Untamed

The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island

Will Harlan

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780802192622
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

The inspiring biography of the adventuresome naturalist Carol Ruckdeschel and her crusade to save her island home from environmental disaster. In a "moving homage... that artfully articulates the ferocities of nature and humanity, " biographer Will Harlan captures the larger-than-life story of biologist, naturalist, and ecological activist Carol Ruckdeschel, known to many as the wildest woman in America. She wrestles alligators, eats roadkill, rides horses bareback, and lives in a ramshackle cabin that she built by hand in an island wilderness. A combination of Henry David Thoreau and Jane Goodall, Carol is a self-taught scientist who has become a tireless defender of sea turtles on Cumberland Island, a national park off the coast of Georgia ( Kirkus Reviews ). Cumberland, the country's largest and most biologically diverse barrier island, is celebrated for its windswept dunes and feral horses. Steel magnate Thomas Carnegie once owned much of the island, and in recent years, Carnegie heirs and the National Park Service have clashed with Carol over the island's future. What happens when a dirt-poor naturalist with only a high school diploma becomes an outspoken advocate on a celebrated but divisive island? Untamed is the story of an American original who fights for what she believes in, no matter the cost, "an environmental classic that belongs on the shelf alongside Carson, Leopold, Muir, and Thoreau" (Thomas Rain Crowe, author of Zoro's Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods ). "Vivid.... Ms. Ruckdeschel's biography, and the way this wandering soul came to settle for so many decades on Cumberland Island, is big enough on its own, but Mr. Harlan hints at bigger questions." — The Wall Street Journal "Wild country produces wild people, who sometimes are just what's needed to keep that wild cycle going. This is a memorable portrait." —Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature "Deliciously engrossing.... Readers are in for a wild ride." — The Citizen-Times

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 jum...