Some are born to the island life; others arrive on an island and feel like it is a place they know by heart. On a beautiful fall day last October, Beverly Johnson began relating the story of how she came to Chebeague Island as a teenager as we stalked a pair of nondescript brownish birds on the shore that she had not seen before. Crouching down in the wind with camera in hand, pieces of Beverly’s improbable journey come into focus.
Beverly Ross, now Beverly Johnson, did not grow up on Chebeague, but came to the island with her father, a law-yer in Wayland, Massachusetts, to attend a client’s funeral. He discovered Chebeague had a golf course, and that did it for him; he bought an island house and brought the whole family back in 1964 for the summer when Beverly was 15.
Because the family first arrived at the island for the funeral in the fall, after the summer people had left, Beverly right away made friends with the year-round islanders. It was only later that Beverly met summer people, and al-though technically she was someone “from away,” she never considered herself a summer person.
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