The Advocate

On Cumberland Island, Carol Ruckdeschel studies
the life and death of its endangered creatures.
I peer into the
cardboard box strapped
to the hind rack of her
vehicle and discover the
source of the gnats’
attraction: the severed
head of a
loggerhead sea turtle.
The ferryboat I’ve taken to Cumberland Island edges up to the Sea Camp dock
along the western shoreline. Passengers disembark and mill along the quay outside the visitors’ center. Many of them are her to explore
the Cumberland Island National National Seashore, which was established in 1972, or to spot
some of the island’s famous “wild” horses;
some hope to catch a glimpse of the ruins of
Dungeness or other mansions built by the Carnegie family on the southern end of the island
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But I am here to visit the field biologist
Carol Ruckdeschel, a longtime resident of the
north end of Cumberland whom I befriended
five years ago while working on the island as
an environmental educator for the National
Park Service.
Carol pulls alongside me on her
Honda ATV, a cloud of gnats following behind.
She appears just as I remember her, with two
coffee-colored braids and a pencil attached to
her wide-brimmed hat. Carol is in her late
fifties, but her lithe body, brisk movements, and
inquisitive gaze belie her age.
“You’ve got bigger ovaries than me,”
she says, referring to my four-day crosscountry drive to get her in a twenty-three-yearold Volkswagen van, which I parked on the
Georgia mainland, seven miles west of Cumberland.
I peer into the cardboard box strapped
to the hind rack of her vehicle and discover the
source of the gnats’ attraction: the severed
head of a loggerhead sea turtle. “Found this
one washed up near the beach at Dungeness,”
she says.
Wedging my backpack between the
rear seat and the box, I slide into the remaining space, and we motor sixteen miles along
the sandy road that runs south-north through
the island’s humid interior. We pass red bay
and live oak trees covered in pink, scab-like
patches of “bubble gum” lichen. Two
painted buntings flit from the forest’s thick
understory and cross the road in front of us,
splaying their blue-green, ruby, and lemonyellow wings for an instant before disappearing inside a tress of muscadine grapevines. Spanish moss, not a true moss but a
flowering plant in the pineapple family,
drapes the oaks and provides nest bedding
for the northern parula warbler, white-eyed
vireo, and mockingbird.
The cabin in which Carol lives with
her husband, the herpetologist’s Bob Shoop,
is on the north end of the island and is part
of an old abandoned neighborhood she calls
“the Settlement.” Its population dwindled
when the completion of the railroad through
Georgia routes and tourists stopped visting
Cumberland altered travel routes and tourists
stopped visiting Cumberland. All hotel
business on the northern end shut down, and
the remaining people moved away. Now
several small, unpainted wooden cabins in
the Settlement contain abandoned tables and
chairs and rusted-through coffee cups.
As I open the swinging gate to the
yard so she can drive through, Carol says,
“You can set up your tent at Halfmoon
Bluff. I’ll walk you down there. Don’t want
you to take a wrong turn and meet up with
Ray.”
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Ceiridwen Terrill
The Advocate
We stroll past the white clapboard First African Baptist Church, which was the
place of worship for residents of the Settlement. It was founded in 1893,
“He only responds to
female voices, and
then he expects to be
fed.”
and, after a fire destroyed the original structure, the current building was erected in the
1930s. Due to a limited budget, the National
Park Service focuses its conservation efforts
on the southern end of Cumberland, where
the ruins of antebellum plantation houses and
Carnegie family mansions still stand. The
northern end of the island, where most of the
residents were poor and black, is all but ignored. Through donations offered by the
occasional visitor, however, Carol helps
maintain the church as a centerpiece of African-American presence on the island. Soon
we enter Halfmoon Bluff, a small clearing
overlooking the salt marsh. “Set up your tent
there,” Carol says, pointing to a wooden platform under the oaks.
I toss my gear down and follow
Carol along a faint path through the saw palmetto and leaf litter, careful to avoid brushing against the fronds where ticks wait for a
warm body. Cumberland Island is no place
for bare legs.
We reach an oblong pen that contains a shallow pool of water and black
sludge festooned with claw prints. “Ray!”
Carol calls out. Turning to me, she explains,
“He only responds to female voices, and then
he expects to be fed.”
The black water stirs, and from the
mud comes a sucking sound. Then jaws
emerge snapping. Checkered with black
squares, Ray’s hide glistens as he swings his
head side to side, flashing white, sightless
sockets. “What did I tell you? He gets hungry when he hears a female voice.”
