The Wildest Woman in America: Cumberland Island National Seashore

She’s been called the wildest woman in America—and with good reason. Carol Ruckdeschel has wrestled alligators, dissected roadkill in the name of science, and lived off the grid in the wilderness she vowed to defend. But behind the sensational headlines is a sharp, fearless conservationist whose tireless efforts helped protect one of the last truly wild places in the Southeast: Cumberland Island National Seashore. Taking on powerful families and even the National Park Service, Carol waged a relentless fight to preserve the island’s fragile ecosystems—and she won, but the fight isn’t over. For a full list of our sources, visit npadpodcast.com/episodesFor the latest NPAD updates, group travel details, merch and more, follow us on npadpodcast.com and our socials:Instagram: @‌nationalparkafterdarkTikTok: @‌nationalparkafterdarkSupport the show by becoming an Outsider and receive ad free listening, bonus content and more on Patreon or Apple Podcasts. Want to see our faces? Catch full episodes on our YouTube Page! Thank you to the week’s partners! Blueland: Use our link to get 15% off your first order. Ollie: Take the online quiz and introduce Ollie to your pet. Visit https://ollie.com/npad today for 60% off your first box of meals! #ToKnowThemIsToLoveThemQuince: Use our link to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Speaker 01

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• 1:02Cassandra Yahnian?

  She wrestles alligators, eats roadkill, rides horses bareback through salt marshes, and lives in a hand-built cabin on a remote stretch of Barrier Island, surrounded by snakes, sea turtles, and the ghosts of Gilded Age tycoons. They call her "the wildest woman in America." To some, she was a backwards eccentric. To others, a dangerous woman with blood on her hands. But to those who paid attention, to the biologists, the conservationists, and the generations who now walk a protected wilderness, she's something else entirely. A warrior. Carol Ruckdeschel isn't famous. She doesn't have a statue or a stamp, but she is the reason Cumberland Island, a vast

• 1:43Cassandra Yahnian?

  stretch of untamed wilderness off the coast of Georgia, isn't paved over with boardwalks, gift shops, and luxury hotels. She stood her ground, not just against developers and politicians, but against the National Park Service itself. And she won. She also went head-to-head with some of the wealthiest families in America. People who saw Cumberland Island as their personal playground. She wasn't rich, she wasn't connected, she had no official title, no institutional power, not even a college degree. What she had was conviction, science, and an unwavering belief that wild places should be protected, no matter who stands in the way. This is the story of how one barefoot, self-taught biologist helped change the course of a national seashore.

• 2:29Cassandra Yahnian?

  And how the fight nearly broke her.

• 2:33Cassandra Yahnian?

  Welcome to National Park After Dark.

• 2:55Danielle LaRock?

  Hello, everyone, and welcome back to National Park After Dark. I'm Danielle.

• 2:59Cassandra Yahnian?

  I'm Cassie.

• 3:00Danielle LaRock?

  We're so happy you're here.

• 3:01Cassandra Yahnian?

  And we're back.

• 3:02Danielle LaRock?

  We're back. We, I mean, this probably doesn't feel like we're back for you guys, but for us, this is the first time we're recording in a while because we were out on our own adventures recently.

• 3:12Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, we were out in Montana and Colorado for a few weeks. It was lovely. We did kind of a combo personal trip slash National Park After Dark group trip out in Colorado. So we've been here, there, and everywhere, and we're finally settled back.

• 3:29Danielle LaRock?

  It feels weird. I forgot how to like hook up our equipment this morning. I'm like, what am I doing?

• 3:35Cassandra Yahnian?

  Have I ever done this before?

• 3:37Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, it's been like a month.

• 3:38Cassandra Yahnian?

  It has been a while. We on, so before this, we recorded a ton. I mean, every day we were recording and then because we were going to be gone for a while. And then now we're back and we're kind of just getting back into the swing of things. But we did visit Glacier National Park for the very first time. And we went to Granite Park Chalet, which if you listen to Night of the Grizzlies, you know what, what a feat that is and how exciting it is that we finally got there. So we got to see it. We had a wonderful time. We saw Sal and two of her cubs, which was really cool. And we learned some more stories that we hadn't heard of before about the Granite Park Chalet, which I'm actually going to do a bonus episode on our Patreon

• 4:23Cassandra Yahnian?

  and Apple subscriptions this month. So if you're interested, we have.

• 4:27Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, Cassie was working.

• 4:29Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, I was working for sure. I was like, wait, what did you just say? What happened here? And I got some inspiration, which I'm excited about.

• 4:35Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, we got to spend two nights up there. It was awesome. One of the most visually stunning parks we've ever been to.

• 4:42Cassandra Yahnian?

  For sure.

• 4:42Danielle LaRock?

  Everyone who's been to Glacier is like, yeah, we know. Uh, we've been telling you. And it was just so cool, such a good park, lots of cool wildlife, good experiences, amazing people. Um, and we'll chat more about it on your bonus episode, I'm sure, because

• 4:56Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 4:57Danielle LaRock?

  there's a lot to say about Montana and how beautiful it is. And I kept looking at Cassie and she kept looking at me like those knowing eyes. And she's like, am I about to lose you to Montana? I'm like, I think so.

• 5:08Cassandra Yahnian?

  Like, I get it. I will happily come visit.

• 5:12Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah. So next move is to be determined, but it's, I knew it wouldn't disappoint as far as like somewhere I would love to see myself in the future. So.

• 5:23Cassandra Yahnian?

  Well, I'm excited to, um, come visit. We'll have to record some episodes out there for work. So I'll have to come out.

• 5:30Danielle LaRock?

  So we're not talking about Montana today. We're talking about Georgia.

• 5:32Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, we're going to Georgia today. And I'm actually telling a story that I have had on my mind for a really long time. I read this book about Carol, I mean, over a year ago, it's been one that's been very highly recommended in our inbox, which I've seen a lot of, and I read the book a while ago, but I've just kind of been sitting on it. And this story I just think is so, it's such an incredible story about a really inspiring woman who I think that you are going to really connect with, Danielle. And I

• 6:01Danielle LaRock?

  Okay.

• 6:01Cassandra Yahnian?

  I, I think you're just gonna love her. I, I love her and I love her story. And I just think she is badass. And she's just so, she's so unwavering in her opinions and her convictions and what she believes in. And I just, I really love that. But her story about how she, I mean, pretty much, I mean, she really is the reason that Cumberland, Ireland, I keep saying Cumberland, Ireland, even when I was reading this.

• 6:25Danielle LaRock?

  Is that his place?

• 6:26Cassandra Yahnian?

  No, Cumberland Island, National Seashore in Georgia. Uh, she's really the reason why it's as protected as it is today. And I think right now it is just such a poignant story because we're seeing so much of the protections of wild space, spaces being either stripped or threatened to be stripped. And her story is really of how one person can truly make a difference. And I think it brings a lot of hope to what we can do to save our wild spaces.

• 6:55Danielle LaRock?

  All right. Let's go.

• 6:57Cassandra Yahnian?

  Cool.

• 6:58Cassandra Yahnian?

  Well, Carol Rectashell was born an only child into a religious home in Rochester, New York in nineteen forty one. Her father, Earl, worked for Kodak and had a gift for mechanics. He taught Carol to shoot a rifle when she was just a toddler and showed her how to take apart and rebuild everything from lawnmower engines to watches. Her mother, Ann, was quiet and practical, but Carol wasn't emotionally close with either of them, and her parents had a strained marriage. They constantly fought and yelled at each other in the presence of Carol. When describing them, Carol has said, quote, "They were traditional, conservative, and walled off. I got used to being by myself. I didn't know anything else, so I didn't know that I was lonely. I knew from an early age that I was different. That meant being comfortable

• 7:39Cassandra Yahnian?

  with solitude." While they were emotionally distant, both parents gave Carol a long leash. Their only rule was that she had to be home for the family's five o'clock cocktail each night, which is crazy. Not five o'clock dinner, their five o'clock cocktail. Otherwise, Carol was free to roam the neighborhood and wander through the woods. While other kids were playing dress up or riding bikes, she was stalking salamanders, collecting roadkill, and dissecting turtles with a steak knife. She chased frogs, studied snakes, and collected the bones of dead creatures along that she found along the side of the road.

• 8:09Cassandra Yahnian?

  Okay, is this why you think I'll like her?

• 8:11Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Cassandra Yahnian?

  Do you already like her?

