Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (24 page)

But the numbers were cold comfort. She would have to bear away her sorrow with no one in her corner. Carol’s few friends mostly abandoned her. Gogo was especially leery.

Island residents asked Carol if she really had to shoot him.
Couldn’t she have shot him in the leg?

He was breaking down her door and threatening to kill her, she would reply. If she had missed, she would be dead—and maybe Pete too.

For the next few months, Carol went subterranean. She buried herself in work. Holed up in island seclusion, she wandered alone through the marshes and slept in the dunes with the turtles. Once again, she had only animals as her companions. In her journal, she wrote: “Never get close to anyone. Ever.”

Louie’s estate only made things worse. Carol still had partial ownership in Louie’s property at Half Moon Bluff. She wanted nothing to do with a haunted house.

But then Grover Henderson claimed Louie’s house for himself.

Grover was the south Georgia lawyer who had already acquired Beulah Alberty’s house, across from Carol’s cabin. He was one of the legal representatives for the Carnegie and Rockefeller families on Cumberland. He also served as the local Camden County attorney until he was involved in a car accident while under the influence of alcohol. Scrutiny following the accident revealed that he had been using government funds for lavish travel and billing the county for personal expenses.

According to Carol Grover drank heavily, talked loudly, shot out the eyes of alligators at Lake Whitney, poached deer, and cut down trees in the national park. Carol had spotted him trawling for fish at night, out of season, using giant spotlights to lure fish to his nets. He dumped his garbage—including three broken-down vehicles—on park lands. When the National Park Service began trapping hogs on the beach, Grover ran over the traps with his truck.

Grover had already tried to take Carol’s property once before. Soon after she had purchased her ramshackle cabin from the Trimmings family, Grover coerced Bobby Rischarde, a black man who owned property adjacent to Carol’s, to claim the cabin belonged to him, because he had occasionally mowed the weeds around it. Grover was behind the scheme. He hoped to chase Carol off the island and have the Settlement to himself.

But his plans backfired when Carol showed up one morning with Frances “Sister” Trimmings and a tape recorder in her pocket. Sister strutted across the yard and stomped up to Bobby and Grover.

“What’s this you claimin’ this property?”

“Sister. Uh . . . good to see you again,” Bobby stammered.

“Who dat house belong to?”

“Uh . . . I looked after it some. Kept the grass cut for you.”

“You knowed this house was mine and I done sold it to this woman,” Sister said, poking Bobby in the chest.

“Oh yes ma’am.”

“So why are you tellin’ folks that it belong to you?”

Bobby looked sheepishly at Grover, whose sunburned cheeks flushed even redder.

“You got a lawyer?” Grover asked Sister.

“That’s all right about the lawyer. I wanna know how you come by dat house,” Sister said. She pursed her lips and leaned forward into Grover’s face.

“I’d rather ask your lawyer that,” Grover said, stepping between them. “I mean, that’s what you pay him good money for.”

“It’s a real simple question,” Carol interjected. “Bobby, did you ever own that house?”

“No, ma’am. It was Grover here that done all the complaining and kicking. He didn’t want you there, you understand.”

“Oh, I understand,” said Carol.

“I’d be more than happy to talk to your lawyer about this,” Grover said.

“As Grover’s neighbor, I didn’t say nothing and went along with it,” Bobby explained, shuffling his feet in the sand. “But then this morning I had a different view about the place. Since you is here, it belongs to you. I want to live in a world with friends.”

“Now wait a minute, wait a minute,” Grover sputtered.

“You done wasted enough of my time already. I don’t wanna hear no more from you,” Sister said to Grover, and marched out of the yard.

Now Grover was back for round two. Just a few weeks after the shooting, Grover moved into Louie’s vacant house at Half Moon Bluff.

“I swore never to step foot in that place again. But I couldn’t just stand by and let Grover swipe it,” Carol said.

She reluctantly decided to sue Grover. Carol couldn’t afford a lawyer, so she represented herself. Even though Grover was the newly minted county attorney, he was already facing a grand jury investigation for traveling on the taxpayers’ dime. So Grover decided to hire the best attorney in south Georgia to represent him: Bobby Lee Cook, widely considered to have been the basis for the television show
Matlock
, though a bit more greasy than Andy Griffith. Cook had succeeded in getting dozens of felons acquitted with his courtroom theatrics and shrewd cross-examinations. By tearing into witnesses and breaking them down on the witness stand, he helped mobsters, Klansmen, and porn racketeers get off the hook. He was a bulldog trial lawyer who had a long-standing reputation as a winner, and he saw Grover’s case as an easy slam dunk. He built his defense around a Georgia law that specifically prevents murderers from benefiting from the death of their victims.

