Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (4 page)

“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” her mom screamed.

The room erupted in bedlam, but Carol felt strangely detached and calm. She pressed her left hand against her abdomen, concerned that her guts might spill out. Earl carried Carol out to the car and laid her in the backseat while Tom called the hospital. The paramedics met Carol at the emergency room entrance, loaded her onto a gurney, and rushed into the operating room.

The bullet had barely missed her stomach and only nicked her small intestine. “I probably could have crawled under a bush and made it,” Carol said. But the surgery had split her abdomen, and she spent one long, miserable week recuperating in the hospital. “The only thing that got me through that week was the ice cream,” she said.

Seven days after being shot by her father, she was tromping the wild woods again; she held no grudge but she never looked back.

After graduating from high school, she camped in her cave beside the river, testing her self-taught, self-reliant outdoor skills. She bathed in the Chattahoochee and drank from its springs. She scavenged road-killed raccoons and squirrels, then cooked the meat over campfires and shared the bones with Catfish. She fished from the river and gathered salads of violets, dandelions, chickweed, shepherd’s purse, sow thistle, and watercress. There was plenty of food—even on the outskirts of the South’s largest metropolis—to eat well year-round.

In the evenings, she sat atop the bluffs and scribbled in her journal. “Tonight the fireflies are truly in competition with the stars!” she wrote. “Where the bluffs meet the sky, it is impossible to tell them apart. As always, I wish for a human companion to share this with.”

It was a lonely but life-changing summer: she proved that she could live on her own terms, by her own rules, without money or a steady job. In her cave beside the river, Carol made a lifelong promise to herself:

“I’ll get as far away from the fighting and from expectations as I possibly can. I’ll live according to my own rules. And the only way to live wild and free is to not need money. I can’t allow myself to want things, because I’ll have to get a job and stay locked in that way of life. I don’t belong there. I belong out here.”

4

But her father’s words still echoed in her ears like a gunshot: “Grow up and get over turtles and snakes. You can’t make money playing in the woods.” So after a summer of living in a cave, Carol reluctantly enrolled at the University of Georgia (UGA) in the fall of 1959.

“I’ve gotta do this,” she told herself. “I’ll try to fit in, at least temporarily. I’ll play the game for as long as I can stand it. I’ll save every penny to buy my freedom in the forest.”

With money she had saved washing windows, Carol bought a used jeep with a burned-out clutch stuck in a mud hole for $50. She drove it to UGA and plodded through the boring basics in freshman lecture halls. She couldn’t wait to take advanced biology classes. Her intro seminars seemed like a regurgitation of ninth grade.

She felt even more alienated by the football-frenzied atmosphere of a Division I university. Most of the girls in her dorm were snobby Southern belles seeking a husband, not a degree. Worst of all was the curfew: the dorm was locked at 10 p.m. sharp, and curfew violations meant immediate expulsion.

“I wasn’t used to being confined,” Carol recalled. “After wandering free in the woods for most of my life, suddenly I was incarcerated every night.”

Two weeks into the semester, Carol returned to Atlanta for a long weekend. Her parents had already purged the basement of Carol’s critters, which infuriated her. She stormed out of the house and headed for the river. She missed the sound of murmuring water, the slap of a beaver’s tail, the shriek of a red-shouldered hawk circling overhead. Her homesickness evaporated as she strolled alongside the riverbank.

The next day, she stopped at the neighborhood gas station near her parents’ house, which was owned by her friend Richard Kiker, a thirty-year-old mechanic. She had spent a lot of time with him that summer working on her jeep. A shock of tawny hair swept across his forehead. His sky-blue eyes were vast.

“Where ya headed?” he asked her.

“A quiet spot beside the river.”

“Mind if I tag along?” he asked.

He told his attendant to run the register, and he hopped into the jeep with Carol. They spent the afternoon drinking beer and skipping stones from the shoals. She had never spent a day beside the river with anyone other than Catfish. She was bewildered by the ease and giddiness she felt.

They hung their bare feet off a sun-warmed boulder and talked for hours. Richard confided that he had disappointed his parents, who had hoped he would become a dentist. Instead of filling teeth, he was filling gas tanks. He also told Carol about his ex-wife and two kids, and how he was struggling with the pressures of business and family.

“I thought life would be more fun than this,” he confessed. “I’m stuck.”

Carol drained her beer. “Then get out of the rut. Cut a new path.”

“That goes where? To dental school? To another dead-end job? I’ve gotta feed my family. I can’t just float down the river like you.”

Carol saw the buried sadness in his bottomless blue eyes.

