If Sapelo and Little St Simons were quiet pieces of history and wonder; Jekyll is holiday fun: I sip margaritas while watching waves crash on the shore, and fall asleep on the beach as fishermen cast nets out to sea.
Cumberland Island, my last stop, is different and perhaps the most glittering of all the Golden Isles. A national park, accessible only by a 45-minute ferry ride, it was once the playground for the kings of America’s industrial Gilded Age, the Carnegies, who left behind two outrageous mansions (one now lying in ruins, the other still immaculate) and —among other ostentatious things—an icehouse. Presumably those gilded G&Ts just weren’t the same if they weren’t served on the rocks.
But before then, Cumberland was the home of the Timucua, and it’s the legacy of this Native Americans group that I feel most acutely here. They called the island Mocoma (their word for ‘ocean’) and they lived in peace here for more than 1,000 years, fishing, hunting game, foraging for edible plants and making some of the earliest-known pottery found anywhere in the New World.
It’s here, too, that I meet Willy Hazlehurst, the local guide who’ll later show me manatees and whisper of the island’s magic — that feeling that’s so hard to put into words. We hike along sandy paths though lush, moss-dripped forests stunted from centuries of salt air whose trees twist like dancers above our heads. Willy shows me one of many shell middens. Apparently, the Timucua were quite tidy, because all along the shores and inland waterways are enormous piles — most now buried in the dirt — comprising tens of thousands of discarded oyster shells.
“Stick a shovel in the ground just about anywhere,” Willy says, “and you’ll find the remains of their dinner.”
Heading to the north of the island, Willy stops suddenly scouring the ground, plucking three black hooks from the silt and dropping them in my hands: fossilized shark teeth, dredged from the nearby sound. Thousands of years after they were formed, they’re still sharp enough to cut.
Later that afternoon, we set up camp on the sandy floor beside the river’s edge, surrounded by the cautious foraging of wild horses and the splashing of manatees nearby. We watch a full moon rise pink over the ocean dunes and a sun set over the salt marsh in a startling color I’ve never seen in nature before coming to Georgia.
But it’s a color I recognize now, a color that glitters in low sun, a color shared in wonder from the Timucua to the Sapelo slaves and beyond. It seeps into your skin like the rising tide. It’s three simple words: pure Georgia gold.
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