Encounters with the Archdruid

by John McPhee

  Candler, who was thirty-eight, had spent much of his life on the island. He grew up on its oysters and shrimp. His children were doing the same. Candler knew where the alligators were, and he had a boxful of diamondback rattles, from snakes he had killed with a hackberry stick. Notches on the stick corresponded to rattles in the box, and Candler would have dearly loved to be able to make an additional notch that corresponded to Charles E. Fraser. There was native gentility in Candler, however, and he did not permit his darker sentiments to surface in the presence of his new neighbor. Candler spoke even more softly than Brower did, and the accents of Atlanta were in his voice. He was a slim man of medium height, with dark hair. He owned, with others in his family, the part of Cumberland Island that Thomas Carnegie did not buy. The Candler property, about twenty-two hundred acres at the north end, was the site of a rambling wooden inn (now Candler’s house) in which business flourished around the turn of the century but atrophied after causeways were built to other islands. Candler’s great-grandfather was the pharmacist who developed and wholly owned the Coca-Cola Company; his son, Candler’s grandfather, bought the Cumberland property in 1928.

  The pilot said goodbye. The airplane waddled into position and took off.

  “An airport is essential here,” Fraser said.

  “But it’s not a nice neighbor,” Brower told him.

  “Yes, but ours would be just large enough for small private jets, no more,” Fraser said. “Let’s go see Cumberland Oaks.”

  Cumberland Oaks was Fraser’s working title for the development he intended to build on Cumberland Island. To get to the site, we drove about ten miles on narrow sand-lane roads, Fraser at the wheel of a Land Rover that belonged to his company. Sunlight came down in slivers through the moss in the canopies of huge virgin oaks. We stopped near one, and Brower paced the ground under it. The limbs reached out so far that, bent by their own weight, they plowed into the ground, from which they emerged farther out, leafily. Yucca grew in a crotch twenty feet high. Brower computed that the canopy covered fifteen thousand square feet of ground.

  We drove on, through long stretches that were straight to the end of perspective. “This is a vast island,” Fraser said. “It can absorb dozens of different kinds of uses. You won’t even be able to find the uses, it’s so vast—if it is handled with discretion.” Brower was silent. “By going into islands, I tarnish my shining image, because I irritate so many druids,” Fraser said. Brower smiled. The Land Rover raced along at forty miles per hour and occasionally bounced over a corduroy bridge. Eventually Fraser said, with both humor and sarcasm in his voice, “Now we’re on my property. Don’t it look lovely?” Brower said sincerely that lovely was how it looked, with its palmettos, its live oaks, its slash and longleaf pines. To Fraser, it was obviously raw and incomplete, but even now he could clearly see before his eyes finished villas and finished roads. So complete was this vision, in fact, that Fraser turned off the existing road and began to zip through the trees, rounding imaginary corners and hugging subdivisional curves. Spiky palmettos rattled against the Land Rover’s sides like venetian blinds. Pine branches smacked against the windshield, making explosive noises and causing us all, instinctively, to blink and cover our heads with our arms. A buck and two does leaped away from the oncoming vehicle, and Candler, raising his voice above the din, commented pointedly that on an island heavy with deer they were the first we had seen. “Variety of wildlife increases sharply with variety of food,” Fraser said, accelerating. “A place like Sea Pines Plantation has more wildlife than an untouched forest—more browsing, more habitat variation.”

  The western edge of Fraser’s property was a high bluff over the Cumberland River, a tidal lagoon separating the island from the broad marsh, and as we stood there looking down at the water and across to the distant mainland Fraser said, “We’ll have slides here, so kids can slide down the bluff.”

  “You could have swings here on these cedars,” Brower offered.

  Fraser said that some of the cedars on his property had been planted by Scottish soldiers who had built and manned a stockade there in the early eighteenth century. Development was thus nothing new around Cumberland Oaks. Looking west across the water and the marsh, he confided that he was envisioning a seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar system of towers, cables, and aerial gondolas to carry people to Cumberland Oaks from the mainland. “Brunswick Pulp & Paper owns those forests over there,” Fraser said. “I would describe Brunswick Pulp & Paper as ‘friendly.’”

