Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (14 page)

Animal migrations are magnificent for many reasons: the steep odds, the amazing feats of precise navigation, and the animals’ unwavering focus. All animal migrations seem driven by an instinctive sense of something we humans find admirable: a larger purpose. Migrating animals are undeterred by blazing heat or blinding blizzards. Flocks stick together and work together, following primordial pathways, driven by a common cellular memory.

Monarch butterflies migrate three thousand miles from Canada to Mexico to overwinter. Humpback whales travel four thousand miles from the Arctic to Hawaii to feed and breed in warm, turquoise waters. Over two million wildebeest cross the Serengeti plains of Africa on their eighteen-hundred-mile spring migration. Sandhill cranes fly five thousand miles from Texas to Russia. The arctic tern holds the overall record for the longest animal migration, flying forty-four thousand miles round-trip from pole to pole each year, breeding in Greenland and wintering in Antarctica.

Sea turtles, unlike most other migrating animals, travel solo. They don’t flock along flyways or gather in groups. They captain their own ships across thousands of miles of open ocean.

Traveling one mile per hour, the lone hatchling swam stealthily through kelp forests and sparkling coral reefs. Danger lurked everywhere: prowling the wild waters were reef sharks and hammerheads, giant tuna and marlin, electric eels and toothed fish.

After nearly seventy miles of nonstop swimming, the hatchling was flagging and fatigued. Her flippers hung beneath her, limp and listless. She had only a few caloric fumes left to burn in her tiny tank.

Then a current caught her. The hatchling had reached the Gulf Stream, a spinning ocean gyre that circulated clockwise from the Caribbean to Europe. The five-mile-an-hour current propelled her eastward on a blue highway across the vast Atlantic.

The next day, a thunderstorm roiled the ocean. Groans of thunder echoed underwater. Afterward, the storm’s sweepings stretched for miles, where it it had churned up clouds of microscopic plants called phytoplankton. The hatchling followed the trail of debris and flotsam, filling her empty belly with the storm-stirred green goodness. Without phytoplankton, the ocean would be a vast water desert. Phytoplankton produces half of all the planet’s oxygen—more than all of the world’s rain forests and trees combined. The one-celled photosynthetic plankton coating the ocean are the lungs of the planet.

Every five minutes, the hatchling pricked the ocean’s satin surface to take a quick breath. Sea turtles are the most ancient marine creatures that still have to breathe air.

She crossed underwater mountains taller than the Rockies and passed over plains and trenches where sunlight never reached. Swimming mouths were everywhere in the ocean, and for two weeks the hatchling dodged them.

Finally, after flapping seven hundred miles from Cumberland, she arrived in the Sargasso Sea, smack in the heart of the Bermuda Triangle. Over ten million tons of seaweed floated in its tranquil waters. The hatchling nestled beneath one of the seaweed mats, gorging on plankton and small shrimp, and slept safely in the floating grass bed.

The Sargasso Sea is an ocean eddy stretching two million square miles. It’s the only sea without shores. In the Sargasso Sea, the water is clear and blue, winds are calm, and it rarely rains. An ocean oasis for tiny turtles, the Sargasso Sea is the still eye of the Atlantic, surrounded by swirling ocean currents that feed the seaweed sanctuary.

Sargassum—a species of brown seaweed—can live for hundreds of years. Some of the sargassum floating there today might have been seen by Columbus. Sailing the ocean blue in 1492, Columbus was the first European to describe the Sargasso Sea. Ever the optimist, Columbus took the seaweed as a sign that he was close to shore, though he was still hundreds of miles from landfall. Meanwhile, his crew feared becoming entangled in the sargassum. For centuries, sailors dreaded passage through the “sea of lost ships.” Ships had often vanished without a trace in the Sargasso Sea: derelict vessels were found shipshape but deserted, and slave ships were discovered with nothing but skeletons aboard. The ships weren’t swallowed by sargassum, however. They were stalled by the sea’s deadly doldrums. Ships found themselves becalmed for weeks in windless waters.

The Sargasso Sea was every sailor’s worst nightmare—and every sea turtle’s dream. The hatchling haven harbored thousands of turtles who floated and fed in the sargassum thickets and slept in rafts of seaweed, sheltered from the open ocean.

