Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (32 page)

“Don’t you get scared living out here?” he asked her.

Carol laughed. “You’re ready to take a bullet for these folks, and you think my life is scary?”

During the ceremony, the priest read from the good book using Carol’s flashlight. The couple exchanged gold wedding bands designed by Gogo. They kissed in the dimly lit chapel, then walked hand-in-hand down the aisle to an a cappella rendering of
“Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”

Outside the church, the couple smiled for photos while standing beside Carol’s fenced pasture. As flashbulbs popped, Pretty Butt craned his neck over the fence and nibbled on Carolyn’s bouquet.

Then the guests piled into vehicles and returned to Greyfield for the reception, while John and Carolyn lingered in the church alone for a few minutes. When they emerged, all the cars had left. Only a single park ranger’s truck remained, which had been used earlier that day for a beach cleanup. The backseat was stuffed with trash bags full of beer bottles, moldy socks, and cigarette butts. The ranger quickly tossed out thqe trash and wiped the seats with a towel.

John and Carolyn arrived back at Greyfield after dark and stepped onto the floor for the first dance—to Prince’s “Forever in My Life.” Afterward, Ted Kennedy’s teary-eyed toast was a powerful, poignant celebration of his family’s storied legacy.

News of the wedding began to leak Saturday afternoon. By Sunday morning, the press was descending on Cumberland in chartered boats and helicopters, but the newlyweds had already left the island, ferried off in a plane flown by Gogo’s cousin.

“I didn’t realize until afterwards how wise we were in not telling anyone about the wedding. Just watching the flotillas of media trying to get onto the island was horrifying,” Gogo recalled. “It just made me even happier to have done that for them. I think that I will always go down as someone who honors people’s privacy.”

Suddenly, the quiet north end of Cumberland Island became a bustling tourist attraction. The Greyfield Inn offered exclusive vehicle tours to the church for their guests, who paid up to $750 per night. They drove their guests through the wilderness and along the beach. Backpackers and beachcombers had to keep an eye out for truckloads of tourists guzzling past.

Greyfield benefitted from the wedding and the park. And unlike the twenty-one other island families who sold their land to the National Park Service when the park was established, Gogo Ferguson’s family at Greyfield did not receive the lifetime rights to drive on parklands or in the wilderness that were part of those agreements.

Gogo defended the tours by arguing that her family had been exceptional guardians of Cumberland for generations and had earned the right to drive the entire island, including roads through the wilderness and on the beaches.

“The minimal use of vehicles has been a traditional use enjoyed by us for almost a hundred years, a small price to pay for the good stewardship we have provided,” Gogo wrote in a letter to Congressman Jack Kingston. Kingston soon became an outspoken supporter of Greyfield’s tours on Cumberland. “We are some of Jack Kingston’s top clients,” acknowledged one Carnegie heir. “We asked him to get involved on our behalf.”

The National Park Service wasn’t going to stop Greyfield. For years, Lucy had intimidated the park, and now Gogo was calling the shots, Carol believed. Numerous National Park Service superintendents felt the significant influence of the Carnegies, and the park wasp not about to tell them they couldn’t drive through a wilderness that they once owned, especially now that the family had Congressman Kingston in their corner.

So Carol did. She spearheaded legal action to stop the tours. A trio of conservation groups filed a lawsuit against the National Park Service for allowing motorized commercial tours through the wilderness. They won. In 2004, the Eleventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals’ unanimous ruling halted Greyfield’s tours through the wilderness. Carol’s small band of dedicated grassroots conservationists had triumphed over a very powerful family.

But the victory was short-lived. Later that year, Gogo once again asked Congressman Kingston to rewrite the law—this time to strip wilderness status from the Greyfield tour route. She and her family had contributed to Kingston’s campaign Gogo wrote to him: “Our hope is for you to sponsor legislation which would delay the implementation of the wilderness.”

