What will you do for the love of nature? Apparently, she has been living on a remote, roadless island for 53 years, saving her life for the world. Every year, 84-year-old Carol Rockdishill walks along the beach on Cumberland Island, Georgia.
Wearing her white shoes, her hair in pigtails, she takes notes about her home in a field journal: spoonbills, terns, sea oats, moon snails, and more. Her mornings have been the same for the past five decades and everyone knows it.Rockdishill moved to the Cumberland in 1973, and the ecologist and naturalist was one of the only full-time residents of one of the Atlantic Ocean’s remote and biodiverse barrier islands. She lives off the land and off the grid in an effort to preserve wildlife for future travelers.
Her research and field observations are so meticulous that they inspired the curators of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History to travel 700 miles south from Washington, D.C.
To meet her in person, according to the BBC.
Cumberland: the remote island
Covering more than 36,000 acres and located 18 miles northeast of Jacksonville, Florida, Cumberland is the largest and southernmost barrier island of the 14 islands off Georgia’s Atlantic coast. It is also among the ten least visited national seashores managed by the US National Park Service (NPS).
The island has no paved roads, trash cans, stores, or amenities. Cars are not allowed and visitors bring what they need and take with them. But it is rich in biodiversity, with seventeen miles of dune-lined beaches where endangered shorebirds and four species of sea turtles nest.To help preserve the island’s wildlife, a maximum of 300 visitors are allowed on the island per day. Each visit requires reservations months in advance, whether for a ferry ride or a stay at the five campsites or at the island’s only inn, the Greyfield Inn.
Wild love
Cumberland is the largest and southernmost of the 14 barrier islands off Georgia’s Atlantic coast.
Unlike the elite who come to vacation on the island, Rokdishil’s arrival here was not just for fun. She first visited the island in 1960 when she was a 28-year-old biology researcher at Georgia State University. As she left, the island was not out of her mind. “[I could] “Go walk in the woods on the trails and be alone and listen to the silence,” she told the BBC.Finally, in 1973, she left Atlanta and moved to Cumberland full time to work as a caretaker at a friend’s family home.
The previous year, the U.S. government designated the island as a protected national seashore and began purchasing all available parcels of land and making deals with homeowners to transfer their property to the park after their death. Over time, most of the island’s few residents died or moved away, leaving their heirs to use their properties as vacation homes.But in 1978, Rockdyshell exhausted her savings to buy one of the only buildings the National Camp Administration had not yet acquired, an abandoned log cabin on the remote northern tip of the island, built by emancipated black residents in the 19th century.
Over the next two years, I used driftwood and found materials to make it livable.Living far from the comforts and easy access of civilization is not easy, but the island is “priceless” to the biologist and she sets out to learn all about it. In the early years, she learned how to conduct sea turtle surveys from a friend from a nearby island. She even monitored sea turtle hatches for the NPS for a while.As she walked along the beach, she noticed that more and more dead sea turtles were washing up on shore. By completing the dissection of each one, she discovered that many of them were drowning in shrimp fishing vessels, and her findings led to a change in legislation and in the design of nets. Over time, Rockdyshell has amassed one of the world’s largest collections of sea turtle skulls, shells and skeletal remains. For many years, she housed them in the hand-carved Cumberland Island Museum she built next to her home, with a laboratory, library, and floor-to-ceiling shelves of carefully cataloged specimens.
Last fall, Rockdechel transferred the collection to the NPS, and as of 2005, there are plans to display it at the Georgia Museum of Natural History.
From the earth, from the earth
It takes a lot to survive in the wilderness, but Rockdyshell is prepared. Along the wooden walls of her cabin, rain barrels collect water for outdoor showers. Her back yard is lined with scrap wood, stacked cooking pots, ceramic bathtubs where she cleans animal remains, and five-gallon buckets.
She also has a chicken coop outside. Interestingly, her place is located just steps from the First African Baptist Church where John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette were married in 1996.Rockdichelle says it took years to develop her garden to the point where it could support her. “Everything you need or want here, you pay for in one way or another,” Rockdechel says of island life. “I just happened to pay at the right time.”Her meals on the island ranged from pig, horse, possum, raccoon, armadillo, and manta rays. She also grows herself grapefruit, lemons, loquats, tomatoes, okra, squash and other vegetables. While she may make a rare visit to the mainland to buy groceries, most of the time she lives off the island itself.Over the decades that have lived here, people have tried to touch the land under the guise of development. People have sought approval to expand truck tours, swapped land to allow new development, and even threatened to build a commercial spaceport on the mainland.
But she fought everything.It is currently fighting an arrangement between the NPS and wealthy landowners that would allow new homes to be built on the island. She’s also monitoring a pending NPS proposal that would raise the daily visitor limit in Cumberland from 300 to 750, expand the presence of e-bikes, and even develop new concessions and facilities. For her, these plans indicate “potential devastation.”Even at 84 years old, she will not stop fighting to protect her island home. “Without realizing it, I had slipped into this conservation mode,” she said. “I didn’t want to spend my time doing that. I just wanted to learn the island.”Today, Carol Rockdishill is known as “the wildest woman in America” or “the Jane Goodall of the sea turtles.”