogs at night across creeks and through the dark woods. When the dogs treed the coon, Carol was the first to arrive. She saw the glowing, banded eyes of the frightened raccoon, clinging to the topmost branch of a pine.

Behind her, the bouncing flashlights of the hunters approached. She knew what would likely come next: the men would stand around the tree and shoot at a cornered animal until its lifeless body thudded to the ground.

Carol quickly climbed up the tree. She could see the parade of flashlights getting closer. The coon inched as high as it could up the spindly pine. Carol squatted a foot below and whispered: “Hey coon. You gotta jump! It’s your only chance!”

The dogs barked below them. She heard the swishing and crunching of leaves underfoot.

“Do you hear me, cooner? When you hit the ground, you can’t stumble, or the dogs will be on you. Land on your feet and run. Now go!” She shook the limb until finally the raccoon released its grip, plunged thirty feet, and nearly landed on top of a baying hound. The coon rolled once and then was on its feet, running through the woods again, the dogs close behind.

The hunters arrived moments later. In the pine tree, Carol held her breath and listened.

“I thought for sure the hounds had it treed,” her dad said.

“Them dogs ain’t worth their feed,” said one of the other hunters.

They shuffled on. Carol waited until their lights crossed the creek before climbing down.

Despite Carol’s efforts, the coon did not live to see morning. When the hunters served coon the next day for lunch, she decided that the best way to honor the coon would be to eat him.

“Your flesh becomes mine,” she whispered before tasting her first bite, a daily grace she would recite for the rest of her life.

Carol convinced her father to bring home one of the hunter’s stray dogs, a male German shepherd mutt that Carol named Catfish. For the first time, Carol had a best friend. She and her partner in grime wandered the banks of the Chattahoochee. She caught fish and crawdads and cooked them over a campfire in an old Cherokee cave she had discovered along the bluffs. The cave became her den, a refuge where she retreated from the emptiness of her everyday life.

Caves are powerful and primeval places. They were among the earliest human shelters, and the first etchings of human art appeared deep in their bowels. Saint John received revelations in a cave, and Plato used a cave to explain reality. For Carol, the cave was home. She spent most of her teenage years camping in her cave above the river, with Catfish snuggled up beside her.

On weekends, she carried two inflatable inner tubes down to the river to float the Hooch, which was still wild and unpolluted in the 1950s. Carol watched trout spawn in the cold, clear waters. T
he river teemed with beavers, muskrats, and giant pike, and herons and egrets lined the banks, stalking on stilts, spearing fish.

One afternoon, Carol and Catfish got caught in a downpour. The swollen river became a thundering torrent of roaring whitewater. Carol’s inner tube flipped, and she fell into a rapid. Bubbles and foam engulfed her. She fought for air as the circulating water churned her repeatedly like a washing machine on spin cycle. After nearly a minute, she began to panic, flailing harder against the weight of the water.

In the frothy chaos, she tried one last desperate option: sink like a stone. Rather than fight for the surface, she went limp and let the current take her. It spun her around once more, then thrust her down to the bottom of the river, below the circulating water. The current flushed her downstream, finally spitting her out 30 yards from the rapid. Purple-lipped and foggy-headed, she swam over to an eddy along the bank. She hugged a boulder, still gasping and coughing up river. Moments later, she felt Catfish’s wet tongue on her forehead.

Walking back from the river with Catfish, Carol took a shortcut through the woods along a gravel road. Along the way, they passed an old trailer with a collapsing wooden porch and rusted metal roof. The yard was littered with tires and scrap metal, and a pit bull was chained to a stake. The dog barked and lunged at Carol as she passed.

It was getting dark, and she still had several miles to go. She had already missed five o’clock drinks, and her dad would be boiling mad. Suddenly, she heard clanking metal behind her. The pit bull had ripped his stake from the soggy ground and was charging her.

