Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (7 page)

Bones especially fascinated her. There was a bone in the heart of a deer, she discovered, and many mammals—including dogs and raccoons—have a bone in their penis called a baculum. Because penis bones were like specially made keys—unique to each species—Carol used them frequently in identifying specimens. Her collection of bones, skulls, and skins was sought by universities and museums. Nearly all of her specimens were roadkill.

“I hate to hunt or trap live animals. With D.O.R.s, though, I feel great. I’ve got a wild specimen and I’m putting it to use.”

She scraped up many gourmet feasts from street meat. She ate braised coon leg adorned with wild-harvested figs and pear slices. Dog was rich and succulent, similar to mutton, but more chewy. Armadillo was mild and—like mushrooms—absorbed whatever seasoning was added. She often cooked and served armadillo meat straight out of the shell. Horse was tender and far better than beef. “I’d prefer horse over cow any day,” she said. Hawk and owl tasted, well, like chicken. She ate a robin once that had been caught and dropped by an eagle. It was fresh, with only puncture wounds, so Carol cooked it over a fire: “It was one delicious breast bite and that’s it.” Woodchuck was sweet and delicious: “It doesn’t get any better for an herbivore.” But she preferred the stronger, gamy taste of carnivores like fox. In nearly all animals, she preferred the tender neck meat to more hunky thigh slabs. Her favorite meat was still raccoon. Second favorite was bobcat, which also had a sharp, tangy flavor. The only animal she wouldn’t eat was domesticated house cat: “They’re full of Friskies, and that can’t be good.”

Wild animals breathed fresh air, drank clean water, and ate untainted, unpolluted plants and critters. Even when they were a few days old, D.O.R. specimens tasted far better than cellophane-wrapped meat shipped from faraway feedlots. “We smugly think we’re a kind people who treat animals in a more civilized way,” Carol wrote in her journal, “but we’ve simply moved the killing floor out of sight.”

For 99.9 percent of human history, food connected us to the natural world. When we changed our relationship to food, we changed our relationship to nature, Carol believed. By allowing agribusiness to feed us processed, packaged foods, we cut ourselves off at the roots. With D.O.R., Carol knew where her meat came from, and she cleaned the carcasses herself.

“There are subtle differences in the tastes of wild animals, but they all basically taste like some variant of chicken or beef. Meat is meat, really.”

Carol’s roadkill diet was enriched when she began working for Georgia’s Natural Areas Council, a new state agency charged with identifying and protecting the wildest lands in Georgia. She was assigned to work with Sam Candler, a soft-spoken, silver-bearded heir of the Coca-Cola family.
Sam didn’t need the job or the money, but he longed for new adventures and direct contact with the wild outdoors. He found both working alongside Carol. They traveled together seeking out Georgia’s most unique and ecologically diverse habitats—swamps, marshes, mountain coves, wild rivers, and old-growth forests.

Carol was twenty-nine years old when she began working for the Natural Areas Council. The first Earth Day had recently been celebrated. The Clean Air Act had just been passed, and an Eastern Wilderness Act had just been introduced to designate more wilderness areas east of the Mississippi, since 99 percent of designated wilderness was out West. Carol hoped her statewide travels might help identify new wilderness areas in Georgia.

Driving rural backroads, Carol and Sam collected a trunkload of D.O.R. each day. Sam ate his first weasel, carried a raccoon baculum in his wallet because it made a great toothpick, and learned how to recognize roadkill from a quarter mile away. Tagging along with Carol and Sam for part of their travels was the acclaimed writer for
The New Yorker
John McPhee, whom they playfully nicknamed “the little Yankee bastard.” McPhee sat in the backseat as they journeyed from the north Georgia mountains to the southern swamps, helping to spot—and occasionally eat—D.O.R. along the way.

Once, McPhee recalled in “Travels in Georgia,” they came upon a snapping turtle hit on the road. It was still alive even though its shell was broken. Carol nudged the turtle out of the road with her foot, smearing blood across the pavement.

“I know it’s bad,” she said to the turtle. “We’re not tormenting you. Honest we’re not.”

