After eight years in Ohio, I came to see it as a beautiful state. Others share this sentiment with me. It hums to a simple and consistent tune and the change of seasons adds another dimension to its simple, flat and rolling landscape. It wouldn’t take anyone eight years to find beauty in Georgia. Anthony and I have spent many weekends hiking through the southern Appalachian Mountains in northwestern Georgia. Beauty abounds. However, we recently took a trip to the southeastern most corner of the state, where the lowlands landscape is closer to Florida than the rest of Georgia.
Cumberland Island National Seashore is one of the Georgia barrier islands. It is what the Outer Banks are to North Carolina, if they had not been colonized by Red Lobster and suburban vacationers. My affection for the Outer Banks runs shallow, as you might have guessed, but Cumberland Island is maybe the best place in the world. In the early 70s, developers looked to purchase large swaths of Cumberland Island for Outer-Banks-esque development. The few people who had houses on the island came together to broker a deal with the National Park Service that would box out commercial developers—forever. Though there are still residents on the island, now most of it is wilderness operated and meticulously conserved by the NPS.
The island is nearly perfect. It is certainly not devoid of human footprints, but it shows how the world might look if humans were not strictly an invasive species. Wildlife abounds. We saw countless wild horses, turkeys, deer, a bald eagle and fields of oysters in the salt marsh. We also saw pickup trucks, litter on the beach, coal plants in the distance and commercial fishing boats taking more than their fair share of fish from the ocean—surely to be wrapped in plastic and shipped to the far ends of the country. I can’t wait to return and observe the Earth’s fauna from up close and afar, in all of its imperfection.
The island also holds histories of colonization, slavery and absurd wealth. The current Carnegie Family Cemetery (where you would be buried if you were a Carnegie who died today) is located on the island, along with a number of mansions that were built by members of their lineage. I figure a cemetery is the least harmful thing a filthy rich family could do with their money to pristine land.
There were only a handful of other campers there, by design. Each campsite is retired every few years so its footprint can reduce back to its original size in order to preserve the palmetto and oak forests. There is one sand and gravel road that stretches the full 16 miles of the island. We biked and biked and biked on that road for two days. We made it only about halfway up the island, after miles dedicated to grabbing firewood off the ferry exhausted us early in the day. We spent an evening drinking boxed wine on the beach before cooking dinner back at camp. We got high and biked some more. We ran into some horses on the trail and had to turn around. We made a fire. We road the ferry in the rain and in the sunshine. We broke in the new tent. We stopped for fried catfish in Savannah on our way home.