  Wild grapevines as thick as hawsers hung from the high limbs of Fraser’s pines, and as we moved east through the woods Brower found them irresistible. Fraser stopped the Land Rover so Brower could get out and swing on one—fifty feet in an arc through the air. He crashed into a palmetto.

  Between the deep woods and the beach, among the secondary dunes of Cumberland Oaks, was a freshwater lake—Whitney Lake—so clear and lustrous that it gave Fraser’s property a slight edge over all other parts of the island. Set in all the whiteness of the big hills of powder sand, the lake was so blue that day it paled the blue sky. Near the north end of the lake, three skeletal trees protruded from the slopes of sand—branches intact, but spare and dead. A buzzard sat in each tree. The trees were dead because the dunes were marching. Slowly, these enormous hills, shaped and reshaped by the wind, were moving south. They had already filled up half of Fraser’s lake, and, left alone, they would eventually fill it all. Five buzzards stood at the edge of the water. Fraser stood there, too, with the unconcealed look on his face of a man watching a major asset disappear. “We’ve got to stabilize these dunes,” he said.

  Brower, for his part, was moved by the lyricism of the scene. If destruction is natural, Brower is for it. “I think it’s just fine to see it happen,” he said.

  Fraser said, “I’ve got to restore dune-grass vegetation here. I’ve got to put the lake back to its original size. I’m an advocate of lakes.”

  “There’s a place for development and there’s a place for nature,” said Candler.

  “What would you move the dunes with?” I asked Fraser.

  “Spoons, hoes, shovels—earthmoving equipment. You change natural gradings very cheaply with a bulldozer,” he said.

  Fraser went on to tell us that the lake had been named for Eli Whitney. Planters on the island had given Whitney financial support toward the development of the cotton gin. “This lake shouldn’t be allowed to disappear,” Fraser said. “There should be canoes on it for children. Children should be fishing here for bream. There is nothing here now but buzzards and dead trees.”

  Thinking of his three thousand acres as a whole, I asked him privately what he would like to build there by Whitney Lake.

  “Houses!” he whispered.

  The northernmost tip of the ocean beach was a long spit owned by Candler. We drove up there, inadvertently filling the sky with sandpipers and gulls. Then we turned and, in the late-afternoon light, went south all the way. The big beach ran on and on before us, white and dazzling in the clear sunlight. No other human beings were there. Of the several houses on Cumberland Island, the one nearest to the beach was a half mile back in the woods. We had been driving for a while when Candler remarked that we were nearing the end of his property. He has two and a half miles of beach. He said, “The only thing wrong with this beach—the traffic’s so bad.” Shells crunched under the wheels and salt foam flew out behind us. Plastic jugs, light bulbs, bottles, and buoys had drifted up along the scum line, but nowhere near enough of them to defeat the wild beach. I remembered the shoreline of the Hudson River at Barrytown, New York. A photographer from Sports Illustrated had caught up with Brower near there, and they had gone to some difficulty to get down to the river’s edge, so that Brower could be photographed with the wind tousling his white hair against a background of natural beauty. For the occasion, Brower had changed from a topcoat into a ski parka, and the picture was successful—this ecological Isaiah by the wide water. It was just a head-and-shou
lders shot, so it did not include the immediate environment of Brower’s feet. The shore of the Hudson River, a hundred miles upstream from Manhattan, was literally obscured by aerosol cans, plastic bottles, boat cushions, sheets of polyethylene, bricks, industrial scum, globs of asphalt, and a tattered yacht flag. Now, on the Cumberland beach, Fraser, for the moment, was sounding much like a hard-line real-estate man. He was saying that we had beside us “the finest, gentlest breakers on the Atlantic coast.” Brower said that where he came from such ripples were not called breakers. We got out of the Land Rover and walked for a while. Brower paused and studied the reflection of the falling sun on the surfaces of the breakers. This was what mattered to him—the play of light. He saw a horseshoe crab and had no idea what it was. He picked up a whelk shell and a clamshell and asked the names of the creatures that had lived in them. He wondered what made the holes of fiddler crabs. Shrimp boats were working offshore. Brower said he liked the look of them, bristling with spars. Brower seems to think in scenes. He seems to paint them in his mind’s eye, and in these scenes not everything made by man is unacceptable. Shrimp boats on a bobbing sea are O.K. On the waterfront in San Francisco, he and I once drove at dusk past a big schooner that is perennially moored there, and its high rigging was beautiful in the fading light. “There should be more masts against the sky,” Brower said. And now, back in the Land Rover, he looked up at high cumulus that was assembling over the ocean and he spoke of “sky mountains,” while Fraser looked the other way and said that the primary dunes were in a process of severe disintegration, and the Land Rover moved on at forty miles per hour, crunching Paisley-spotted shells of the tiger crab.