A few months later, Kingston tacked a couple of paragraphs onto a two-thousand-page omnibus spending bill. His legislation removed the Greyfield tour route—including the entire beach and the main road—from wilderness. The change went largely unnoticed by Congress. Kingston’s legislation was never voted on or discussed in any committee. In the wee hours before the 2004 winter recess, the spending bill passed, with the Cumberland wilderness removal rider dangling from its coattails. Never before had wilderness been removed from the federal system without any public input.

“People come before nature,” Kingston said. “Access to the island shouldn’t be limited by a wilderness that never should have been designated in the first place.”

Cumberland’s wilderness was fragmented by Kingston’s legislation, and vehicle tours increased dramatically, including a turtle nesting habitat. The bill also called for eight busloads of tourists to be shuttled to the north end daily, and Kingston earmarked millions for the renovation of Plum Orchard mansion.

The Carnegie family had prevailed.

Kingston’s legislation made it a lot easier for the Park Service to manage the island and for residents to enjoy it. Both could drive freely on the island without worrying about wilderness restrictions. It also simplified and solved many logistical problems. Plum Orchard and the First African Baptist Church could be reached by vehicle, and the beach was no longer wilderness, which helped untangle the laws governing its use.

But the wilderness was critically wounded. So was Carol.

“This park is run by the rich,” Carol fumed afterward. “They ignore the law. And when they don’t like the law, they buy a congressman who changes it for them.”

“You used the influence of Jimmy Carter to create the wilderness,” Bob pointed out. “Now they’re using Jack Kingston to dismantle it.”

Some island families weren’t satisfied with removing just the beach and main road from wilderness. “I’d like to repeal the wilderness entirely,” Grover said. “I think it’s a stupid idea, and I intend to fight it. It’ll give me something to do in my retirement.”

To demonstrate his opposition, Grover began riding his ATV on hiking trails in the wilderness. “The park tells me I can’t ride my four-wheeler on certain trails. I ride whatever trails I want,” he boasted. “Somebody asked me why I collect machine guns. I said, ‘Cause I can.’ I need no better reason than that.”

Other island families have gone even further. Even though they were already paid millions for their land, the Carnegies have lobbied to extend their lifetime rights on the island forever. For the past decade, the Carnegies have been lobbying the White House and Congress to allow them to live on their taxpayer-owned estates permanently.
The Carnegies claim they are seeking to lease back their historic houses because the park does not have the budget to preserve them. “It is certainly one very good option regarding important structures which require significant maintenance,” said Gogo.
So far, the National Park Service has stood its ground and refused. But Carnegies continue to urge influential leaders and legislators to grant them rights and residences without end.

“If lifetime rights are extended, the park is doomed,” Carol said. “Extending rights—including my own—would be selling out a publicly owned national park to a privileged few.”

Meanwhile, island families convinced the state of Georgia—which has jurisdiction over the beach—to issue them nearly four hundred beach driving permits on Cumberland Island. These permits are special exemptions that allow them to drive along the seashore,
which—even without wilderness protection—is supposed to be
free of vehicles. More people drive on Cumberland Island National Seashore than any other island in Georgia. The most important beach for sea turtles and shorebirds in the state also has the most traffic.

Carol saw more tire tracks than ever on her island surveys. She learned to recognize the grooved tread of the Greyfield jeeps and the knobby tread of National Park Service trucks and vans.

In the early spring of 2007, Carol noticed the sandy tire tracks of park vehicles headed to the house of Ben “Doc” Jenkins, an island resident who lived between Greyfield and Stafford. Jenkins had just turned eighty-five, and his rights to live on the island were set to expire in two years. Unlike most other islanders, Jenkins had negotiated for a forty-year contract instead of lifetime rights. Now he was regretting that decision.

“I’m not leaving without a fight,” Doc said. “They’ll probably have to bring in the army to get me off the island.”

