unfortunately, it was paradise
By Virginia Cornett, Wisteria Magazine
In September of 1996, John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette married in the primitive First African Baptist Church on Cumberland island. In a humble one-room church enclosed by crude wooden frames and Georgian jungle, the pair married in a candlelit ceremony in front of guests they had invited 5 days before.
My first thoughts of Cumberland island, when I stepped off the ferry onto the soupy shore, was that I should not be there. It was not the alligators sunning in the marsh, the unabashed wild horses that gave me the warning sign, but the crumbling Dungeness ruins which had once, in its prime, been a vacation home for the Carnegie family. The ruins, like something out of a Du Maurier novel, tell a haunting tale of man vs. nature, and nature’s vicious inclination to survive. Wild and unconquerable horses roamed the old tennis court, ate weeds at the base of a crumbling sundial, sauntered through the once grand entrance hall. They could have been eating the corpses of the Carnegie family themselves and I would have cringed all the same.
I cringed in the face of natural beauty that could only be bought by the dirtiest of hands. I cringed like the Mocama when machetes woke them from their grog-infused slumber. I think the Carnegies must have enjoyed Cumberland island for the same reason colonists ran away to join indigenous tribes in the late 18th century; for the same reason children like to play house. In a similar sense, I like to imagine that the Kennedys saw in the untamed jungle the same reckless abandon that would come, one stormy night in 1999, to haunt them.
There is something grand and curiously abstract about playing at something you’ll never have to experience. Marie Antoinette, for instance, famously had a hamlet cottage built for her at the edge of her palace. As the mistreated people of France marched a short carriage ride from Versailles, Antoinette frolicked in humble fields and dined to the sounds of hard labor beneath her boudoir window. At some point, it seems that operas, plays, and even palaces grow stiff and artificial to the elite, that the influx of money and power grows so overwhelming that submission to the elements, to the wild horses and gators of Cumberland Island, is the only form of escape possible.
The romanticism of succumbing, of dissolving into nature, is an inclination that has followed us from our hunter-gatherer origins, but the replication of such humble origins seems almost exclusively reserved for the elite. The emergence of “coastal grandmother” and “English country” aesthetics that encourage overconsumption are frequently perpetuated by wealthy individuals often living amongst the bowels of privilege and microtrends. Nature hasn't just become a commodity, but the luxury to live without hindrance in nature as well. In 1996, the Kennedy party stayed at Cumberland Island’s historic Greyfield Inn, where today tourists can perfect their foraging and birding for $725 to $935 a night.
Only when wealth becomes meaningless, can submission take true form within the instability of nature and her violent whims. But Dungeness eventually burned into ruins, and John and Carolyn crashed into the Atlantic three years after they married, so maybe Mother Nature can settle her disputes on her own.
