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

Confederacy.”
    Tom removed the grenade plug and set it aside. He unsealed the grenade’s powder chamber. Carol inched closer, buzzed with adrenaline. Jim crept out the basement door.
    Tom safely emptied the gunpowder and then filled the powder chamber with water. He tossed the reassembled grenade to Carol, who gingerly caught it with her fingertips.
    “You’re holding history. Handle it with care.”
    Carol found Jim sitting in a lawn chair in Tom’s backyard. His eyes were wet and pleading. “Let’s get married,” he said.
    Carol was shell-shocked. “You’re already married,” she replied.
    “That’s a formality. Martha and I are getting a divorce.”
    “I don’t know, Jim. You’ve got a family. You’ve got kids.”
    “And you’ve got nothing. So you’ve got nothing to lose.”
    She felt the heaviness of the grenade in her trembling hands.
    “All right,” she whispered.
    She felt no explosion of emotion, no flare of feelings. Just a wet fizzle.
    Jim and Carol quietly married in a civil ceremony in north Georgia in 1962. She was twenty years old.
    “It was a mistake. I was lost. I had nothing else, no direction, no idea what to do with my life,” Carol recalled. “I was still trying to obey my parents and do what everyone else does: get married, have children, fit in. Only it didn’t work.”
    Jim and Carol’s marriage lasted less than a year. They moved into a public housing apartment together and continued relic hunting for a while, but already cracks were fissuring through their fragile relationship. Jim continued visiting Martha and the kids. Carol spent more time alone in the woods.
    “I was going through the motions,” Carol said. “There was no glue to hold us together. Deep down, we both knew there was nothing to our relationship but a few cheap thrills.”
    Jim and Carol divorced in 1963. Jim moved back in with Martha, and his children barely noticed his absence. He kept the radio shop afloat and rejoined his family. Carol got a divorce certificate and a few rusted cannonballs, the last shots of their confederacy.

5
     
    “I’ve given normal life a fair shot, and it didn’t work out,” Carol wrote in her journal after the divorce. “So I’ve finally decided to do what I’d wanted to do all along: immerse myself in the study of nature.” In 1966, she enrolled in biology classes at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Never before had she been surrounded by a community of people who cherished nature like she did.
    Among them was renowned river ecologist Dr. Charles Wharton. Head of the biology department, Wharton literally wrote the textbook on Southern ecology. He was a six-foot-six, blue-eyed beanpole, with auburn hair and a warm, magnetic smile. He spoke slowly and thoughtfully, with Spanish moss hanging off his long, gentrified syllables. On the first day of Biology 101, Wharton arrived five minutes late to the lecture hall. He glided to the podium in long, smooth strides and then stood silently for several moments to scan the audience. His eyes stopped on Carol, seated in the front row.
    “H uman culture is built around monogamy, but our biology is not,” he began. “Most animals have multiple sexual partners. Only 3 percent of species exhibit monogamous pair bonding. Monogamy” he concluded, “is not natural.”
    He paused, allowing his words to sink in. A few students shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Guys in the back row smirked. Carol raised her hand.
    “Lots of animals mate for life,” Carol said, and rattled off a list, including her two favorites, vultures and turtles.
    Wharton smiled. “Most still cheat,” he said. “Cheating ensures more genetic mixing and a better chance that offspring will survive.”
    Sex is as wild in nature as it is among humans, Wharton maintained. Goshawks fornicate ten times a day. Oystercatchers like threesomes: they form partnerships of two females and one male. Snails shoot a dart into their partners to prolong copulation.