Squat, squinty-eyed, and gray-bearded, Doc always had a cigar in his mouth, and his discarded stumps littered the main road. It wasn’t clear if Doc was really a doctor. He had been accused of forging documents to get his medical degree. He practiced for decades as an ear, nose, and throat doctor near Atlanta until an investigation by the
Atlanta Constitution
revealed his alleged fraud. He fled to Cumberland Island in 1970, where he bought a house on the south end, paying in cash, just before the national seashore was created.

Then, in 2007, with his island living and driving priveleges set to expire soon, Doc Jenkins hatched a plan to extend his stay. The tire tracks clued Carol in to the collusion. Just before dawn one evening, she crept up to Doc’s house through the woods, slinking through the clattering palmetto along the spongy forest floor. She couldn’t believe her eyes: through the Spanish moss, she spied a glimpse of an immense construction project next to Doc’s house.

Carol contacted a couple of journalists, who staked out the construction site one evening and watched a National Park Service truck pull up to the house. The new park superintendent, Jerre Brumbelow, stepped out of the truck, along with the longtime county sheriff Bill Smith. Doc Jenkins, with a cigar stub wedged in the corner of his mouth, waddled out to meet them. The superintendent and sheriff drank beers with Doc on the porch until nightfall. The journalists heard their guffaws and smelled Doc’s cigar smoke from their spot in the forest fifty yards away.

Just after dusk, lights appeared on the water. Under the cloak of darkness, a barge approached the dock near Doc’s house. Local inmates unloaded stacks of framing wood, concrete block, and other construction materials.

Carol and the journalists did some more digging and uncovered the subterfuge: Doc had teamed up with the sheriff and superintendent to secretly build a private vacation retreat on publicly owned parklands. As part of the deal, Doc would get his rights to live on the island extended indefinitely, and the superintendent would get his own private residence on the island. The sheriff covertly provided inmate labor from the county jail to build the facility. In return, the sheriff would get to use it as a fishing spot and island getaway for his family. They planned to disguise the facility as a center for disabled children. Sheriff Smith’s son was a paraplegic. Superintendent Brumbelow and Sheriff Smith hoped to play on public sympathies so they could have a place of their own on Cumberland.

Carol’s sleuthing helped stop the secret construction project. In 2008, a U.S. district court judge halted all construction until a federal probe could investigate. Doc continued construction in defiance of the judge’s ruling and was held in criminal contempt. Eventually, a federal court permanently ended the illegal construction. Sheriff Smith was voted out of office and Superintendent Brumbelow was fired. It was the third island superintendent that Carol had ousted.

Afterward, animosity toward Carol intensified. She received hate mail and anonymous violent threats. Park employees and island families loyal to Brumbelow unleashed vicious tirades.

“You’re a dirty dumpster diver with death breath,” said one Brumbelow backer. “How the hell did you get away with murder anyway?”

“You can go fuck yourself and the fucking sea turtle you rode in on,” said another.

She caught park employees snooping around her property. Law enforcement rangers began shadowing Carol on her island surveys, waiting for the slightest slip-up. One afternoon, Carol was inspecting a gator hole near South Cut Trail when a gun-toting ranger arrived suddenly. He barreled up in his big truck and slammed on his brakes, then jumped out of the cab with one hand on his holster, ready to arrest her. Carol was on all fours in the muddy slough inspecting deposits at the gator den’s entrance.

“Whatcha got there, Carol?” he shouted.

“I don’t know,” she said. She lifted it up and handed it to the ranger. “Is it salty or sweet?”

The ranger held a log of gator shit in his hands. He stood
silently for a full minute, trying to figure out if he could write her a ticket. Finally, he threw the dung down in the ditch and drove off.

20

Early one morning, Carol got a call on her walkie-talkie: “Dead turtle near Duck House Beach.”

She raced out to the beach at dawn. A wafer of sun crested the horizon, and by the time she arrived at the Duck House dune crossing it had filled the purple sky dome with fiery orange breaths of light. The wind whipped streamers of sand across the shore. Then she saw the stranded carcass ahead. She squinted through the blowing sand at the dead turtle with the missing left flipper—and stopped in her tracks. It was Stumpy, the turtle whose nests she had helped dig and whose hatchling she had rescued years ago.