They sat on the hood of Carol’s jeep and watched the sun sink beneath the wispy braid of river. Fish rippled circles on the water.

Carol headed back to college the next morning. On her way out of town, she stopped by Richard’s station to top off her tank.

“Don’t break too many hearts in Athens,” he told her.

“I’m not looking for love, just a piece of paper—my ticket to freedom.”

The Georgia Bulldogs, led by freshman quarterback Fran Tarkenton, were hosting Alabama for the 1959 season opener at Sanford Stadium. Tarkenton had a breakout game, passing for 200 yards and two touchdowns, and the Bulldogs defense shut down the Crimson Tide in a 17–3 rout. Athens was ecstatic. Inebriated fans flooded the streets.

Carol, meanwhile, was cloistered in her dorm room dissecting the innards of a white-footed mouse carcass she had found on campus. When the dorm supervisor knocked on the door, Carol quickly stashed the mouse platter in her desk drawer.

The supervisor was an overweight woman with round glasses resting atop puffy, red cheeks, whose allergy-clogged nostrils didn’t notice the dead mouse stench. “Carol, there’s a phone call for you,” she said flatly.

Carol walked down the hall and picked up the phone. It was her parents, calling with tragic news: Richard Kiker had committed suicide. He had driven his car into one of the garage bays at the service station, connected one end of a garden hose to the tailpipe, ran the other end into the passenger compartment, sat down behind the steering wheel, and left it all behind.

Carol hung up the receiver and walked numbly back to her room. She sat on her bed in the dark. Her roommate was already asleep. After a long, empty silence, Carol unlatched the second-story window and climbed down. The breeze woke her roommate.

“Where are you going?” her roommate called through the open window.

“To get drunk.”

At an Athens bar, Carol tossed back shots of whiskey and replayed the scenes of her friendship with Richard. She felt a cocktail of emotions: sadness, grief, loss, and a sharp pinch of guilt. Did she completely miss his cries for help? Could she have done something? Carol had hoped the river would heal him, as it had healed her. But inside, he was already drowning.

Around midnight, Carol stumbled across the empty quad, still littered with beer bottles from the afternoon’s postgame revelry, and crept back to her dorm. She climbed woozily onto the first-floor window ledge, steadied herself against the building with one hand, then performed a one-armed pull-up to reach the narrow second-story ledge outside her window. A few pebbles tumbled off the crumbling ledge. Then Carol slid the window open and stepped through.

The next morning, the dorm supervisor knocked at her door again. “You were spotted walking across the quad past curfew last night.”

Carol stared at the floor.

“Start packing,” she said through pursed lips. “You’re expelled.”

Carol believed that the price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. Nothing was more valuable to her than a life outdoors. She wanted to live where she could explore rugged backcountry by day and see the stars at night. To get there, she realized, she would have to sacrifice a few young years. So Carol traded in her twenties working in Atlanta, hoping to scrape up enough money to buy land and a lifetime of freedom.

She tried to fit in to city life. Though she dressed differently than the well-heeled professionals around her, she noticed that they shared one thing in common: they, too, craved the wild, even in the climate-controlled confines of the city. Without untamed country to explore, city people instead pursued the undiscovered terrain of other bodies. Sex was a primitive and animalistic intrusion into an otherwise sanitized life. People were dressed-up animals disguising their animal thoughts with button-down etiquette. Without the natural world to satisfy their wild hunger, city dwellers sought it in one another, getting liquored and laid in the overpeopled urban jungle.

But neither sex nor drink could fill the gaping hole in Carol’s wild heart. Lost and lonely, she spent nearly a decade scratching out a life in Atlanta, taking odd jobs to make ends meet. They didn’t come easy.

“A woman can’t do this kind of work,” said Jim Kemph, manager of the Buckhead Radio Service Company in Atlanta. In 1959, women didn’t get their hands greasy fixing machines. How could a bronzed teenage girl know her way around a mechanic’s shop?

Carol stormed out of Jim’s shop, disconnected the broken radio from her jeep, and marched back in, swinging the door wide open against its hinges, the doorbell clanging loudly against the glass. She walked behind the counter past Jim and slammed the radio down on the shop’s workbench. Without saying a word, she deftly removed the chassis and frayed speaker wires in less than a minute. Then she soldered the wires, reassembled the radio, and cranked up the volume to Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” in the parking lot outside the store. Jim hired her on the spot.

Jim was a trim, hardworking forty-four-year-old father of six children. His cinnamon-brown hair was beginning to gray after managing the repair shop on a bustling corner of Buckhead Avenue for nearly two decades. Like Carol’s father, Jim was a polished conversationalist whose charisma and confidence kept the customers returning. Jim even resembled her father: tall, handsome, with a sharp, angular German nose and high cheekbones.

