Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (28 page)

Gogo replied that friends don’t put politics ahead of feelings, and they don’t put their personal agenda ahead of their friends’ passions. The slammed door rattled the frame.

To replace the outgoing superintendent, the National Park Service brought in a rookie, Denis Davis, to manage the country’s most contentious and complicated national park. On his first day as park superintendent, he met with Gogo at Greyfield, and then later with Carol on the beach.

“They were two of the most strong-willed women I had ever met,” Davis recalled. “I knew right then that I was in trouble.”

He was impressed by Gogo’s unwavering commitment to her family’s heritage, and he admired Carol’s encyclopedic knowledge of the island. “Carol loved the ecology of the island and knew more about it than anyone in the park,” Davis said. “I wish there were more Carols on Cumberland who loved the island for the reasons that she loved it.”

But it was a struggle to work with her, Davis said. She was obstinate in her defense of wilderness, rigid in her interpretations of policy, and brutally candid in her criticism of park management.

“She would approach me directly and say, ‘This is wrong.’ I often found myself saying, ‘Oh come on, Carol, be a little more flexible.’ But for her, wilderness had already been compromised on Cumberland, and she wasn’t willing to give another inch.”

She was a thorn in the side of the National Park Service, Davis admitted, and every other previous superintendent expressed a distasteful opinion of Carol. But Gogo, he said, could be even worse.

Davis organized a series of meetings aimed at bringing together island families and conservation advocates. He believed both the natural and cultural resources of the island were important and could be preserved. In the first ten minutes of the first meeting, the park service mediator was removed as mediator and replaced by an island resident married to a Carnegie heir, who set the agenda. A compromise agreement that grew out of these meetings only resulted in more lawsuits.

Undaunted, Davis spent three years drafting a compromise management plan for preserving historic structures and protecting the wilderness. Thousands of letters supporting the plan poured in from the public. He received an award from the National Parks and Conservation Association for his efforts. Then, weeks before the plan was finalized, Davis was transferred.

“I was forced out,” Davis said, which his superiors later told him was due to political pressure from Gogo’s family and Congressman Jack Kingston, who represented the coastal Georgia district.

Kingston claimed that Davis was not concerned enough with historic preservation. As proof, Kingston said that the superintendent had demonstrated his contempt for historic resources by putting vinyl siding on his mainland home in the St. Marys Historic District. In fact, it was a man named Dennis Davis, not the park superintendent Denis Davis, who had altered the historic home.

“The real reason I was transferred was because the Carnegies felt I was too sympathetic to conservation,” said Davis.

After her rift with Gogo, Carol was blackballed by the Carnegies and Candlers. Most of the island families had already snubbed Carol after she shot Louie McKee, but her role in establishing wilderness and torpedoing the Plum Orchard artist retreat permanently ostracized her. “Carol is an eccentric whack job who turned on us,” said Molly Prochazka, Gogo’s cousin. “She’s a radical one-sided wilderness hermit who weaseled her way onto the island. She’s not one of us. It makes me nervous to have residents on this island who don’t have our history.”

Carol was an outsider who snuck in the door at the last minute, a penniless loner living in an old black shantytown. Even her longtime friend Sam Candler abandoned her, calling her “an isolated environmental extremist who has cut herself off with her militant, radical stance on wilderness.”

Carol was hurt, especially by Sam, but tried not to show it.

“Trying to save the last one percent of wild places is not radical,” she said. “Radical is wiping out half of the world’s species in less than a century.”

She still had plenty of animals to keep her company, including a family of vultures that congregated on her roof. And instead of feuding with the Carnegies, she brawled with Bob.

Carol and Bob loved to butt heads. Every evening on the porch, while sipping White Peggies, they fiercely argued ideas and disputed each other’s research. Their porch debates became legendary. Scientists from across the country traveled to the north end of Cumberland to sit ringside on rickety wooden porch chairs, grab a handful of popcorn, and listen to the heated exchanges between the PhD biologist and the gutsy turtle girl with a high school diploma. Carol and Bob wrangled over controversial ideas such as animal altruism, overpopulation, and their favorite topic, human nature.

