Vanished sisters leave behind family and friends in disbelief
The two depart on a familiar overnight trip, taking a rowboat to remote Butler Island, and disappear without a trace.
By CURTIS KRUEGER
Published September 24, 2004
[Times photo: Ted McLaren]
Russell Jones, the son-in-law of Ivy Edmonds Hutchinson, waits for news Thursday at the Horshoe Beach marina in Dixie County where the sisters left Saturday, a day Hurricane Ivan was affecting the Gulf of Mexico.
HORSESHOE BEACH - At 79, Olief Edmonds Nash has never seen any reason to stop rowing across the shallows to camp in her private shack on remote, wooded Butler Island.
Friends say she knows the water and wilderness in Dixie County like a gopher tortoise knows its hole. If the tide goes out beneath her motorless aluminum rowboat, she's the kind to just hop overboard and pull the boat through the mud, said her son Fred Poppells, 60.
She sometimes carries a shotgun and a chainsaw on her frequent camping trips and knows how to use both. She also brings food, but if she ever ran out, friends are confident she would gather oysters, catch crabs, cut swamp cabbage or shoot and fry a cat squirrel.
She and her 81-year-old sister, Ivy Edmonds Hutchinson, set out on one of those camping trips Saturday, planning to return Sunday night. They didn't show, and a search has yielded no clues.
A profound sense of shock is spreading across Dixie County, which sits on the Gulf Coast north of Cedar Key and west of the Suwannee River.
People are not surprised that Ms. Edmonds Nash - whom most people call "Miss Ollie" - put in at the marina last Saturday, on a day when the distant Hurricane Ivan continued to churn the Gulf of Mexico. What shocks people is that such a tough woman could have gotten in trouble.
"As good as Ollie knows the water, everyone just can't believe something's happened to them," said Gainell Ellison, 63, a retired school bus driver who used to let Miss Ollie's grandkids play at her house.
"I can't understand what happened because they've done it so many times," said Kathy Hutchison, mayor of Horseshoe Beach. "We're all very upset. We're sitting here, nothing we know what to do." The Coast Guard stopped searching by air Thursday, but continued what it calls a "communications search," asking boaters for any relevant information. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission searched with three boats Thursday and "the plan is to search through the weekend," said spokeswoman Karen Parker.
The two sisters grew up in the tiny community of Horseshoe Beach, a finger of sand that is shaped like its name. Miss Ollie, who is currently single but whom friends say has been married at least three times, had not worked a regular job recently, but she used to be a "floor walker" at a seafood plant, making sure workers were picking the crab meat correctly.
For decades she has been trekking to Butler Island, about a mile away from the Horseshoe Beach marina, to stay at her small private "camp," or cabin. "She was kind of what they call a woods person. She knew how to survive," said Ed Ellison, a commercial fisherman who is Mrs. Ellison's husband.
Oftentimes she goes with a relative, especially one of her grandchildren. Her sister Ivy also had a camp on the island, and she too is considered hardy and capable. But people here say she had been sick lately, and didn't stay there nearly as much as Miss Ollie.
The sisters rowed to the island on Saturday and were due back Sunday. Joe Spradley, who owns the marina, said a doctor who took out a fishing boat Saturday urged the women to reconsider their camping trip, but they declined. He said the doctor told him about it later that night. But nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
"It wasn't their first rodeo, do you know what I mean?" said his wife, Tasha Spradley.
"They weren't a couple of greenhorns that went out on an adventure," said Miss Ollie's son, Poppells. "They loved that island so much. Mom actually called it her little piece of heaven."
All this week, the coast near Horseshoe Beach has buzzed with the sound of airboats and Coast Guard aircraft and private boats on the search. At the same time, residents have run through the possibilities in their minds, wondering what dangers the women faced, and what they might have done to save themselves.
The route to the island is through shallow water, so someone who capsized could possibly have waded back to shore, with an occasional short swim.
But at low tide the wading or walking would be across some nasty muck that locals call "pudding mud."
Miss Ollie's outdoor skills are so well-respected here that at midweek, many still believed she could be alive and fighting to get back home.
"I don't know if you've heard the expression "tough as whip leather,' " said Mrs. Ellison. "That's what Ollie was."
Mrs. Ellison's son, Dan Ellison, a fisherman who also works in the county sanitation department, shook his head inside his father's bait house on Wednesday and said, "I tell you the truth, I feel like she's maybe up in the swamp. Take her a day or two to get out."
"I think Mama's going to be found, but I think they're on some other island," Poppells said.
But no matter how optimistic the words, people's expressions turned grim when they spoke of the wind.
On Horseshoe Beach, essentially a fishing village that is showing early signs of giving way to fancy homes, people know the weather and the sea. They know that Hurricane Ivan's wide counter-clockwise force created winds from the east that blew off shore. Winds that could blow a small rowboat out to sea.
"That east wind's probably what done them wrong," Mrs. Ellison said.
Mrs. Spradley said everyone knows the longer the search goes on, "the less hope we have of finding them alive."
Ed Ellison was thinking that way too. And hoping he was wrong.
"Lord," he said, "it'd tickle me to death to be able to reverse my thinking."