But Carol had done her homework, too, and discovered that the law did not apply to acts of self-defense. In the end, Carol triumphed over Matlock. Louie’s house belonged to Carol, and Grover was sent packing.

Carol didn’t ever want the house to begin with. So she gave it to her parents, who had loaned her the money to build her cabin. But that didn’t change the facts: she had acquired the house of the man she had killed. It sparked rumors that she had intentionally shot Louie to get his island property.

“She murdered her way onto the island,” said Renee Noe, a National Park Service ranger. “She used men to get what she wanted.”

Other park employees joined in. “Did she really need to blast a shotgun through her lover’s heart at point-blank range?” said Zack Kirkland, a veteran park ranger on Cumberland. “He was holding a canoe paddle, not a gun or knife. Did that really warrant a death sentence?”

Even the media turned on her.

“She engineered the whole thing. Louie’s death made her life very comfortable,” said Robert Coram, a former Cumberland Island park ranger and reporter for the
Atlanta Constitution
. “I am convinced that she lured Louie onto the porch and killed him cold-blooded, without remorse. She is an amoral sociopath devoid of feeling who wanted the island for herself. She killed Louie to protect her privacy. She literally got away with murder.”

In a 1981 story in the
Atlanta Weekly,
Coram wrote: “Men seem to sense in her a primitive woodsy vitality of extraordinary appeal. She has been married twice and caused two other men to leave hearth and home to be with her. . . . Another man later left his wife to be with her. She shot and killed him with a gun he had given her. . . . It was Carol, the vigilant protector of Cumberland, who brought the worst of the world to the island.”

Two books were written about Carol that further maligned her. One was a conspiratorial account written by Ard Eulenfeld, a friend of Louie McKee. In his book, Eulenfeld claimed that Carol masterminded Louie’s murder, and then Jimmy Carter and the CIA provided the cover-up. He recounted a fiddle party where Carol once playfully slithered like a rattlesnake, stalking her prey. She supposedly flicked her tongue and writhed across the floor, then suddenly coiled and struck, biting Louie in the crotch.

“She latched onto Louie McKee, got all she could out of him, then shot and killed him at the back door of the cottage he had built for her,” he wrote. “Every man she touches winds up dead. She must have some kind of hole on her.”

Later, bestselling author and former Cumberland Island park ranger Nevada Barr published a novel about a bloodthirsty villainess with long braided pigtails who ate roadkill, slept her way onto a Georgia barrier island, and murdered her lover. In the novel, she also used money designated for sea turtle research to support her cocaine habit. Carol later sued Nevada Barr for libel and won, but the damage had been done.

Carol had come to Cumberland to find a deep connection to a place where she belonged. Now, she lived in torment and isolation. Instead of Louie stalking her, she was constantly shadowed by shame and sorrow.
I did nothing wrong
, she told herself, over and over. But everywhere she went, she felt the sting of venomous words and glares. Once again, Carol decided to pack up her belongings and leave the island. She had nowhere to go, but she couldn’t bear to stay.

The night before she planned to leave, she wandered out to the beach to say goodbye. As she crested the dunes, she stopped suddenly, awestruck: the ocean had come alive with light. Bioluminescent plankton shimmered across the water. Not even the star-filled sky could compete with the ocean’s neon glitter. Flecks of electric blue light washed onto the beach, breaking apart beneath her feet as she walked beside the water. Her footprints glowed in the summer sand.

Carol waded out into the shining sea. Amid the fiery foam of the curling breakers, she made up her mind once and for all: she wasn’t ever going to be chased off the island. This was the only home she had ever known. This was her habitat, her feeding grounds, and the tangled web of life she studied was her family, who accepted her as she was, no matter what. This was where she belonged.

Carol still felt pangs of guilt for living in the middle of a protected national park. She was infringing upon its wildness by residing within it. But she was temporary, she reminded herself. As lifetime rights expired, including hers, the human thumbprint would fade, and the wild island would heal. She wouldn’t live to see it, but at least she could help nudge it in the right direction. She would keep her ear to the sand, watch over the island, and guard it with her life.

