Issue 2:2 | Non-Fiction | Will Harlan

Place of Fire: Cumberland Island

Will Harlan

It was Jany’s idea to visit Cumberland. I didn’t care where we went. I just wanted to go somewhere with her. Jany was one of those hard, physical girls that thrived on adventure. She was the first girl I’d slept with, the first girl I’d lived with, and the first girl to whom I’d said “I love you” and actually meant it.

We rented an old house behind the university. It was a desperate, dilapidated cottage with flaking yellow paint, an overgrown lawn, and a partially shingled roof matted with pine needles. But it was ours. We spent our weekends painting the walls and repairing the roof. We were remodeling our house and our lives together.

Train tracks ran directly across from the house, and each night at exactly 11:13 p.m. and 2:42 a.m. a train would rumble by, shaking the floors, shelves, and crumbling concrete foundations of our house. We usually waited for the last heavy breaths of the 11:13 train before going to bed. During the summer, we’d sit on the steel tracks together, watching the stars pulse and throb a few feet above our heads.

“Some nights I want to jump on— just leap into a boxcar and see where it takes me,” Jany said one night while sitting on the tracks. She was smoking a cigarette, her back pressed against mine.

“How would you get back?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. I could feel the sweat where our backs touched.

“Maybe we should go away for a few days together,” I suggested.

“Where?”

“Anywhere. We’re running out of summer.”

The train tracks shivered with the first faint vibrations of the approaching train. I could feel Jany returning from somewhere far away inside. Perhaps in her mind she had already hopped the train. But she came back to me this time, because a few minutes later she said: “How about Cumberland Island?”

We were packed and out the door before the last boxcar rattled past the house. We drove all night together and barely caught the 9:00 a.m. ferry from St. Mary’s to Cumberland Island. Once we arrived on the island, Jany and I threw down our packs and sprinted for the ocean. The live oak canopy filtered all but a few stripes of sunlight as we moved through the forest, chasing the beach hungrily.

We reached the dunes and scrambled up the sand, our ears ringing with the roar of the ocean. We stood atop a towering dune, looking across the virgin beach. Terns flocked along the surf. Pelicans skimmed the water, their wingtips brushing the white caps. So much beauty in one place, in one moment, made my heart hurt. But I was not in love with Cumberland then, not yet. All I remember seeing in those moments on the dune was Jany, her blue eyes catching the glint of the ocean.

Jany broke it to me the next day on a hike to Cumberland Island’s Plum Orchard mansion.

“You and I— it has to end. I’m sorry. I really am.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing exactly what she meant. It was a desperate question asked to buy some time, while my mind tried to catch up with my emotions.

She said nothing. I felt a dryness in the back of my throat. We stood for a long time, staring at the ruins of a rotted mansion. Then we walked in silence back to the ferry.

For the next few months, I forgot about Cumberland and tried to forget about Jany. Then, one year after moving out of Jany’s life, I came across an old photo of Cumberland’s wedding-gown white ribbon of beach. The seashore stretched for miles—pristine and unbroken—before disappearing beneath the Earth’s curve. As I stared at the water-stained photo, a twinge of feeling broke through the gauzy numbness in which I’d wrapped myself.

So at 2 a.m. on a restless Friday night, I threw some oatmeal and pasta in my pack and headed for Cumberland.

When I arrived on the island again, I was expecting some sort of epiphany, some magical moment of change. It never happened. Jany was gone, and she wasn’t coming back.

But I had come back. For five days I explored every trail on the island. I slept hard and woke early. I slopped through marshes, climbed in the arms of ancient live oaks, and swam in the ocean, and ran for miles along the beach. I was soaking in the island through every pore.

At night, I cooked parmesan noodles under the Milky Way. Then I perched myself on a dune and watched the moon rise over the ocean.

I don’t know if we ever get over the ones we love. Maybe we just get past them and move on. But lying under the summer stars, I noticed that I had finally stopped missing her, and all I could feel at night was my heart throbbing against the sand.

* * *

Cumberland Island— a barrier island of marsh, forest, and seashore along the Georgia coast— has hidden treasures buried in her blonde sand. Loggerhead turtles crawl out of the ocean under the cloak of midnight, dragging their ancient bodies across the beach, and dig nests amid towering dunes. Bald eagles circle the wind-swept marshes, while alligators slide through coffee-colored sloughs. Beneath the smudge of Cumberland’s human thumbprint— five cemeteries, Indian burial grounds, old slave chimneys, crumbling mansions— it is an island immemorial, where the story of creation continues in golden stalks of sea oats and centuries-old live oaks.