Over the next decade, the hatchling grew until her shell was hard as a shield, her head tough as a helmet. She began foraging beyond the sargassum jungle in search of her favorite food: jellyfish. Masses of moon jellies, medusas, and lion’s manes floated up from the abyss. She joined other fledgling turtles in devouring the tentacled, translucent treats. She was now ten years old and the size of a Frisbee. To tiger sharks patrolling the sargassum, she looked like a dinner plate floating on a platter of golden seaweed.

There were other dangers, too. Barges began to rumble through the Sargasso Sea with towering mounds of seaweed piled on their decks. The barges gathered sargassum using mechanical rakes skimming the surface, and harvesters sold the seaweed at $50 a ton for biofuels, fertilizers, and cattle fodder. The sargassum refuge was disappearing to feed cows.

After ten years, it was time for the juvenile turtle to venture out of the shrinking seaweed sanctuary. She swam out to the gyrating Gulf Stream current and began a four-thousand-mile journey farther eastward to soak in the bath-warm waters off the western coast of Africa. Unlike her swim to the Sargasso Sea as a defenseless, delectable dinner-to-go, now she was built like an armored tank.

The turtle carried on her back the weight of her species, which had dwindled to less than 2 percent of its original population since Columbus first set sail. They had persisted through ice ages, million-year droughts, and meteor-induced mass extinctions. Now, the sea turtle hoped to survive the greatest threat her species had ever faced—us. She would need some help from an old friend back home.

10

Carol was becoming feral. She ate wild-caught critters, sometimes raw. She trained her body to rely on only one meal a day, staying lean and mean like the other predators stalking the island. She bathed in the surf. Her body was adapting to sleeping in short snatches, just like animals. The exhaustion toughened her resolve. “Overextend your will to strengthen it,” she wrote in her journal.

On Cumberland, she lived through all five senses. She and the island were melting into each other. “It’s almost like you become the weather out here,” she noted. Thunder rattled her bones. Heat drained the sap from her veins. Rain washed her clean.

Carol memorized and sketched every species of plant and animal on Cumberland. “We no longer know the names of things,” she said. “When we don’t know the names, we cannot mourn their loss.”

She began dissecting every dead sea turtle that washed ashore to figure out why they were dying. She soon preferred the fetid funk of carcasses to the pungent perfume and cologne of the wealthy islanders. Citified living smothered our natural instincts, Carol believed. Only contact with the wild could uncover them. It couldn’t happen in a day hike. It required deep immersion in wilderness, where senses are sharpened and instincts honed.

“When I look at a human, I see an animal,” Carol wrote. “I see our disguised animal thoughts and instincts simmering beneath modernity, seeping to the surface.”

Carol didn’t think we should abandon civilization and become hunter-gatherers. She sought a border life that combined the vitality of wilderness with the technological growth of modern society. The ideal human being straddled the frontier between wild and civilized, an amalgam of the best of both worlds.

But the balance had tilted lopsidedly toward civilization and away from wilderness. Pollution coated the planet, and people crowded out animals and ecosystems. Less than 1 percent of the globe was still supposedly protected for nature, and it was disappearing fast.

Carol knew she couldn’t save even 1 percent of the world. But maybe she could save a wild island and the hundreds of turtles who nested there.

On a starry summer night in 1974, Carol walked along the surf’s edge at low tide, searching for turtle tracks, while John trailed behind her. It was his first time patrolling with Carol.

“I’m getting eaten alive,” he said, slapping the back of his neck. Mosquitoes hummed in his ears and sand flies nibbled at his ankles. He scratched his forearms until they bled.

“You shouldn’t have worn shorts and a T-shirt,” Carol replied. She wore a long-sleeve flannel shirt with a wire notebook stuffed into the chest pocket, a bandana around her neck, and a floppy, wide-brimmed hat with a pencil slotted through a notch in the brim. Tucked into her firefighter’s boots were baggy, mud-smeared jeans with a knife and watch hanging from the belt loops. Most of her clothes were shades of brown, green, and gray—her favorite color—which blended with the muted tones of the forest and beach.

Her outfit of salvaged men’s clothes was often ridiculed, especially by the fashionable island families who vacationed on Cumberland, but long-sleeve shirts and rugged pants were the most practical attire for life on a barrier island. Sand flies swarmed the seashore, especially at night. The forest was infested with ticks carrying Lyme disease. Mosquitoes bred in the marshes, and fire ants fed in the open fields. Cumberland was home to venomous cottonmouth moccasins and diamondback rattlesnakes, the largest and deadliest rattlers in North America. Alligators slid through the sloughs. This wasn’t Cancún or Daytona, where beachgoers with bare skin, board shorts, and bikinis stretched for miles. This was a wilderness island, where exposed flesh was chewed, chawed, and chomped.