Jim’s shop was cluttered with old televisions, dismantled record players, and antique radios. In the back corner was a metal detector used in World War II to search for land mines.

“Does it still work?” Carol asked him as the shop was closing one Friday afternoon.

“I think the coils are fried. I used it for years to search for Civil War relics around Atlanta. Then my kids arrived.”

Carol tinkered with the metal detector over the weekend. She decided to test it out near the battlegrounds of the Battle of Atlanta, where General Sherman’s troops killed over twelve thousand Confederates on their march to the sea.

On a moonless Saturday night, Carol swept the metal detector all around the overgrown battlefield grounds. Only the faint glow of distant streetlights shone through the forest. She waved the detector over a muddy swale and suddenly the receiver erupted with pulses. Like a hungry dog digging for a bone, she hastily shoveled away the dirt with her bare hands, unearthing a brass oval buckle with three letters engraved on it.

On Monday morning, she returned the metal detector to Jim, then casually asked, “Do you happen to know what the letters CSA stand for?”

Jim’s eyes widened. “Confederate States of America.” He smiled. “What have you been up to?”

Carol revived Jim’s interest in Civil War relic hunting, and soon they were scouring sites together, often late at night. One evening, they went out to Stone Mountain, a sixteen-hundred-foot rock dome near Atlanta with a monumental carving of three Confederate leaders chiseled into its north face. Stone Mountain had recently been turned into an amusement park with a golf course, an aerial tram, and a giant broadcast tower atop the summit. “We defile every square inch,” Carol lamented. “The Indians held Stone Mountain in such high esteem. Then we come along and take a big shit on it.”

The following weekend, she and Jim explored a Civil War trench beneath an old bridge along the Chattahoochee River. Afterward, they hiked up to Carol’s cave, where they drank bourbon and watched a full moon rise over the bluffs.

Jim was twenty-six years older than Carol—nearly the same age as her father—but that didn’t step them from becoming closer. She continued working at the shop during the day and joining him on late-night relic hunting adventures. Soon they were traveling further afield, exploring larger battlefield sites throughout the South. Once, they journeyed together to Fort Pulaski along the Georgia coast. In 1863, the Union Army had fired the first long-distance rifled cannons at Fort Pulaski which obliterated the Confederate fort’s walls from a mile away and transformed the tactics of the Civil War. Carol and Jim were determined to find some of those fort-smashing cannonballs.

Some of the shells landed in the marsh, so on a cold, starry night in early December, they borrowed scuba gear and headed for the fort. They parked Jim’s station wagon behind some palmetto about a half mile away and crept in. Carol donned the scuba mask and waded into the marsh, while Jim watched from the shore. With an underwater flashlight, she plunged down to explore the soft, muddy bottom keeping an eye out for alligators.

After an hour underwater, Carol heard the oxygen tank echoing. Her skin was numb, her lips purple and swollen. She had lost sensation in her fingers and toes. Just before she turned back and headed for shore, Carol pulled back the cordgrass and noticed a rusted metal ball sunken in marsh mud. She pried it up, and found another cannonball beneath it, and then another. She unearthed six cannonballs from the marsh that night, dragging each of the large shells out of the water and heaving them onto dry land.

Jim was ecstatic. They rolled the cannonballs under the fence and loaded them in the back of the station wagon. The rear bumper nearly scraped the pavement, sagged by the weight of six hundred pounds of Civil War artillery. They couldn’t completely close the back door, so Carol—still shivering in her wet clothes—climbed atop the cannonballs and held the back door shut while Jim motored down the empty two-lane road toward town.

Just before they crossed the intracoastal bridge, blue lights flashed in the rearview mirror.

“Carol, grab the tarp!” Jim shouted between clenched teeth as he pulled the station wagon to the shoulder. The police car parked directly behind him. Carol yanked a battered green tarp over both her and the cannonballs while still holding the back gate partially closed.

The officer approached the car slowly. “Keep your hands on the wheel!” he shouted at Jim, who stared blankly into the midnight darkness. The cop shone his flashlight through the back windows. Through a hole in the tarp, Carol could see the officer’s breath fogging the glass.

Finally he arrived at Jim’s window. Jim white-knuckled the steering wheel, jaw locked, as the cop flashed his light through the open window. He asked for Jim’s license and then studied it for a long time. Finally he clicked off his flashlight.

“Mr. Kemph,” the officer said, “did you know that your left taillight is out?”