It is also a place where bulldozers have carved long scars through the belly of the forest, where private runways and summer estates encroach on the wilderness, where wealthy families drive along the beach and raid sea turtle nests. Despite its natural treasures, the island has been logged, mined, and manipulated by many of its current residents.

The Timicuan Indians— natives of the Cumberland soil— referred to the island as tacatacuru, or “place of fire.” Today Cumberland’s forests are burning with lawsuits, back-door legislation, and heated family feuds. Land swaps and underhand deals are being negotiated between a few wealthy residents, a local Congressman they have purchased, and the puppet-leaders of the National Park Service. Meanwhile, record numbers of dead loggerhead turtles was ashore each year, and more cars and developments plague the vanishing Cumberland wilderness.

It is tempting to look away from the muck and mire, to see only ocean and oak. Sometimes I feel a sudden urge to scramble back up the dunes and cling to my first clean impressions of the island. I could preserve forever that transcendent moment of climbing the dunes at Sea Camp and seeing the ocean kiss the raw shore. But I am too involved with Cumberland now. It’s hard to see the political scum filming the surface. But if I really love this place, I’ll have to wade deeper into the sinking, stinking mud.

After a summer love affair with Cumberland, I have returned again and again first as a volunteer ranger and sea turtle technician, then as a naturalist’s aide, and now, simply as a solace-seeking hiker. With each visit, I rediscover the rhythms of the island— and my place within them. I follow the motions of the tides, the patterns of the night sky, the migrations of the birds. I gorge myself with island beauty, hoping it will sustain me back on the mainland. And when I am lost in the loud city, I gather my island moments around me like seashells, and listen.

Marsh

I’m not going to lie to you: it takes work to love a marsh. Feet get soggy, legs get mosquito-bitten, shins get slashed by sharp wiry grass, and insects swarm. On the fringe, it just looks like a whole lot of grass and bugs.

But if you peek behind the needle rush and pull back the cordgrass curtains, you find that Cumberland’s saltwater marshes are teeming with life. One-third of all bird species live in saltwater marshes. Over 1300 living creatures and well over two million bacteria and fungi are found in a single teaspoon of marsh mud. Marshes sustain more living material than any other ecosystem on earth. This organic soup provides a nursery for fish, oysters, and shrimp, and it provides critical feeding habitat for crabs, coons, and gators.

The marsh matters to human beings, too. Its dense vegetation helps removes pollutants from the water. As nearby paper mills along the Georgia coast dump more nitrates daily into rivers and intracoastal waters, the marsh’s Spartina cordgrass filters out many of the chemicals. Marshes also stabilize shorelines of Cumberland and absorb floodwaters. But I don’t love the marsh for its water filtration or flood protection. I love the marsh because it seethes and oozes with Life.

Beside Cumberland’s marsh near Half Moon Bluff, I watch an osprey hover silently over the cordgrass scanning for prey. A raccoon paws along the water’s edge, where hundreds of male fiddler crabs brandish oversized right claws, waving them in wild sexual frenzy. In the world of fiddler crabs, size matters. Large-clawed male fiddlers attract females to their burrow to mate, while the smaller-clawed fiddlers are left on the surface to chew mud.

Today, a fight breaks out in the mudflats— a skirmish between two male fiddler crabs. The right-handed fiddler has wooed a lover to his burrow, but not before a jealous left-hander follows them into the hole. Enraged, the two males emerge, wildly snapping and gesticulating at each other. A few neighboring crabs lower their claws to watch. It is a brief battle. After a series of back-and-forth pursuits and retreats, Rightie lunges in and snaps off Leftie’s large claw. He clips quickly and suddenly with a scissor-like snip at the base of his opponent’s outstretched claw. Leftie stands defeated.

Such skirmishes are not uncommon. Dismembered fiddlers like Leftie quickly regenerate another big claw, but on the opposite leg. In a few days, the defeated southpaw will grow a large right claw, and today’s humility will be left to rot into the mud. Indeed, as Annie Dillard puts it, “The world is a wild wrestle under the grass.”

When it rains here— and it rains often— the patter of the rain against the sulfur-rich marsh mud creates a rotten-egg odor. At first, it might seem like a foul, putrid stench. But it has become an aroma of freshness to me. It is the scent of island nourishment and renewal.

