Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (5 page)

“No sir. I’ll get that fixed tomorrow.”

He handed back Jim’s license. “Have a good evening.”

Back in Atlanta, Martha Kemph wondered why her husband was spending late nights and long weekends away from home. She had met Jim’s new employee, the lewd jezebel who cursed and drank and wore baggy men’s clothes. But she didn’t suspect any mischief from her husband of nineteen years, especially with Carol, who was only three years older than their eldest daughter.

A devoted wife and devout Christian, Martha prayed for her husband every evening in her empty bedroom, after packing lunches for six children and getting them all tucked in.

One night, Jim came home late, half-drunk, with bad news: the radio store business was going under. Martha couldn’t believe it. He had been working late hours and spending more time than ever at the shop.

There was only one way to stop the bank from seizing the house and the car, Jim told her: they must get a divorce.

Martha stood in stunned, horrified silence.

Jim explained his plan: once they divorced, he would deed the house to her and then declare bankruptcy. That way, at least she and the kids would have a place to live.

Martha quietly consented to a divorce, though they didn’t tell their children. Martha’s parents came to live with her and help raise the kids, while Jim indulged in a midlife crisis with a woman half his age.

Carol’s friend Tom Dickey was also a Civil War relic hunter. He specialized in defusing artillery. In the spring of 1962, Carol and Jim brought him a hand grenade they found near the river. Tom began disassembling the grenade on his workbench in the basement.

Tom’s basement was lined floor to ceiling with shelves containing mine balls, shrapnel, unexploded projectiles, artillery shells, and other Civil War treasures dug up from Atlanta backyards, swamps in South Carolina, and Louisiana bayous.

“Don’t you worry about all of the explosives you have down here?” Carol asked.

“I do fret about it some. If this house caught on fire, you’d hear the last shots fired of the Confederacy.”

Tom removed the grenade plug and set it aside. He unsealed the grenade’s powder chamber. Carol inched closer, buzzed with adrenaline. Jim crept out the basement door.

Tom safely emptied the gunpowder and then filled the powder chamber with water. He tossed the reassembled grenade to Carol, who gingerly caught it with her fingertips.

“You’re holding history. Handle it with care.”

Carol found Jim sitting in a lawn chair in Tom’s backyard. His eyes were wet and pleading. “Let’s get married,” he said.

Carol was shell-shocked. “You’re already married,” she replied.

“That’s a formality. Martha and I are getting a divorce.”

“I don’t know, Jim. You’ve got a family. You’ve got kids.”

“And you’ve got nothing. So you’ve got nothing to lose.”

She felt the heaviness of the grenade in her trembling hands.

“All right,” she whispered.

She felt no explosion of emotion, no flare of feelings. Just a wet fizzle.

Jim and Carol quietly married in a civil ceremony in north Georgia in 1962. She was twenty years old.

“It was a mistake. I was lost. I had nothing else, no direction, no idea what to do with my life,” Carol recalled. “I was still trying to obey my parents and do what everyone else does: get married, have children, fit in. Only it didn’t work.”

Jim and Carol’s marriage lasted less than a year. They moved into a public housing apartment together and continued relic hunting for a while, but already cracks were fissuring through their fragile relationship. Jim continued visiting Martha and the kids. Carol spent more time alone in the woods.

“I was going through the motions,” Carol said. “There was no glue to hold us together. Deep down, we both knew there was nothing to our relationship but a few cheap thrills.”

Jim and Carol divorced in 1963. Jim moved back in with Martha, and his children barely noticed his absence. He kept the radio shop afloat and rejoined his family. Carol got a divorce certificate and a few rusted cannonballs, the last shots of their confederacy.

5

“I’ve given normal life a fair shot, and it didn’t work out,” Carol wrote in her journal after the divorce. “So I’ve finally decided to do what I’d wanted to do all along: immerse myself in the study of nature.” In 1966, she enrolled in biology classes at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Never before had she been surrounded by a community of people who cherished nature like she did.