“Does it have a chance to live?” Sam asked.

“Not at all.”

Moments later, the county sheriff pulled up. He eyed Carol, barefoot, wearing dungarees with a hunting knife strapped to her belt. Carol asked him to shoot the turtle.

“Surely, ma’am,” he said. He drew his revolver, extended his arm, and took aim. He fired and missed twice. The shots echoed across the sun-baked asphalt. He took aim once more, holding the pistol six inches from the turtle’s head. The third shot finally killed the turtle. The sheriff blew the smoke away from the barrel of his pistol and nodded.

“That should do it,” he said, tipping his hat.

Their two years of road trips were not without some tense moments. Often, Carol and Sam knocked on the doors of rural landowners and asked them to consider protecting rare wildlife habitat on their properties in exchange for tax breaks. Doors were slammed in their faces, slurs slung at them, and one farmer chased them off at gunpoint.

Back in the truck afterward, Sam muttered, “Goddamn redneck.”

“What is a redneck, Sam?” McPhee asked from the backseat, notebook in hand.

“You know what a redneck is, you little Yankee bastard.”

“I want to hear your definition.”

“A redneck is a fat slob in a pickup truck with a rifle across the back. He hates ‘niggers.’ He would rather have his kids ignorant than go to school with colored children. I guess I don’t like rednecks. I’ve known a few.”

“Some of my best friends are rednecks,” Carol said.

She identified more closely with the working-class southerner than the aristocratic elite. Both were equally racist and ignorant, she said, but at least rednecks got their boots muddy and earned a living by the sweat of their brows.

Redneck stereotypes had worsened recently in Georgia due to the 1970 publication of
Deliverance
, the bestselling novel by James Dickey, the brother of Carol’s family friend and grenade defuser Tom Dickey. The book—and, later, the Hollywood blockbuster—followed the fictional journey of four city-dwelling, thrill-seeking weekend warriors who canoe down a wild stretch of whitewater in north Georgia. Ultimately, the conflict centers around handsome, athletic urban adventurists and rural southerners, who are darkly represented by a cross-eyed, inbred banjo player and two sinister men who sodomize a canoeist and command him to “squeal like a pig.” The book reinforced stereotypes of Appalachian folk as backward, lawless, uneducated rednecks. It also inspired a new generation of kayakers, canoeists, and whitewater rafters to explore the Chattooga River, where the movie was filmed.

“There’s a lot more truth in the story than you might think,” Jim Dickey told Carol over dinner with Tom one evening. He based the book on a real-life paddling trip in north Georgia. He was canoeing solo, while his friend Lewis King—the paddler upon whom the Burt Reynolds character is based—drove to a spot a few miles downstream where he could pick up Jim. King parked along a logging road and started hiking down toward the river, when suddenly two armed men appeared and demanded to know his business. They thought he was a government agent looking for their moonshine still. The men held him at gunpoint beside the river for several hours.

“Lewis was sweating bullets, praying for me to arrive before dark,” Jim told Carol. Jim had flipped his canoe in one of the rapids, so he was late getting downriver. Finally he rounded a bend and spotted Lewis and the armed men just as daylight was beginning to dim. When he arrived, the shotguns disappeared, and the men even helped him carry his canoe back to the truck.

Deliverance
was being filmed when Carol and Sam journeyed to the Chattooga River in 1971. They encountered no malevolent mountain men, but they met with hundreds of locals eager to protect their beloved river. Development and sewage threatened the Chattooga’s pristine headwaters. In the early 1970s, rednecks and radicals joined forces, hoping to permanently protect the Chattooga as a federally designated Wild and Scenic River.

The key to the Chattooga’s Wild and Scenic designation was its most famous whitewater kayaker, Governor Jimmy Carter. Carter and his son often paddled down the Chattooga, perfecting their kayak rolls at Big Shoals and Turnhole rapids. Jimmy Carter was one of the first to paddle the class-IV Bull Sluice rapid in an open canoe.