Ray is the blind alligator that Carol found
four years ago, skinny and starving in Christmas Creek. She obtained a permit to take
care of him, and since Ray is no longer able
to catch prey, Carol will care for him until he
dies.
“Uh-huh,” I say, unable to muster
anything more.
Carol feeds Ray fat from the corpses
of feral hogs. “Those damn hogs eat dozens
of turtle eggs a night. Nothing natural about
them. Carnegies and Rockefellers brought
them over for sport. When I first came to
this island over twenty-six years ago, I don’t
think a single nest survived—not one. And
there wasn’t a square yard of the island that
wasn’t rooted up.”
Holding out the handle of a kitchen
broom to keep the alligator at bay, she empties the contents of two ten-pound buckets of
hog fat and offal into the pen. Carol is brave.
Even though Ray is blind, he can hear her
movements, and those teeth could tear off
her leg.
***
Carol came to Cumberland Island
first as an undergraduate student doing field
research on the island’s lizard species. “I
loved it here and wanted to come back,” she
says. So she dropped out of school and went
to work as a caretaker for the Candler family’s estate on the island. “I’ve been on
Cumberland Island ever since,” she says. For
the past twenty-five years, Carol has been
conducting fieldwork on sea turtles and
building the Cumberland Island Museum to
house her specimens.
The museum, which is adjacent to
Carol’s rustic cabin, provides valuable information about the diet, reproductive condition,
general health, and taxonomy of the island
animals. Skulls, skeletons, and whole specimens line the wooden shelves. The bodies of
snakes found dead on the sandy road are now
pickled and coiled in Mason jars; alligator
hatchlings are preserved in recycled olive
jars. These smaller fauna, along with loggerhead sea turtles, double-crested cormorants,
porpoise, and numerous bird species, represent each of the island’s ecosystems (salt
marsh, maritime forest, ocean, dune, and
freshwater lake). All of the museum’s specimens are collected opportunistically, meaning that the animals were found dead rather
than killed for analysis. As curators of the
museum, Carol and Bob catalog and store the
collected specimens.
Any carcass in good condition is a
candidate for the museum because it has the
potential to provide knowledge about the
evolution of that island species.
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Ceiridwen Terrill
Page 3
“Most people cannot understand why I might want yet another dead
blacksnake when I already have four or five pickled,” Carol says.
“However, that animal might be from a different time of year, a different sex, have
eaten a different food item, and on and on.
There is no such thing as having too many
animals to look at if you are after a true picture of what is going on here.” Carol and
Bob compare notes with other researchers
around the country and invite them to use the
museum for their own investigations.
Despite Carol’s lack of academic credentials,
she has been the senior author of a number of
scientific papers on sea turtles, and has a
reputation for presenting innovative ideas
about rare and endangered species at conferences and workshops throughout the country.
Her regular monitoring of sea turtle nesting
patterns and turtle mortalities makes her
uniquely qualified to educate and advise on
sea turtle biology and conservation. “I bet
we have more loggerhead skulls and skeletal
material from the southeast Atlantic coast
than anybody else—anybody,” she says.
And because species evolve faster on islands
due to separation from mainland influences,
island geography provides an ideal setting to
study evolutionary processes.
“The virtue of all wilderness areas is
that you learn and observe cycles,” Carol
says. “Ecologists watch changes. We know
things are changing in the natural world, but
we don’t know how these changes occur
unless we observe long-term patterns. If we
destroy all the naturally functioning systems
on the planet, there’s no hope for us to understand these systems and then we’re just playing God.”
Though many biologist conduct
research on Cumberland, most inhabit a field
site only temporarily or seasonally. Carol
lives on Cumberland year-round. I ask her
why she chose to remain on this particular
barrier island to do her research.
“I didn’t. It takes most of us so long to find
our lifework. Later on, we look back and
say, ‘if only I’d seen where I was going back
then, I could have had all this time to get my
ducks in a row and get down to work soon.’
But that just rarely happens. The real spark
is discovering questions about Cumberland’s
natural systems that no one knows the answers to. And you know, what matters to me
is living in a place where rain counts for the
right reasons—not because you might get
your panty hose or your shoes muddy, but
because rain is critical to gardens and natural communities.”
Most days, Carol works from early
morning to late afternoon preparing specimens for the museum and performing autopsies (or what naturalists call necropsies)
on washed-up loggerhead sea turtles and
other wildlife. She also travels the island to
count least tern nests, and during nesting
season makes monthly boat trips to nearby
islands to count pelicans and cranes. A
constant advocate for wilderness preservation, she has written letters to Congress
since 1965 recommending conservation
measures on behalf of Cumberland Island.
