Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (20 page)

“Now I’m safe,” she wrote in a letter to her parents. “Nobody can run me off. Now I can concentrate on a place without having to worry about supporting myself. I can always go to the mainland and work for a week, enough to buy beans and a sack of corn.”

For the rest of her life, Carol would live mostly outside the money economy, acquiring most of her food and resources directly from the island. Age thirty-six was the last time Carol worked for someone else.

“I wasn’t ever going back to cleaning toilets for the Candlers. I had my foot on solid land,” she said. “I was finally starting my life.”

Carol didn’t move in to the Trimmings cabin right away. For the next year, while she rebuilt the cabin, she lived in the old storage shed across the yard. Her shed wasn’t much better than her leaning, sagging cabin. The shed was just boards and a screen that creaked and groaned with every puff of wind. She installed a woodstove and slept on a mattress on the floor.

Carol did have electricity, thanks to developer Charles Fraser. While planning to build his development on Cumberland, Fraser convinced the local utility company to install underground electric lines along the entire island. When his resort plans folded, the underground electricity infrastructure was left behind for the handful of remaining residents. Carol’s only electrical appliances were a small refrigerator and freezer that she used to store scavenged meat and animal carcasses.

Already Carol had begun collecting driftwood that washed in from the ocean. Some of the planks were from centuries-old hulls of shipwrecked boats covered in oakum. Piece by piece, she hauled planks from the beach to her house, dragging them behind her jeep.

For Louie, the cabin construction was a great excuse to spend more time with Carol. He and Betty had finally divorced. It was an amicable parting, and Betty and Ebby continued coming to the island for fiddle-playing festivities. Louie looked forward to building a new life with Carol. Together they replaced the joists, repaired the chimney, and patched the roof.

Even in carpentry, Carol went against the grain. She purposely installed the exterior wood backwards to provide a tighter seal and a more weathered look. She attached her roof screws along the ridges so they wouldn’t leak. She salvaged doors, windows, and roof tin from collapsed and abandoned island structures. She hoped to use the dead pine tree beside her shed for interior woodwork, but the vultures were roosting in it, so she couldn’t bring herself to cut it down.

While she rebuilt her cabin, she ate dead-on-the-road arma
dillo and dead-on-the-beach porpoise. Jesse brought her mullet. She cast crab traps and shrimp nets off the Half Moon Bluff dock.
She mucked barefoot out into the mudflats to harvest clams, and she
stripped off her trousers and waded half-naked into tidal creeks
to fish. And she happily shot hogs on the beach that were raiding turtle nests.

Carol had switched to morning turtle patrols rather than staying
up all night. But she was still short on time. So she began waking at 3
A.M.
every morning. She monitored turtles before twilight, hunted and gathered food around sunrise, hiked the island during the day, worked on her cabin in the afternoon, and went to sleep around sunset. If Louie was around, he joined her for an evening drink. Though infatuated with Carol, he usually returned to his house at night. He didn’t like to sleep on the floor of the shed, and he sure as hell wasn’t waking up at 3
A.M.

Carol had other bed buddies instead. Gator the otter still slept with her each night. She had also acquired an old tomcat named Spider who crawled under the mosquito net to sleep beside her each evening. One midsummer night, Spider and Gator had just curled into the crook of her legs when Carol heard the thin drum of rain on the tin roof. She loved drifting off to sleep in a summer shower.

But the patter of rain grew louder. Lightning flashed and splintered across the sky. Thunder shook the shed walls. Winds heaved limbs and ripped leaves from the trees.

Then Carol heard a
crrrraaaack
outside the shed, and she suddenly remembered the dead pine tree just outside her window.

She waited for the tree to fall on her. It was probably better not to see it coming, she figured. So she laid stiff as a board, bracing for the impact. Spider’s fur bristled. Gator shivered beside her. Carol squinted her eyes closed and held her breath.

The jarring thud from the crash rattled the shack’s frame, and the top of the pine landed inches from her head. The wind had snapped the pine tree like a matchstick, but it hadn’t broken at the base. It had split ten feet up. Even then, the top of the tree had scraped the corner of the shed. Had the tree snapped at the base, or even a foot lower, Carol, Gator, and Spider would have been crushed.

By 1979, Cumberland Island National Seashore had officially opened to the public. Backpackers had begun hiking the trails, and a few made it all the way to the north end of the island. Louie didn’t like the idea of dirty strangers roaming near his house—or Carol’s. Alone in the backwoods, she might be easy prey for a deranged camper. So, as a housewarming gift, Louie gave Carol a sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun to keep beside her at night. Carol thought it was unnecessary, especially since she already had a pistol, but she took the shotgun to make Louie happy.

“I promise I’ll never shoot it unless I’m serious,” she told him.

Carol frantically worked on her cabin, hoping to complete as much renovation as possible before the National Park Service offered to buy it, so she could receive the highest possible appraisal. Louie helped on the weekends, and he even hauled discarded wood over to the island from an abandoned house in Jacksonville. But he usually went fishing while Carol worked. Louie’s air-conditioned house was just a half mile from Carol’s place, and she often met him there in the evenings. He always had her drink poured when she arrived, and usually he was on his second or third.

Once Carol finished renovating her cabin, she decided to build
a garage and chicken coop on her property. She also converted the shed into her lab. Carol was still running electrical conduit to the lab when the National Park Service trucks pulled up to appraise the
property and make an offer.

Louie had three decades of experience with deeds and contracts, so he helped Carol draft her rights agreement. Her contract with the National Park Service was the only one that included chickens.

“I was afraid the park wouldn’t let me keep my hens and roosters, so I made sure they were included in the deal,” Carol explained.

Before selling to the National Park Service, Louie also suggested that he and Carol give each other partial ownership in their respective properties.