• 8:14Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, I see a lot of myself in her. I'm not an only child, but there are aspects of my childhood that I was alone a lot, especially just, I was my dad's only child, so when I was with him and he was off working and things like that, I would spend a lot of time by myself. And me and my sister have a pretty significant age gap. And I don't know, I just did a lot of things by myself. I feel like I have only child tendencies and energy. But, um, yeah, the roadkill thing I get too.

• 8:45Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, that was honestly what it was. It's like, she collects roadkill. It was like, most kids don't see roadkill. I would see roadkill and I'd be like, no, that's so sad.

• 8:56Danielle LaRock?

  And I do think that, for the record. And then I'm like, can I have it?

• 9:01Cassandra Yahnian?

  Well, that's what Carol was like too, because she was like, I'm gonna take it home and I want to study it and see what these

• 9:06Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, and understand it.

• 9:07Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, which totally, it's cool. It's cool. It's just different. She also had a love for all animals. She wasn't allowed to bring animals into the house, but she was allowed to bring them into the basement. So she turned the basement into a makeshift rehab center for injured wildlife. Nature became Carol's refuge, her obsession, and eventually her calling. When she was 10, her father's job took the family to Hawaii, where Carol was captivated by the ocean. She swam for miles through the canals behind her apartment, following porpoises and sea turtles all the way out to the bay. In fact, these were the first sea turtles Carol ever saw, and they would end up playing a major role in her life later on. A year later, the family relocated again, this time to the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia,

• 9:50Cassandra Yahnian?

  where Carol's bond with the natural world deepened even further. By age 11, she was hiking four miles alone every weekend to set crawfish traps and track raccoons. She often slept in caves, learning to cook food she caught and foraged herself over open fire. When she was 14, she got her best friend, a German shepherd who Carol named Catfish, which I think is a really cute name for a German shepherd.

• 10:14Danielle LaRock?

  It is cute.

• 10:14Cassandra Yahnian?

  I've never met a German shepherd named Catfish, but I think that that's really cute.

• 10:18Danielle LaRock?

  Never met anyone named Catfish.

• 10:20Cassandra Yahnian?

  No.

• 10:21Danielle LaRock?

  Would it be Cat or Fish as a nickname?

• 10:23Cassandra Yahnian?

  Fish.

• 10:24Danielle LaRock?

  Or neither?

• 10:25Cassandra Yahnian?

  I think maybe Catfish is just the name. Like, Ember doesn't have a nickname, except for

• 10:29Danielle LaRock?

  You don't call her anything other than her full name?

• 10:32Cassandra Yahnian?

  No, I call her my little baby.

• 10:34Danielle LaRock?

  Oh.

• 10:34Cassandra Yahnian?

  Girlie. A lot of like, high pitched noises.

• 10:37Danielle LaRock?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 10:38Cassandra Yahnian?

  But I don't know a nickname.

• 10:40Danielle LaRock?

  And they also evolve. Like, I called Chaska Bossy.

• 10:43Cassandra Yahnian?

  That's true.

• 10:44Danielle LaRock?

  You know, like, Blue ended up being Birdy, because like, Bluebird, Birdy.

• 10:50Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 10:50Danielle LaRock?

  Bird. It just like evolves, you know? And Chaska is Bossy by nature, so I call him Bossy.

• 10:57Danielle LaRock?

  Chossey bossy.

• 10:58Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, Amber gets a lot of high pitched noises her way that she responds to.

• 11:03Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, so it's the tone, not the name.

• 11:06Cassandra Yahnian?

  You could say anything to her as long as the tone's right.

• 11:08Danielle LaRock?

  Good to know.

• 11:09Cassandra Yahnian?

  At fourteen years old, Carol wrote in her journal, "Out in nature is where I belong. I love it so much and it accepts me." After graduating from high school in the spring of nineteen fifty-nine, Carol spent a summer living in her favorite cave near the Chattahoochee River, honing the survival skills she taught herself throughout her childhood. She proved to herself that she could live off the land without depending on anyone. And during that summer in the cave, she wrote down a lifelong promise to herself in her journal, saying, "I'll get as far away from fighting and from the expectations as I possibly can. I'll live according to my own rules, and the only way to live wild and free is not to need money. I can't allow myself to want things because I'll have to get a job and stay locked in that way for life. I don't belong there, I belong out here."

• 11:54Cassandra Yahnian?

  But escaping expectations wasn't so easy. Her father's own words echoed in her ears. Grow up and get over turtles and snakes. You can't make money playing in the woods. So she tried to play by the rules. In the fall of nineteen fifty-nine, after a wild summer in the cave, Carol reluctantly enrolled in the University of Georgia. She told herself, "I've got to do this. I'll try to fit in, at least temporarily. I'll save every penny to buy my freedom in the forest." Unfortunately, campus life was stifling. The freshman curriculum bored her and the social scene repulsed her. Football mania, southern belle seeking husbands, and a strict ten P M. curfew that felt like a prison sentence to someone who used to wander free.

• 12:33Cassandra Yahnian?

  Two weeks into the fall semester, she returned to Atlanta for a long weekend and ran into Richard Keiker, a mechanic nearly twice her age. They'd spent the previous summer fixing her Jeep together, and that day, they skipped Stones by the River, drinking beer and trading confessions. It was the first time Carol had shared that kind of intimacy with someone besides her dog Catfish. The next morning, she returned to campus, and a few days later, her parents called her with tragic news. Richard had taken his own life. Shaken, grieving, and guilt-ridden, Carol snuck out that night to go drinking, breaking the 10 p.m. curfew at her school. She was spotted and promptly expelled from the University of Georgia. At just 18, expelled from college and without a degree, Carol did her best to adapt to city life while chasing her true dream:

• 13:18Cassandra Yahnian?

  buying land and living free. For nearly a decade, she scraped by in Atlanta, taking on a string of low-paying jobs and saving whatever she could. She gave conventional adulthood a shot, even getting married to a man 26 years older than her. Her boss had a radio repair shop, but that marriage lasted less than a year, and she said it was a mistake and that she was lost, she had nothing else, no direction, and no idea what she was doing with her life at the time. In 1966, when Carol was in her mid-20s, she decided to try college again, this time at Georgia State, where she studied biology under the charismatic ecologist Charles Wharton. They had passionate discussions in class, and then they led outside of class. Before long, Charles became Carol's second husband.

• 14:01Cassandra Yahnian?

  He loved the natural world like she did, and for a time, Carol believed that they could build a life together in the mountains. She even thought about having kids for the first time in her life, but Charles would later betray her. Just one semester before she was supposed to graduate, he convinced her to drop out of college so she could assist him with his research. And then, not long after dropping out, Carol discovered that he was having an affair with another woman. She was devastated and directionless once more. She had tried, tried to fit in, tried to find love, to follow a path that other people told her made sense. And it had brought her nothing but heartbreak. She decided that she needed to get away to get back to nature where she truly felt like herself. So she got in her Jeep and drove to the wildest place she could find:

• 14:45Cassandra Yahnian?

  Cumberland Island. Cumberland Island is one of the biggest and most biologically diverse islands in North America. It's a wild, wind-shaped strip of sand, salt marsh, and maritime forests off the southern coast of Georgia. It stretches 18 miles from north to south, but in most places, it's only a few miles wide. The island is reachable only by boat. And when Carol first arrived in 1971 at the age of 29, it felt like stepping into a forgotten world. There were no bridges or paved roads, no gas stations or grocery stores, just soft sand paths, the hush of wind through towering live oaks, and the sharp cry of ospreys circling overhead. Dense thicket of palmetto opened onto moonlit beaches where wild horses grazed along the tideline and loggerhead sea turtles hauled themselves

• 15:30Cassandra Yahnian?

  ashore to nest in the cover of the night. Spanish moss draped from the trees like tattered lace and the air smell of salt and sun-warm pine. But beneath the island's beauty lies a long and complicated history. For thousands of years, Cumberland was home to the Timokua people, who lived in scattered villages and thrived on the island's abundant natural resources. In the 1500s, Spanish missionaries arrived, establishing outposts and attempting to convert the Timokua to Christianity. These efforts, combined with disease and violence brought by European colonizers, devastated the indigenous population. By the 1700s, the island had shifted into British and then American hands, and by the early 1800s, it had become a site of sprawling cotton and rice plantations, fueled by forced

• 16:14Cassandra Yahnian?

  labor of enslaved Africans. After the Civil War and the abolishment of slavery, much of the island was brought up by wealthy industrialists, looking for secluded winter retreats. Chief among them was the Carnegie family, whose descendants would come to own nearly 90% of Cumberland Island. Lucy Carnegie, the widow of Thomas Carnegie, commissioned the building of massive estates, including one called Dungeness, a 59-room mansion complete with golf, a golf course, pool, lavish gardens, all constructed in the 1880s. The ruins of that era still remain, crumbling chimneys of former slave quarters, brick hills, family cemeteries, and empty mansions that are now overtaken by vines. For decades, Cumberland I- I-

• 16:59Danielle LaRock?