After dinner, we stack our plates
in the kitchen and move to a storage shed,
separate from the museum, that is filled
with boxes of turtle bones, containers of
Lysol bleach, wire scrubbers, and piles of
plastic dish drains and fusty crockery.
This is where she dissects her
specimens. The museum collection helps
Carol place wildlife deaths into a larger
scientific context, but before she can catalog a specimen, she must first clean, prepare, and label it. This evening Carol begins gluing together the skull plates of a
loggerhead. She explains that because juvenile craniums are not fully developed and
readily fall apart, she must first bleach
away the flesh, and glue the plates securely
in place before she can mount the skeletons
in the museum.
Jagged seams across the skull of
another immature loggerhead reveal where
the turtle experienced trauma to the head,
perhaps from the bludgeon of a shrimper.
When it eventually died of the wounds, the
turtle washed ashore. Carol maneuvers
tenderly around the site of the trauma.
Reading glasses perched on her nose, she
carefully inscribes in black ink directly
onto the bleached surface the species of sea
turtle, the date and location found, and the
bone type.
“The virtue of all
wilderness areas is
that you learn and
observe cycles.
Ecologists watch
changes.”
Sea turtle trail to the nest
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Ceiridwen Terrill
The Advocate
The specimens that Carol catalogs are stored inside the Cumberland
Island Museum, but they may not remain their indefinitely.
First African Baptist Church
“You know, you just
can’t predict what
your greatest
contribution will be.”
When the federal government established Cumberland Island National Seashore in
1972, most private landholders negotiated individual retained-rights agreements. Like many
other island residents, only about thirty-three
of whom live on Cumberland year-round.
Carol sold her property to the government but
has the right to live there until her death, at
which time the Park Service will claim the
property as public land. The agreement does
not extend to the lifetimes of spouses or children. But while the federal government will
“inherit” Carol’s small cabin, the specimens
cataloged and stored inside the museum may
be moved to a permanent location where
they’ll be available for the next generation of
ecologists researching the distinctive ecosystems of this barrier island.
I help Carol gather the tagged and
separated bones, and we carry them to the museum. We climb the wooden steps and open
the front door to a small room used as an office
and a library. The smell of formaldehyde
wafts through the main collections room.
Stacks of science journals and books of peoms,
as well as Carol’s publications dating back to
the 1960s, line the shelves. An interior door
opens into a room of skulls, boxes containing
complete sets of bones, and jars of preserved
frogs and salamanders. We store the turtle
bones in old banana and peach boxes.
Carol yawns. It’s about seven in the evening
and her bedtime. Retiring early facilitates her
pre-dawn scholarly work: reading the latest
issues of Marine Ecology and Smithsonian to
stay abreast of recent
developments in her field
and cross-referencing her
previous day’s data on
three-by-five note cards to
look for trends in the
island’s ecology.
“You know,” she
says as we close the museum door behind us,
“you just can’t predict
what your greatest contribution will be. You just
don’t know. When I was
younger, I kept thinking
that I would get of the animal corpse business.
I certainly didn’t get into cataloging dead tur-
tles because I loved it. But someone has to
record what’s going on here, to try and
change things. I keep field notes every day.
I also have a separate turtle book. Bob and I
thought that when the law went into effect
requiring shrimp boats to use TEDS [Turtle
Excluder Devices—hatch doors allowing
turtles to swim free of shrimp nets] that we’d
be out of the turtle business. Everybody did.
But nothing changed. Nothing at all.”
Carol and I say good night, and I
close the yard gate behind me. Several
chipped granite headstones leaning against
the side of the porch catch my eye. Their
written dedications have been gouged out.
Carol raised the money to purchase these
gravestones, which she placed on the unmarked graves of freed slaves and slave descendants who had lived out their lives on
Cumberland. When I arrived, she mentioned
the recent vandalism of the burial sites and
stressed that the destruction wasn’t random.
“Had to be an island resident,” she said. “No
one else would care enough to make a fuss.”
She has strong suspicions about the culprit’s
identity, but resolving to repair or replace the
markers and move on, keeps the name to
herself.
Before continuing down the pathway to Halfmoon Bluff and my tent, I walk
up three plank stairs into the First African
Baptist Church. There are only eleven simple wooden pews. The building was used as
a schoolhouse as well as a place of worship.