“I’m sorry, girl,” Carol said. “I let you down.”

The turtle’s gut was loaded with shrimp. Her lungs were filled with blood. Lactic acid levels in her bones confirmed it: she had died in a trawl net. Dozens of shrimp boats lined the horizon.

Carol glared out across the water. “I swear to you, Stump. The slaughter stops here.”

Over four thousand miles away, Stumpy’s daughter had hitched a ride to Africa in the gyrating Gulf Stream to bask in turquoise lagoons and feed on crunchy crabs and juicy jellies.

The turtle had grown large, and her size attracted the males. They circled her and sniffed her cloaca. They tried to mount her, clawing at her carapace. But she was saving herself for the boys on the other side of the pond. The nesting beaches of Cumberland Island were calling her home. An ancient instinct had awakened. She set out to trace an ancestral memory across an invisible, indelible route.

Slow and steady, she flapped through the water toward home. It would take nearly a year for her to complete her voyage back across the ocean.

A lot had changed since her transatlantic crossing thirty years earlier. Much of the floating seaweed that had sheltered her in the Sargasso Sea had been harvested. Instead of a seaweed sanctuary, the still eye of the Atlantic gyre had become a trash dump. The Texas-sized Atlantic Garbage Patch was a swirl of confetti-like debris—mainly from cigarette butts, soda cans, beer bottles, and plastics. Worldwide, over one hundred thousand turtles, dolphins, and whales die each year from ingesting plastic. She chomped into a floating plastic bag, which resembled a jelly but didn’t taste like one. She shook it loose from her jaws before it clogged her throat.

There were far fewer fish in the sea—and a lot more nets and hooks. Trawls had flattened the ocean’s ancient forests of coral, sponges, and seaweed, leaving behind barren plains. The ocean was a lot more empty—and lonely.

There were fewer turtles, too. Many were sluggish and diseased, covered in warts and parasites. Others hung dead from longlines—burly fishing lines with baited hooks extending for miles across the open ocean.

There was one upshot: more jellyfish. The turtle gorged on swarms of moon jellies, purple-tentacled Portuguese man-of-wars, and lacy lion’s manes.

At night, she swam for the shelter of one of the few remaining coral reefs, which were the mortar for massive metropolises of marine creatures. The reef was an underwater rain forest crowded with life. Sharp-toothed morays slithered across the stony polyps, scraping parasites from their skin. Reef sharks stopped by to brush their teeth: picking the flesh from their open jaws were zebra-striped angelfish living amid the corals.

The turtle let her head and flippers hang down loosely, a special posture to welcome cleaning barberfish. Their jaws tickled her skin as they removed barnacles—crustaceans that glue their shells to docks, boats, and the backs of turtles. Barnacles created drag and weighed down her streamlined shell.

The reef’s night life was the marine equivalent of a hot tub orgy. All around her, coral colonies released sperm and eggs in a briny bacchanal. Corals discharged their eggs and sperm in a synchronous mass spawning that occurred for only a few minutes, one night a year. Triggered by the moon and the tides, female polyps squeezed pink bundles of eggs from their translucent mouths, while male corals simultaneously released dense golden clouds of sperm. In a matter of minutes, millions of corals spawned, coating the sea in a soupy slick of pink goop.

Corals weren’t the only critters spewing sex. Fish, jellies,
sponges, and anemones bred in milky mobs of sperm and eggs floating in the ocean. Male sea horses gave birth, squirting out hatched babies from their brood pouches. And on the turtle’s back, hermaphroditic barnacles still attached to her shell used their penises—the longest in the animal kingdom relative to their body size—to reach out and touch someone.

The turtle swam through a sea of love on her long journey home, where mating males eagerly awaited her arrival. She used the magnetite crystals in her brain, electrified by impulses from her optic nerve, like a compass to orient her home and to magnetically map the seafloor below her. She followed mountain chains and recognized deep abysses illuminated by bioluminescent fish, electric eels, and glowing squid. The sun and stars were also guideposts, which she checked every five minutes when she surfaced for air.