  God, there it is.

• 17:00Cassandra Yahnian?

  There it is again. I was saying it while I was like, reading and writing this too. I kept saying Cumberland, Ireland, and I don't know why. That is not the name. It is Cumberland Island. For decades, Cumberland Island functioned like a private kingdom, accessible only to the ultra wealthy. But in the early 1970s, two things began to change that. The first was a growing national push to protect wild places. Amid mounting development pressure and internal divisions among the Carnegie heirs, Cumberland was officially designated as a national seashore in 1972, putting it under the management of the National Park Service. But even that didn't guarantee preservation. Powerful families still held large tracts of land. Developers had ambitious plans and the federal government through the National Park Service

• 17:45Cassandra Yahnian?

  was eager to make the island more accessible to the public with paved roads, visitor centers, and conference facilities. Which brings us back to the second thing that changed the lives of the wealthy on Cumberland Island. And that was Carol Ruckdeschel's arrival there. It wasn't just the beauty of Cumberland Island that captivated her. It was the wildness. It was the silence and the possibility of disappearing completely to live off the land and be self-sufficient. She felt like she had finally arrived somewhere that made sense. Somewhere that could hold her. In a richly detailed biography of Carol's life titled Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island, the author Will Harland writes, and this is the book I read also, by the way, highly recommend if you haven't read it yet, for everyone listening.

• 18:29Cassandra Yahnian?

  He wrote, "She and Charlie were finished, but a new relationship had begun. The island had already started to grab a hold of her. Nothing in her life had ever felt so right. Carol knew she had to return to the city after a few days, but she vowed to return to the island as soon as she was able." I think that's just so special to find a place that your heart is truly like, this is where I belong. I think it's pretty rare. And to find your place in the world, I think it's a really special moment to realize.

• 18:58Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, this is where me and her just kind of diverge. I was really, I was like, oh, are we one in the same? And then I realized quickly, I'm like, I've never had that feeling before.

• 19:07Cassandra Yahnian?

  It's not too late for you.

• 19:09Danielle LaRock?

  It's not too late.

• 19:10Cassandra Yahnian?

  You're still good.

• 19:11Danielle LaRock?

  It's never too late, as they say. But yeah, I mean. The way you're describing it and everything, I mean, who wouldn't fall in love with somewhere like that? And then just to see kind of like projected out into the future, the changes that could undergo with all of these proposals and things to develop it further. It's, yeah, it's a little scary to see like, oh, this piece of treasured landscape could just be gone right in front of me. And I just found it.

• 19:37Cassandra Yahnian?

  Commercialized.

• 19:38Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah.

• 19:39Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah. It's like I just found it. This is magical. This is where I'm meant to be and it's under threat. And this is definitely a book that I read and I personally didn't know much about Cumberland Island National Seashore before this. I had actually never heard of it until I read this book. And now I'm so inspired to visit. And I think part of it is because Carol's love for it shines through so, so much. It makes me want to see it as well. But also, it just seems so wonderful. There, there are so many hikes that you can do out to these really remote parts of the island and you can sit and you can see loggerheads come up on the shore and there's a huge diverse ocean life too, marine life that's there.

• 20:23Cassandra Yahnian?

  And there's dolphins and whales and it just feels, it feels so magical. And I really, really want to plan a trip there at some point.

• 20:31Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah. Well, the Carnegie's were like, we love it too. And we need a 59 room mansion.

• 20:36Cassandra Yahnian?

  Everywhere. My Acadia, they're in Acadia, they're everywhere. They're over everywhere. And I get it. If you're super rich, you want to live in the best places and have the best things, but you also can't destroy it.

• 20:50Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah. I don't know if you need a golf course there too.

• 20:52Cassandra Yahnian?

  Why do you need a golf course? Golf courses are so.

• 20:54Danielle LaRock?

  Don't get me started on golf courses.

• 20:58Cassandra Yahnian?

  Golf courses are so.

• 21:00Danielle LaRock?

  Ugly.

• 21:00Cassandra Yahnian?

  Ugly. They are so ugly.

• 21:02Danielle LaRock?

  Incite rage. Okay. Remember when we talked about lawns and people got so mad?

• 21:06Cassandra Yahnian?

  I know. But they are like.

• 21:08Danielle LaRock?

  Golf courses are just giant lawns. So it's kind of the same conversation.

• 21:11Cassandra Yahnian?

  They are just giant lawns. There's not a single wildflower. And I know you need your like pristine golf course and the ball roll where it needs to go and doesn't mess up your shot. Whatever. They're so ugly. And then you just throw random sand pits in there just for funsies that didn't even exist before.

• 21:30Danielle LaRock?

  I don't know. Sorry. Golf is so boring. I saw golf on at the bar the other day and I'm like, what, what have we come to? Why are we all sitting here watching golf?

• 21:41Cassandra Yahnian?

  The only time I want to watch golf is if it's during Happy Gilmore and that is where I draw the line.

• 21:46Danielle LaRock?

  That is it. Contained to those.

• 21:48Cassandra Yahnian?

  That is the only place golf should exist.

• 21:50Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, I don't know. Mini golf I've been to a few times.

• 21:54Cassandra Yahnian?

  I like mini golf. My dad and I have been mini golfing. That's like something that we do together like for a long time. But mini golf courses are so small and they're fun and they're family oriented and I just, I like mini golf, but.

• 22:07Danielle LaRock?

  I don't know. I will say, Nataia, and sorry to call you out, Nataia, but if you're listening. I know she's gonna listen eventually, whenever she gets around to it. As a new mom, she has other things going on. But she and her husband, Mike, are super into golf. Like she was never a golf girlie and she's like morphed. I mean, to the point that like, I'll look at her Instagram stories on like a Sunday and she's out like on the golf cart. And like she has her own like golf, I almost say golf kit. I don't know what it's called.

• 22:36Cassandra Yahnian?

  Okay, does she like golf or does she like the environment around golf where you get to drive a cute little, um, those carts? Wear a cute outfit, have a nice drink, you're outside in the sun.

• 22:48Danielle LaRock?

  Okay, I'm, I think she likes the golf aesthetic versus the actual game. But I don't even, and again, I'm like, girl, you're my best friend. Where did we go wrong? That sounds like an awful way for me to spend my day. It's so boring. It's like, I'm just gonna sit around and watch this game drag on for like seven hours.

• 23:10Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 23:11Danielle LaRock?

  I don't even like to drink. I don't want to drink. I don't want to sit down on a golf cart all day.

• 23:16Cassandra Yahnian?

  It's hot, you're in the sun.

• 23:18Danielle LaRock?

  I don't even like skirts. I'm not a skirt wearer.

• 23:21Cassandra Yahnian?

  See, I would, I like volleyball, so I would wear a skirt and tennis. Yeah, tennis and ball. Give me something with some action, you know?

• 23:30Danielle LaRock?

  Well, that's what I'm saying. At least you're doing something.

• 23:31Cassandra Yahnian?

  I want some competition. I want some like movement. I want to like almost beat each other up, you know, like.

• 23:37Danielle LaRock?

  We're isolating our golf audience.

• 23:40Cassandra Yahnian?

  We're sorry.

• 23:41Danielle LaRock?

  Apologies.

• 23:41Cassandra Yahnian?

  Apologies if you like golf.

• 23:44Danielle LaRock?

  Just know if you ever see me on a golf course, I'm in trouble.

• 23:48Cassandra Yahnian?

  She's at bottom.

• 23:51Danielle LaRock?

  Something happened.

• 23:53Cassandra Yahnian?

  I will say also, maybe also why I don't like golf is because I can't swing for shit. Like I tried, I remember this was years and years ago, but someone that I was seeing wanted to go to the golf course and just like hit the balls. I don't even notice. I don't know golf.

• 24:09Danielle LaRock?

  Driving, like going to a driving range?

• 24:11Cassandra Yahnian?