Among them was renowned river ecologist Dr. Charles Wharton. Head of the biology department, Wharton literally wrote the textbook on Southern ecology. He was a six-foot-six, blue-eyed beanpole, with auburn hair and a warm, magnetic smile. He spoke slowly and thoughtfully, with Spanish moss hanging off his long, gentrified syllables. On the first day of Biology 101, Wharton arrived five minutes late to the lecture hall. He glided to the podium in long, smooth strides and then stood silently for several moments to scan the audience. His eyes stopped on Carol, seated in the front row.

“H
uman culture is built around monogamy, but our biology is not,” he began. “Most animals have multiple sexual partners. Only 3
percent of species exhibit monogamous pair bonding. Monogamy” he concluded, “is not natural.”

He paused, allowing his words to sink in. A few students shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Guys in the back row smirked. Carol raised her hand.

“Lots of animals mate for life,” Carol said, and rattled off a list, including her two favorites, vultures and turtles.

Wharton smiled. “Most still cheat,” he said. “Cheating ensures more genetic mixing and a better chance that offspring will survive.”

Sex is as wild in nature as it is among humans, Wharton maintained. Goshawks fornicate ten times a day. Oystercatchers like threesomes: they form partnerships of two females and one male. Snails shoot a dart into their partners to prolong copulation. Bonobos engage in erotic behavior, including genital rubbing, tongue kissing, and oral sex, Wharton explained.

He and Carol sparred throughout the semester, and their debates often continued after class. They began meeting regularly in his office for long conversations, then adjourned to the bar for drinks and more provocative discourse.

Like her father and her ex-husband, Charlie Wharton was a charismatic and authoritative figure with a keen intellect. He was also twenty years older than her.

Age wasn’t important to Carol. It was just a number. And after her affair with Jim, she wasn’t looking for entertainment anymore. Brains were what mattered most to her. “I didn’t want to roll over and wonder, ‘Who’s this?
’
” she said. “I’d rather have something to talk about.”

She had a lot to talk about with Charlie. For the first time in her life, Carol had met someone who shared her love for the natural world. Their heated discussions soon inflamed other passions, and the line between teacher and student began to blur.

They traveled together from the mountains to the coastal islands of Georgia conducting fieldwork. One afternoon, Charlie took Carol to a tributary of the Chattahoochee River not far from her childhood stomping grounds. For two decades, Charlie had gathered specimens from the creek. He knew it better than anyone—except Carol. She had been exploring the creek since she was in sixth grade and knew every unturned rock and eddy pool.

They hiked the creek up to Carol’s cave, tucked beneath an outcropping in the bluffs, and hung their bare feet off the edge. For once, they didn’t talk. They just listened, silent in each other’s presence, the river chattering below.

A few years earlier, Carol had gotten drunk in the cave after relic hunting with Jim. With Charlie, it was different. Carol felt something new and surprisingly unscientific, like the heart-catching moment of seeing her first sea turtle in the Hawaiian canal. It was something mysterious, frightening, irrational, and perhaps uniquely human. Whatever it was, there was only one word for it: love.

Charlie, a forty-four-year-old bachelor, was smitten by this savvy, sexy undergrad with smoldering brown eyes who knew more about salamanders and snakes than most of his colleagues. Carol was equally fearless around tenured professors and twelve-foot alligators.

On weekends, he drove her to his cabin in the north Georgia mountains. It was at the end of a long gravel road, surrounded by virgin forests and pristine, free-flowing creeks. Carol quickly befriended the locals living deep in the hollers. From one mountain woman named Mamie, she learned how to make soap from wood ashes, how to track a bee to its honey tree, and where to harvest wild morels, ramps, and ginseng. Carol visited her often and imbibed her backwoods wisdom. She was dead set on learning the storehouse of skills and lore from old-timers like Mamie before they were gone.

