Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island by Will Harlan Read Free Book Online

word, she deftly removed the chassis and frayed speaker wires in less than a minute. Then she soldered the wires, reassembled the radio, and cranked up the volume to Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” in the parking lot outside the store. Jim hired her on the spot.
    Jim was a trim, hardworking forty-four-year-old father of six children. His cinnamon-brown hair was beginning to gray after managing the repair shop on a bustling corner of Buckhead Avenue for nearly two decades. Like Carol’s father, Jim was a polished conversationalist whose charisma and confidence kept the customers returning. Jim even resembled her father: tall, handsome, with a sharp, angular German nose and high cheekbones.
    Jim’s shop was cluttered with old televisions, dismantled record players, and antique radios. In the back corner was a metal detector used in World War II to search for land mines.
    “Does it still work?” Carol asked him as the shop was closing one Friday afternoon.
    “I think the coils are fried. I used it for years to search for Civil War relics around Atlanta. Then my kids arrived.”
    Carol tinkered with the metal detector over the weekend. She decided to test it out near the battlegrounds of the Battle of Atlanta, where General Sherman’s troops killed over twelve thousand Confederates on their march to the sea.
    On a moonless Saturday night, Carol swept the metal detector all around the overgrown battlefield grounds. Only the faint glow of distant streetlights shone through the forest. She waved the detector over a muddy swale and suddenly the receiver erupted with pulses. Like a hungry dog digging for a bone, she hastily shoveled away the dirt with her bare hands, unearthing a brass oval buckle with three letters engraved on it.
    On Monday morning, she returned the metal detector to Jim, then casually asked, “Do you happen to know what the letters CSA stand for?”
    Jim’s eyes widened. “Confederate States of America.” He smiled. “What have you been up to?”
    Carol revived Jim’s interest in Civil War relic hunting, and soon they were scouring sites together, often late at night. One evening, they went out to Stone Mountain, a sixteen-hundred-foot rock dome near Atlanta with a monumental carving of three Confederate leaders chiseled into its north face. Stone Mountain had recently been turned into an amusement park with a golf course, an aerial tram, and a giant broadcast tower atop the summit. “We defile every square inch,” Carol lamented. “The Indians held Stone Mountain in such high esteem. Then we come along and take a big shit on it.”
    The following weekend, she and Jim explored a Civil War trench beneath an old bridge along the Chattahoochee River. Afterward, they hiked up to Carol’s cave, where they drank bourbon and watched a full moon rise over the bluffs.
    Jim was twenty-six years older than Carol—nearly the same age as her father—but that didn’t step them from becoming closer. She continued working at the shop during the day and joining him on late-night relic hunting adventures. Soon they were traveling further afield, exploring larger battlefield sites throughout the South. Once, they journeyed together to Fort Pulaski along the Georgia coast. In 1863, the Union Army had fired the first long-distance rifled cannons at Fort Pulaski which obliterated the Confederate fort’s walls from a mile away and transformed the tactics of the Civil War. Carol and Jim were determined to find some of those fort-smashing cannonballs.
    Some of the shells landed in the marsh, so on a cold, starry night in early December, they borrowed scuba gear and headed for the fort. They parked Jim’s station wagon behind some palmetto about a half mile away and crept in. Carol donned the scuba mask and waded into the marsh, while Jim watched from the shore. With an underwater flashlight, she plunged down to explore the soft, muddy bottom keeping an eye out for alligators.
    After an hour underwater, Carol heard