  Golfing drive, driving range, whatever the fuck. I don't know. We were there and he was like, yeah, do you want to hit this? It was like, yeah, sure. And he's like, yep, you just swing like this and blah, blah, blah. So I try this ball. I ca- I can't at all. I couldn't.

• 24:28Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah.

• 24:28Cassandra Yahnian?

  I couldn't get it far. Everyone else is swinging them. They're flying in the air, doing the whole Happy Gilmore thing where it launches super far away. I, mine barely goes off the ground and then it's like, I could walk to wherever.

• 24:42Danielle LaRock?

  To go pick it up.

• 24:43Cassandra Yahnian?

  It was embarrassing. So maybe that's also why I don't like golf, but.

• 24:46Danielle LaRock?

  I've never tried. I haven't tested my skills beyond the putt putt thing and that's fine with me.

• 24:53Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 24:54Danielle LaRock?

  Maybe I'm just like untapped. Maybe I'm really good at golf.

• 24:58Cassandra Yahnian?

  Maybe. Maybe you're missing out on your life's calling.

• 25:01Danielle LaRock?

  Maybe. Probably not, but you never know. It's never too late.

• 25:06Cassandra Yahnian?

  I think I would do like, I don't know, eighteen holes. Why are there eighteen?

• 25:10Danielle LaRock?

  Well, you can do the half.

• 25:12Cassandra Yahnian?

  Okay, I would do nine and I would dress up cute and I would.

• 25:16Danielle LaRock?

  We could do it for charity. We could do it like a charity golf.

• 25:19Cassandra Yahnian?

  Charity golf.

• 25:20Danielle LaRock?

  We'd be really bad.

• 25:21Cassandra Yahnian?

  What are we raising money for?

• 25:22Danielle LaRock?

  I don't know.

• 25:24Cassandra Yahnian?

  Anything.

• 25:25Danielle LaRock?

  Anti.

• 25:26Cassandra Yahnian?

  Well, I.

• 25:27Danielle LaRock?

  Golf.

• 25:28Cassandra Yahnian?

  Anti lawns.

• 25:35Danielle LaRock?

  Rewilding. It's for charities that try and rewild people's lawns.

• 25:42Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah. So that's what we'll do. Okay. Anyway, I don't even know how we got here, but.

• 25:47Cassandra Yahnian?

  Uh, just to be clear, we like people who golf and we're friends.

• 25:51Danielle LaRock?

  I like people who golf. I know one person right now that I know golfs and he's forgiven.

• 25:58Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yes. And if you are listening and you golf, we're, we like you and we're sorry.

• 26:04Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah. Anyway, going back into Carol, she hates golf courses and she reali- she sees this island, she sees Cumberland Island, she falls in love. And she has to leave, but she vows that she is going to come back one day. So back in Atlanta, Carol found herself torn between two worlds. By day, she worked in the windowless basement of a natural history museum, preparing animal specimens for display, skinning elephants and ostriches beneath the hum of fluorescent lights. But after hours, her real work began. Her home was a ramshackle, one-bedroom house that she filled with animals, her own miniature wilderness in the middle of a rundown suburban neighborhood. Her roommates included an owl with a damaged wing, a raven, a gopher tortoise, gray rat

• 26:49Cassandra Yahnian?

  snakes, frogs, salamanders, and five white leghorn roosters. Children from the neighborhood would knock on her door, asking to see the animals. And Carol wrote in her journal of this, saying, quote, "Kids reveal an obvious truth. Natural wonder is built into us. We are instinctively attracted to nature." And we'll see throughout this whole story that Carol is very big on journaling and she writes a lot about her experiences in her life. Meanwhile, Carol was becoming increasingly active in the environmental movement that was sweeping the country in the early 1970s. Atlanta was a hotbed of civil rights and anti-war activism, and Carol added protecting nature to that list of causes. She lobbied for the Endangered Species Act and the Wilderness Act and joint efforts

• 27:31Cassandra Yahnian?

  to preserve Georgia's rapidly vanishing wild spaces. In 1971, she began working with the newly formed Georgia Natural Areas Council, a state agency tasked with identifying the most ecologically significant lands for protection. Her partner in the effort was Sam Kandler, a soft-spoken heir to the Coca-Cola fortune, who shared her love of wild places and had little interest in boardrooms. As you can imagine, Sam didn't take this government job for the money. He just really loved, uh, loved nature. Together, the two crisscrossed the state, hiking through mountain coves, exploring swamps, wading through marshes, and camping in ancient forests. They drove backroads in search of untouchable habitats, and more often than not, collected

• 28:13Cassandra Yahnian?

  a cooler full of roadkill, which Carol called D O R, an abbreviation for dead on road. She's just exploring, picking up her roadkill, bringing it home. And surprisingly, given Carol's wildness, she rarely hunted. Thinking back to the first time she had killed an animal at the age of 10, a sparrow, she said, "I had taken life unnecessarily and instinctively I felt remorse." But she was far from being a vegetarian. She felt that consuming animals deepened her connection to the natural world and made her woven more tightly into the web of life. It's just that, in her view, there was no need to spend hours hunting animals when freshly killed ones, like squirrels, deer, possums, and raccoons, could be found for free around every bend in the road.

• 28:56Danielle LaRock?

  Oh, okay, so she's leveling up.

• 28:58Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, so she's not just collecting and researching roadkill, she's actually eating them.

• 29:03Danielle LaRock?

  I mean, I can't.

• 29:05Cassandra Yahnian?

  Don't knock it till you try it.

• 29:07Danielle LaRock?

  I just feel like, I don't know, I, I have come across roadkill that was fresh like a handful of times.

• 29:16Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 29:16Danielle LaRock?

  Like, fresh enough to eat.

• 29:18Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 29:19Danielle LaRock?

  Otherwise, it's rancid and putrid and it's being actively, there's, yeah.

• 29:24Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 29:25Danielle LaRock?

  That's a step too far. I'm, I'm good.

• 29:29Cassandra Yahnian?

  Well, each time she would eat me, she would whisper a sort of prayer. She would say, "Your flesh becomes mine." And Sam Kandler learned to spot roadkill from a quarter mile away. Carol taught him how to skin and prepare a wide variety of wild animals to be eaten. But their work wasn't just about finding something to eat. Carol and Sam were gathering scientific data and political momentum to push for long-term protection of Georgia's wildlands. In one of Carol's biggest successes, she helped secure a federal designation for the Chautauqua River under the newly passed Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, a landmark piece of legislation that would ensure the river remained free-flowing and protected from dams and development. It helped that Governor Jimmy Carter was an avid whitewater paddler who had navigated the Chautauqua himself.

• 30:14Cassandra Yahnian?

  And if Jimmy Carter sounds familiar, he was governor at the time, but he is later the president. And Carol actually knew. Future President Jimmy Carter. Her and Jimmy would often exchange stories in the Hall of the Georgia Capitol, and he proved to be a crucial ally. Not long after she took him out for an epic whitewater rafting trip, Jimmy signed the Metropolitan River Protection Act of 1973, laying the groundwork to safeguard the Chattahoochee River Corridor, a sprawling ecosystem that included 48 miles of riverbank and Carol's favorite cave where she had lived for it that summer in high school. The proposal to make that stretch of land a national recreation area initially stalled under President Nixon, but when Jimmy became president a few years later, he signed the bill himself into law.

• 30:59Cassandra Yahnian?

  The land Carol had known and loved was now federally protected.

• 31:03Danielle LaRock?

  It's not what you know, it's who you know.

• 31:05Cassandra Yahnian?

  It is. Get you a president that cares about the wilderness. Still, even as Carol racked up conservation victories, something fell off. Her suburban home overflowing with wild animals and adorned with scenic posters felt like a cheap imitation of the wildlife she truly wanted. And as her name started appearing in headlines, thanks to The New Yorker profile, Travels in Georgia, and a Mademoiselle magazine nod naming her the Woman of the Year alongside Barbra Streisand and Aubrey Hepburn, Carol felt increasingly disillusioned. She turned down the invitation to attend the awards banquet in New York, saying, quote, "They probably just want to look at that freak from Georgia who eats roadkill. I would have been miserable trying to act what they call civilized

• 31:48Cassandra Yahnian?

  and breathing all that smoke and pollution." Like, it is cool that you have her name next to Barbra Streisand and Aubrey Hepburn, but I totally get that.

• 31:57Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, she kind of feels like...

• 31:59Cassandra Yahnian?

  She's like, "I'm not one of them."

