Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (36 page)

“We’re hogging the planet,” Carol wrote in her journal. “We’re reducing life’s diversity to a single species and the handful of livestock and crops we’ve domesticated. There’s only so much protoplasm our planet can support.” There isn’t room or resources for one hundred million species and seven billion people. It’s either more of us or fewer of them.

On their way back from the bird haven, Carol drove past a dead armadillo on Cumberland’s sandy main road. Carol thought about stopping to pick it up, but Bob had a head-splitting migraine and wanted to get home.

The next morning, they ate a breakfast of marsh rabbit chili and lemon-drizzled watercress while watching the vultures drying their wings atop the museum roof like statued gargoyles. One glided down to peck a hunk of rabbit meat from Carol’s palm. She admired his cinder body, ashen face, and long, curved bill.

“Vultures get such a bad rap,” Carol said. “They are such beautiful, life-affirming birds.”

The vulture glided over to the chicken yard to pick at table scraps that Carol had scattered for them, but one of Carol’s hens pecked at him and chased him away.

“That hen—she’s a C-C-Cumberland Island woman,” Bob said.

“You haven’t even had a drink yet, and you’re already slurring your words,” Carol said.

Bob stood to get another helping of chili. Woozily, he stumbled against the wall, dropping his plate and silverware. Then everything went black, and he collapsed to the porch.

Carol used his cell phone to call for help. He was transported to a Jacksonville hospital, where surgeons showed Carol the CT scans: over half of his brain was dark. A blood vessel had burst in his brain.

Carol sat beside his bed in the windowless hospital room and held his cold hand. For twenty-five years, he had stuck by her. She didn’t realize how much she leaned on him until suddenly he was yanked away.

“Stay with me,” she whispered.

Later that morning, the hemorrhage swelled, swallowing the rest of his brain. Bob died the next day.

A memorial was held at Plum Orchard. Carol went through the motions. There was nothing new to be said. All the old truisms and condolences were repeated, as they had to be. The first twinges of feeling didn’t come until everyone left, and the sun sank into the marsh, and the frogs began to sing.

Carol returned home alone. Grief washed over her like the tides. In the span of less than two years, she had lost everyone who mattered—first her parents and now Bob.

Driving back to her cabin, Carol passed the same dead armadillo in the road from a few days earlier. A bed of leaves now surrounded the carcass. Puzzled, Carol pulled over for a closer look. The armadillo was wreathed by laurel leaves.
How did those get there?
she wondered. The carcass was in the middle of a pine forest, but the nearest laurel trees were a half-mile away.

She looked closer. Within the wreath, twigs were neatly arranged in a pattern around the dead armadillo. Then she heard a rustle. Hiding in the palmetto, a female armadillo watched through the fronds. She had been tending to her mate in something resembling a burial ritual.

Carol hunkered down behind a tree and observed. Eventually, the armadillo crept over to her partner, twigs and foliage in her mouth, and continued cloaking him in a leafy shroud. Was this armadillo mourning like her? Carol was awestruck. The armadillo ceremony opened a hairline crack in Carol’s hardboiled relationship to the universe.

Her heart ached every evening at five o’clock, when the porch was empty, Bob’s glass unfilled. Carol kept her wedding ring on a necklace and fingered it whenever she felt her sorrow swell.

Though the rest of her body felt benumbed, her heart continued to hurt, like a dull knife in her chest. Then she caught a cold that she couldn’t shake and grew increasingly listless and lethargic. Her breathing became shallow and raspy. She moved glacially through her days.

After several months, she suspected something was seriously wrong. She was frail and bony, barely able to eat or drink. Finally, at age sixty-nine, for the first time since her dad had shot her, Carol went to the hospital as a patient. Doctors immediately rushed her into open heart surgery. One of her heart valves had become dangerously infected.

On her way to the operating room, Carol felt death slide over her. It hovered in the air, the way flocks of seagulls floated above a boat adrift at sea. Death was unexplored terrain of the far shore, at once frightening and fascinating, and she let herself go there. She had nothing left to live for. The people she loved most had left her. The people on the island hated her. She was never good at relationships, but she loved more intensely than she let on—and hurt more deeply than anyone knew.

Now she was tired. Tired of bearing it away. Tired of fighting. For what? Nobody was willing to change. Nobody really cared about wilderness or sea turtles or anything except themselves. Nobody really cared about her, either.

Being tired made it easier to let go. Death descended closer, like a suffocatingly hot blanket. She wasn’t afraid of death, but she hoped it would go quickly.

