Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (35 page)

Carol hoped to create water wilderness areas along the continental shelf that were off-limits to trawling and commercial fishing, especially where turtles feed and breed. The United States has already established a patchwork of semi-protected areas, but nearly all of these so-called sanctuaries—including Gray’s Reef, a vast complex of underwater sandstone caves and outcroppings just forty miles north of Cumberland—still allow commercial fishing, and many even allow bottom trawling. “They’re nothing but paper parks,” said Carol.

Marine reserves are more protective—and more rare. They are true underwater wilderness areas. Less than a fraction of 1 percent of the world’s oceans are currently protected as no-trawl marine reserves. But the tide seems to be turning. In the past decade, over a dozen countries have established no-trawl zones, protecting some 2.5 million acres of underwater habitat for sea turtles and other endangered marine species.

“Habitat is their only hope,” Carol said.

After the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, tar-black sea turtles drowned in oil-coated waters, and hatchlings flapped across poisoned beaches. Thousands more turtles were torched alive as BP burned off the oil. Now, oil companies are eyeing the Atlantic and the offshore waters of Georgia for new drilling platforms. Their seismic underwater oil explorations fire air guns every ten seconds, nonstop, that are even louder and more deadly than the navy’s whale-deafening sonar.

Meanwhile, Carol has turned up the volume on her call for a marine reserve along the Southeastern coast of the United States, home to the world’s largest population of loggerhead sea turtles and their most prized nesting habitat, along with the nursery of the most endangered species of whales.

Many locals, including Grover Henderson, scoffed at Carol’s idea of prioritizing sea life over submarines.

“Those subs are keeping this country safe. Are you willing to die for a bunch of whales and turtles?”

“Our security depends more on the health of the wild ocean than a bunch of blowhards playing underwater war games,” Carol said.

“You oughta be shot for treason,” he replied.

“We gotta look beyond our borders at the whole web.”

Like wilderness boundaries on land, marine reserves are just dotted lines on a map. But at least they can buy time for whales, dolphins, and other marine life to replenish their numbers. They can offer a trawl-free haven for turtles amid deeply troubled waters. And they can help us, too, Carol believed. Marine reserves can help restore fisheries and stabilize the ocean’s health, which sustains our own.

“Our planet—and our bodies—are mostly ocean,” Carol often observed. “Our blood has the same salinity and pH as seawater. Our fate is bound to the tides.”

part five

beneath the shell

22

Most of us have opinions and principles that we argue and vote for, but we still live our everyday lives like everyone else: buying food at the grocery store, watching televison, driving to work for corporate America. Carol is different. She lives her convictions every day, without compromise.

She doesn’t want much. She lives frugally and feeds herself from the island. She is straightforward and direct, and she doesn’t play games—she says exactly what she thinks. It doesn’t take a lot to make her happy: sunrise, silence, a sky full of stars.

She sums up the solution to all of the island’s problems in three words: leave it alone. Let nature do the work, she says. Managing wildlife inevitably fails. Manipulating ecosystems invariably backfires. Vehicle tours are no substitute for a walk in the woods.

Her solution to the world’s problems is also clear and straight-forward: fewer people, more wilderness. People are still part of nature, but we have gobbled up too much of it. None of our little feel-good actions will save us unless we can share the planet with other species. Our only hope is working with Mother Nature rather than crowding her out.

Carol sees the world in black and white, but her own life is a gauzy gray. She isn’t always as simple as she seems. She is too kaleidoscopic to fit neatly into categories, too paradoxical to be pegged by stereotypes. She will rescue an injured coon but will shoot a healthy one sneaking into her yard. She saves animals but doesn’t think we should be saving humans who overbreed or overconsume.

She’s not afraid of snakes or alligators, but driving in traffic makes her nervous. She is a bold, iconoclastic female, yet she has cooked and cleaned for every one of her men. She is fearlessly candid one on one, yet surprisingly shy in front of groups.

She wants the horses off the island, but she rides them, feeds them, and looks after them more than anyone, including the National Park Service. She thinks hogs should be removed, too, but she relies on pork for most of her food and even has a pet pig named Priscilla. She fights for untrammeled wilderness yet lives and drives within it.

Publicly, she is strictly scientific. Privately, she is deeply soulful. Her arguments are grounded in logic and law, but her actions are guided by emotion, especially compassion. She doesn’t hold out much hope for change, yet she has spent her whole life fighting for it.

Carol says she isn’t lonely, but sometimes she is.

She says that people don’t hurt her, but sometimes they do.

In 2009, turtles lost their voice. Soon after Carol uncovered the illegal construction in the park, the National Park Service revoked her permits and officially ended Carol’s turtle research. After four decades of compiling the most comprehensive sea turtle stranding data in the world, Carol had been abruptly cut off. The new superintendent, Fred Boyles, claimed that her research permits were not renewed because Carol had been listening to confidential conversations on her park-issued radio. “She needed to learn that her actions have consequences,” he said.