  “Have you ever been on a shrimp boat to see how they work?” Brower said.

  “I have—when I was twelve,” said Fraser. “I want a shrimp boat out of Cumberland Oaks, taking four or five kids a day.”

  The distance was so great across the beach and the dunes to the woods that I asked Fraser how far back he thought the nearest of his houses ought to be.

  “The mainland,” said Candler.

  “That’s a real dilemma here,” Fraser said. “If the houses are set back in the trees, it’s bad for recreation. What we need is an extensive tree-planting program to build up destroyed areas by the shore.”

  “Destroyed?”

  “Destroyed. These dunes are not ordinary.”

  “They have always looked all right to me,” Candler said.

  “Pine trees grow exceedingly fast down by the ocean,” Fraser went on.

  Brower was silent.

  “Within thirty years, there need to be fifty thousand more points for a week’s visit on the Georgia coast,” Fraser said. “You don’t decrease the number of Americans taking a vacation by sealing off a particular land area. Surveys show that seventy-five per cent of Americans prefer beaches to all other places of recreation. I believe in human enjoyment of beaches, but, of course, the druids think it would be a shame and a crime to have people on this beach—a shame and a crime.”

  Acres of ducks darkened the swells of the ocean. A wild brown mare and her gray colt stood ankle-deep in a tidal pool. “Sam, why didn’t you buy the property I bought?” Fraser said.

  “I didn’t have enough money,” Candler said.

  A line of pelicans—nineteen of them—new south just seaward of the breakers. Pelicans fly single file, and Candler said he could remember them going by in lines a hundred pelicans long. That was in an era that seems to be gone. DDT has got into the bodies of pelicans and eventually into the shells of their eggs, and its effect on the shells is that they come out so thin they crack before chicks are ready to be born. Brower remarked that the pelican is one of the earth’s oldest species. He quoted Robinson Jeffers, saying that pelicans “remember the cone that the oldest redwood dropped from.” We were nearing the end of the beach, and we could see Florida across the mouth of the St. Mary’s River. The pelicans kept going, like flying boxcars, across the river. “They’re doomed,” Brower said. “Maybe we’re lined up behind those pelicans.”

  Fraser is descended from the Frasers of Inverness and the Bacons of Dorchester, who began their existence in the New World as Puritans of seventeenth-century New England and gradually moved in a southerly direction, establishing Dorchester, Massachusetts; Dorchester, South Carolina; and, eventually, Dorchester, Georgia. The Bacons and the Frasers were on the original roll of the Midway Church Settlement, a seat of Presbyterian enlightenment important in the history of Georgia and the South. The Frasers regularly sent their sons to Edinburgh to be educated. The 1810 census showed the Frasers to be among the ten foremost slaveholders in the state. One distinguished Fraser voted against secession, and another used a slingshot against troops of General Sherman. For two hundred years, the family has had what Fraser calls “substantial amounts of land,” and the family’s “social antennae” (as he would phrase it) have developed a length and sensitivity commensurate with the family’s history and standing. Consequently, nothing makes Fraser sit straighter and tuck his chin in deeper than the assertion—often repeated in gossip—that his acquisition of property on Cumberland Island was something straight out of Chekhov: the capitulation of a fine old family under inexorable pressure from a nouveau-riche developer.

