If there’s one thing that Southerners do well, it’s keeping a secret. So well, in fact, that in September 1996 when John F. Kennedy Jr. married Carolyn Bessette in stunning secrecy at Cumberland Island’s First African Church, only a very few, including residents of nearby St. Mary’s, the gateway to Cumberland, knew about it until days later. The wedding was fairy tale-perfect, elegant, simple and, most of all, utterly romantic under its cloak of anonymity.
There are few places comparable to Cumberland Island. Its wildness is purely poetic, its waves echo against the shoreline with the lyrical rhythm of iambic pentameter, and its live oaks, untold acres of them, sway and sing in cadence with salty breezes.
The southernmost of Georgia's barrier islands, the string of islands protecting the mainland from the tumultuous Atlantic, Cumberland's lure fringes on the mystical. The profuse, unbroken canopy of treetops, etched with silvery sunlight on the spring day we visit, stretches across the island like intricately tatted lace, hiding a cache of nature's secrets: a jewel-like painted bunting flitting among the oaks, a raccoon skittering after a fiddler crab, an armadillo sunning himself on a sandy knoll, a whitetail deer nibbling on a bed of pungent mushrooms, or a bobcat shadowing its next meal of an unsuspecting field mouse.