John doused his bare arms and legs with bug spray, but it offered little relief. Carol pulled a poncho from her backpack. “Wear this. You’ll get sweaty but at least you won’t get eaten up.” Then she gathered wax myrtle from the dunes and slathered his face with oil from its crushed leaves—a natural insect repellent once used by the native Timucuans.

A blueberry moon ripened on the horizon. The wind was still, the ocean taut and glossy. Across the beach, ghost crabs scuttled sideways and vanished into burrows, their stalked periscope eyes poking up from the sand. Rotted skeletons of stranded turtles littered the beach. Vultures had already picked at many of the fresh carcasses. Others were bleached and bone dry.

“Why are there so many dead turtles?” John asked.

“Don’t know yet, but I’ve got a hunch, ” Carol said. It was a murder mystery that she would spend the next four decades trying to solve. Carol conducted a necropsy—an animal autopsy and dissection to determine the cause of death—on each of the ninety dead sea turtles that first summer.

The necropsies were already revealing some tantalizing clues. Carol straddled one of the putrefying turtle carcasses and lifted its smashed skull. Sharks usually went for the flippers, not the hard cranium, she explained. And there was no ripped flesh to indicate a boat strike. She suspected that the turtle took a blow to the head from a blunt object, like a sledgehammer.

“Who would bash in the brains of a harmless sea turtle?”

Carol nodded to the orange lights of shrimp trawlers moored just offshore. They were so close that Carol could hear the shrimpers’ conversations.

Farther up the beach, Carol spotted the glowing eyes of a hog digging in the dunes, its cheeks swollen with turtle eggs. Domesticated hogs, set loose by island families, had overrun Cumberland and were ravaging sea turtle nests. Pork filled Carol’s freezer, but she didn’t shoot hogs just for their meat. Carol wanted them off the island. She reached for the gun tucked into her jeans.

“Don’t shoot it,” John said.

“That dang hog is gobbling up mouthfuls of endangered species.”

Twenty yards downwind, Carol clicked a bullet into the barrel of her revolver and aimed.

“You’re tinkering with evolution.”

“I’m restoring it,” Carol said. Humans brought hogs to the island only a few decades ago, she explained. Turtles have nested on Cumberland for millennia—and they swam a long way to get here.

John swatted at sand gnats swarming his ears. “Maybe turtles are meant to go extinct.”

“Not on my watch.”

Carol steadied her pistol and squeezed the trigger. The hog snorted, rolled down the dunes, and landed in a clump of sea oats. Blood leaked from its toothed snout. Carol dragged the hog by its hind legs out onto the beach and cleaved a hunk of pork belly. “We’ll have bacon for breakfast,” she said.

Fireflies flickered through the trees like camera bulbs flashing in a crowded stadium. John pulled a bottle of whiskey from his
backpack as they trekked up to Long Point, the northernmost tip of Cumberland Island, where a turtle had nested at the bottom of the
dunes. Carol used a cockle shell to dig another nest higher in the
dunes, where i
t wouldn’t get inundated by the tides. She filled the new nest with eggs in the exact same order they were deposited, since the gender of sea turtle hatchlings was determined by temperature—warmer eggs closer to the surface resulted in females, while cooler temperatures deeper in the nest produced males—or, as Carol put it, “hot mamas and cool dudes.”

“First you shoot a hungry hog. Now you’re digging nests for the turtles,” John said. “I know your intentions are good. But I don’t think you should be playing God.”

“Look around,” she replied. Dozens of dead sea turtle carcasses were strewn along the island. Thousands more littered the Southern coast. And those were just the few that actually washed ashore. “It’s a turtle holocaust out here, and no one seems to care.”

Around midnight, they came upon a dead leatherback—the world’s largest sea turtle, weighing over a ton, with a twelve-foot wingspan. It would have filled a pickup truck, with its flippers hanging over the sides and touching the ground.

This was Carol’s first leatherback sighting—and also a first for the island. No one had ever seen a leatherback, dead or alive, on Cumberland. She knelt beside its hulking carcass and stroked its thick, lustrous pelt. She strummed her fingers along its ridged back. Its unwrinkled skin was loose and movable, like an elephant’s. Carol used her steel knife to carve open the flat-bottomed shell, slicing through ivory-colored muscle and brown ribbons of fat.

