Campers As Youths, Husband-Wife Team Now Directs Nature Camp
from the Aug. 6th, 2004 "Lifestyle" feature on Nature Camp -- by the Lexington News-Gazette and reporter Mary Price
[Editor's Note: Paul Cabe and Leigh Ann Beavers were Camp Directors from 2000 through 2003.]

Their love for Nature Camp began in the 1970s but it was 10 years later that they discovered their love for each other. It would be more than 10 more before their paths would lead them back to the place where it all began.

Paul Cabe and Leigh Ann Beavers, husband-and-wife directors of Nature Camp since the summer of 2000, first met as young teen-agers when they were campers in the mid-1970s. Each knew the other, but there were no indications of a future romance. With his high school years over, Cabe went on to the College of William and Mary, while returning to Nature Camp in the summers to work as a counselor. Graduate work in biology at the University of Minnesota followed. Cabe now teaches general biology and genetics at Washington and Lee University.

His future wife, meanwhile, pursued her love of art at Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Wisconsin. She teaches print-making and drawing at Hollins University.

The couple met again as adults when both were guests at the wedding of a mutual friend who, not surprisingly, also attended Nature Camp. They've now been married for 14 years. And while the couple is now living year-round at the place where they first met, they are quick to stress that it's not the past, but the future, that brought them back to Nature Camp. "We came back because over the last 20 years, we developed a really strong passion for conservation," said Beavers. "Coming back here was less about loving Nature Camp than it was about educating young conservationists or biologists. So many people who come here wind up in biology."

"I think people make the mistake of thinking that we came back because we're nostalgic about our golden youth here at Nature Camp," added Cabe. "We have no nostalgia left for the place, and not much in the way of warm fuzzy feelings. ... It's chance to affect hundreds of kids each summer about a subject we feel passionate about."