Her chest felt heavy. It was hard to breathe. She distracted herself with highlight reels of happy memories, and she kept looping back to one scene: her porch at sunset, Bob in the rocking chair beside her, hands laced behind his head, his floppy lips stretching into a wide, warm smile as he said softly: “Ain’t life the greatest.”

Amen, she uttered aloud.

Life was messy and mean, she realized, but mostly it was amazing. She still relished its faint hum, even as her heart sputtered to a stop. She loved being a part of it. And she wasn’t ready to leave it after all. She wanted to stay. Every extra second was even more precious and made her want to stay even harder.

She didn’t care about the meaning of life, but rather the experience of it—the sublime pleasure of a storm rolling in, the raw, jagged feeling of cutting into a carcass, the simple wonder of a crackling fire. There was no sentimentality to it—only an urgency to live.

She kicked and thrashed against the blanket. There was so much still to do. She still had some fight left in her. She clung to life, fierce as a barnacle.

The operating doors swung open. Down came the anesthesia mask. Carol wondered if the fluorescent bulbs overhead would be the last light she saw.

Her heart went silent. She was connected to a machine that pumped blood for her. Surgeons cut through her breastbone to reach her damaged heart—just as she had dissevered thousands of turtle shells to examine their chest cavities.

Once they opened her heart, the surgeons removed the rotted valve and sewed a stainless steel one into place. After five hours, the surgeons closed up the foot-long incision in her chest. Carol would have loved to watch—to see how she was put together inside, to understand her inner workings, to examine the hole in her heart.

She survived the surgery, but surgeons worried about her recovery. The infection could have spread to other parts of her heart. Doctors kept her on life support.

Carol awoke one afternoon in a gray hospital room, breathing tube down her throat, feeding tube in her nose, machines controlling her breathing. The warm blanket had lifted. Her blurry vision came into focus.

I sat in the wooden chair beside her bed and pretended to be upbeat. She was a ragged skeleton with bulging eyes and limp skin hanging from her bones. Her hair was thin and frayed. Never had she seemed so vulnerable.

Rain strummed the window. Not knowing what to say, I just sat there, holding her bony, rope-veined hand. It was callused and coarse. Her hands had eviscerated turtles and stitched torn flesh, caressed lovers and wiped away tears. They were a map of her life.

We listened to the steady patter of the rain for a few more minutes.

“You can’t die on me,” I said finally. “This will make a shitty ending to the book.”

Carol’s cracked lips curved into a faint smile.

Unable to speak, Carol feebly lifted a finger. Wired to a buzzing, beeping life support system, she pointed out the window to the breathing trees, the pulsing wind, the wet sky.

23

One week after open heart surgery, Carol returned home to Cumberland Island. She ritually splashed the back of her neck with saltwater. Then she walked barefoot along the wide shore, the sun-warmed sand between her toes. Ahead, a flock of terns lifted as one cloud of wings, like white flames burning the sky.
What was the signal?
she wondered. How did they know when to rise together like mist from the beach?

Beside the sea, Carol felt stirrings of the heartbroken girl she once was, arriving on Cumberland’s dark beach for the first time, carving her name in the wet sand. Now she had come home again, and once more her battered heart needed to heal.

She closed her eyes as she walked. With her eyes shut, her other senses were magnified: she tasted the salty breeze, felt the pings of windblown sand, and listened to the murmur of the tides growing louder with each step. She didn’t open her eyes until her feet touched water.

An hour later, Gogo’s husband, David, drove down the beach. He saw Carol and his jaw dropped to the dashboard. He slammed his brakes and skidded beside her.

“You’re back?” he asked.

“Apparently so.”

“I thought you—you’re living here?”

“Got nowhere else to go.”

“I mean, in your condition, I figured you might—is it wise? For how long—”

“For good.”

He stared blankly at the steering wheel. They hadn’t gotten rid of her. He shook his head, gunned his engine, and drove off.

Carol missed Gogo, but she had let go of the hurt. Now, instead of a hard knot, there was just a frayed end to a friendship.

Near Long Point, Carol came upon a dead sea turtle. She whistled, and soon a pair of vultures circled overhead. One alighted on the turtle carcass and watched her with unblinking eyes.

Carol had once been invincible. Now she felt the weight of her own mortality. Death’s hot breath had brushed her cheek. Like everything else, she came with an expiration date. She still had fire in her blood. But soon enough, she would feed the vultures.

Carol loved life more than herself. Like gravity, she was drawn to it. She couldn’t get enough of it, and she still was astonished by it every day. She hoped that it would never end, but she knew that it had to. She secretly longed for the eternal but was blood-bound to the earth.