Catfish dove at the pit bull before it reached Carol, and the dogs tumbled, jaws at each other’s necks. Carol shouted at the dogs and tried to kick them apart. Her pants got shredded and her legs were gored. The pit bull slashed at Catfish, but Catfish pounced and momentarily pinned the pit bull, baring her gums and teeth. Carol grabbed the pit bull’s chain and dragged him back down the road. He cowered under a pickup truck, licking his wounds.

Then a light clicked on inside the trailer. A shirtless, beer-bellied man wearing cut-off jean shorts and cowboy boots stomped down the wooden steps. A wad of chewing tobacco was tucked beneath his lower lip. His bloodied pit bull limped over to him, panting heavily. He grabbed a rod of steel rebar from his front yard and walked toward Carol and Catfish.

“I’m gonna beat the shit out of your dog,” he said.

Carol picked up a big stick. “No you’re not.”

The man stopped a few feet from her. Carol stood her ground. He eyed her closely: a scrappy teenage girl, wearing tattered, blood-soaked jeans, hammer-gripping a sharp stick.

After a long silence, he dropped the rebar, spat his chew, and clunked back to his trailer.

Carol confounded the boys in high school. They didn’t know whether to fight or French kiss her. She was a hard-bodied hellion who dressed ruggedly, but beneath the jeans and flannel, she was sun-kissed and sensuous. Carol had developed into a natural knockout, a drop-dead gorgeous girl with curves and confidence. Lean and athletic, with fawn eyes and long, raven hair often braided down her back, she wore no makeup and rarely brushed her hair, yet she was radiantly beautiful.

Her reticence only added to her intrigue. Several boys had crushes on Carol, but few could break through her steely silence. Despite her confidence in the woods, she felt vulnerable and shy around people. No one had taught her how to chitchat, flirt, or gossip.

She knew that boys liked her and figured out quickly what they wanted. While playing tackle football, she felt the neighborhood boys groping for more than pigskin, and she had enjoyed getting tangled up in the surf with the Hawaiian natives.

But in high school, the social scene became more complex. Neighborhood boys became varsity lettermen with frilly-dressed girls tucked in their arms. Nevertheless, they were still intrigued by the mysterious, dark-haired nature girl who was smarter than her teachers but barely attended class. She could outdrink and outcuss even the toughest punks.

She liked the boys’ attention and craved their touch. But for her, it wasn’t worth painting her face and dressing like a princess. So she remained an outsider. Her classmates called her a tomboy, and in the 1950s tomboys were stigmatized and scorned, even when they were as sassy and sexy as Carol.

Two million years of evolution had hard-wired human beings—male and female alike—to explore nature, Carol reasoned. Why, then, was outdoor play still considered boy behavior?

Certainly, physiological gender differences exist between men and women. On average, women tend to be shorter and carry more body fat to aid in childbirth. They typically have fewer oxygen-carrying red blood cells and smaller hearts. Because they have far less testosterone, women tend to have less body hair, a much smaller Adam’s apple, and less muscle mass.

But when it comes to endurance, women close the gap and even surpass men. On average, women can walk, run, and swim for longer periods of time than men. That’s because women’s smaller size makes them more efficient, and over long distances and durations, more fat is burned, giving women a metabolic edge.

The claim that women are the weaker sex doesn’t hold up—not even in prehistoric times. Our far-roaming hunter-gatherer ancestors were long-distance travelers. Even as primitive women bore, nursed, and reared children, they gathered wild foods and trekked long distances, often with multiple kids on their backs. They were just as hardy and adroit as the males, and they required a deep, intimate knowledge of the natural world for their own survival and the sustenance of their kin.

Nature, then, has never been solely the domain of men. If social norms and pressures were stripped away, nearly all girls would climb trees and scrape their knees. Nature requires a thick-skinned toughness for survival in both genders. But in the stiff, stereotyped suburbia of the 1950s, it was tougher than ever to be a tomboy.