For years, she had taken from the island: oysters from the marsh, driftwood from the beach, data from dead animals. The only way she could stay on Cumberland was to give something back. She could fight for the wild. She could speak for the turtles and gators. She could be a voice crying out for the wilderness.

She had sheltered beneath her shell for too long, cloistered in her cabin, hidden away from humanity. Now it was time to stick her neck out and fight for life beyond her own.

The underwater light show flashed around her. She vowed to carry the light inside her, like warm coals in her chest, to illuminate the dark days ahead.

Later that night, after unpacking her boxes, she wrote in her journal: “It is my fault that Louie is dead. I must face that guilt every day, for the rest of my life. I’ll have to learn to live with that. But I’m sure as hell not gonna run away. With every fiber of my being, I’m gonna stay and fight.”

Cumberland needed her more than ever. In the late 1970s, the National Park Service planned colossal developments on the island to accommodate one million tourists annually. A bridge from the mainland was proposed. Carol quickly learned that the National Park Service could develop the supposedly protected island almost as ruthlessly as Charles Fraser. Cumberland’s status as a national seashore was not enough. Even well-intentioned agencies like the National Park Service had become more focused on visitation revenues than preserving wild places. Parks could be loved to death, especially a sandbar in south Georgia that was about to be inundated by a million people.

Once again, Cumberland Island needed to be saved—and once again, it needed a woman to save it. Carol realized that the only way to prevent overcrowded beaches, noisy vehicle tours, bulldozed dunes, cluttered concession stands, and garbage-strewn boardwalks was to designate the island a wilderness.

part four

last of the wild

15

Right now, trillions of critters are grazing on each of us. Microbes are feeding in our gut, swimming over the surface of our eyes, and drilling into the enamel of our teeth. There are more organisms on our tongue than all the stars in the galaxy. Without them, we’d be dead.

The human body is an untamed wilderness of undulating mountains, folded valleys, tangled hairy jungles, and cavernous maws brimming with microscopic life. We are vast. We contain multitudes. Each of us is an ecosystem, a walking biome. There are ten times more cells of other organisms in our body than our own. That makes us 90 percent nonhuman.

“We are wild country,” Carol says. Our bodies are as lush and diverse as the world they inhabit.

Because wilderness is so deeply rooted in us, it’s one of our most fiercely conflicted ideas. Like our own hearts, wilderness is dark and light, deadly and divine, sinister and sublime.
Wilderness can be a place of sacred and inspired transformation: Moses went to the mountaintop; John the Baptist was a voice crying out from the wilderness; Jesus wandered the wilderness for forty days and transfigured himself there. In every major religion, wilderness is where the great spiritual pilgrims went to seek revelation: Muhammad met the angel Gabriel in the wilderness near Mecca, Buddha found the path to enlightenment beneath a tree, and Lao-tzu retreated to a remote mountain cave.

But wilderness can also be a dark and shadowed realm, home to witches and evildoers. Fear of nature lingers in our mythologies, from the serpent in the Garden of Eden to the Blair Witch and other woodsy horror-flick slashers. Even beloved fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel perpetuate phobias of bogeymen lurking behind every tree. Today, the great outdoors is still haunted by the dueling banjos of
Deliverance
. The moral of most of these stories is pretty consistent: if you go into the woods, bad stuff happens.

However, we’re usually scared of the wrong things. We’re hundreds of times more likely to die driving to the trailhead than actually hiking in the forest. Fear of snakes keeps millions away from the woods, but only fifteen people die of snake bites each year in the United States. Bears and sharks kill a combined eight Americans annually.

If we’re looking for something to fear, we should take a glance in the mirror. There are over seventeen thousand murders annually in the United States, and less than .001 percent of them take place in the woods. Our neighbors are far more dangerous than any animals in the forest. Wilderness is far safer than our own backyards.

Some say wilderness is everywhere. Others argue it doesn’t exist. Wilderness might describe an untouched forest or an unmowed field, a roadless area or a roadside rest stop.

Wilderness actually has a very specific definition, enshrined in what Carol calls “America’s most astounding piece of legislation,” the Wilderness Act of 1964—the first law ever to give nature priority over people. It defines wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man . . . an area of undeveloped land retaining its primeval character.”

