Read Online Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island by Will Harlan - Free Book Online
Authors: Will Harlan
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days, but she vowed to come back. She had printed that promise in the sand and sealed it by blowing a kiss to the starlit ocean. As she turned to leave, the tide filled her sand-carved letters and carried them out to sea.
6
Back in Atlanta, Carol watched thousands of mourners solemnly processing along Auburn Avenue behind the mule-drawn coffin of Martin Luther King Jr. In 1968, King was laid to rest beside Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he and his father had been pastors. Atlanta was a hotbed of civil rights and antiwar activism in the 1960s. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded by King, was headquartered in Atlanta, “the city too busy to hate.” Freedom Riders boarded buses in Atlanta, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had organized mass sit-ins at eight lunch counters across the city that inspired a wave of direct action nationwide.
From freedom marches to the feminist movement, Carol was swept up in a rising tide of gender, racial, and cultural civil rights. She fought to include nature in that swell. In the 1960s and early ’70s, Carol joined activists in Atlanta who rallied support for the Wilderness Act and Endangered Species Act, which enshrined permanent protections for wild creatures. Carol also championed campaigns to safeguard the Chattahoochee River and create wilderness in the north Georgia mountains.
But most of her nine-to-five was spent indoors beneath fluorescent lights. Carol had landed a job preparing specimens for an Atlanta museum, skinning elephants, tigers, and ostriches for exhibits. She liked working with animals—even dead ones. But after three years of tediously scraping flesh from bones in a windowless basement, she felt like she was frittering away her life.
Carol began wondering if she would ever escape Atlanta. Amid her daily drudgery, she followed one guiding principle, which kept her connected to the real world beneath the concrete and beyond the city limits: search for the source. Food didn’t come from a grocery store. Water didn’t come from a faucet. Ultimately, everything came from nature.
Even the seemingly mundane items in her everyday city life were derived from the natural world. Each morning, she woke up to an alarm clock, which used quartz crystals—highly compressed sand—to keep time. She brushed her teeth with toothpaste made with the same seaweed that sheltered sea turtle hatchlings. She sat on a toilet made of heated clay and wiped with toilet paper made from trees. She got dressed in clothes woven from sheep-sheared wool and drove to work in a jeep made mostly out of iron—which came from the guts of exploding stars. She filled it with oil made from dead plants and animals decaying on the ocean floor for five hundred million years. After work, she went for a hike in boots comprised of dried cow skin and the milky sap of a rubber tree and, afterward, drank river water from a glass formed by lightning striking beach sand. At the end of a long day, she rested her head on a pillow made of feathers stripped from geese.
She was no different than the caveman in her total reliance on nature. Money enabled her to hire middlemen to mine and refine natural resources for her, but it also distanced her from the source of her sustenance.
“For most of human history, we lived in direct contact with nature. Now we get resources from companies who extract them from nature for us,” she wrote in her journal. “We’ve added a money economy between us and nature.”
Carol sought to cut out the moneymaking middlemen. Outside was the natural economy that kept everyone alive. Inside was the artificial economy that separated us from real sources of things. She wanted a direct, original relationship to nature, where she used her own hands to acquire the food and shelter she needed.
In Atlanta, Carol felt like a confined animal, prowling hungrily around the perimeter of her citified cage. She had been dreaming about her escape for
6
Back in Atlanta, Carol watched thousands of mourners solemnly processing along Auburn Avenue behind the mule-drawn coffin of Martin Luther King Jr. In 1968, King was laid to rest beside Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he and his father had been pastors. Atlanta was a hotbed of civil rights and antiwar activism in the 1960s. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded by King, was headquartered in Atlanta, “the city too busy to hate.” Freedom Riders boarded buses in Atlanta, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had organized mass sit-ins at eight lunch counters across the city that inspired a wave of direct action nationwide.
From freedom marches to the feminist movement, Carol was swept up in a rising tide of gender, racial, and cultural civil rights. She fought to include nature in that swell. In the 1960s and early ’70s, Carol joined activists in Atlanta who rallied support for the Wilderness Act and Endangered Species Act, which enshrined permanent protections for wild creatures. Carol also championed campaigns to safeguard the Chattahoochee River and create wilderness in the north Georgia mountains.
But most of her nine-to-five was spent indoors beneath fluorescent lights. Carol had landed a job preparing specimens for an Atlanta museum, skinning elephants, tigers, and ostriches for exhibits. She liked working with animals—even dead ones. But after three years of tediously scraping flesh from bones in a windowless basement, she felt like she was frittering away her life.
Carol began wondering if she would ever escape Atlanta. Amid her daily drudgery, she followed one guiding principle, which kept her connected to the real world beneath the concrete and beyond the city limits: search for the source. Food didn’t come from a grocery store. Water didn’t come from a faucet. Ultimately, everything came from nature.
Even the seemingly mundane items in her everyday city life were derived from the natural world. Each morning, she woke up to an alarm clock, which used quartz crystals—highly compressed sand—to keep time. She brushed her teeth with toothpaste made with the same seaweed that sheltered sea turtle hatchlings. She sat on a toilet made of heated clay and wiped with toilet paper made from trees. She got dressed in clothes woven from sheep-sheared wool and drove to work in a jeep made mostly out of iron—which came from the guts of exploding stars. She filled it with oil made from dead plants and animals decaying on the ocean floor for five hundred million years. After work, she went for a hike in boots comprised of dried cow skin and the milky sap of a rubber tree and, afterward, drank river water from a glass formed by lightning striking beach sand. At the end of a long day, she rested her head on a pillow made of feathers stripped from geese.
She was no different than the caveman in her total reliance on nature. Money enabled her to hire middlemen to mine and refine natural resources for her, but it also distanced her from the source of her sustenance.
“For most of human history, we lived in direct contact with nature. Now we get resources from companies who extract them from nature for us,” she wrote in her journal. “We’ve added a money economy between us and nature.”
Carol sought to cut out the moneymaking middlemen. Outside was the natural economy that kept everyone alive. Inside was the artificial economy that separated us from real sources of things. She wanted a direct, original relationship to nature, where she used her own hands to acquire the food and shelter she needed.
In Atlanta, Carol felt like a confined animal, prowling hungrily around the perimeter of her citified cage. She had been dreaming about her escape for
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