Were anyone devoted enough to undertake a lifelong study of the nature of fog, one couldn't stumble upon a much better spot than mist-shrouded Kent Island, one of the small Three Islands group south of Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy C justly famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) for its lingering pea-soup fogs.

And it was here in 1937 that a young meteorological student from Cambridge, Mass., Robert "Bob" Cunningham, fell headlong into his fascination with fog, one that was to become a consuming lifelong passion. By his own admission, his investigations into the fogs of Kent Island, stretching over a period of some 70 years, revealed nothing spectacular. However, many would beg to differ.

For instance, during the 1970s and 1980s, when acid rain was more of a problem than it is today, Dr. Cunningham, who earned his doctorate in 1952, documented fog samples at Kent Island that were as acidic as vinegar. As one could well imagine, a constant bath of acid fog greatly damaged the coastal conifer forests of Maine and Maritime Canada, which Bob nicely documented in a paper he co-authored in 1989.

Simply titled "Impact of Acid Fog and Ozone on Coastal Red Spruce" and published in the journal Water, Air and Soil Pollution, it used data collected from Kent Island and several other sites along the Maine coast to prove that acid fog was dissolving the protective waxy coating found on spruce needles. What many coastal residents at the time thought was simply salt damage from winter storms, evidenced by the spruce needles turning red, turned out upon closer scientific investigation to have a more insidious cause.

Bob was ever eager to share this enthusiasm for cloud and weather study with anyone who showed the slightest interest, including many generations of visiting students to the Bowdoin Scientific Station on Kent Island, as well as local residents. When the author conducted a bird-banding study on the island in the fall of 1995, he was quickly enlisted to collect weather data daily at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. In return, Bob graciously provided a detailed summary of that summer's weather, along with a concise five-page analysis.

Sadly, this past spring, cloud physicist extraordinaire Bob Cunningham, 88, passed away on April 15 in Concord, Mass. As a measure of the esteem in which was he held by several generations of resident and summering Grand Mananers alike, more than 65 adventurous souls journeyed to Kent Island on an appropriately foggy July 28 to attend a special memorial service in his honor. From four months to 94 years, all converged on Bob's little weather-collecting station in the South Field known simply as "Fog Heaven."

Gathered around his fog collector C a tattered piece of aluminum screening on a simple metal frame and older than most of those present C all listened intently as son Peter kept his last promise to his father to relate the story of his last days. He had "several leaks in his boat" over the past few years, as Peter put it, but he kept getting back up, and until last year getting himself healthy enough to return to his beloved Kent Island. But after a bout with pneumonia last fall, he fell at home and broke his neck.

"He hated that brace and kept trying to rip it off. He also kept trying to walk out of the hospital rooms, alarming the staff, but we saw it as a good sign, a sign that he still wanted to explore on his own. We finally got him home for several days. He loved being home, it gave him strength, but when on the evening of April 14 he had trouble breathing, we called the ambulance. The medics incorrectly told the hospital he was 'Full Code' not a DNR [Do Not Resuscitate], so when his heart stopped they did CPR and intubated him. He had died, and when we arrived with the DNR paperwork, he was unconscious on a breathing machine.

"In the morning the family went together to the hospital not knowing what to expect. We were very surprised to be told that he was breathing on his own. When we entered the room we were shocked to see him open his eyes and recognize our presence. Bob was awakened from the dead, reborn, resurrected. We had feared that when his heart stopped he had suffered brain damage, but that clearly was not the case. He still had a tube down his throat but he was still Bob. One tough bird.

"The doctors successfully pulled out the tube and had him on dialysis. He tried to talk repeatedly, but his throat was ruined by the breathing tube and I couldn't understand what he was saying. I told him he would be made comfortable, but he indicated he didn't want drugs. I told him two things that seemed to provide some comfort. I said several times, 'I'm here with you and I'm not going to leave you, I am not going to leave you.' The other thing I said was, 'I will tell your story.' That is why we are here today.

"At about 5:30 p.m., he removed his oxygen mask. I thought he mistook it for his neck brace which had been removed earlier, but it wasn't that; he knew something was changing and he wanted to talk. As he motioned with his left arm toward the fading light in the hospital window, he said very clearly and loudly, 'Get me outta here! Get me outta here!' I asked, 'Do you want me to take you to Grand Manan?' 'Yeah!' he replied. With the help of the intensive care nurse, I then moved his bed over to the window.

"I leaned him over close, face to face, and told him that now I would get him out of bed, get him dressed, take him downstairs, put him in the car, and then we would drive together directly to Grand Manan. He smiled, and he kept smiling, and then he started laughing and laughing, and it became a body-shaking belly laugh, not a short one. He laughed and laughed and laughed. Half an hour later when I turned my back for an instant, he had quietly passed into lifelessness. That laughter was his last word."

Robert Mauck, interim director of Bowdoin Station, then related how he first met Bob in 1992, as he arrived at the wharf in the basin at Kent Island in his little skiff C appropriately named Fogseeker C having rowed all the way from Ingalls Head. "He was grinning like a five-year-old," recalled Mauck, "and said, 'Don't tell Claire!'" Claire was his wife since 1945 but unfortunately could not be present at the service.

Jeannie Wheelwright, wife of former station director Nathaniel Wheelwright, read a poem especially written for Bob by Jaune Evens entitled "Bob's Home Poem." Vickie Tate sang the first verse of "Amazing Grace" and everyone then joined in to finish. Russell Ingalls gave a benediction and related how on July 25 during a heavy rain he had mixed a concrete base for a 20-foot mast to hold a complex suite of permanent automated weather equipment. Log onto <http://datagarrison.com/users/300034012518720/300034012518720/plots.php> to access current weather from Fog Heaven in the Bay of Fundy C yet another legacy left by Bob.

All those who were present at the service are grateful to Bowdoin Scientific Station for hosting the service and to Bert Green in the Shiloh out of Ingalls Head, and Russell Ingalls in the Island Bound out of Seal Cove for ferrying everyone out to Kent Island and back. Photos of the memorial service by Peter Cunningham can be found at <http://www.wordwiseweb.com/2008/fogseekerservice/> while an autobiography penned by Bob himself is located at <http://www.wordwiseweb.com/fogseeker/>.

(Violet Sturgeon contributed to this article with notes taken at Fog Heaven that day, and Peter Cunningham provided Internet links and a copy of his eulogy read at the actual funeral service.