• 32:00Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah. Imposter syndrome is not what I'm trying to say. But yeah, probably just like, kind of like, I get it and it's an honor, but I'm just, I'm not really one of you type of thing.

• 32:11Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, it's like, "Thank you for the recognition, but that's not my world and that's not why I'm doing this and whatever." And I think it also goes back to what she was saying at the beginning. She's like, "I can't, I'm not going to allow myself to want things because that's not the point. I want to be in nature." So to put yourself with all of these celebrities and millionaires in New York City feels like it's so outside her realm of her values that I totally get it. Like, no, I'm good. That's not, that's not where I belong. Looking around, Carol felt her life in Atlanta had grown too comfortable. As she frequently did, she journaled her feelings, saying, "The highest and best thing I can do is find a place and know it as deeply and intimately as I know myself." And one place kept calling her back: Cumberland Island.

• 32:54Cassandra Yahnian?

  So when Sam mentioned that his family needed a caretaker for their property there, someone to clean toilets and wash dishes, Carol didn't hesitate. That's how, in 1974, Carol took a job as hired help for the Camler family, wealthy Coca-Cola heirs with a private estate on Cumberland Island. It wasn't a glamorous job, but it gave her something more important: a foothold on the island. As I mentioned earlier, it had just been named a national seashore in 1972, and Carol could feel the tension in the air. Wealthy families wanted to hold on to their land. The government wanted to build roads, ferry terminals, and visitor centers. And Carol wanted none of it. She wanted to protect the wilderness. By 1978, after four years of washing dishes and scrubbing toilets,

• 33:38Cassandra Yahnian?

  Carol had finally saved enough to buy a piece of land on Cumberland to call her own. She purchased a third of an acre for $36,000 from a man named Ike Trimmings, a descendant of Charlie Trimmings, who had been enslaved on the island. The land was modest and remote, carved out from a strip of maritime forest and tucked far from the main visitor paths, but it was hers. The shack on the property was barely standing. It had no electricity, no running water, no insulation from the stifling summer heat, or the damp, bone-chill of the island winters, but Carol didn't mind. She had no bosses, no landlords, no men calling the shots. It was the life she dreamed of since girlhood: wild, free, and entirely on her own.

• 34:21Cassandra Yahnian?

  However, knowing that the National Park Service might eventually claim the land, Carol decided to arrange a deal. Just a year after buying it, she sold the property to the National Park Service for $45,000 with the stipulation that she could live there for the rest of her life and keep her flock of chickens. To further protect her home, she granted joint ownership to her romantic partner at the time, a realtor named Louis McKee, ensuring that if just one of them died, the Park Service couldn't automatically seize control. At last, she had planted her roots. She lived like the animals she studied, lean, alert, and attuned to every shift on the island. She foraged and scrounged for roadkill. She trained her body to survive

• 35:03Cassandra Yahnian?

  on one meal a day. She bathed in the ocean, slept in short spurts like the predators she shared the woods with, and wore salvage men's clothing that earned her side eyes from the island's seasonal residents, but she didn't care. She was, quote, "becoming feral," like the horses that roam freely on the island's sandy beaches. But she wasn't just living her dream of living in the wild. She had discovered a deeper purpose. Even before buying the land, Carol had begun paying close attention to the sea turtles that nested on Cumberland's beaches. She started patrolling at night, watching the mothers crawl ashore to dig their nests, marking the locations, returning weeks later to see which ones had hatched. And when dead turtles began washing up ashore on the beaches of Cumberland

• 35:45Cassandra Yahnian?

  Island, sometimes whole, sometimes half eaten, she didn't look away. She studied them. She brought their bodies back to her cabin and performed necropsies, slicing them open on plywood tables, taking notes and preserving bones. She was meticulous, relentless, and far more embedded in the ecosystem than the officials who would occasionally come to the island from the mainland to observe the area. And not everyone liked that. Even after the island became a national seashore in the early 1970s, the Carnegie and Candler families retained influence, and their vision for the island included curated access, horse-drawn carriages, tour groups, boardwalks. The National Park Service, for its part, was eager to build infrastructure. They wanted roads, visitor centers, ferry landings. They

• 36:30Cassandra Yahnian?

  saw the island as an underdeveloped asset. Carol saw it for what it was, a fragile, interwoven ecosystem that could be destroyed by a single bulldozer. And already, the turtles were dying. Carol was determined to find out why. At first, there were just a few carcasses washed up near the dunes, tangled in driftwood. Their shells cracked or bloated, then more. Some looked like they had been struck by boats, others bore the jagged bite marks of sharks. But something didn't add up. Carol began performing her home necropsies on every turtle she could find. She documented each one with clinical precision, size, weight, location, time of death. She cut them open and examined their lungs, their stomachs, their tracheas, and noticed a pattern. Even the turtles with visible injuries had drowned.

• 37:15Cassandra Yahnian?

  Their airways were foamy, their bodies were full of bloody fluid. Whatever had killed them, it had started with suffocation. Over time, a grim picture emerged. More endangered sea turtles were dying than ever before. Shrimp trawlers off the shore of the island were dragging their nets too long underwater. In the process, they were unintentionally catching and drowning sea turtles, thousands of them. It was carnage on a massive scale, and almost no one was paying attention, except for Carol. She compiled her findings into reports and started sending them to anyone who would listen. Government agencies, universities, reporters. She didn't have a PhD or even a college degree, and she didn't work for a lab. But her data was airtight, and her commitment was impossible to ignore.

• 38:00Cassandra Yahnian?

  When asked why she was studying the turtles, she said, quote, "The whole point of my work is to make their deaths useful. Preserving and studying the carcasses at least provides some purpose of the carnage." Word began to spread. Journalists came to the island to interview the barefoot woman gutting turtles in the woods. Mainstream scientists took interest, and even conservationists began citing her work. In a world that often dismissed people without formal credentials, Carol had done something remarkable. She generated meaningful, undeniable science. And she had done it alone, but the attention didn't make her life any easier. The National Park Service was already uneasy about her presence on the island.

• 38:39Cassandra Yahnian?

  Now, she was publicly criticizing their management and documenting the environmental damage that they were ignoring. When a wildfire swept through the island and the park service dropped toxic fire retardants and salt water from helicopters to put it out, Carol took samples of the contaminated freshwater lakes, soil, and marsh plants to show how they'd harmed the fragile ecosystem. In response, the park superintendent told her, quote, "To be perfectly candid, Carol, as long as we don't lose any houses or human lives, it really doesn't matter." As you can imagine,

• 39:11Cassandra Yahnian?

  Carol clashed repeatedly with the superintendent who accused her of being a pest, a squatter and a troublemaker. In return, she thought he was an idiot, saying, quote, "If his IQ were any lower, he'd have to be watered twice a day."

• 39:25Danielle LaRock?

  Oh.

• 39:28Danielle LaRock?

  Whoa.

• 39:30Cassandra Yahnian?

  Like, that's fired. But honestly, I mean, they're polluting this eco, the National Bark Service is doing something detrimental to the environment. And she's like, hey, here's all my, here's all my research that I did. You are harm, you are harming the environment with what you're doing here. You are the superintendent. Take notice. And he's like, as long as no people are dead, we don't care.

• 39:54Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah.

• 39:54Cassandra Yahnian?

  It's like, ah.

• 39:55Danielle LaRock?

  Feels like a sin when it, especially given your position.

• 39:59Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, it's like, why are you there?

• 40:01Danielle LaRock?

  Doing, yeah, and overseeing and what you're supposed to be working for and who you're supposed to be protecting. Yeah.

• 40:08Cassandra Yahnian?

  I love that insult too.

• 40:10Danielle LaRock?

  That was like among the top insults I've ever heard.

• 40:14Cassandra Yahnian?

  If I ever need to insult someone, that's what amusing.

• 40:18Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, cuz the best insults are ones that make the other person kind of like stop for a moment and reflect and let it really sink in. Yeah.

• 40:28Cassandra Yahnian?

  It's like ouch. And I couldn't even be mad. I think if someone, I mean, my feelings would be hurt if someone said that to me, but I would just be in awe of them.

• 40:38Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah. So everyone who gives us like really mean reviews, they're not like that. Yeah, be wittier.

• 40:46Cassandra Yahnian?