Carol drifted through high school. She occasionally met up with a gaggle of gossipy girls to drink beer at the river bluff, but even that seemed juvenile to Carol, who had been drinking hard liquor every night with her parents since she was twelve.

She knew more than many of her teachers, and they didn’t like being shown up by a scruffy slacker. “Biology was easy for me. It was like breathing,” Carol recalled. “The teachers knew what the book said, but they didn’t know biology. I could learn more at the river than in the classroom.”

Carol skipped homework and headed for the woods, where she could learn from her favorite teacher. She recorded her observations in journals filled with exhaustive notes and exquisitely intricate sketches. She dissected birds, bats, and beavers to teach herself animal anatomy and physiology. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life, but she knew for certain what she didn’t want to do.

“I am not going to work at a job that I don’t like until I can retire,” she told her father. “I want a life outdoors.”

“When are you gonna grow up? You can’t make a living playing with turtles and snakes,” he replied.

“I refuse to squander my life breathing stale air in an office cubicle. I need contact with the real world.”

“How are you gonna put a roof over your head without income? What are you gonna do for food? Eat out of the dumpster?”

Carol felt trapped. She wanted to immerse herself in the wild, but she couldn’t afford a house or land in the woods. The only way she could stay close to nature was to pare down her needs and live simply and frugally. There were two sides to every balance sheet, Carol realized.

“I knew I had to structure my life around not wanting much, so that I wouldn’t require resources to support myself financially,” she said. “I would have to find the resources inside myself.”

Or along the road.

While hiking to the river one afternoon when she was seventeen, Carol stepped over a freshly killed squirrel carcass along the shoulder of the road. Suddenly, it occurred to her: free food! She pulled out her steel knife and sliced open the squirrel. The dark, moist tenderloin was better than anything she could buy. Instead of prepackaged, chemical-injected meat from the store, Carol could harvest all the wild meat she wanted from the side of the road.

She began collecting and tasting every animal carcass she came across: raccoon, possum, snake, bird, rabbit, turtle, even fox. Her criteria were simple: if it had a decent amount of unsmashed meat and it didn’t smell completely rancid, it was good enough to eat.

With free food along the road and shelter in her cave beside the river, Carol began plotting her escape from stale, suffocating suburban life. Her exodus became even more urgent a few years later.

One night, Earl was in the basement showing off his World War II gun collection at a party. A neighbor’s teenage son went over to examine a revolver that Earl had been demonstrating. Unseen, he loaded a bullet in the chamber.

“Put that down, boy!” Earl shouted, and snatched the revolver out of his hands. Then he turned and showed the gun to his friend Tom Dickey, brother of the celebrated author of
Deliverance
, James Dickey.

“This is a military .45 with a special lockout,” Earl said. He explained that the lockout was a safety feature in case an enemy soldier grabbed it in close combat. Whenever the barrel was pressed against a person’s chest, the gun locked up and wouldn’t fire. That way, an officer’s gun could not be used against him.

“How can a gun know how to lock itsel
f
?” Tom asked.

“I’ll show you.” Earl held the pistol against his chest and pulled the trigger. Halfway back, the trigger locked.

“The gun isn’t loaded, but even if it had bullets, the trigger will lock when the gun’s barrel is fully pushed in by someone’s chest.”

Earl demonstrated again, this time on Tom. He pressed the gun into his chest and pulled the trigger. It locked again.

“That’s amazing!” said Tom.

“Now, if I pull the trigger without the barrel pushed in by someone’s chest, the trigger unlocks and works just fine.” He nonchalantly pointed the gun off to the side and pulled the trigger, unaware that the gun had been loaded. Earl expected to hear an empty click. Instead, a bullet exploded from the chamber. It ricocheted off Earl’s table saw and struck Carol in the abdomen.

Carol felt a gust of wind blow through her. There was no pain, only a whoosh of dizziness. She steadied herself against a chair. The room was silent. Carol didn’t realize she had been shot until her mom saw blood soaking through Carol’s white shirt.