Carol had lived close to the bone, engrossed in dead things. She went where no one else dared. She wallowed in the rank and rancid, picking fetid flesh from beneath her fingernails. She reveled in the raveling rot. She studied death to better understand life, and in the end, what she had learned was this: the greater the knowledge, the
deeper the mystery.

She once had said that her religion was truth. And what was true? Death was true, and it was nothing to be afraid of. Her only fear was not fully living.

Carol was an unsentimental biologist who grounded herself in the messy sludge of reality. All she needed to get to heaven was a good pair of boots, she often said. She resisted mixing spirituality with science. But recently, she had felt the presence of something larger in her life and work.

“I don’t fool myself into any talk about an afterlife or immortality,” she wrote in her journal. “But when I am waist-deep in a gator hole or elbow-deep in turtle guts, all I can say is: I feel a deep, visceral connection to the Source.” It couldn’t be talked about, prayed to, hoped for, understood, or even sought. In rare moments, it revealed itself—in the shadows of an old-growth forest, the morning fog ghosting over the ocean, and the flickering light in the eye of a whale. It was ordinary as sunlight—and as luminous.

The armadillo funeral pointed toward something deeper, too. There was a current flowing through all of life, an undertow of awe that swept her away. She felt it on a bareback turtle ride into the depths and in quiet moments on the dock, throwing a cast net like Jesse had taught her.

She felt it again nights later, alone on the dark beach, a dripping wet lemon moon rising over the water behind a scrim of cloud. She held her hand over her scarred, steeled heart and felt it ticking.

“Well, here I am,” she said aloud. It was all she knew for certain. And it was enough.

The tide was like a metronome marking the now. In the glassy moon-glow of the sea, she beheld a reflection of herself, oscillating like the ocean between ferociousness and tenderness. Human nature was not hopelessly selfish, as she once thought. The ocean had violent tempests and dark depths. And yet the ocean could be gentle and lucent, too. So could she. Carol had killed a man and saved an island. She was oceanic: brutal and benevolent, savage and sympathetic, cutthroat and compassionate. Both were part of the ebb and flow of the human heart.

The most meaningful men in her life were long gone. Jim Kemph died of a heart attack years ago. Charlie Wharton passed away in his mountain cabin in 2003. John Pennington died of colon cancer in 1980, only a few years after leaving Cumberland, and Jimmy Carter had visited his hospital room to say goodbye. Now her dad was dead, and Bob was gone, too.

She and Bob had often locked horns, but the old bastard was right about one thing: nobody goes it alone, not even a self-sufficient naturalist living in the wilderness. She cut her own firewood and gathered her own food, but that didn’t make her any less dependent on the world around her. She had always relied on a community of animals and plants—and people. Her mom changed her diapers. Her dad taught her how to hunt. Jesse taught her how to live. Bob taught her how to love.

Love. It was a word she never heard from her family and only rarely from the men in her life. But it was love that had helped her crawl out from her hiding place. Love reconnected her to life.

She had wrung every drop out of life. Each day she immersed herself in its natural wonders. But there was one wonder that had passed her by: she had missed her chance to have kids. It was one of her biggest regrets and deepest sorrows.

Instead of children, Carol had devoted her life to parenting the island and protecting its wildlife. Yet by her reckoning, she had failed there, too. Species were disappearing faster than ever. The island wilderness was fragmented and its future uncertain. The wood storks beside Lake Whitney were gone. The island’s freshwater was drying up, and its ponds were shrinking. There were only a few big gators left. She hadn’t saved the sea turtles, either. All five island species were still endangered, and carcasses continued to wash ashore.

Then Carol saw a wet-backed glimmer in the moonlit surf. A sea turtle was crawling out of the water. The turtle pressed her beak into the sand and tasted home.

The turtle climbed into the dunes, dug a nest, and buried her hundred embryos. Salty tears trickled from her eyes.

Before heading back to sea, the turtle stopped to look at Carol. A breath of wind stirred the sand between them.

Carol couldn’t prove it, but she knew: one of the hatchlings that she had rescued thirty years ago had come home to nest. She didn’t measure the turtle or count the eggs this time. She just watched her crawl back to the ocean.

Then, in a moment of scientific weakness, Carol etched a word in the wet sand below the nest. Using the back of her heel, she wrote: THANKS.

Her turtle heart was still beating. She stood beside the sea, her bare feet sinking into the sand, whispering to no one in particular: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.