John, bone-tired and mosquito-tormented, grew weary of watching. “I’m heading home,” he said.

“It’s not even a hair past midnight,” Carol replied.

“Why don’t you come back with me?” John said. “You’ve been on the beach every night since we arrived. The turtles can spare you for a few hours.”

“This is my first leatherback. Come on, John. Stick around till dawn.”

“No more damn turtles. You care more about them than me.”

Later that evening, Carol checked the nests of Stumpy, the one-flippered sea turtle. One of her nests hatched just before dawn, and Carol described it in a letter to her parents: “Sand trails spider-webbed out from the nest as the hatchlings scampered toward the surf. Maybe it was the effects of chronic sleep-deprivation, but standing atop the dune watching the tiny turtles swim in the mother ocean for the first time, it felt—there’s no other word for it—holy. What a way to spend a Sunday morning! Just think: some people have to go in a big building and bow down to some tortured idol to find the same satisfaction. I get miracles every day. Ain’t I lucky?”

Carol had been writing her parents every week. She sent them animal bones and shells, along with updates about her island life. The letters became a weekly combination of field notes and diary. She found it a lot easier to communicate with her parents on paper.

In the same letter, she confessed that things weren’t going well with John. He had worked a desk job all his life and wasn’t used to long hours of manual labor, even if it mostly consisted of driving a boat to the mainland to get groceries.

He had other regrets. John had left behind a wife and three children in Atlanta, and the guilt began to weigh heavily on him. Did he make a mistake abandoning all that he loved to work a crappy custodian job on Cumberland Island? “John was literally being eaten alive by guilt,” said his close friend Robert Coram, a colleague from his days at the newspaper. A few years later, it turned out, John was diagnosed with colon cancer.

The great American novel wasn’t materializing, either. Even on a remote wilderness island, he was too distracted. John got caught up in island social gatherings and stayed out late cavorting with some of the younger Carnegies and Rockefellers, especially since Carol spent every evening on the beach. When he actually sat down to write, he stared at the blank paper in the typewriter, banged at the keys for a few minutes, and then drank himself into rage or stupor.

John’s depression-fueled drinking had made him increasingly volatile. The light was fading from his once-sparkling eyes. Carol loved the man he used to be. But she didn’t trust the drunk that he had become. She wasn’t going to let another guy drag her down again.

Carol wrote to her parents: “He complains of writer’s block. It’s more accurately called a hangover. He’s been drinking heavily, especially at night, and it usually leads to tantrums. He is extremely possessive of my time and jealous of my work, and his drunken rampages are only getting worse.”

Her parents wrote back a week later: “Please try to work things out with John. He clearly loves you, perhaps overly so. He’s hard working, handsome, and loves the outdoors almost as much as you. Think of the stability he could provide to your uncertain future. Think of how much fun you could have together sharing your adventures, rather than going it alone.”

Carol fired back a quick one-line response: “I learned long ago never to rely on anyone for my happiness.”

The beach was her nightly escape. Every evening, she fled into the arms of the ocean. Sea turtles became her closest companions, and she immersed herself in their night life. She was a midwife for the hundreds of turtle mothers who entrusted their offspring to the island.

Carol fiercely guarded her nests and didn’t back down from a fight, especially when it came to turtles. Sea turtle populations had declined by 98 percent in the past five centuries. She believed wholeheartedly that saving sea turtles was the key to saving the human race.

“If sea turtles go extinct, we’ll go down with them,” she said. “Turtles are the ocean’s pulse. When the turtles are gone, the ocean will flatline—and so will we.”

The ocean covers most of the planet, produces most of our oxygen, provides most of our food, and absorbs most of our pollution, she explained. When the ocean can’t support sea turtles, it won’t support us either.

Already, humans are starting to feel the sting. Plummeting sea turtle populations have led to massive blooms of their main meal: jellyfish. When sea turtles once numbered in the hundreds of millions, they controlled the population of their favorite food. With sea turtles on the brink of extinction, jellies now swarm the seas. Jellyfish plagues are closing beaches around the world and filling the void left in our overfished oceans.

As long as humans have wandered the planet, turtles have nourished and protected us. Giant sea turtle shells were used as shields by ancient hunters. Their abundant eggs fed many coastal cultures, and fishing communities from Africa to Asia relied on turtle meat as their main source of protein.