Not on her magnetic radar were oil barges, rigs, and platforms, some taller than the Eiffel Tower. Oil slicks stained the sea for miles. Also not expected were sprawling 6,000 mile dead zones where polluted river runoff had starved the ocean water of oxygen and killed off all life. Former turtle foraging grounds were barren water wastelands.

There was less life in the ocean but a lot more noise. Missile-carrying submarines plied the waters, emitting deafening sonar pulses. Air guns on oil ships fired round-the-clock fusillades loud enough to locate oil buried under the seafloor. Barges filled busy shipping lanes, pleasure boats crowded the coast, and colossal fleets of commercial shrimp boats trawled the open waters. The underwater ocean had become one hundred times louder in her lifetime.

On a late spring evening, the turtle lifted her head out of the water and spied the soaring dunes and emerald forest of her home island. She had swum nine thousand miles around the Atlantic to arrive back where she started: Cumberland Island. Just offshore, she burrowed into the soft sandy seafloor, folded her flippers across her back, and slept. She awoke to a massive shadow passing overhead. Above her drifted a pod of right whales and their nursing calves. Right whales sang to each other in shrill, fluted melodies that they mysteriously changed each year. They ate the caloric equivalent of five thousand Big Macs a day, and their heartbeats could be heard a half mile away. Right whales were the most endangered whales in the world, and their only known birthing grounds were just a few miles offshore of Cumberland.

After her transatlantic swim, the turtle had worked up an appetite, too. She had looked forward to a Southern shrimp feast, but there were few to be found. So she settled for a spread of jellies and crab. She also satisfied another craving: for the next few weeks, she rolled in the surf with dozens of male loggerheads in frenzied lovemaking. Before mating, the boys nuzzled and nibbled her. They stroked their flippers along her shell. They fought for her, thrashing and biting each other to claim the prize of the giant, brown-eyed, thirty-year-old virgin.

Once a victorious male emerged from the scuffle, he then began circling her. They spiraled for several minutes, eyes locked, sizing each other up. Finally, he made the move. He mounted her, his belly to her back. He clasped her shell with the curved claws of his front flippers. Then he twisted his longer tail down and around hers so that their rear vents met. His penis extended out and into her cloaca. She stored his sperm with the semen of a dozen other males in her month-long orgy, and she could store it up to four years after mating. But she didn’t wait around. By summer, over one hundred eggs filled her oviduct. She was ready to nest.

Just before heading to shore, she was foraging near Cumberland Island along a seam of shrimp, when she suddenly noticed a wall of netted rope headed for her. She swam sideways but couldn’t escape it. The trawl engulfed her. The turtle thrashed against the net, flapping and snapping. She nipped at the ropes with her hooked beak, but the net was too thick and moving too fast. She was tangled in a panicked swarm of shrimp, crabs, and fish as the trawl dragged through the water.

Stuck in the trawl for nearly two hours, she couldn’t surface for air. Blood filled her lungs. Her muscles swelled with lactic acid. The escape hatch in the back of the net was slowly moving toward her, but she was slipping into an anoxic coma.

The turtle was heavy with one hundred embryos that had taken her thirty years and thousands of miles to produce. She had dodged tiger sharks and toothed eels, sargassum barges and submarines, only to be swept up in a shrimp net a half mile from her home beach.

Out of oxygen, out of time, she shut down and floated limply in the water.

Shrouded in 4
A.M.
darkness, Calvin Lang guided his seventy-five-foot trawler slowly down the black, ebbing water of the St. Marys River and out to the Atlantic. Hands on the pegs of the wooden wheel at ten and two, he knew by heart every coil and curve of the river and every rock along the ocean shelf. He could navigate these waters with his eyes closed. Calvin had been at the helm of a shrimp boat since he was ten years old, when his father bolted a milk crate to the floor so he could see over the wheel. Now he was wrinkled and leathered from six decades of piloting trawlers, but the sound of the sea still buoyed him.