  So we can at least appreciate them and all their meanness. But obviously with Carol saying stuff like that, she didn't really care about making friends. She wasn't trying to climb this ladder. She wasn't, she was simply just trying to protect the turtles. That's all she cared about. And she didn't care where it was coming from. It didn't matter what your position was. She was very hard and fast in hers. And it was that she wanted to protect the island and the turtles and all of the wildlife that's there. Because what she understood more than most scientists or officials or politicians was that everything was connected. The dunes shaped the tides, the tides shaped the nesting grounds, and the turtle's survival hinged on all of it. You couldn't protect a single species without protecting the entire ecosystem.

• 41:30Cassandra Yahnian?

  But the balance was shifting. More development loomed. There were more roads, more visitors, more disruption.

• 41:36Cassandra Yahnian?

  And Carol, who had once come here simply to observe, knew she could no longer stay on the sidelines. She was about to go from self-taught biologist to full-blown activist, because it was becoming clear that the data and field work wouldn't be enough. If she wanted to save the turtles, she'd have to fight for the island itself, which meant going head-to-head with the very agency tasked with protecting it. As I mentioned, after years of private ownership by families like the Carnegie's and Kamblers, the federal government had stepped in to preserve the island. But by late 1970s, the writing was on the wall. Preservation to the Park Service didn't mean what Carol thought it should. The Park Service envisioned hotels, paved roads, a conference center, gift shops, and ferry service to accommodate as many as a million visitors a year. They

• 42:21Cassandra Yahnian?

  wanted to make the island more accessible. To Carol, it felt like they were preparing to destroy it. Because remember, this place is 18 miles-

• 42:28Danielle LaRock?

  It's not long. It's not big.

• 42:30Cassandra Yahnian?

  It's not big at all. And there's-

• 42:32Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, 18 miles is not that long to support that amount of human traffic.

• 42:37Cassandra Yahnian?

  A million visitors a year-

• 42:39Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, a lot.

• 42:40Cassandra Yahnian?

  On such a small, fragile-

• 42:42Danielle LaRock?

  Space.

• 42:43Cassandra Yahnian?

  Space with roads now. And yeah, it's just, it's, it's a big ask to do that. And she noticed that even sacred sites weren't safe. One proposal included a wastewater treatment plant near Brick Hill Bluff, which was an area rich in indigenous history and ecological diversity. Another suggested building 12 ferry landings from the mainland and bringing in tour buses. Carol was obviously mortified. So she began to mobilize. She drafted letter after letter to the National Park Service leadership, the Department of Interior, Washington officials, and the press. She challenged the official environmental impact statements, weak understanding of wilderness, and raised flags about potential damage

• 43:27Cassandra Yahnian?

  to fragile historic and natural features. To many in power, this made her a nuisance. But to others, she was a rallying point. She began building coalitions, calling in conservationists from Atlanta, scientists she'd met through her turtle research, and writers who could help amplify her cause. And she proposed something radical. Rather than develop the island, why not designate the northern half of Cumberland as federally protected wilderness? Eventually, her campaign caught the attention of William Whelan, the Director of the National Park Service. In late 1978, William traveled to Cumberland to inspect the contested North End, the roads, the historic structures, and the proposed visitor zones. Carol seized her opportunity. Rather than a formal briefing in a Washington office,

• 44:12Cassandra Yahnian?

  she arranged a private meeting with William on the island, where he'd experienced Cumberland the carolway on foot. She took him on a long, quiet walk through the dunes, pointing out turtle nests, showing him the traces of feral horses, and the marshland that thrummed with hidden life. They walked in silence for long stretches, and something in William shifted. Where before, he was all on board with all of this infrastructure being put in place, now, he was seeing the island the way Carol did. After that transformative afternoon on the island, he had made up his mind. He ordered the National Park Service to immediately drop plans for tour bus transport north of Plum Orchard, and eventually, a ban was put in place on vehicle access in the southern dunes as well.

• 44:55Cassandra Yahnian?

  Development plans were scrapped, hotels and roads were off the table, and the park service capped daily visitors at about 300 people, limiting ferry service to about two boats per day. And he pledged to leave the island's roads and natural contours undisturbed. It's amazing what can be done when you make people care.

• 45:14Danielle LaRock?

  Well, I mean, I always think of that Steve Irwin quote about him saying, like, "People protect what they love." And you can't love something without having like a tangible experience with it, and something that you can relate to. And, I mean, you can read about everything about a certain location, or space, or species, and all the most flowering of descriptions, and no matter how well they're written about, or how passionate the person is who's telling you about these things are, like regardless of all that, it still is not, it can't replace having an experience herself. And I think she harnessed that and understood that.

• 45:58Danielle LaRock?

  And it's one thing to, you know, it would be a different conversation if, you know, he went out there and he was like, "I still don't care." Because not everyone holds the same values, or sees this, looks at a location and sees the same vision. I mean, he could have been like, "This is a prime spot for tourism. What are you talking about?" You know, like, it could have gone a completely different way. But I think that kind of going back to what she wrote about children and how we're all kind of born with this innate curiosity and respect and regard for nature. And I think that lingers in most people.

• 46:35Cassandra Yahnian?

  I agree.

• 46:36Danielle LaRock?

  And she knows that. And she was like, okay, well, come on down. And you see for yourself what I'm trying to describe to you and what I'm advocating for. And let's go from there.

• 46:46Cassandra Yahnian?

  For sure. And I think that it's also really admirable on her part to have a conversation with someone who she knows is not on her side.

• 46:54Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah.

• 46:55Cassandra Yahnian?

  You know, and I think to facilitate those conversations, it can be really hard sometimes. And I think especially when you are so adamant and passionate about something, to have a conversation with someone who doesn't see your vision can be really frustrating and can almost seem not worth it. And kind of like going back to her other comment, like if your IQ were any lower, you

• 47:17Danielle LaRock?

  You'd have to be watered twice a day.

• 47:18Cassandra Yahnian?

  And it would be so easy to just say that and be like, the hell with you. But to be like, no, come see my world, see what this is. Let me like, let's get on the same playing fields here and let's see this, but see this from my eyes and then have a conversation about it.

• 47:36Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah.

• 47:36Cassandra Yahnian?

  And I think to do that is really admirable and it worked. Carol's hard work had paid off and it was a stunning reversal, but it was just the beginning because Carol knew that although the park service reversal was a major win, it wasn't permanent. Policies could be rewritten, superintendents could be replaced. And if she wanted lasting protections for the island, she needed more than promises and goodwill. She needed legal safeguards. So she got to work. Teaming up with conservationist Bill Mankin, Carol began drafting a federal bill to designate the northern half of Cumberland Island as wilderness, a legal status that would prevent future development and severely limit mechanized access. No tour buses, no new infrastructure,

• 48:19Cassandra Yahnian?

  just silent sand and sea. But as you can imagine, not everyone on the island was on board. The Carnegie family, who still owned large tracts of land and operated the exclusive Grayfield Inn. Oppose the bill outright. Wilderness designation would ban the vehicle tours they offered to their guests. Local fishermen protested too, as they were worried that it would restrict boat access and recreational use. Even disability advocates raised concern that a wilderness designation would limit wheelchair access to parts of the island. With all this opposition, Carol's support in Congress began to waver. But Carol wasn't alone anymore. A growing coalition of conservationists rallied to her side.

• 48:58Cassandra Yahnian?

  Some had been drawn in by her turtle research, others by her willingness to speak uncomfortable truths about development and environmental policy. And Carol leveraged her network. She called in every favor she could think of, including an old friend from Atlanta with whom she shared a deep respect for the wilderness and who now happened to be the President of the United States, Jimmy Carter. It's good to have connections. Jimmy Carter was, of course, a little harder to reach now that he was president instead of governor. But in the end, he publicly endorsed the bill to designate Cumberland Northern Half as wilderness. And that show of support proved to be pivotal. In 1981, Ronald Reagan became president, and in 1982, he signed the bill into law.

• 49:41Cassandra Yahnian?

  The northern half of Cumberland Island became federally designated wilderness, one of the few such protected areas on the East Coast. Soon after, the United Nations took things a step further, naming Cumberland Island a global biosphere of reserve alongside the Serengeti, Denali, and Yellowstone. Oh, whoa. Big, big name. Yeah, that's an achievement. It's huge. The same dunes Carol had walked barefoot for years were now recognized as globally significant. And the island's fragile ecology finally had the legal armor it needed to endure. So, I mean, huge.

• 50:19Cassandra Yahnian?