The sun sets slowly over the marsh, disappearing for a moment behind a strip of low clouds. As it slides out from the pink fluff, it appears as if the cloud is laying a giant, blazing red egg. I wrench my boots from the mud and take one last look at the marsh. Buried in the lime stalks of cordgrass, there is a river flowing alive. And beside it is perched a white egret, waiting beside the water for something to rise. Something inside me is rising, too…Energy. Fire. Hope. I heave my pack onto my shoulders and feel myself sinking deeper into the island— ankle deep, knee deep, now waist-deep.

Forest

My pupils swell as I enter the forest, where I am swallowed up in darkness. I shuffle forward along the trail, guided by the crunch of crushed oyster shells in the trail beneath my feet. Bats flit across the trail. My eyes bulge from the sockets. In this tar-black thickness, I am reduced to instinct.

A shriek. I freeze.

Two screech owls glide between the trees, leaving shrill whistles to mark their territory. My ears feel the thin ribbons of sound disappear into the dark.

Darkness hides here in the maritime forest. A mantle of blackness slides along the backs of the wild palms, and a heavy silence breathes through the oaks. I’m still afraid of the dark.

My sagging pack is digging into my shoulder blades, so I pull the straps tight— so tight that I can feel my heart pounding against the walls of my chest. My fist of flesh beats 72 times a minute, 60 minutes an hour, 24 hours a day. To pass the time, I calculate how many heartbeats I have left until I die….two million, if I’m really lucky. I’ll have to make them count.

A few minutes later, I pass by a rotting carcass, startling a pair of vultures. They flap into a tree and wait for me to pass. When I look more closely at the carcass beside the trail, I can make out the banded tail of a decomposing raccoon. It gets me thinking about the margins of life and death, and how they bleed into one another out here. Raccoon becomes vulture, vulture becomes insect, insect becomes bird, bird becomes alligator. Back on the mainland, death is hidden in coffins or pushed to the shoulder of the road. But on Cumberland, death and life are knitted together, stitched into the same fleshy fabric.

Eventually, I emerge from the dark forest into a star-lit meadow. Stars pulse and throb overhead, and I am lost between the black spaces. Then I begin to see patterns. As my eyes adjust, more constellations come into view: the square shield of Hercules, the faint diamond of Delphinus, the backward question mark of Leo’s mane. I can barely see the hazy patch of stars called the Beehive— an open cluster of distant, ancient stars. The longer I look up, the deeper I see into the past.

Moments later, a shooting star blazes through the crown of Cassiopeia. The yellow slash through the sky is not fire but friction— a trail of heat from the meteor rubbing against the Earth’s atmosphere. Over twenty tons of these meteors fall to Earth each night. Cosmic dust is settling on live oaks limbs, in the darkest depths of the ocean, and on my shirt sleeve.

A veil of cloud begins spreading across the sky, covering the stars in a gray gauze. I’ve been standing here for over an hour. That’s 4,320 heartbeats.

Maybe nothing lasts very long, and maybe I am only a visitor on this island and this world. Bur right now, that brief meteor streak means everything. After all, that is what I am— a smear of light against the void, a brief mortal flare in the dark. The stars remind me to burn fiercely and alive while I can.

Seashore

A snow-white fawn, an albino, roams the meadows near Dungeness. I have heard park rangers talk about her, and I’ve seen a blurry picture of her scampering into the forest. But this morning, while waiting for my turtle-monitoring partner, I saw her with my own eyes.

Dale had forgotten his clipboard, so he wheeled back to the barracks before we began our morning patrol of sea turtle nests. As I waited, the sun climbed out of the ocean, and soon the sand flies were biting. The new-moon tide crept closer to the dunes. In about thirty minutes, we’ll be sloshing through a foot of water, I said to myself. Impatiently, I glanced back toward the beach crossing, hoping to see Dale emerging from the forest.

Instead, a milk-white deer balanced herself gracefully in the meadow, about thirty yards away. She was already looking at me, and now she lifted her head higher and blinked. Her eye was a moist black drop. When she heard the distant drone Dale’s four-wheeler approaching, she didn’t bolt. She strolled gracefully into the myrtle thickets and vanished.

I couldn’t wait to tell Dale that I saw her— or rather, that she saw me— that I had been chosen by the elusive albino to be a witness to a morning sunrise on the dunes. But when Dale pulled up beside me, I didn’t say anything. I figured it was a secret between the fawn and me, so Dale and I drove down the beach in silence, searching for crawls.

Sea turtle crawls look like tractor tracks in the sand that lead from the ocean to spot in the dunes where a mama turtle nests. Some crawls are straight shots; others look like a Family Circus cartoon.