The whitewashed walls made of plank board
brighten the interior of the church, whose
dingy windows don’t permit much light. A
cross made of sticks fastened together with
string marks the front of the pulpit, and a
Bible lies open to the Gospel According to
Luke. Nearby, a small bench bears a jar
filled with coins, where visitors offer spare
change for the building’s upkeep.
In the fall of 1996, the wedding of
the late John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn
Bessette took place inside this church. The
building was dark, and Carol offered the
Kennedy party the use of her oil lantern for
the ceremony. I asked her what it was like to
witness the wedding of a famous couple in
her backyard.
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Ceiridwen Terrill
Page 5
“I took my bowl of popcorn and a beer and sat on a milk crate to watch. I would
have kicked myself later if I had just gone in the house and worked on my field notes.”
Although the wedding was supposed to be a secret, news of it leaked out,
and a handful of reporters chartered a boat
to the island. One described Carol as “the
local eccentric who lives in a broken-down
cabin” without electricity or a toilet. In
fact, both the museum and her cabin have
electric power (which she installed herself). There is even air conditioning in the
museum, though she is strict about its
use—it’s to protect vital specimens from
rot, not for luxury. She and Bob say they
don’t use their cabin’s toilet—it was installed for the occasional visiting relative—but she admits to having flushed it
once to make sure it worked. Now the seat
is stacked with back issues of Smithsonian
and Nature.
Back at my tent, I zip myself in
and flash my headlamp around the wall,
swatting any mosquitoes that have tracked
me inside. I comfort myself with thoughts
of mosquito fish that inhabit the waters of
nearby Christmas Creek and Lake Whitney. These two-inch-long fish gorge themselves on mosquito larvae. I hope they are
supping blissfully.
***
The next morning, I wake up late.
It’s Thursday and the day of Carol’s
weekly beach survey, a thorough patrol of
the seventeen-mile stretch of Cumberland’s beach to take stock of all marine life
washed ashore. I quickly pull on my
clothes, slap a hat on my head, and run up
the pathway to Carol’s cabin. I find her
loading the ATV with field equipment for
the survey. I know I’ve made a poor start
to our fieldwork when Carol hands me two
slices of plain bread for breakfast and nods
for me to open the gate. She has been
awake since 3 a.m. writing summaries of
the previous day’s observations.
Carol told me once that if she had
too many visitors, she would never get her
work done. I feel embarrassed at my tardiness. A field biologist’s life is about timing—Carol must get out at the right time of
the morning to study marine debris washed
in by the tide before it’s lost to the receding
ebb.
Long pants tucked into white rubber boots, shirt sleeves buttoned at the
wrists, and felt hat over her pigtails, Carol is
prepared for the scalding sun and mosquitoes. She turns over the Honda’s engine,
and we start out. To access the beach, Carol
motors the four-wheel ATV along North
Cut Road through curtains of gray-green
Spanish moss, past houses owned by other
private residents.
Carol slows, pointing to tracks in
the sand that disappear into the duff. They
are yellow belly turtle tracks but nowhere
near the island’s freshwater ponds. The
drought, severe this year, drives land turtles
all over the island in search of pools. “You
could think of these conditions as bad,”
Carol says above the din of the ATV’s engine. Then, slipping into teacher mode, she
adds, “but extremes provide the necessary
stress for the most effective natural selection.”
Although Carol champions Darwin’s theory of natural selection, when we
find a wayward turtle at the end of the
tracks, she scoops up the animal and drives
to South Cut Trail to release it in the stream.
We then drive over the dune crossing to the
beach, where jackknife clamshells jut out of
the sand and plastic Sunny Delight jugs lie
half-buried , stranded by low tide. A wavy
ribbon of debris marks high tide, and Carol
spots a Teva sandal. “Want a pair of sandals?” she asks.
“Saw the left foot
fifty yards back.
Good shape.
Someone can use
them if they’re too
small for you.” She
idles the ATV and
retrieves the sandals, placing them
in the cardboard
box bungeed to the
hind rack.
Terns on Cumberland
“You could think of
these extremes as
bad, but extremes
provide the necessary
stress for the most
effective natural
selection.”
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Ceiridwen Terrill
In keeping with her conservation efforts, Carol
has a use for everything. She salvages lightbulbs the
items of marine debris most frequently washed in by the
tide, and turns them into Christmas ornaments. She reuses National Park Service envelopes, scratching out the
old addresses and stuffing them with new letters. She
writes her correspondence to friends and colleagues on
the blank side of tossed-out Park Service computer paper.