  And the book really goes a lot further into why this island is so important to be designated as it is. But essentially, this island serves as one of the most important stops for loggerhead turtles in the world. Okay. And they're all connected to populations around the world. And she actually did a lot of research connecting them in South America and globally. And her research on turtles serves still to this day as something that people from around the world use to track. Lagerhead turtles and also off the shores of Cumberland Island are is a very big pool

• 50:59Cassandra Yahnian?

  for breeding for whales and dolphins as well. That's really important. So there are so many things about this island that even though it's just this small little spot in Georgia, a lot of these species travel here from around the world to be here at certain times of year. So it's very, very important. Carol had done it up against the richest and most powerful families in the nation without a degree, without an institution behind her. She helped write wilderness into law, but for all that Carol had accomplished, she didn't always walk away a hero. Her battles with the park service and the wealthy families who still held sway over the island had left her isolated. She was no longer just an outsider. To many on Cumberland, she had become the enemy. Tensions with the Carnegie family in particular escalated,

• 51:44Cassandra Yahnian?

  especially with Lucy and Gogo Carnegie, who wanted to transform the historic Plum Orchard Mansion into an artist retreat. Carol opposed it. She believed that the land should be preserved, not repurposed. In the end, she won. Plum Orchard was protected, but she lost any remaining goodwill the Carnegie's had as her allies. She was ostracized. And then there was her relationship with Louis McKee. As I mentioned earlier, when Carol had purchased her small parcel of land on the island back in 1978, she had added her then partner Louis McKee, who was a local realtor to the deed to prevent the land from being seized by the government if one of them died. But Louis began

• 52:25Cassandra Yahnian?

  drinking heavily, and when Carol told him she felt their relationship had run its course, he turned extremely violent. At one point, he knocked her unconscious. The physical abuse forced Carol to flee the island. And at the age of 39, she moved back into her parents' home in Atlanta to escape him. For months, she tried to let go of the place she loved most, thinking that she could never return because of the threat of Louis' violence, she wholeheartedly believed that he would kill her. But still with that in mind, the island was tugging at her. In the end, it was her friend Jesse Bailey, who lived on the island that lured her back. He called her one day with reassuring words. He told her that Louis had moved on. The chickens she left behind had missed her and it was now safe to come home. And Carol believed him.

• 53:10Cassandra Yahnian?

  She was excited, she packed immediately and returned to Cumberland the next morning. Her first stop was the ocean. She dunked herself in its wild waters, letting the salt wash away months of fear and homesickness. And when she returned to her cabin, something fell off. It was quiet. It was too quiet. She discovered that raccoons had raided the coop long before and Jesse hadn't been looking after them as he had told her. She questioned, had he also been lying about Louis? She confronted Jesse and he confessed that the whole lie to get Carol to return to the island was Louis' idea. She forgave Jesse because he didn't know the extent of their relationship. But the dread returned quickly and Louis began prowling again, showing up drunk, snarling threats through the windows.

• 53:55Cassandra Yahnian?

  Carol tried everything to protect herself. She talked to rangers, pled with local law enforcement, but no one claimed jurisdiction over the island. She was sleeping in fear, wide-eyed at every creek outside her window, waiting for the crack of a gunshot that Louis often threatened her with. She wrote of the experience saying, "There is no feeling like trying to work at your desk and waiting for a bullet to hit your brain. I wonder what it would feel like." God, this is dark. Super dark. She made plans to leave again because of fear for her life, but before she could, Louis came for her. It was April 5th, 1980, the night before she planned to leave. That afternoon, Carol had offered a young camper named Pete, who was also planning to take the ferry back to the mainland the next day.

• 54:38Cassandra Yahnian?

  A place to stay for the night. When Louis, who was stalking Carol and watched this interaction take place, saw Pete in her car heading back to her cabin, he lost it, believing that this was some new lover of hers. In a drunken and jealous rage, he broke down her door with a splintered canoe paddle in hand. Carol screamed at him to stop, but he charged forward to attack her. She had no choice. Acting on an animalistic instinct, she grabbed a sawed-off shotgun from behind the bathroom door, braced it against her hip like her father had taught her, and she fired. The shot hit Louis square in the chest. He staggered backwards and collapsed on the porch, the shot killing him almost instantly. Smoke hung in the air, and Pete clutched his glass of water, stunned

• 55:22Cassandra Yahnian?

  while Carol stood frozen. She hadn't wanted this, had tried everything to avoid it, but she had done what she had to to survive. But it wasn't horror or regret that she felt most. It was relief. At last, she thought she might finally live in peace. And of course, she had Pete there as a witness to everything that happened.

• 55:40Danielle LaRock?

  This poor guy.

• 55:41Cassandra Yahnian?

  This poor guy. He's like, I just wanted his place to sleep for the night.

• 55:45Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah.

• 55:46Cassandra Yahnian?

  And then, and then this happened. Yeah. But I mean, even though, poor guy, great for Carol because

• 55:52Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, good thing he was there. Yeah.

• 55:54Cassandra Yahnian?

  I think, yeah, because she's already ostracized from this community. They're looking for any reason to get her out of there. And something like this, are they gonna believe her?

• 56:04Danielle LaRock?

  I mean, despite all of her, I mean, it's clearly on record that she had been trying to get other people's attention and assistance and help and kind of trying to advocate for herself.

• 56:15Cassandra Yahnian?

  But no one had really taken her seriously.

• 56:17Danielle LaRock?

  So there's like this kind of paper trail of recognition that this was kind of happening. But we all know that in the end, a lot of times it, it, yeah, doesn't really do much.

• 56:27Cassandra Yahnian?

  It should matter, but it doesn't always.

• 56:29Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah.

• 56:29Cassandra Yahnian?

  Thankfully, the law agreed that she was not guilty and it was defense. Carol spent a single night in jail and a grand jury ruled that the killing was an act of self-defense before she was acquitted on all charges. But it turned out she still couldn't live. And peace on the island because in the court of public opinion, she was condemned. Rangers whispered that she had murdered her way onto the island. Louis's brother called her a black widow spider. People said she had killed for control of the land. Already seen strange and unsociable. Carol became something more threatening in public imagination. Now she was a figure to be feared, resented and vilified. As Will Harland wrote in her biography of the aftermath.

• 57:10Cassandra Yahnian?

  Instead of Louis stalking her, she was now constantly shadowed by shame and sorrow. Two years after Louis's death in 1982 came another tragedy. Carol's close friend Jessie drowned during the high tide while clamming. It was his dog who led Carol to his body. When she didn't attend the funeral, the rumors started again that she had something to do with his death too. The rumors and gossip followed Carol for decades. In 1997, years after her big wins getting Cumberland Island protected as federally designated wilderness, a bestselling author named Nevada Barr wrote a novel called Endangered Species that many on Cumberland immediately recognized as a thinly veiled caricature of Carol.

• 57:52Cassandra Yahnian?

  A woman who ate roadkill, seduced men for power, and used sea turtle research funds to support a cocaine habit. Carol sued Barr for libel. And in 2006, she won the suit, but the damage was done. The image of the wildest woman in America was now layered with something darker and much more dangerous. And what an insult. I mean, to base a character off of her and then say using her funds for her turtle research, which she's also not making money off of, by the way. She literally like survives on her own on this island. She eats roadkill. She eats roadkill. She's not grocery shopping. She doesn't have a lot, a lot of money here. She doesn't, she's never cared about money. And to say that she's funding a cocaine addiction.

• 58:34Cassandra Yahnian?

  Well, not only that, but just like the stark difference of like who she's sharing the island with, like some of the most wealthy people and families in.

• 58:45Danielle LaRock?

  The United States or the world and it's like not to say that they're doing anything nefarious with their money, but of course you know they're not spending it wisely. And yet you're picking on Carol.

• 58:58Cassandra Yahnian?

  Saving environment. She like she doesn't have a dime to her name almost and she's.

• 59:02Danielle LaRock?

  She's living in a, on a third of an acre in the shack, in a shack. And they have a 59 room mansion and a golf course and whatever else going on.

• 59:13Cassandra Yahnian?

  And they're vilifying her.

• 59:14Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, she's getting picked on. It's just like, yeah, oh my God.

• 59:18Cassandra Yahnian?

  The audacity.

• 59:19Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah.

• 59:20Cassandra Yahnian?