Her sea turtle research suddenly came to a screeching halt. Dead sea turtles rotted on the beach again. Carol buried her sorrow.

“More food for the vultures,” she shrugged, her eyes wet.

Carol continued to follow vultures, as she had since childhood. They led her to other carcasses and kills. They helped her clean the flesh from bones. Carol whistled to them and called them by name.

Then Carol turned sixty-five and, suddenly, the vultures shadowed her. Feisty and fearless as ever, Carol was the only senior citizen in America wading in gator holes, tracking bobcats through midnight swamps, and climbing trees to check bald eagle nests. But age was catching up to the other people in her life.

Carol’s mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Helplessly, Carol watched her painful decline. She traveled back to Atlanta every weekend to be with her. In a sudden moment of clarity a few weeks before her death, her mom looked Carol straight in the eye and asked, “What’s happening to me?”

Carol wished she could end her mother’s misery. “At least we take care of animals. We put them down when they’re in pain or fading,” she said to her father one afternoon.

“I’ll kill myself before I ever get that sick,” Earl vowed. “I plan on shooting myself as soon as I start going downhill.”

“That’s fine if you want to do that,” Carol said. “But don’t you dare leave without giving me a chance to say goodbye.”

Anne died quietly in her sleep later that year. Earl fell apart after his wife’s death. He stopped eating and leaving the house. For the next year, Carol spent more time in Atlanta than on Cumberland. She sat beside her father on the musty living room couch, listening to the wall clock ticking. She flipped through scrapbooks with him, hoping the old photographs—taken by cameras and film he had developed while working for Kodak—would pry open his shuttered heart. She confessed to skipping Sunday School to feed the feral cats in Rochester, and she reminisced about family swims and volcano hikes in Hawaii. Earl remained despondent.

While in Atlanta, Carol took a few trips to check on the Pigeon Mountain salamander she had discovered decades earlier. Many of the hollers where her salamander once thrived were being filled with vacation homes. Mamie, the mountain woman who had taught her backwoods skills, had moved to a housing project next to a four-lane highway. When Carol stopped by to visit, the first thing she noticed was Mamie’s unnatural smile. “She had fake teeth that didn’t fit right, so there was no way to feel that good gut-feeling warmth that comes from the smile of an old friend,” Carol recalled. Mamie wore city clothes instead of dirty dresses with sweaty aprons. Her food came from the grocery store. “She seemed happy, but that wonderful essence, that strong driving spirit, that fierce independence which I so admired in her, is subdued. Gone are the woodstove ashes, the mounds of cathead biscuits, the rows of vegetables in mason jars. Mother is no longer personified in Mamie.”

One afternoon, sick of sitting in the stale house, Carol drove her dad down to the Chattahoochee River. Her dad sat quietly on the bank while she rolled up her jeans and walked out shin-deep into the shoals.

Water rolled over rock. The cascades drowned out the noise of the interstate bridge a mile downstream. Earl took off his shoes and dipped his toes in the river. Carol sat next to him, skipping stones across the water.

“I thought I would be relieved when she was gone,” Earl said. “I was wrong.”

“I miss her, too,” Carol said.

“I loved her so much,” said Earl.

Carol looked out across the river. “Why didn’t you tell her that when she was alive?”

Carol’s father died soon after her mother’s passing. He didn’t end up shooting himself. He fought to the very end. He was eventually hospitalized for heart complications and kidney failure. A few days before he died, he held Carol’s hand.

“I’m so proud of you,” he whispered.

They were words she had waited a lifetime to hear.

Death was part of Carol’s daily life. She faced it up close: swarming flies, rotten flesh, maggots crawling up her arm. She saw death as it was: not dressed up by a mortician, but rank, raw, and real.

Though death was necessary and natural, Carol wanted to minimize it. She avoided needless killing. She saved life wherever she could, rescuing wounded animals, relocating snakes, and even liberating moths from bug traps.

“There is nothing moral or altruistic about what I do,” Carol wrote in her journal. “We all share the same flesh.”

Death brought out the best in us, Carol believed. In the face of death, we discover what really matters. For Carol, daily contact with death provided perspective on her everyday life that was refreshingly candid and clear. Death’s hot wind stripped away the veneer and exposed deeper truth. Death didn’t numb her to death. Just the opposite: it intensified her life.

Back on the mainland, death was pushed to the shoulder of the road or hidden in coffins. But on Cumberland, life and death bled out in the open, knitted together, stitched into the same fleshy fabric. Life didn’t stop. It only changed form, like a windblown wave melting into the sea.

