Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (2 page)

She’d had no job or steady income in three decades, so she lived frugally using the island’s plentiful—and free—natural resources. Her water came from a naturally flowing artesian well. She heated and often cooked with wood that she hauled and split herself. Grapefruit and fig trees flanked the cabin, and a bedraggled wire fence surrounded a garden of tomatoes, okra, squash, greens, and melons. She had electricity, which she used primarily for food storage. Her freezer was stocked with meats from island wildlife—hog, deer, coon, armadillo, gator, horse.

“I never go hungry,” she said. “But dang, what I wouldn’t give for some ice cream.”

She had plenty of living creatures surrounding her, too. In addition to a wild horse she had tamed, she had a dozen chickens, four cats, six pigs, two snakes, an otter and an orphaned duckling. In a cage behind her cabin, she was nursing an injured red-shouldered hawk back to health. She had bottle-fed wounded otters and rescued bobcat cubs.

“I’ve always felt close to animals,” she said. “They don’t let you down.”

Carol’s kinship with the wild was as refreshingly simple as her bare-bones life in the woods. Her relationship with her fellow
Homo sapiens
, however, was a bit more complicated, as I soon learned.

I ended up shadowing Carol for the next two decades. I’ve been alongside her dissecting dead sea turtles on the beach and sipping cocktails in Carnegie mansions. I’ve waded into gator dens and chased wildfires with her. She has shared her extensive field notes, journals, photographs, correspondence, and, most importantly, her heart.

It’s a heart that is tempestuous and tormented, a crucible of conflict. She is haunted by her past and hated by many of her island neighbors. She violates the wilderness she loves most by living in it. Yet she is also deeply committed to the wild island and has risked her life to defend it.

Her unflinching defense of the wilderness has put her at odds with island families and park managers. Neither of them likes a penniless, pigtailed carcass collector standing in the way of their plans. When a tourist resort is proposed for the island, Carol stops the development. And when hundreds of dead sea turtles inexplicably begin washing ashore, her turtle autopsies help solve the mystery. As she searches for clues, she also discovers something else: herself. A lost and lonely girl finds her way home—and fights like hell to save it.

part one

wild child

1

On a gray winter morning in 1946 in upstate New York, Carol walked to church with her parents. The lacy frills of her dress made her legs itch. They passed the manicured lots of her square-block neighborhood in silence. As they crossed Titus Avenue, her father clasped her five-year-old hand tight.

“Stop scratching,” he warned her. “You’re worse than a fleabag mutt.”

Two cans of tuna were tucked beneath her dress. Her parents did not hear the metal cans thunking as they marched up the steps of United Congregational Church, a red brick edifice with colonial pillars and a domed steeple. Just before the church bell clanged, Carol and her parents scooted into a pew near the back. She fidgeted through the preacher’s sermon, which was about a man feeding fish to a hungry crowd. Wedged between her parents, it smelled like roses and bleach.

“Can I go to Sunday School now?” Carol asked.

Her mother frowned. “Go on, then.”

Carol dashed down the aisle, but instead of turning down the hall to the classrooms, she creaked open the heavy wooden doors and tiptoed out of the church.

Outside, the wind tussled her dress. She headed straight for the boarded-up high school behind the church. In the empty parking lot, she opened the tuna cans and sat on the curb.

A scrawny black tomcat crept out of a broken window. He was little more than a patchy, threadbare mat of fur draped over a cage of bones, and he devoured the tuna with big bites. As Carol rubbed her hand down his back, he arched his spine and flicked his wiry tail. A low purr rumbled between mouthfuls.

“That’s a good boy,” she said.

Four more feral cats climbed out of the school windows and jostled for position around the tuna cans. Carol pulled her dress over her knees to keep out the cold wind. A slant of winter sunlight broke through the tattered clouds, and she felt it warm her cheeks. She didn’t need to hear sermons about feeding the hungry. She was doing it.

Then Carol smelled smoke curling from the church chimney and followed its trail down a narrow flight of stairs into the church basement. Carol peered around the corner of the doorway. A silver-haired groundskeeper was tending to a fire in the hearth of the church chimney. The wheelbarrow beside him was loaded with the carcasses of feral cats. One by one, he lifted dead cats by their tails and tossed them into the flames. The fire sparked and popped. She watched the charred flesh of a tabby cat smolder and then ignite until all that remained was the bony skeleton swallowed in orange flames. She wanted to cry. But she also wanted to get closer.