Wilderness areas are the last pristine pockets of nature. They sustain themselves, without human manipulation. People can visit but not live in wilderness. No roads, vehicles, or structures are allowed. Logging, mining, and development are also prohibited. It is machine free: not even bicycles or chainsaws are permitted. Simply put, wilderness is pure nature, where the human imprint is minimized.

Such a division between humans and nature is relatively new. For 99 percent of human history, we have seen ourselves as part of nature, not separated from it. Most indigenous cultures have no word for wilderness, because they never divided themselves from the natural world.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors weren’t noble savages, nor were they tree-hugging environmental saints. They cut down trees for firewood, and they routinely burned down forests to improve hunting and replenish the soil. They butchered sea turtles and ate their eggs. When they competed for limited resources, they slaughtered each other.
For the most part, however, they lived within the resource limits of their environments.

Everything changed about ten thousand years ago, when we began domesticating animals and plants and concentrating into agricultural societies. Food was stockpiled and distributed in cities, and hierarchies developed around the surplus. The human population began to swell. Forests were cleared for farmland. Ordered rows of grain crops and settled societies replaced nomadic hunter-gatherer life in the wilderness. Fences were built. Animals were corralled. Boundaries were mapped. For the first time, we drew a line separating our controlled spaces from the wild beyond.

We benefited immensely from bringing nature under control. Food and shelter were more secure, life expectancy increased, and social organization enabled the arts and education to flourish. Everyday living became cleaner, safer, healthier, and more convenient.

But we also took a big risk: we bet our entire evolutionary future on controlling nature rather than living within it. We began distancing ourselves from the untamed wilderness and favoring the domesticated. Dogs replaced wolves. Cows replaced buffaloes. Wild grasses were plowed under to plant wheat.

We can’t fault our ancestors for wanting a bit of security—a steady and predictable surplus, a corncrib to get them through the long winter, a hog to slaughter if food got tight. Both the wild and the tame have their place, even in the natural world. But things went wrong when we wanted to control not just a small garden patch but all of nature. Modern civilization severed the web of life and turned it into a chain, with humans at the top, the puppeteer pulling on nature’s strings.

Conquering nature became a central tenet of human faith and philosophy. Control—for both religion and resources—even drove us to domesticate our fellow human beings.

We have so thoroughly conquered nature that most of its resources support not the diverse species of life but a monoculture of man, seven billion strong and doubling every half century. We’re on our way to oceans without whales or sea turtles. Empty forests. A world without wild animals.

For two million years, we played by the same rules of nature as everyone else: Diversify. Adapt. Cooperate. Waste nothing. Stay within resource limits.

Then, fairly recently, we decided that the world belonged to humans and the rules of nature didn’t apply to us any longer. We tamed the wilderness and controlled the earth. We tried to butcher the turtle on which Turtle Island rests.

But she didn’t die.

In 1969, NASA scientist James Lovelock noticed something unusual happening in the earth’s atmosphere: inexplicably, its balance of oxygen and other gases was regulating itself like a thermostat. But what was doing the regulating? He looked at other planetary processes—including the stable concentration of ocean salinity and the cycling of nutrients—and came to a startling conclusion: the earth is alive.

He proposed that the earth is a superorganism—one giant living system that includes not just animals and plants but rocks, gases, and soil—acting together as if the planet was a single living being. Its bodily systems, such as the water cycle and nitrogen cycle, are balanced to maintain life on earth. The throb of the tides was the systole and diastole of the earth, and water coursed like blood through its veins. We proud humans may simply be microbes on the surface of a superbeing whose entirety we cannot fully comprehend. Like the bacteria in our body, is it possible that we, too, are part of a larger living earth, a speck on the eyeball of the universe?

Tree roots break the sidewalk. Dandelions spring through the cracks. Insects grow resistant to pesticides. Rivers flood our tallest levees and break through our mightiest dams. Beaches keep moving, despite jetty walls and truckloads of imported sand. “Our domination of nature is a delusion,” Carol says. “We cannot exempt ourselves from nature’s ironclad laws. We cannot grow infinitely on a finite planet.”