The household garbage she produces in a week’s time fits
in a small grocery bag.
Hot gusts drub our ears as we drive toward the
southern tip of the island. Carol eyes the dun-colored
wedge of a turtle’s shell from a distance. When we get
closer, she cuts the Honda’s engine and slides off the seat
to investigate the scene. “So many of the turtles deaths
are a result of shrimp trawlers,” she says. “They scoop
up everything. Trawling is like bulldozing a woodland
for blueberries.”
The turtle’s head is swollen, its throat bloated
with putrefied shrimp. “I hate to see this,” she says, shaking her head. “They know they’re killing these damn
turtles.”
Carol leans over the carcass to ascertain its sex,
and my eyes linger on the wrinkled backs of her hands,
the folds of skin that stretch lean across the knucklebone.
Carol’s hands have had years of practice navigating inside the body cavity of turtles, whales, and birds. Today,
she performs a field necropsy. These examinations are a
large part of Carol’s field work, and they are perhaps the
least pleasant aspect. She has to decapitate the turtles in
order to analyze the skulls for trauma. She scrapes off
tissue samples and collects the gut contents.
Carol traces, with her finger, the slash along the
turtle’s throat that was likely caused by the blade of some
fisherman’s knife. “What a
beautiful animal. God, does it hurt.”
With her buck knife, she cuts off the turtle’s
head at the nape and places it next to the sandals in the
cardboard box, along with a plastic bag containing the
turtle’s last meal. Then she drags the carcass to the back
dune to prevent the tide from taking it out. She may need
to revisit the turtle’s body for more tissue samples. Back
at Carol’s yard, black vultures and gnats will peck and
nibble the skull clean.
Carol’s specimen-collecting is difficult and emotionally taxing. She tells me that at times, large groups of
turtles wash up on the beach, causing Bob and her to perform necropsies for twelve to fifteen hours a day on one
loggerhead after another. They have also seen whales
stranded in the surf fighting for their lives. But with no
way to save them, she and Bob could only watch them
die.
We continue along the strandline and spot an
osprey with a mullet dangling from its talons. Least terns
hover above schools of olive-colored sheepshead minnow
as they slice through the shallows. One after another
these birds plunge into the surf and catch the shiny min-
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nows in their sharp beaks. We brake along a wide
swath of white sand beach and count the terns. Carol
instructs me to tally the birds on our right, while she
adds up the ones on our left. Then she plucks the pencil from her hat and jots down the numbers in her field
notebook. Her counts of least terns monitor the success
of these ground-nesting birds against damage by the
island’s feral horses (the horses damage tern nests
while grazing on sea oats).
The horses on the island are controversial.
The popular notion is that they are an indigenous population, or that they may even be left from the Spanish
invasions. More likely, however, is that they are leftover stock from the first generation of Carnegies.
Within a larger story about conservation,
Carol casually mentions her friendship with Jimmy
Carter. In the early ‘70s, she says, she helped navigate
a stretch of the Chattahoochee River with carter, then
the governor of Georgia. She showed him where the
river choked on millions of gallons of raw sewage and
hot effluent from power plants as it entered Atlanta.
Carter was moved to support the preservation of the
Chattahoochee not only Carol’s eloquence, but also by
the evidence she produced. Since that river ride, the
Chattahoochee has been designated a National
Recreation Area.
But Carol’s efforts do not always result in
agency compliance with conservation measures. Perhaps picking up on occasional disputes between Carol
and the National Park Service, the popular mystery
writer Nevada Barr created a villain in her novel Endangered Species that resembled Carol. Barr, a former
Park Service ranger, worked on the island one summer
as part of a fire-suppression team. Like Carol, Barr’s
character Marty Schlessinger is a sea turtle biologist in
her late fifties who lives in a cabin on the north end of
Cumberland Island. Unlike Carol, Marty is a murderer,
drug addict, and embezzler, using money she acquires
for sea turtle research to support her cocaine habit.
Carol’s lawyer, Hal Wright, was quoted in the Augusta
Chronicle as saying, “Probably the worst thing you can
do to a scientist is question what they do with their
research funds.”
“The thing that gets me,” says Carol, “is that I
never even met the woman. Sometime after her book
came out, I was down on the south end of the island
picking up my mail when a park visitor said, ‘Oh, hey,
are you that biologist on the north end?’ and I just
thought, ‘Oh, shit. Does this guy think I’m Marty or
did he hear something legitimate?’ Visitors have asked
some of the park rangers if ‘that biologist Marty’ still
lives on the north end of the island. People go screwy.