In 1972, Carter joined a whitewater rafting expedition down a harrowing stretch of the Chattooga. At Seven Foot Falls, Carter’s raft guide misjudged his line, and the raft toppled into the seething rapid, spilling the governor, the guide, and two others. At the bottom of the falls, the raft folded, bucked, and straightened once more, leaving only Rosalynn Carter still in the boat. Carter and the others swam safely to a nearby eddy. Nodding toward his wife, the waterlogged governor said, “Now you know who really steers the ship.”

There was another woman behind the scenes of Carter’s Chattooga legacy. Carol had documented several rare and endangered species in the Chattooga watershed and identified the river as highest priority among their Georgia Natural Areas sites. Her findings bolstered Carter’s push to include the Chattooga in the federal Wild and Scenic River system. As a result, the Chattooga River today is forever protected from dams and development.

After the success of the Chattooga, Carol hoped her hometown river could also be saved. The Chattahoochee River was Georgia’s lifeblood, flowing four hundred miles from Blue Ridge headwaters to the Florida panhandle, where it empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Below Atlanta’s treatment plants and industrial dumps, the river became a swirling brown drainage ditch of sewage. But the northern segment was still clear-bottomed, wild, and pristine, from the mountains all the way down to the city limits.

Not for long, though. Bulldozers were already leveling the river bluff forests north of Atlanta, and a sewage line to service the city’s sprawl was planned to cross the river near Carol’s cliffside cave. Carol worked with grassroots activists, but they were being outpaced by development and dynamite. Something needed to happen fast.

So one morning, after filing paperwork at the Natural Areas Council headquarters in downtown Atlanta, Carol crossed the hall to the governor’s office and knocked on Jimmy Carter’s open door.

“Hey Jimmy!” she hollered. “You wanna shoot the Hooch with us next week?”

“You bet,” he said, without even checking his calendar.

Carter was already awestruck by the brash, barefoot conservationist who moved with equal fearlessness through snake-infested swamps and the snake-infested state capitol building.

“Hers wasn’t just a scientific relationship with nature, but a deeply personal one,” Carter said later. “Whenever I spent time with Carol, I was reminded of the ten-year-old boy I used to be, slogging barefoot through soft-bottomed swamps in south Georgia.”

Jimmy always stopped to talk with Carol when they passed in the halls of the gold-domed capitol. They often traded stories about river adventures and trout fishing. And, as it turned out, Carol was dating a man from Carter’s neck of the woods: John Pennington, an investigative journalist who, ten years earlier, had helped launch Carter’s political career.

John Pennington and Jimmy Carter had a lot in common. Pennington was born one month before Carter, in the same rural Georgia county. Both grew up on farms, and their families often traded mules and other livestock. Both men attended Georgia Southwestern College in Americus. Later, Pennington served as editor of the University of Georgia newspaper, a position held previously by Jimmy Carter’s cousin, Don. Don Carter, who became city editor of the
Atlanta Journal
, offered Pennington his first job as a reporter.

Pennington quickly became recognized as a scrupulous, hard-nosed investigative journalist. He covered desegregation of the first high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, and his series about corruption in Georgia prisons led to extensive state reforms.

On an overcast October evening in 1962, Pennington was crouched over a typewriter, working late on deadline, when he received a phone call from his old boss.

“Hey John. I’ve got something for you,” said Don Carter. “My cousin Jimmy just lost the election in the fourteenth district. He’s claiming election fraud.”

John leaned back in his chair. “Is he just bellyaching, or does he have something to prove it?”

“According to the ballot box register, several hundred dead people voted—all for his opponent.”

Pennington left that night for south Georgia and began his investigation before sunrise the next morning.

He
already knew that
Jimmy Carter was more than a peanut farmer. He had built a lucrative cotton warehouse, served on the county school board, and was deacon of his church. Then, on October 1, 1962, his thirty-eighth birthday, Jimmy told Rosal
ynn that he planned to run for the state senate. The election was only fifteen days away. He and his family mounted an amateurish, whirlwind campaign.

His opponent was incumbent Homer Moore, who had close ties with a local boss and power broker, Congressman Joe Hurst. Hurst planned to control the election as he had for almost thirty years. He strong-armed local elections to ensure his puppets remained in office.