Calvin lived by the changing tides, working to harvest nature’s prize: wild-caught shrimp from coastal Georgia waters. With a seven-boat fleet and help from his wife and sons, Calvin Lang carried on the family shrimping business through good times and bad, working long, hard hours to net the tender, tasty shrimp.

Choppy water slapped against the hull of
Lang’s Pride
. With masts extending at odd angles, like jointed appendages carefully probing the sky, the shrimp boat bore an eerie resemblance to its prey. Out on the ocean, dozens of star-like specks were scattered across the water—lights from the decks of other shrimp boats. The first tint of twilight painted the clouds.

Calvin scoured map and memory to predict where
shrimp might be waiting. It was low tide, so shrimp tended to cluster. And it was early in the season, so they were more likely to be close to shore. Beyond that, the hunt was pure intuition. Calvin could pick any patch of blue on the topo. There was no such thing as territory among shrimpers. And because shrimp gathered unevenly across the ocean floor, rippled with trenches and holes where the bottom dwellers could hide, one trawler could drag right beside another and catch three times as many shrimp.

Calvin throttled his engines to a hum just a half mile offshore of Cumberland Island, where the soft muddy shelf reliably sheltered seams of shrimp that had migrated out from the marshes. The rising sun traced the horizon with a thin white line. He lowered two nets into the water and began a steady two-mile-per-hour prowl. At the bottom of the trawl nets were quarter-ton steel plates chained together to form a plow. They dragged along the bottom of the ocean, dredging shrimp and other sea life into the nets.

On board with Calvin was a crew of two strikers, who helped work the nets. After lowering the nets into the water, they rested in the air-conditioned cabin for a few hours, snacking on Doritos and watching game shows on a portable television. Up in the pilothouse, Calvin scribbled notes as the sun climbed out of the ocean, glossing the sea in amber.

After two hours of trawling, Calvin and the strikers reeled in the squealing steel cables of the trawler’s tow arms, hoisting the nets out of the water. Calvin tugged the nets’ drawstrings and a shimmering cascade of creatures tumbled onto the deck. Amid a writhing two-foot mountain of fish were eels, crabs, jellies, rays, anemones, urchins, sponges, sand dollars, sea stars, squid, sea cucumbers, horseshoe crabs, a juvenile bonnethead shark, and a languishing loggerhead sea turtle, which they heaved overboard. From the thrashing mound of marine life, strikers picked out two bushels of translucent, eight-inch white shrimp. They worked quickly,
pinching off the heads of shrimp and throwing the meaty torsos and tails in a basket. Dozens of gulls and pelicans hovered overhead, picking off flopping fish from the pile.

Once their shrimp baskets were filled, the strikers swept the bycatch—most of it already dead—back into the sea.
Alongside the trawler, porpoises splashed and thrashed amid the feast. Then Calvin dropped the nets back in the water, cranked the engines, and continued raking shrimp from the ocean floor.

Shrimp is the most popular seafood in the United States. Over forty million pounds are consumed annually in America—more than tuna, crab, cod, and clams combined.
Forrest Gump
got it right: there are a lot of ways to eat shrimp, from boils and barbecues to creoles and cocktails. That’s why the average American eats four pounds of it each year, and it has been a staple of coastal diets for centuries.

Until recently, most of the country’s shrimp was caught along the Southern coast. In the waters offshore of Cumberland, female shrimp release millions of eggs. Males release even more sperm in thick, creamy clouds. When they drift together and meet, eggs are fertilized and hatch twenty-four hours later. The mite-sized shrimp larvae then migrate to the marshes along Cumberland Island and Georgia’s Golden Isles. These nutrient-rich nurseries allow the shrimp to grow quickly. Whenever Carol waded into the marshes’ tidal creeks, she felt the spawning swarms of juvenile shrimp pricking her skin. At night, she saw their tiny red eyes darting all around her in the water.