Mother Nature is a tough old broad. Like the humble tortoise lining up against the hotshot hare, she will outlast us. We can’t sustain our blustery sprint to the front of the pack. Our current reign has lasted fewer than ten thousand years—barely a blip in the earth’s four-billion-year history. Our supremacy is short-lived, and our species’ future is uncertain. Only one thing is for sure: we need Mother Nature a lot more than she needs us.

Nowhere is the human relationship to nature more schizophrenic than in
Homo americanus
. The United States is home to the most technologically advanced civilization and the most raw, untamed wildness in the world. Over the past five hundred years, Americans hated and feared wilderness, then loved it, then nearly killed the thing they loved.

The Americas were already inhabited by at least ten million indigenous people when Columbus dropped anchor. But those folks didn’t count to Europeans—except as slaves. They viewed the continent as a blank spot on the map, virgin terrain to be reaped for its abundant resources.

The first pilgrims aboard the
Mayflower
looked across the waters and gloomily beheld “a hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts.” Puritan colonists viewed themselves as Christian soldiers in a divinely ordained war against pagan wildness. A century later, American pioneers also believed it was their divinely ordained duty to tame the wilderness. They were spearheads of progress, fulfilling America’s Manifest Destiny to expand westward across the continent. After the American Revolution, frontiersmen blazed paths across the Wild West. Indigenous people—and species like the buffalo and passenger pigeon—were corralled or killed to make way for America’s transcontinental conquest. We carved our civilization out of the wild, endlessly expanding frontier.

Along the way, though, wilderness became deeply ingrained in American identity. The wilderness had forged rugged individuals and a pioneering spirit. The challenges of frontier travel ennobled our character and toughened our resolve. The vigor and vitality of wilderness life distinguished us from our stodgy, effete European parents and tested the mettle of our young nation. America had succeeded in transforming the wilderness, but the wilderness had also transformed us.

Then, in the late nineteenth century, westward expansion ran out of room. Industrialized America had finally sprawled from sea to shining sea. The American frontier—the border between civilization and wilderness, order and chaos, the cultivated and wild—disappeared forever. The howling wolf and trumpeting elk went silent.

Sentiment toward wilderness began to shift. Without the frontier, Americans began to view wilderness as an asset rather than an adversary. Instead of being reviled, wilderness became revered. “We need the tonic of wildness,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, the first prophet of the wilderness gospel, who built a one-room cabin and grew beans beside Walden Pond in 1845.

Carol built her cabin in the wilderness for many of the same reasons as Thoreau, who went to the woods “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I had not lived.” Like Thoreau, Carol was a student of nature and a geographical extension of the wilderness that surrounded her. Both explored a life stripped down to its essentials. They wanted “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”

Thoreau believed wilderness provided a necessary counterbalance to the materialism and urbanization of industrialized America. It was a place of self-renewal and contact with the raw material of life. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” he famously wrote.

Thoreau was among the first to advocate for protecting America’s vanishing wildlands, proposing that the nation formally preserve “a certain sample of wild nature . . . a network of national preserves in which the bear and the panther may still exist and not be civilized off the face of the earth.” Wilderness preserves could provide a perpetual frontier to keep overindustrialized Americans in contact with the primitive honesty of the woods.

In 1872—the same year that Tom and Andy founded Carnegie Steel—America designated its first national park: over two million acres in northwest Wyoming were set aside as Yellowstone National Park.

A second national park soon followed, thanks to the inspiration of Sierra Club founder John Muir.

He so loved the Sierra that he proposed a fifteen-hundred-square-mile park around Yosemite Valley and spent decades fighting for it. When Yosemite National Park was finally signed into law in 1890, Muir wrote, “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home, that wildness is a necessity, and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”

But a few pristine parklands were not nearly enough. By the beginning of the twentieth century, nearly the entire continent had been clearcut, from the California redwoods to the eastern chestnut. The federal government bought the slashed stumplands left behind by timber companies and formed the U.S. Forest Service, which would eventually manage nearly two hundred million acres of forestland. However, the government continued to allow logging, dam building, cattle grazing, and mining in these forests.

“The earth and its resources belong to its people,” proclaimed the U.S. Forest Service’s first chief, Gifford Pinchot. He wanted to democratize the forest resources. Pinchot advocated the wise use of public lands to maximize benefits for all Americans. According to Pinchot, sustainably cutting timber from the forests made them even more healthy and productive than a hands-off approach.