News

Focus on Nature: More on our journey with ‘Focus’

COURTESY PHOTO

Let’s pick up where we left off last time after traveling around our country and continue with the writings and travels of Focus on Nature.

When we were married in 1950 we borrowed a tent from the Goldsmith family for a trip to Montauk to see if we’d like camping. Later we purchased a large, heavy Army-like tent with one side all screened. I remember one time we spent three rainy days in it in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, where we ran into Southold schoolteacher Bea Payne and her husband, Bill, from Shelter Island.

The last time we used the tent — on a camping trip to Maine when the kids were older — we went to pick it up in the morning and found a snake coiled up underneath it! That night I remember, too, the mosquitoes were so bad, inside and out, that we all got in the car and drove around to try to get away from them. With no air conditioning and the windows open, the mosquitoes got in the car with us anyway so we headed back to the tent and fought them there.

We then graduated to an 18-foot Holly trailer, which we used to travel around the Great Lakes in 1962, the year after the road opened north of Wawa. We visited the big Fond du Lac Indian Reservation and stopped at huge grain elevators, where we watched grain being dumped from freight cars into waiting ships at the docks. They shook the cars as if they were empty egg cartons to get every piece of grain out.

We were so far north that it stayed light late and the kids could swim until 10 p.m. We had two flat tires 50 miles apart and had to cross the border twice from Canada to the U.S. to get to a Montgomery Ward store to replace them. We found out later the company had bought up tires that were sitting in storage for a long time for that particular camper.

With these added expenses, money was getting tight as we traveled on our summer school vacation. We called to say we would be heading home and not complete our trip all the way around the Great Lakes, but we were told, “Don’t come home. Your house is rented.” Actually, Barbara’s mother had rented our house to Douglas Moore’s protégés, John Kander and Fred Ebb, who together wrote the music and words for “Cabaret” on our piano while spending that summer in our home.

One year, we headed to Newfoundland, where Peter and I figured we could get to see and photograph the famous Atlantic puffins and razor-billed auks that nested in burrows there. When we stopped on our way to camp along the coast of Maine we went on a lobster boat out to Machias Seal Island, where we spent a night in the lighthouse with fresh fish chowder for supper and a place to sleep on the floor. At first light, we found our puffins and auks and spent the morning photographing them.

While we spent our time on the island, Barbara, Roger and Peggy spent their time camping at Cobs Cook State Park. Once we were able to get the pictures we were after, we didn’t need to travel farther north, so it gave us time to spend camping and exploring Acadia National Park, where I got to see my first moose.

Over the years Focus has received many letters. One lady moved away from our area and when reading a Focus article about picking and making beach plum jam said she could “just smell the beach plums cooking.” At the time, Barbara’s Aunt Libby was picking and making beach plum jam for her church to sell, so I talked her into sending a jar to the lady.

Once, when camping down south, I wrote about yellow pine kindling known as firewood. A classmate of mine living in Texas read my article and on a trip back home he brought me a can of it.

Fran Woodward never got to Hawaii but told us when we returned from our tenting tour of four of the islands there that she had been able to travel along with us via Focus. She said they had always planned to make the trip when they retired but her husband died before they got there so she was able to enjoy it through our eyes. This is just a sample of some of the many comments we’ve received from our readers over the years.

Focus got mixed up in politics once. Our opponents asked Troy to stop Focus while I ran for public office — first for town trustee and later for councilman. They felt it was an advertisement for me. Troy said as long as the article didn’t get political, he wouldn’t stop it. Once we mentioned the name of a candidate from Fishers Island while sailing out that way and Troy cut his name out.

Another time there was a half-page vertical ad of our grandson fishing from a dock and the Focus on Nature story was about fishing with him. Troy said I could run one or the other but not both. I chose to run the ad — and I won. The ad showed our then 3-year-old grandson Robby sitting on a dock with a fishing pole in his hand saying, “Vote for my Pa and there’ll still be fish around when I grow up.”