Live oaks, Spanish moss, palmettos, armadillos, wild horses and feral pigs, grand ruins: Cumberland Island off the southern coast of Georgia has all of these things in abundance, as if to remind the visitor how different it is from the mainland or even other islands. It’s a mind-opening sort of place, a destination that seems designed to make us think differently after we have been there.
Cumberland is striking for its contradictions. Much of it is designated as “wilderness” by the federal government, although — like many islands in Maine — it has a rich human history and was once settled by planters and worked by slaves. That it has escaped the sprawl and development that has overtaken so much of the East Coast is due less to the efforts of conservationists than to 19th and early 20th century robber-barons who used their wealth to create a refuge for themselves before turning parts of the island over to the National Park Service for public use.
Very wealthy people get to indulge their fantasies. In Cumberland Island’s case the money came from the steel mills of Pittsburgh, where Andrew and Thomas Carnegie, both Scottish immigrants, amassed enormous fortunes. Thomas Carnegie, at least, chose a fantasy that was as old-fashioned and agrarian as steelmaking was modern: a baronial estate on an isolated coastal island, where he could entertain guests of his choosing, on his terms, at his expense, in a setting he could easily have devised a century or two earlier. Backward-looking, to say the least.
The results, even the burned-out ruins of Carnegie’s once-grand house, are impressive. And like Cumberland Island itself, the ruins are reminders of how likely it is that the certainties, plans and projects of one age will become the quaint relics of the next.
I visited Cumberland Island in early March under the auspices of Two Roads Maine, a nonprofit group dedicated to helping people through the transitions in their lives. Eleven of us made the trip there to explore the island and ourselves, sharing the stories we had lived. Among us we had lost jobs, lived with cancer, been through the breakdown of relationships, experienced a crisis of faith or faced some other momentous change in our lives. Some of us were just beginning our journeys; others were farther down our respective roads.
We listened — to each other, to the island, to ourselves. We talked. We hiked, alone and in groups. We shared our impressions of the place, and for a few days at least we let the island into our souls. Each of us came away with something different, of course, depending on the experiences we had carried in with us. For me the take-home messages came from the island’s unusual history and natural character, as well as the above-mentioned contradictions. They also came from the others in the group as we lived together in a strange place, from the stories we shared, from knowing that in a world where life seems tenuous and even threatening, we need not be alone. An island can make you think differently if you let it. For five days, we listened to Cumberland Island. It may have changed us all.
Two Roads Maine maintains a website at www.tworoadsmaine.org.