  Having returned to the middle of the island, Fraser stopped at a small graveyard, not by chance. Its walls were made of tabby—lime, sand, and oyster shells—and it was only twenty feet square. Dusk had come and was now heavy, and Brower grew rhapsodic about the penumbral grays, the deep shafts of varied gloom under the high trees. Fraser, meanwhile, was intently pointing to a stone, and there was still enough light to reveal what was written there: “Thomas Morrison Carnegie, born Dunfermline, 1843, died Pittsburgh, 1886.” What Fraser wanted us to note was that the Carnegies are comparatively recent immigrants. He referred to them as “upstarts,” and said, “I have no patience with them. They have no sense of history. They think the history of the island is the history of their occupancy. They think history began when they arrived. Look there.” He was pointing to another stone. The inscription said, “In memory of Catherine Miller, widow of Major General Nathaniel Greene, Commander-in-Chief of the American Revolutionary Army in the Southern Department, 1783, who died November 2, 1814, aged 59 years. She possessed great talents and exalted virtues.” “More talents and more virtues than all the Carnegies put together,” Fraser said. “Her friend General Lighthorse Harry Lee died here on Cumberland Island. Did you know that, Sam?”

  “Yes, I did, Charles.”

  “The family of my friend Brailsford Nightingale, in Savannah, owned parts of this island when the Carnegies were still herding sheep. The Nightingales have been elegant for more generations than you can count. They are descendants of General Greene. They had subdivided this island and were going to make it a rich man’s retreat before the Carnegies had ever heard of it, but the Nightingales were thwarted by history. Reconstruction was a brutal wipeout. And now the Carnegie druids do not wish to share the island with other people. They think only Carnegie eyes are sensitive enough to appreciate the beauties of that beach out there. On any list of America’s hundred most selfish families these poor new-rich Carnegies must be placed very high.”

  On the way in from the beach we had passed another kind of graveyard—a place where at least twenty automobiles and pickup trucks were disintegrating in flakes of rust. It was this scene that had set off Fraser’s ridicule and fulminating scorn. Here, he said, was a family posing as conservationists, attempting at this very moment to enlist the support of the federal government in protecting their island with them on it, and this junk heap was their idea of preserving natural beauty. He said he would like to bring a bulldozer to the island and cover the junk up. And he said, “How about your place, Sam? You must have some things up there that need covering up. Could I give you a neighborly hand?”

  “I have nothing to hide,” Candler said.

  “You haven’t got anything one day with a bulldozer won’t c
ure.”

  Fraser’s relationship with the Carnegies had not always been as clearly defined as it now appeared to be. The Carnegie heirs were a diffuse group. Most of them spent little or no time on the island. Two or three of them lived there. During early negotiations, the Carnegies’ attitudes toward Fraser varied considerably. Then a social event framed the nature of things to come. A few days after Fraser was given the deed to his new lands, one of the Carnegie heirs, a pretty girl in her twenties, was married on Cumberland Island. The groom, a junior executive in Fraser’s Sea Pines Plantation Company, had been assigned to the Cumberland Island project and had met his bride there. That should be plot enough for a Deep South Lorca, but there was more: The bride was the author of a Sierra Club book. Fraser arrived for the wedding, as various Carnegies recall the scene, wearing an ascot and carrying an enormous leather map case. They say that he unstrapped his case in the middle of the reception and displayed plats and plans for his new utopia on Cumberland Island. They say he called them idiots not to understand the concept of conservation easements. Moreover, they say, he burped in front of ladies. According to the bride, Fraser “galvanized the Carnegies into unanimity.” They united in order to block Fraser in any way possible, most notably by promoting a Cumberland Island National Seashore, with “inholding” or “life-time-estate” provisions for established residents. The groom, for his part, defected. He quit the Sea Pines Plantation Company, the better to live happily ever after.

  And now, by the little graveyard, in the near-darkness, Fraser said to Candler, “Sam, what do you think of that line about the hundred most selfish families? Do you think I can get some mileage out of that? Shall I hone it?”