Late one evening, Carol and Charlie were searching for salamanders in the headwaters of the Tallulah River. Charlie knelt down in the ice-cold, ankle-deep water and proposed. Carol threw her arms around him.

“He is the one,” Carol told her mom afterward.

“He’s your teacher,” she replied. “He’s twenty years older than you.”

“We’ll make it work.”

“You said that last time.”

“I’m in love with him. He loves what I love.”

“He loves one thing.”

Carol and Charlie married and lived in Atlanta while they finished building the mountain cabin. Carol continued working toward her biology degree, although she ended up spending most of her time cooking meals and cleaning house.

“I couldn’t cook like his mom,” Carol recalled. “He wanted my spaghetti sauce to taste exactly like hers.”

Carol held on to her dreams of living with Charlie in the mountains—and maybe even raising a few kids who would run wild in the woods with her. She had never before considered having a child, but with Charlie she could see a future with children for the first time.

“What do you think about having kids?” Carol asked him one afternoon, rocking in the porch swing of the half-built cabin.

“I already have hundreds of them in my lecture halls.”

“I mean children of our own.”

“Are you serious?”

Carol stopped the rocking porch swing with her feet. She steadied herself beside him. “It might be fun,” she said.

“Aren’t we already having fun?”

“Sure.”

“Let’s not spoil it then.”

One semester before Carol was to graduate, Charlie convinced her to drop out of college so she could spend more time at home and help him with research. For the next year, she gathered specimens for his studies—while also editing his publications, grading his students’ papers, washing his laundry, and ironing his shirts.

Then one brisk October morning, as the first bright leaves twirled from the trees, Carol suggested that they head to the mountain cabin for the weekend.

“I’ve got some writing to do. Go on without me,” Charlie mumbled, nose in a book, pen in his mouth, surrounded by towers of scientific journals on his desk.

So Carol drove up to northwest Georgia alone. Autumn colors were already spilling down the slopes. During her hike up Pigeon Mountain, not far from Charlie’s cabin, Carol stumbled upon a cave along its north face. She tucked her baggy jeans into black, knee-high fireman’s boots and slushed through the shin-deep water gurgling from the chasm. She shone her flashlight into every crack in the limestone searching for critters. Bats stirred overhead.

Then, wedged between two jagged fins of rock, Carol spotted a salamander she had never seen before: it was rusty brown, with an olive band and a slate-black belly. It was the largest salamander she had come across—nearly seven inches long, with a spotted, flattened tail. She plucked the salamander from the crevice and examined it more closely: it had an elongated toe on each foot, which enabled it to climb slick cave walls and rock faces. Could this be a new species?

Carol dashed down the mountain with her salamander and sped straight back to Atlanta, not even stopping to pick up a fresh coon carcass near Chatsworth. She burst into the house, eager to show Charlie.

He was with another woman.

A few days later, Carol returned to pack up her belongings, all of which fit inside a single cardboard box. He met her on the porch as she was about to leave.

“I’m sorry, Carol.”

“What did I do wrong?” Her voice trembled.

“Nothing. It’s just . . . I feel cramped. I guess I’m just not ready to settle down.”

“Then why did you marry me?”

“I don’t know.” A misty drizzle pattered the leaves. He tugged on his vest. “I warned you the first day I laid eyes on you: monogamy doesn’t come naturally to me.” Then he turned and walked back into the house, the screen door slapping behind him.

For months, Carol felt anesthetized, like a specimen floating in formaldehyde. Her parents blamed her for a second failed marriage. Her few remaining friends and colleagues sided with the distinguished professor. Years of her life had been utterly wasted, her heart bled dry.

It turned out that Carol’s salamander was indeed a new spe
cies. It was named the Pigeon Mountain salamander, and today it is
on Georgia’s rare and endangered list. But not even the salamander discovery could lift her spirits. Listless and vacant, she shuffled through each day and slept fitfully at night. Weeks and months sloughed past uncalendared. The gloom was tightening its grip.