Carol believed that humans were fundamentally greedy and selfish. Like all animals, we competed for limited resources, and the fittest survived to pass on their genes.

Bob argued that humans were far more cooperative and empathetic. Across cultures, we had demonstrated a universal hunger for fairness and equality that sprang from our long nomadic history as tightly-knit tribal bands. For at least half a million years, we hunted and gathered food communally, shared resources around a campfire, and jointly nurtured the young and the elderly. People weren’t purely selfish, Bob maintained. We were hardwired to work together and help each other.

Carol and Bob were mixing drinks on the porch one evening when a jeep loaded with Greyfield tourists rumbled past. Carol smiled and waved. Bob shook his head and grumbled about rich snobs.

“The Carnegies are the top predators on the food chain,” Carol said. “You can fault them for a lot of things, but not for being wealthy.”

“They exploited hardworking Americans to make their millions,” Bob replied.

“Looking out for number one—that’s how nature built us to survive,” Carol said.

“That’s a lopsided view of nature,” Bob said. “Nature has been wrongly portrayed as only viciously cutthroat and merciless. Yet even Darwin believed that cooperation was just as fundamental as competition.”

Bob rattled off a list of examples: bees fly millions of miles to feed their colony and die in defense of their queen. Ants similarly work together like a single superorganism to find food and shelter. Vampire bats disgorge blood meals to share with the sick or hungry. Dolphins swim beneath injured animals—including humans—and carry them to safety. And bacteria—the oldest and most numerous organisms on the planet—cooperatively share survival information with each other. Perhaps most amazing of all are the humble slime molds. They live as individual amoeba scattered widely across the forest floor until they are starving. Then hundreds of them simultaneously crawl together and merge to form a slug, so they can seek out food as a collective organism.

Humans, too, are a kind of superorganism, Bob contended.
Homo sapiens
have thrived primarily because we cooperate better than other species. Even primitive humans took care of the elderly, weak, and disabled, as evidenced by eighty-thousand-year-old skeletons of handicapped Neanderthals found in Iraq’s Shanidar Cave. But it was care for our young that especially distinguished us as a cooperative species. When our ancestors climbed down from the trees and started walking upright, it meant giving birth to babies that were small and six months premature. Human infants were—and still are—the most vulnerable beings on the planet, with the longest developmental period in the animal kingdom. Years of around-the-clock care required strong partner bonding and the help of a clan. It took a village—or at least a pair of parents working together—to raise a child.

“Ultimately the secret to our success was cooperation—and perhaps even the first primitive flickers of love.”

Carol rolled her eyes. “Love isn’t stopping us from raping Mother Nature,” she said. “Any other animal with our forebrain would
overpopulate and overconsume just like us. It’s a dog-eat-dog world.”

They continued the debate early the next morning. Carol was working in her lab picking worms from coyote scat. On the wall above her microscope was a bulletin board of her favorite quotes.

Jane Goodall: “The least I can do is speak out for those who can’t speak for themselves.”

Rachel Carson: “Those who contemplate the beauty and mystery of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.”

Mary Oliver: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Around dawn, Bob swung open the screen door to the lab.

“Smells good in here,” he said. Then he asked her to join him on his morning five-mile run. “Come on—it’ll be a lot more fun than playing with poop.”

Carol was naturally fit. When she wasn’t tromping to gator holes or hiking to turtle nests, there was always wood to cut or traps to check. But she had not run in years. Reluctantly, she set down her tweezers and agreed to run the first mile with him.

As they trotted along, a veil of fog cloaked the island in gray. After about a mile, Carol asked, “When are we gonna actually start running?”

“What do you mean?”

“This isn’t running. This is shuffling our feet.”

“You thought I ran a five-mile sprint every morning?”

“The only kind of running I know is for my life. I’m either chasing something or being chased.”