  Okay, so with all this, her being ostracized and everything, it's no surprise that Carol withdrew further and further over the years despite her success as a conservationist. She had always been comfortable in solitude. Now it was this armor for her. But she kept working with a special focus on her beloved sea turtles. Carol had necropsied more than 4,000 sea turtles on Cumberland Island, documenting every injury, every pattern, every data point that might help future scientists understand what was killing them and how to stop it. In 1990, the Smithsonian Institution requested her collection of sea turtle and marine mammal specimens, which at that point was one of the largest in the world. She agreed. Her meticulously cataloged skeletons and tissue samples were shipped to Washington DC,

• 1:00:05Cassandra Yahnian?

  where they remain part of the National Collection. More recently, in 2023, thousands more of Carol's specimens, along with field notes, maps, and documents from the Cumberland Island Museum, were transferred to the University of Georgia's Natural History Museum, where they'll be preserved for future research. Carol never sought recognition. She didn't give TED Talks or lead nonprofits, but her fingerprints are everywhere, from the island's lasting legal protections to the drawers of the Smithsonian. Her legacy is complicated and it's unfinished. Carol Ruckdeschel is now in her 80s. She still lives on Cumberland Island in the same ramshackle cabin she built by hand more than 40 years ago.

• 1:00:47Cassandra Yahnian?

  The wooden beams are bleached by the sun and warped by salt air. The roof leaks when it rains, but Carol doesn't mind. On the island, she's connected to nature, a part of it, not apart from it. In many ways, Carol's battle never ended. Over the last several decades, she has continued to advocate fiercely for Cumberland's protection, objecting to new proposals of increased tourism, opposing development, and defending the humane treatment of feral horses. Most recently, she fought back against plans to launch rockets from a site just miles from the island. The proposed flight path would have sent spacecraft soaring directly over Cumberland's protected wilderness. Carol, despite being in her 80s, didn't hesitate to spring into action. She

• 1:01:29Cassandra Yahnian?

  joined forces with other conservationists, spoke out at public hearings, and did interviews with journalists on the topic. As ever, her goal was to protect the island's fragile ecosystems, along with historic indigenous heritage sites. And once again, she came out victorious. In March 2022, referendum in Camden County, 72% of voters rejected the purchase of land for the proposed rocket site, effectively blocking its development. At times, Carol's battles have felt like a one-woman war. She's been isolated, ostracized, and publicly shamed. And yet, much of what she fought for has endured. The northern half of the island remains federally protected wilderness. Hotels were never built. Like when Carol first visited the island in 1971,

• 1:02:14Cassandra Yahnian?

  more than 50 years ago, the roads remain unpaved, and the turtles still come ashore to nest. Her work hasn't been clean or easy, going up against some of the most powerful and wealthy families in the country. Her victories came with losses. She has been feared, maligned, ignored, and at times, completely alone. But she's never stopped. And in doing so, she's left a mark deeper than any developer could ever carve. Her journals, her specimens, and her battle scars tell a story as complex and elemental as the island itself. Carol Rucktichel didn't tame Cumberland Island. She matched it. And maybe that's the point. Some places and some people aren't meant to be tamed. And that is my story of Carol

• 1:02:58Cassandra Yahnian?

  Rucktichel, the wildest woman in America.

• 1:03:01Danielle LaRock?

  Oh, you're right. I love her.

• 1:03:03Cassandra Yahnian?

  She's great.

• 1:03:04Danielle LaRock?

  She's, she's awesome.

• 1:03:05Cassandra Yahnian?

  I love her story so much. And I love that she's still there. I love that she's still advocating. I just, I think that her commitment to wild spaces and this place that she's found her calling in is just, it's incredible.

• 1:03:20Danielle LaRock?

  Well, there's that, but there's also, I think the thing that I really appreciate, appreciate about her the most is she walks the walk, like she lives really true to her values because a lot of times, you know, you have certain beliefs or hold certain values or have certain structures of, you know, ways of life that you're just like, this is what I'm about and this is what I advocate for and you know, you can talk the talk all you want, but you know, living true to what you're saying is a whole nother thing. And I think that even though she didn't, there wasn't a point in time, at least that I picked up on that she gained,

• 1:04:04Danielle LaRock?

  you know, this huge financial influx that would have led her to have like this choice of like, oh, I'm actually gonna get a better house or buy a nicer car or do whatever the heck else. Like she just kind of stayed true to what she had always said, you know, from the beginning since she was a child. And I think that's really cool because that's not always the case.

• 1:04:29Cassandra Yahnian?

  I mean, she went to the National Park Service and she said, hey, I'm gonna sell you this land, but under the stipulation that I will be here for the rest of my life. And she is holding true. She's holding so true to that.

• 1:04:40Danielle LaRock?

  I mean, things change though, like you never know. So like, it's just really cool to see that play out, you know?

• 1:04:45Cassandra Yahnian?

  It is. And I think one of the things that I really, really love about her story is that she started at this alone. You know, she saw how special and important this was and she was up against some of the richest families in the world and that didn't deter her, that didn't stop her. She had to get into some political stuff and to get her voice heard. It didn't stop her, it didn't deter her. She was just so, she relied on the facts, she relied on her own observations and I think it's just really inspiring. Firing in a time where we're seeing, like I said at the beginning, we're seeing some federally protected lands being stripped of their protections and to see that one person can make such a

• 1:05:28Cassandra Yahnian?

  difference and how much one voice can do. I don't think it should have to be one voice. I think that it should be collectively so many voices and I, I feel sad that she was alone in this fight for a long time. I'm glad that people came around and, and I mean, that's not always the case. She's still obviously fighting for it, but I'm glad that more people have her back now. And I think collectively as a country, we're leaning more that way where we want um our natural spaces to be protected. But I think it is such a poignant story right now because when things feel a little hopeless and that these places that we love are gonna lose, lose their protections and be developed, that there are stories like these ones.

• 1:06:10Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, to lean on and recognize and remember.

• 1:06:14Cassandra Yahnian?

  Cumberland Island is still, is still the way it was when she first got there and that is because of her. And I really, really hope to visit one day.

• 1:06:22Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah. I mean, everything you were just saying reminds me of, I mean, it's not like super uh breaking news or anything, but because it's been a few months now, I think since April, but the whole news about um opening up the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, the biggest marine national monument in the world for commercial fishing.

• 1:06:44Cassandra Yahnian?

  It's crazy.

• 1:06:45Danielle LaRock?

  It's just like, I mean,

• 1:06:48Cassandra Yahnian?

  It's protected for a reason.

• 1:06:51Danielle LaRock?

  So there's that. That's our kind of like, I think.

• 1:06:55Cassandra Yahnian?

  We need all our carols to step up now.

• 1:06:57Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:57Cassandra Yahnian?

  And let's start, grab some inspiration from her. Grab an ounce of what she's got. Yeah. Let's go girls and everyone else too, because it's not just a girls' fight.

• 1:07:06Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Cassandra Yahnian?

  Doubt your spaces are for everyone.

• 1:07:09Danielle LaRock?

  Great. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story. I know you said it was a long time coming and I remember that because I remember when you first told me that you were interested in her story. I was living in Colorado, so it's been well over a year.

• 1:07:21Cassandra Yahnian?

  I read her book so long ago. I have it sitting on my shelf. I loved it.

• 1:07:25Danielle LaRock?

  Staring at you.

• 1:07:26Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah. And there's so, if anyone is looking for a book recommendation, read her book, The Wow This Woman in America. It is not written by her, but the author worked very closely alongside her and she had very much a say in this book. Um, so it wasn't like published against her will or like not in conjunction with her. Um, so she's very heavily involved in it and it's just, it's a beautiful book and it is very, it's very interesting and I really loved it. So that's my book rec for this episode.

• 1:07:56Danielle LaRock?

  Awesome. Well, and as always, I'll add it to our NPADpodcast.com, our website. We have a bookshelf tab where I try to put every book that we reference. I know there are so many, at least like the big ones, the heavily used or recommended for each episode. I try and put up there. They're not categorized by episode, but they're all like just up there. So that'll be there too. I'll add it on there. And thank you everyone for listening. We will see you next week. In the meantime, enjoy the view.

• 1:08:29Cassandra Yahnian?

  But watch your back.

• 1:08:30Danielle LaRock?

  Bye, everyone.

• 1:08:31Cassandra Yahnian?

  Bye.

• 1:08:32Danielle LaRock?

  Thank you for joining us again this week. If you love National Park After Dark and want to hear exclusive bonus stories, join us on Patreon or Apple subscriptions. Patreon subscribers have access to our National Park After Dark Book Club, live streams, Discord, and much more. If you prefer to watch our episodes, video episodes are now available on YouTube. If you're enjoying the show, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe on your favorite listening platform. And to follow along with all our adventures, you can find us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X at National Park After Dark.

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