They don’t separate fact from fiction. Not when all the
place names are right and Barr’s physical description of
Marty exactly matches me.”
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Ceiridwen Terrill
Carol filed a libel lawsuit in 1998 against
Barr. The parties reached an out-of-court settlement,
and the paperback version of Endangered Species features Marty as a man.
Other writers have lauded Carol, portraying
her as a bright and capable field scientist. John
McPhee wrote about her in his 1973 New Yorker profile “Travels in Georgia,” and Anne LaBastille, in her
1980 book Women and Wilderness, praised Carol’s
conservation efforts and her commitment to protect the
sea turtles. “Carol is her own self-appointed conservation watchdog,” LaBastille wrote. “Nothing escapes
her notice—planes flying too low over the beaches, the
ran sulfurous stink from air-polluting paper mills
nearby…” LaBastille also quoted from a National Marine Fishery Service report, “‘We are compelled to singularly acknowledge the valuable contribution of Carol
Ruckdeschel; sea turtles have no greater
ambassador.’”
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tub. He beats his wings to cool off, sloshing water over
the rim. Six black vultures lurk nearby, and when Duck
Duck finishes, two of them hop into the tepid water
while the other four press themselves against the ground
and pant, their legs stretched out behind them in the
shade.
For the rest of the afternoon, Carol washes
bones, turning the delicate pieces of skeleton over and
over in her hands. She scours the ligament oil from
hinges and smoothes the bones with her fingers under
the purl of the garden hose. Lines etched around Carol’s
eyes deepen as she steadies each vertebra between her
fingers.
“All we have left are islands of wilderness,”
she says. “Islands are living laboratories for studying
larger systems.”
***
Still riding south along the shoreline, Carol
brakes the ATV and leans over to loosen three burst
balloons from their sand-shingle moorings. The faded
lettering reads CAPTAIN D’S SEAFOOD,
FARMER’S FURNITURE GRAND OPENING, and
HAPPY BIRTHDAY. Helium-filled balloons tear
when they reach a certain altitude. When they fall in
the ocean, they hang in the water column and resemble
jellyfish, a favorite food of sea turtles and other marine
life. Balloons and plastic bags lodge in animals’
throats and sea birds’ gizzards where they become a
lethal mess. Carol publishes the names of the companies and the messages printed on these scraps of balloon in the Cumberland Island Museum newsletter.
We have one stop before heading north up the
main road: the Park Service woodpile. We drive under
the cabbage palms to the woodpile and winnow
through piles of scrap lumber, tricycles, and life preservers dumped by the island’s other residents or their
renters. Wild turkeys gawk at us from the shade of a
palm. “That timber there,” says Carol, pointing to a
dense-looking plank, “that’s a gorgeous piece. You
couldn’t buy that today. It’s all fast-grown junk wood.
This here is slow grown. Feel how heavy this is.” We
gather a few smaller pieces of the good wood and tie
them to the ATV.
When we return to the Settlement and Halfmoon Bluff,
completing a loop of the island, Carol takes the turtle’s
head out of the cardboard box and places it beneath tall
stems of fennel. Vultures loaf in the year, having
picked clean yesterday’s turtle skulls.
Carol rewards us with a rest on the cabin
porch. We bolt fistfuls of Indian-spiced popcorn—a
specialty of Carol’s—and open some beers. Duck
Duck—Carol’s pet drake, bathes in the rusty outdoor
Cumberland Island beach at low tide
***
Nearly finished cataloging vertebrae, Carol
calls the work done for the day. It’s almost seven
o’clock. As we gather the bones from the floor of the
storage room, I ask her why she chose her profession.
“Science was my passion—ever since I was a
girl,” she says. “And of course, that’s the ideal thing to
do when you have a passion: spend your whole life
committed to your lifework and get paid for it…My
family kept telling me that I’d grow up and forget about
toads and frogs and spiders. ‘You’ll outgrow all that,’
they said. And I kept waiting to grow up. Goddamn
hurry and grow up. But I couldn’t help myself and finally gave up trying to do what they wanted. I didn’t
care anymore. I did what I wanted to do. I had my
snakes, and I went in the woods. I’ve always been selfdirected.”
Carol is quite for a moment, turning the bones
over in her hands. “I’ve gone through some evolutionary processes—in my own thinking and in my way of
life,” she says. “I do everything myself. See,” she says,
gesturing around at her cabin and at the Cumberland
Island Museum, “I don’t have an electrician. I don’t
want an electrician. I am the electrician.”