There were worse things than death, Carol believed. Suffering scared her more than dying. She had seen too many injured animals still clinging to life—writhing, gasping, bleeding the sand red.

Once, Carol had come upon a pilot whale stranded alive on the beach. It had already furrowed itself into a depression in the sand, where it was jerking and convulsing. The low tide was far from shore. She wrapped chains around its tail and tried to pull it with her jeep, but it wouldn’t budge.

The whale’s huge flopping anguish was unbearable. There was nothing she could do to save it. So she unsheathed her knife and sliced the whale’s throat, working as quickly as possible to end its suffering. The whale thrashed as the knife went in. Once she gouged a hole, she shoved first her fist and then her arm into the whale, found its heart, and ripped it out. She watched the fire fade from its ink-black eyes. Pain—and life—left the whale. She knelt down in the sand beside the dead whale, its heart still twitching in her bloody hands, and whispered goodbye.

Dealing with death on a daily basis had made her unafraid of it. But she never got used to it. Her stomach still dropped every time a carcass washed ashore. She wept for days when Gator, her pet otter, was bitten by a rattlesnake and died in her arms. But then she dried her tears, steeled herself, and dissected the dead otter. She removed the otter’s skull for the museum and tossed the carcass to the vultures.

Life ate itself. She faced this naked truth inside every dead turtle. Death fed life’s insatiable appetite. We were all brief survivors of flesh, nibbled and pecked, eaten alive, devoured even as we dined. Not even the wealthiest could escape it. The rich died as plainly as the poor, and, like every creature that has ever lived, they all decayed into the same earth.

Just before her father died, Carol and Bob stumbled upon a secret island deep in the tidal creeks near Hush Your Mouth. It was blanketed with large birds, especially pelicans, egrets, herons, ibises, and endangered wood storks. Their nests covered nearly every square inch of open ground. The stench of guano was overpowered only by the deafening shrieks of dive-bombing birds. Carol and Bob marveled at the fecundity of life crammed onto the tiny island.

“This is what the world must have looked like before we arrived,” Bob said. “We have no idea what we’re missing.”

“A good mechanic doesn’t throw away any parts,” Carol said. “When I used to disassemble my dad’s watches, he always asked: ‘Did you save all the pieces? Do you know how to put that back together again? Can you make it work?’”

She gingerly tiptoed between nests counting birds and eggs.

“But my dad was no tree hugger,” she continued. “He also used to ask me, ‘Do we really need millions of species? Humans only use a few of them. Give me a few deer to shoot at and some trout to fish for. Everything else needs to get the hell out of the way.
’
”

It was a fair question, Carol acknowledged, and one that she had been asked often: do we really need so much nature? Can’t we get by with fewer cockroaches? Surely some of the world’s ten million species are superfluous. We can probably stand to lose a few of the twenty-seven hundred species of mosquitoes, forty thousand species of spiders, or three hundred thousand different kinds of beetles.

There’s just one problem, Carol pointed out. We don’t know which ones we need. Species are like the rivets holding together an airplane, she said. If a few pop out, the plane might rattle a bit, but it can keep flying. Lose a few more, and the plane goes down—along with all of its passengers.

Earth has already seen five big rivet-popping crashes, including the mass extinction around 250 million years ago that wiped out 95 percent of species on earth. The 5 percent of species that survived may have seemed superfluous until they saved life itself from going extinct.

Life’s diversity was the key to surviving these mass extinctions. Mother Nature was not just showing off with her jeweled squid, flamingo tongue snails, and glowing octopus. She was creating as many possibilities of life as possible, hoping that a few strange forms survive. We’re alive today only because a handful of rare species hung on in the dark times. Diversity kept life going.

Diversity keeps life going today. It produces the oxygen we breathe, pollinates the food we eat, nourishes the soil for our crops, recycles nutrients, and filters our air and water. More species diversity means fewer disease outbreaks and pandemics.

Biodiversity is also our best medicine. Half of all pharmaceuticals come from plants, animals, and fungi, including aspirin and penicillin. It’s our best investment, too. Economists calculate the total value of ecosystem services—such as water purification, soil building, and pollination of food crops—at over $33 trillion each year, twice as large as the entire world’s economy. Nature does it all free of charge.

Life is a diversified portfolio, but we are drawing down our capital and stealing from the future. Our economy is consuming its planetary host. The end result is inevitable: bankruptcy. We’re causing a sixth mass extinction. Frogs and salamanders are dying from a deadly fungus. So are bats. Bees—which pollinate one-third of the food we eat—are mysteriously disappearing. Sea turtle, whale, and dolphin populations are crashing. Even the seemingly ubiquitous songbirds are in serious trouble. Half of all species alive today will be gone by the end of the century.