“That way, if one of us dies, the other can make sure the land is protected and not misused,” Louie explained. Carol agreed. She had become mistrustful of the National Park Service after learning of its proposal to develop large parts of the island and run vehicle tours all over it. She was already crafting plans to stop them.

But first she had to secure her spot on the island. In 1979, Carol sold her property to the National Park Service for $45,000—by far the lowest price of any park acquisition—along with the right to keep a flock of chickens and the right to live on the island for the rest of her life.

Of the twenty-one lifetime rights holders, sixteen were Carnegie and Candler families, two were longtime north end families, two were attorneys (the Carnegie attorney Thornton Morris and the county attorney Grover Henderson), and one was a reclusive, dirt-poor naturalist. Carol lived on Cumberland year-round; the others mostly vacationed there.

In her journal that evening, she wrote: “I’m home. No place like it.”

Carol was eager to meet more of her neighbors—the alligator at Ashley Pond, the pair of peregrine falcons on the south beach, the gopher tortoise burrowing near Terrapin Point, and the snow-white deer grazing in the dune meadows.

Her home had human neighbors, too. The old Trimmings house was part of the Settlement, the collection of former African American dwellings clustered on the north end. Nearly all the other houses had already collapsed, but Grover Henderson had managed to acquire Beulah Alberty’s old house just a stone’s throw away from Carol’s cabin. And across the yard was the one-room First African Baptist Church. Louie lived just down the road at Half Moon Bluff, which continued to be a popular party spot on the weekends. The Greyfield gang and other island folk came up to the north end for drinking and dancing, and the revelry lasted late into the evenings.

Carol loved the boisterous bluegrass, but after a while the parties got old. She preferred to wander the wild dunes with nesting turtles than to drink cheap beer and listen to repetitious chatter.

“It’s the same conversations with the same people, night after night,” Carol wrote in her journal. “Partying is all the island people ever do, so after a while, there isn’t much to talk about other than the previous night’s party.”

Things with Louie were also starting to wear thin. They quarreled frequently, and after a few drinks Louie became abusive. Carol wrote her parents on February 14, 1979: “Unhappy Valentine’s Day. Louie got a little far in his cups Sunday night. It resulted in Louie and I having a slight altercation.” A few weeks later, she wrote her parents again: “Things are okay here, I guess. Louie has settled down a little. I don’t feel a physical threat now, anyway.”

But the abuse worsened, and for the first time in her life Carol knew real fear. “When you’re afraid, it’s a whole new ballgame,” she wrote. “Every day, I live with the fact that there is someone out there determined to hurt me.”

She wanted out of the relationship but was afraid that a confrontation would provoke even more rage. So she tried to just let things dissolve. She stopped attending the fiddle parties. She spent her weekends in the woods and swamps searching for gators, and she resumed sleeping on the beach with the sea turtles.

On clear, moonless evenings, Carol sometimes saw the lights of Rebecca Bell’s truck on Little Cumberland Island to the north. Rebecca had taught Carol how to tag turtles years earlier, and they had remained friends. In the middle of the night, in between turtle patrols, Rebecca and Carol flashed their red-filtered lights at each other across Christmas Creek (red-filtered light does not disrupt turtle nesting). After a while, they invested in a citizen’s band (CB) radio—a walkie-talkie attached to a signal-transmitting radio. For Carol, who lived without a phone or television, the CB radio was a lifeline. She relished her evening chats with Rebecca.

“Howdy, girl. Any nests on your little spit of sand?” Carol said, pressing the transmit button.

“Just two false crawls. It’s been lonely,” Rebecca’s garbled voice sputtered back. “How are things with Louie?”

“Like flat soda,” Carol said. “The fizz is gone.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“It was fun while it lasted.”

A few weeks later, Carol got a call from Rebecca, inviting her to a national sea turtle conference in D.C.

“I can’t afford it,” Carol replied.

“The conference is already paid for, and we have a free place to stay in D.C. All we need is gas money.”

Carol wanted to get away from the island. She had been avoiding Louie, who continued to lash out. During his outbursts, she smelled stale alcohol on his hot breath. His explosive temper, fueled by binge drinking, had swallowed the gentle, soft-spoken man she once knew.

“The relationship with Louie has run its course,” she wrote in a letter to her friend Anne LaBastille. “There was never anything long-term about it. We had some good times together, but it wasn’t going anywhere.”

However, Louie continued stalking her. Carol realized that she needed to put some physical distance between them so things could calm down. The turtle conference in D.C. was the perfect excuse.

Jesse drove Carol over to Little Cumberland in his johnboat to meet up with Rebecca.

“I’z worried about you,” he said on the way over, a cigarette drooping from his lips.

“I’m worried too, Jess.”

“Maybe you should go talk to Louie.”

“I’ve tried. He just gets more worked up. There’s no easy way out of this.”

Carol climbed out of the boat and handed Jesse her outgoing mail, which included her letter to Anne LaBastille, her weekly note to her parents, and a scathing letter to the National Park Service about its development plans. Jesse added her letters to the Candlers’ mailbag, which was delivered by boat to the mainland post office each week. She also asked Jesse to feed her animals while she was away.

Carol looked back across the creek at Cumberland Island. For the first time, leaving the island was filled not with remorse but relief.

Carol’s windows-down, radio-blaring road trip with Rebecca was a much-needed girl getaway. They belted out tunes and traded island gossip. It was 1979, and tensions in Iran had caused a spike in oil prices. Carol spent most of her money on gas and had little left for food. Near Richmond, she spotted a dead woodchuck on the side of the interstate and made Rebecca pull to the shoulder.

“Free food! And look, only its skull is crushed. The rest is good eating!” Carol said, scraping the carcass into a cooler. “Do you think the folks we’re staying with will mind if I skin it in their backyard?”