She needed to get as far away as she could. But where? The mountains were too close and still too painful. So one rainy afternoon, she hopped in her jeep and drove down the Georgia coast to the wildest spot on the map: Cumberland Island.

Cumberland was one of the biggest and most biologically rich islands in North America. It was also the most beauteous bottom jewel in a necklace of barrier islands lining the Georgia coast called the Golden Isles—so named for the amber marsh grasses flanking their shores. The immense island—over eighteen miles from tip to tip, about the size of Manhattan—was home to a greater diversity of life than a tropical rain forest.

For Carol, the sand between her toes brought back memories of her childhood on the beaches of Hawaii, tracking sea turtles and tumbling in the tide. She climbed Cumberland’s towering dunes, her ears ringing with the roar of the ocean, and gazed out across the bare beach. Thousands of terns flocked along the foamy surf. Pelicans skimmed the water, their wingtips brushing the whitecaps. On the beach, she splashed saltwater on the back of her neck, then across her face. She tasted the brine and knew she was home.

The next day, Carol hiked across the entire island. She began atop the high bluffs that rim the western edge of Cumberland Island, pocked with irregular humps—Native American burial mounds that had never been excavated. Then she began a shoe-sucking slog through the marsh. To Carol, the marsh’s sulfurous, rotten-egg stench was the fragrance of fecundity. Marshes are the most productive ecosystem in the world. Stewing in the marsh’s oozing organic soup was a greater mass of life than anywhere else on earth.

Carol climbed out of the marshy mudbath, emptied the sloshing water from her boots, and plunged into the old-growth forest. Rainbow-colored buntings and scarlet tanagers nested in the green arms of ancient trees mottled with bubble-gum lichen. Ferns sprouted from the wet bark. Carol crossed a narrow one-lane sandy road running north to south, a green tunnel where dappled sunlight flecked through a dense canopy of knotted, contorted live oaks draped with gray beards of Spanish moss.

Puncturing the cool, shaded forest was an oasis of light at Lake Whitney—the island’s largest body of freshwater. Carol stopped to rinse her face in the lake. Dozens of alligators congregated there. She watched egrets peck at leftover flesh from the gators’ open jaws. At dusk, Carol sat beside the lake, boiled a pot of beans and rice, and watched the first stars appear. Gators growled husky bellows that rolled across the water, their unblinking red eyes glowing just above the surface.

The black night swallowed the forest as Carol hiked from Lake Whitney toward the ocean. In the dark woods, every experience was heightened. Sticks in the trail were slithering snakes. An armadillo rummaging in the leaf litter sounded like a wild boar crashing toward her. Finally, the dark forest gave way to an unbroken, undulating span of dunes, carpeted with golden stalks of sea oats. Starlight flooded the sky—ancient light, thousands of years old, traveling millions of miles across the universe, bathing the beach in prehistoric candescence.

Carol walked barefoot down to the beach, the frothy surf foaming between her toes. Alone on the empty shore, she was left to face a hard truth: Charlie was gone for good. “I don’t know if we ever get over the ones we love,” she wrote later. “Maybe we just get past them.” But she had finally stopped missing him, and once more she could feel the thrum of her heart.

She and Charlie were finished, but a new relationship had begun. The island had already started to grab hold of her. Nothing in her life had ever felt so right. On Cumberland, she felt like she had finally clicked into place. After twenty-eight years, two failed marriages, and several false starts, the island was wiping the slate clean. Twice each day, the beach—rinsed by the tides—started anew. So could she.

Birds signal territorial boundaries with their calls; bobcats with their scat; bears with clawed trees. That night, Carol—using the back of her heel—scratched her name into the wet sand. Like the sea turtles who nested on Cumberland, Carol was imprinting herself upon the island. She had to return to the city in a few days, but she vowed to come back. She had printed that promise in the sand and sealed it by blowing a kiss to the starlit ocean. As she turned to leave, the tide filled her sand-carved letters and carried them out to sea.