A View of Little Cumberland
“A little lower!” our grandma shouted from the house, atop the dune.
My sister and I shimmied back down the pine, swatting at the whining veil of mosquitoes and sand gnats.
“How’s this?” we called back.
That was the spot, she confirmed; I placed the bow saw to the trunk and began to cut in. My sister, perched nearby, now devoted her energies to warding off the swarms of insects, so that we could trim the tree and get down quick. At the foot of the dune, our mom and grandpa were posted as lookouts, spaced out along the sand trail beside the marsh. “All clear,” they hollered up occasionally. The saw now bit furiously into the spongy wood, gumming its teeth in the fresh pitch. In the heat of the June mid-morning, my shirt was nearly soaked through as I pruned away as fast as I could.
* * *
A three-mile-long thumb sticking out from the northern tip of Georgia’s “Big” Cumberland Island, Little Cumberland Island persisted as a coastal haven from the headlong rush of modernity. In the mid-1960s, amid the scramble for development along the Southern coast, a group of forward-thinking individuals quietly formed the Little Cumberland Island Association and bought the isle, left almost entirely in its natural state, from its private owners. The Association, according to their 1965 brochure, would exist as “a non-commercial project of conservation-minded members whose objective [was] to maintain a private wildlife preserve on which they [might] live with the opportunity for study and recreation.”1 My grandpa was one of those members.
Of the total 2,300 acres comprising LCI (as we called it), lots parceled out were relatively small—two acres—and no member could own more than five. There were never to be in excess of 100 houses built on the island, though when I was growing up there were hardly 30 standing, each one of them fairly rustic and requiring the Association’s express approval for any improvements. Though a few of the more adventurous members lived there year-round, for most folks these were second homes. First and foremost, Little Cumberland was home to wild horses and alligators; bobcats, deer, and feral pigs; armadillos, turkeys, and raccoons; bald eagles, shorebirds, and wading birds; not to mention all manner of marine and estuarine life in its surrounding waters and marshes, including manatees and hammerhead sharks. In listing the unique facts and features of the isle, the brochure specifically cited the “virgin woodland,” “uncontaminated salt marsh,” “secluded ocean beach”—and the Association had undertaken to keep them that way.2
The rigors of life on a wild barrier island, combined with the Association’s strict provisions to maintain it as such, warded off most buyers. Fresh water was supplied from an underground, pressurized aquifer, with communal wells dug to 750 feet deep. Power, originally diesel-generated on site, was eventually provided by a cable from the mainland, laid along the bottom of the Intracoastal Waterway and draped across poles over the west-flanking marshes. Sand trails crisscrossed the island, by which dune buggies, Land Rovers, Jeeps, and ATVs could access Ocean Beach to the east, River Beach to the west, the Old Lighthouse to the north, and the Crab Dock to the south. There were no stores, no pavement, no phones—all supplies had to be brought by boat from the mainland. With the humidity and salt wreaking constant havoc on machinery and homes, owners needed to be not only conservationists but also all-purpose pragmatists.
My grandpa was both. A naval aviator and entrepreneur, he liked what he saw on a visit to the island in the late 1960s. As newlyweds, he and my grandma had settled on St. Simons Island—two islands to the north—and my mom had been born in the nearby port city of Brunswick, both places considerably more developed than LCI. Now the president of a marble company in bustling 1960s Atlanta, he thrilled at the idea of owning property on a barrier island whose bulk would be perpetually, and almost wholly, preserved as wilderness. Applying for membership, he provided as proof of his conservation-mindedness an editorial he had written, published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: In this, he had come down against the proposed Kerr-McGee titanium dioxide mining operation on the Georgia coast, for ecological reasons. The contention, especially coming from a mining executive, had turned several heads, and he was even asked to dine with an Atlanta lawyer representing Kerr-McGee who sought to sway him to the cause. Over lunch, he held his ground. (Due to the myriad voices raised against it, the mining proposal eventually failed.)
At the end of the day, though, my grandpa would hardly describe himself as a “tree-hugger”—nor would anyone else, for that matter. He simply wanted a retreat on the Georgia coast, and Little Cumberland fit the bill uniquely. Granted membership in the Association, he purchased a second home on LCI in 1971, and the island soon became inextricably entwined with our family history—at least once a year, since well before I was born, my family found retreat among its pristine marshes, beaches, and maritime forests. For me, especially as a kid, the place took on an almost dreamlike nostalgia; in the past couple of decades, I’ve returned to these memories more often, as the family property was sold when I was in college.
* * *
“Timber!” we shouted, though not too loudly.
The top of the pine crashed to the ground with a piercing snap of branches and the green, tinkling confetti of needles. With nothing but open air now over our heads, my sister and I looked at each other with a laugh and quickly scrambled down the tree. Thoroughly grimy from the effort, we rubbed sap-smeared hands in the sandy soil, as Grandpa emerged through the brush with congratulations and promptly hauled off the treetop into the palmettos. An armadillo skittered out of his way. Mom came up, her tennis shoes—no socks—brimming with sand, shaking her head. “You crazy kids,” she laughed, and we trudged together to the top of the dune.
“It’s perfect,” Grandma said, looking out from the deck, the now truncated pine no longer blocking the view of the salt marsh and Ocean Beach beyond. A painted bunting alit on the topmost branch of the abruptly shaped canopy.
We had broken a more or less cardinal tenet in the Association’s rulebook, and Grandpa joined us on the deck with a finger to his lips in a mock whisper. Inside, my dad and brother laid down the flounder they were filleting—we had gigged it the night before—and opened the sliding glass door.
“How’d it go?” my brother asked.
“Don’t tell!” chuckled Grandma.
They came out onto the deck, muggy and dappled beneath boughs of live oak, Spanish moss swaying overhead in the breeze. My sister picked a tick from the back of her knee, wrinkling her nose in revulsion; my brother and I snickered.
“What do you think of that, bubba?” Grandpa asked, draping a sturdy arm around me. He took a deep breath of salt air, gazing out toward the ocean. I looked with him, out over the pine, which was—beyond the deck, and apart from the quiet trail below—the only thing, as far as the eye could see, observably touched by man.
Our transgression in lopping off the obstructing part of the tree, of course, raises tricky questions. To what extent should humans be allowed to influence nature? Who should be allowed to decide? If an unobstructed view leads to greater advocacy for preservation, is that worth the top of one pine? As to the answers, I am ambivalent. Humanity is—whether for good or ill—decidedly part of the ecosystem. So are beavers, and no one faults them for felling trees. And yet I am of the mind that it is imperative to minimize our impact, if for no other reason than the fact that humans get greedy. At the time, however—quite naturally—all we could think about was how much more now we could enjoy the beauty of the island, sans treetop. Indeed, the scene stretched before us in tones sublime and tumbling, a balm of woods, marsh, dunes, sea.
“That’s some view,” I said at last to my grandpa, looking up at him. Altogether tranquil, unimpeded, he smiled.
1 Little Cumberland Island Association, Little Cumberland Island, Membership Guide, January 1965.
2 Ibid.