They jogged beneath hoary, hefty oaks as the sun burned off the morning mist. A soft breeze stirred the ribbons of Spanish moss.

Then, halfway through the run, Carol noticed tracks in the sand and tore off like a bloodhound, disappearing into a tunnel of palmetto. Bob followed her boot prints and eventually came upon Carol sniffing around the remains of a deer. The kill was written in the sand. Carol pointed out two pairs of coyote tracks leading up to the lunge, then traced their paths as they dragged the carcass beneath a tree to eat it.

“See? All of your warm, fuzzy, lovey-dovey, holding-hands hogwash doesn’t stop hungry coyotes from killing Bambi,” Carol said.

“Predator eats prey. There’s no denying that,” Bob replied. “But these coyotes hunted together to take down this deer. It’s also a dog-help-dog world.”

He recounted the saga of the Donner Party, a wagon train caravan of eighty-seven frontier pioneers who were stranded in the Sierra Nevada for an entire winter. Their numbers dwindled as survivors resorted to cannibalism to avoid starvation. Only forty-six came down from Donner Pass alive the following spring, and it wasn’t the virile young males. The survivors were mostly those who were embedded in families. The same was true of the
Mayflower
colonists who first set foot on American soil: death was disproportionately higher among the unattached. Families fared better than even the healthiest, fittest individuals.

“Groups nourish us and give us something to live for,” he said. “In the long run, it’s survival of the friendliest.”

“What about cheaters?” Carol asked. “There will always be selfish individuals stealing from the altruistic suckers. Nice guys finish dead last—or just dead.”

“But nice groups win every time,” Bob replied. A tribe of cooperating members will always triumph over a tribe of selfishly motivated ones, he pointed out. “We are a social species more naturally inclined to work together than rip each other’s hearts out.”

“I don’t know about that,” Carol said, and began sprinting back toward the cabin. Bob strained to keep up, while Carol barely broke a sweat. Even in her heavy boots, she outkicked Bob.

“I win,” she said.

After the run, they gulped freshly squeezed grapefruit juice on the porch and watched a family of vultures perched atop the museum’s tin roof. Dad regurgitated food into the mouth of his tottering fledgling, a runt with a broken leg. The runt repeatedly lost his balance and slid down the tin roof, its long claws scrabbling at the metal. Mom snatched him by his nape each time just before he plunged off.

Below the vultures, hordes of horny toads stirred in the shaggy stubble surrounding Carol’s small pond. Hundreds of spadefoot toads had waited for the previous night’s rain to begin breeding explosively in Carol’s waterlogged yard. They mated once a year, crawling out of underground burrows to copulate in shallow rain puddles. The frogs frantically mounted each other and smeared fertilized eggs across the soggy yard, their breeding calls roaring to a deafening pitch. It was a cacophony of spadefoot screams and vulture claws screeching against tin.

“Ain’t life the greatest,” Bob said.

That evening, before Bob left for Rhode Island for the semester, he proposed to Carol again.

“I’m damaged goods,” she said. “In case you’re keeping score, I’m 0 for 2 in the marriage game.”

“We can do it quietly. No one else needs to know.”

“We already live like a married couple,” Carol said. “Your dirty laundry is everywhere. The spot where you pee off the porch is stained with piss dribbles. I don’t think you’ve ever washed the dishes or cooked dinner. You’ve got everything a husband could want. What do you need a piece of paper for?”

Curled in Carol’s lap on a drizzly spring evening was her cat Pal, named after Stuart Woods’ bestselling thriller
Palindrome
, which takes place on Cumberland Island. The novel’s female heroine is Liz Barwick, a bold, brave loner living on Cumberland who is beaten up by her lover. Liz soon befriends the carefree, promiscuous granddaughter of a wealthy family who runs the Greyfield Inn. Liz’s lover stalks her on the island, and eventually, he is killed. Carol found the novel entertaining, even though it hit uncomfortably close to home.