When the groundskeeper left the room, she crept up to the fire. A scorched skull lay buried in the ashes. It seemed shockingly small and naked to Carol, and its exposed teeth made it look more vicious. Is that what she looked like under her skin? She stared into its empty eye sockets for a long time.

Carol was late returning to church. Her parents were waiting for her outside the empty Sunday School classroom. Her father grabbed her hand and yanked her down the hall.

“You smell like barbecue! And your dress is filthy. Where the hell have you been?”

Carol Anne Ruckdeschel was born in Rochester, New York, on December 3, 1941, four days before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Her parents, Earl and Anne, beamed over their daughter, with chocolate brown eyes and a tangle of brown hair.

Raising a child during World War II was stressful for the young couple. Anne planted a victory garden, and Earl amassed an arsenal of guns. Earl and Anne decided to wait until after the war to have more kids, but when the Japanese surrendered in 1945 they were too exhausted from chasing after their rowdy four-year-old to consider having another. Carol would be an only child, just like her father.

Earl’s parents had died of tuberculosis when Earl was barely a toddler. He was raised by his Aunt Mabel and Uncle Free, who themselves never had children. Uncle Free worked as a chemist for Kodak, and despite the Depression-era job shortages he begged his boss to hire Earl as a messenger boy at age fourteen. From the very bottom rung, Earl worked his way up the corporate ladder and became a lab manager for Kodak. “I went up the ranks by following orders and respecting authority,” Earl said. “My daughter took a different approach.”

Earl was a tall, commanding authoritarian of German descent. His chestnut-brown hair cleanly parted to the right, and his face was chiseled by sharp cheekbones and a wide brow. Despite his stern appearance, he was a lively entertainer, engaging conversationalist, and the life of a party. After a few drinks, Earl could match wits with anyone in the room.

On his way to a meeting with his boss one afternoon, Earl passed by the desk of twenty-four-year-old Anne Rogers, a secretary at Kodak. Short and slender, Anne was dark skinned with round amber eyes, a button nose, and a wide, warm smile. Over the next few weeks, he invented more excuses to visit his boss and eventually asked Anne on a date. One year later, they were married. They moved into a small, two-story suburban box on the same block where Earl’s family lived.

Quiet and curious, Anne steadfastly played the role of housewife but longed for more creative outlets. On summer afternoons, Anne unfurled a blanket beneath a backyard maple tree for her infant daughter while she staked tomatoes and harvested squash from her postage-stamp garden. Later
,
Anne let her five-year-old daughter roam the neighborhood and play tackle football with older neighborhood boys, despite whispers from neighbors about her uncouth tomboy of a daughter. Anne often took Carol to a nearby creek, where Carol waded in her underwear and caught minnows and tadpoles.

Her mother’s leniency stiffened at the end of each day when Earl arrived home from work. He expected a tidy house, a cocktail at five o’clock sharp, and dinner on the table by six. Anne dutifully complied.

Earl prided himself on precision. His grandfather had been a diamond cutter in Germany, and Earl inherited his obsession with intricacy. He tinkered with watches and built his own stonecutting tools so he could transform uncut semiprecious minerals into gems of polished perfection.

But his lifelong passion was guns. Every evening after dinner, he cleaned gun barrels and refashioned stocks to fire with pinpoint accuracy. He collected World War II rifles and pistols, and he taught Carol how to shoot when she was a toddler.

Once, when Earl took Carol to the rifle range, she wandered out onto the range, directly beneath her father’s gun. He fired, and the deafening discharge knocked his two-year-old daughter backward. She curled into a ball, clutching her bleeding ear and sobbing. Carol lost 50 percent of her hearing in her right ear that day. It only sharpened her other senses.

Her acuity became apparent one autumn morning when she was five. Carol had feigned illness to stay home from school. Her mom brought in a bowl of tomato soup and a washcloth while Carol looked out the bedroom window. She saw a dark object on the road.

“Look, Ma. It’s a turtle.”

Anne squinted. “That’s just a fallen leaf.”

Carol smelled diesel and heard—through her left ear—a distant engine rumble. She sprang out of bed, spilling her soup, and dashed out the front door.

Her mother shouted after her, but Carol was already scampering down the road toward the turtle. Seconds after she plucked him off the pavement, a tow truck rounded the curve. Carol hopped to the shoulder of the road as it barreled past.