Loggerhead sea turtles have been crawling ashore to nest in the Southeast for at least 200 million years. Older than dinosaurs, they are one of the largest egg-laying animals on the planet. Nesting at night, a female loggerhead turtle drags her 300-pound body out of the ocean, using her flippers to crawl toward the dunes. Once she finds a safe, secure spot for her clutch, she digs a cavity in the sand with her back flippers and begins dropping ping-pong-ball-sized eggs into the hole. Tear-like pools drip from the corners of her eyes as she rocks back and forth atop the cavity, depositing as many as 300 eggs before covering them up with sand. She will never see her hatchlings emerge gooey and gasping from their shells two months later. She will miss their desperate sprint for the ocean and their first years hiding and foraging amid floating seaweed. Instead, mama loggerhead returns to the ocean, entrusting her offspring to the protection of the island— and two scrawny, sleep-starved guys on four-wheelers.

We find our first crawl a few miles from Dungeness. The nest is located in the foredunes and is vulnerable to being inundated by the high tide or scavenged by raccoons. Should we leave the nest unmolested, where the encroaching tide will probably destroy hundreds of eggs of an endangered species? Or should we relocate the nest to a safer location in the dunes and interfere with evolution? It’s the same discussion every morning.

“Let’s relocate. We’ve already messed up evolution anyway,” I say. “They need all the help they can get.” I point to the dozens of shrimp boats hovering a few hundred yards offshore from Cumberland. The loggerhead that nested here last night is probably getting tangled in their nets and drowning while we debate about her offspring.

Guided instinctively for millions of years to dark, deserted islands like Cumberland, loggerheads have not been able to adjust to the heavily lighted developments and industries that have sprung up along the coast in the past century. Hatchlings are being found in parking lots. Pregnant loggerheads— disoriented by lights and noise on the beach— are aborting their eggs in the ocean. An average of two dead sea turtles wash ashore each day during the summer on Cumberland Island alone, mostly victims of shrimp trawl nets.

But more human intervention isn’t necessarily the answer, Dale reminds me. By relocating nests, we are affecting more than sea turtles. We are playing God, tinkering with entire webs of species through our unnatural selection.

“My kindergarten teacher had it right: we should keep our hands to ourselves,” Dale says. He tells me how half of all sea turtles have tar in their jaws from water pollution, and one-third of them have plastic in the lining of their stomachs. Why protect turtle nests when we continue to dump tar and plastic into their water?

In the end, Dale and I decide to relocate the nest anyway. We dig another cavity higher in the dunes and transport the eggs, trying to maintain their alignment and position. The slightest change in such variables can affect their gender, embryonic development, and chances of survival. Then we carefully fill the cavity with sand, place a protective wire mesh screen across the nest, and mark it with a stake.

“You’re on your own now,” Dale says to the buried hatchlings. “Grow strong, eat your seaweed, and stay alive.”

* * *

On our trip back down the beach, we notice a dimple in the sand near Nest #37. “I don’t believe it,” Dale says, leaping off his four-wheeler.

Neither of us had expected Nest #37 to hatch. A month ago, hogs had dug beneath the nest’s wire screen and scavenged several eggs. Coons and ghost crabs had also besieged this particular nest, and the nest had incubated well past the sixty-day average. Yet here were hatchlings flinging sand in the face of science and statistics. Dale and I watch silently, stunned as the first hatchling— no bigger than a half-dollar— clambers to the surface. More gooey hatchlings emerge, climbing over broken shells and each other. They grope and stumble blindly onto the beach, then zig-zag toward the ocean.

Only one out of 1,000 hatchlings survives its first year. If they’re not gobbled up on their way to the ocean by crabs or birds, the defenseless hatchlings provide an easy snack for sharks and other marine predators. But numbers mean nothing to these hatchlings. They all have a shot at life, and they’re eager to take their chances in the wild waters of their origin. Dale and I stand like crossing guards on the beach, directing turtle traffic, watching for approaching vehicles, chasing away ghost crabs and plugging their holes with dried sea wrack. When the hatchlings safely reach the water, waves topple them, and they surge and flap with delight.

From Cumberland, the turtle hatchlings will swim hundreds of miles to seek shelter in the Sargassum Sea, a giant floating bed of seaweed in the South Atlantic. Once they mature, the turtles will begin mating, and females will eventually return to their natal beach to nest. Perhaps in twenty or thirty years, I’ll be seeing one of these hatchlings again on Cumberland.

That night, lying in bed with the windows open, a faint trickle of breeze brushing across my skin, I listen to the tide rinsing onto the beach. As long as there is life, there’s hope, I tell myself, and stumble over the words of a long-forgotten prayer.