Carol filled an old washtub with water and fed the turtle lettuce leaves from their garden. She named the turtle Coon, beginning a lifelong habit of naming pets after other animal species.

Coon would soon have company in the Ruckdeschel basement. With no siblings and few neighborhood children to play with, Carol turned to animals for companionship. By age seven, she was riding her bike to a nearby pond to catch crayfish, frogs, and turtles. She waded alone into neck-deep water, probing the bottom with her bare feet. One afternoon, her toes bumped something hard in the mud.
She dove down into the brown water and scoured the bottom. Suddenly, something pinched her hand sharply and let go. She screamed underwater, sending a torrent of bubbles to the surface. But she still had enough oxygen in her lungs to go back for a closer look. Bedded down in the mud was the largest snapping turtle she had ever seen.

She popped up for air, grabbed a hefty tree branch, and pried up the giant turtle from the bottom of the pond. It was nearly two feet long, with horned ridges on its back. As she lifted it from the mud, she felt like she was unearthing a prehistoric creature, with its long claws, hooked beak, and horned shell. She lifted it by its tail and balanced it headfirst on the handlebars of her bike. At home she filled up the bathtub and kept it hidden for nearly a week. Finally, Earl demanded that she take a bath.

“I don’t need to, really. I got clean splashing in the creek today,” Carol said.

“You’re covered in filth and you stink,” Earl replied, dragging his daughter into the bathroom. He pulled back the curtain and jumped back. The snapping beast hissed at him.

“I got whipped that night,” Carol said. “My rear was always chapped from whippings. I probably deserved most of them.”

For her eighth birthday, Carol received the present she had been hoping for: her dad’s broken watch. She immediately grabbed a screwdriver and began disassembling it on the kitchen table. Earl beamed.

Both Carol and her dad loved to tinker. Carol especially savored the time her father spent with her, huddled together over the workbench, taking apart and reassembling watches, radios, lawn mower engines, and, of course, rifles.

“It was the only real quality time we spent together,” she said. “I loved sorting through a mess of gears and springs. I always wanted to understand the inner workings of things.”

Carol’s fascination with how things worked extended beyond the mechanical world and into the biological. As early as age six, Carol was dissecting dead cat carcasses behind the church. She used her pocketknife to slice into the cats, gutting them to see what they had been eating. Often the scrawny feral cats had empty stomachs, but occasionally she’d find partially digested mice. Next, she cut down the legs and shoulders to admire the lean, dark muscles and sinewy tendons attached like guitar strings to mottled gray bones. Finally, she spread open the chest wall, pulled back the ribs and lungs, and found the heart. Even after several days of decay, the meaty red lobes of the heart were distinctly swollen, with arteries branching from the top like a celery stalk.

“The heart is the most beautiful organ, and it always made me feel more alive to see it and touch it,” Carol recalled. “When I held the heart’s red flesh in my hands, I could feel my own heart beating. Seeing another animal’s heart was like looking inside myself.”

On weekends, Earl drove country roads, smoking heavily with the windows rolled up, hunting for woodchucks. When he saw one, he’d pull off, crouch, and shoot. Despite the suffocating cigarette smoke, Carol loved accompanying her dad on his Sunday drives, mainly to listen to the radio and to see the dead animals. Earl would examine his kill to see how far his bullet penetrated the woodchuck’s skull. Carol was more interested in the animal’s anatomy: How did it all fit together inside? How did life work?

Once, Earl took Carol hunting, and he shot a deer. Carol was the first to arrive beside the buck. She knelt beside him, enraptured by his moist brown eyes, so much like her own. She held her hand over the bullet wound in his chest and felt the warmth rise against her palm. Then she watched life flicker from his eyes. Yet nothing had perceptibly changed. The eyes were still brown and wet—only now they were eerily empty.

Later that evening, Earl parked at the edge of the woods. He handed a quarter to Carol and ordered his six-year-old daughter to march fifty feet, extend her arm, and hold the quarter between her thumb and index finger. Earl shouldered his favorite rifle and took aim at the quarter. Carol saw the barrel pointed toward her, and a flash flood of adrenaline swept through her.

“Stop shaking, dammit!” Earl shouted.

Carol closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. She stood frozen in dark silence, listening for the gunshot. Finally, she heard a metallic clank, followed by the rifle’s report echoing through the woods. When she opened her eyes, the quarter was gone.