Name: Will Huggins

Age: 45

Lives in: Mattapoisett

How he got here: His parents, both local natives, eloped to Idaho but returned home with young Will in tow after a short stint; he’s been here ever since.

Favorite Tri-Town place: Goodspeed Island / Eel Pond area, “But I have to ponder that one. There’s a lot of great spots.”

What he’d change if he were the President of Tri-Town: “I’d like to see more cultural diversity.”

By Jonathan Comey

When Will Huggins talks about old times, new adventures, events of the day, he’s animated, loud, laughing, and his eyes crinkle into amused slits.

But when he talks about matters of the human spirit, he gets quiet and still, and you have to lean in a bit – not just because his voice gets soft and slow, but because you want to hear what he has to say.

Having survived a series of cancer-related challenges over the last nine years, beating some fairly long odds in the process, Huggins feels he’s learned one wonderful lesson.

“I had no idea how good people could be,” he said. “I knew certain people, but I guess I didn’t know how good everyone really was. I was a little more pessimistic, I guess, but I think I learned how much good people have in them.”

At the height of his battle with cancer (which is in remission, not “cured”), Huggins said he was down, physically and spiritually. But the people of the community came through for him, in ways that he wasn’t comfortable with at first.

“It changed me,” he said. “It was hard for me to accept help. I’m a proud guy, I’ve earned everything I have, worked hard for this decent little life I have right now.”

From a $10 bill attached to a prayer in the mail from a stranger to a check for $15,000 to defray medical costs, he was astounded and embarrassed to be the center of attention. When a friend from high school he only knew on an acquaintance level came to his house with $2,000 from her cancer-fighting foundation, it really clicked.

“I told my wife, ‘I’m doing this,’” he said. “It changed me.”

The I WILL fund, originally started by friend Julie Sherman to help the Huggins family, has now shifted gears to help other families battling cancer. Every year, the I WILL polar plunge “Freezin’ for a Reason” on New Year’s Day raises over $10,000 – with all proceeds going directly to local people with cancer who could use the help.

“We just give them a check, no questions asked,” he said. “It’s a completely local effort, one hundred percent. I think that was one of the things for me, to justify taking the help, was to pay it forward. We take that seriously, my wife and I, and we try to instill that in our children.”

Will has a grown son, William, and lives with his wife Michelle and elementary school kids Cy and Olive. For Olive’s recent birthday, she requested that friends bring food for the needy instead of gifts; the family traveled to Wareham to donate the goods and ended up staying for a meal with the folks there.

In his younger days, Huggins might not have seen this future coming. Raised by a loving grandmother but with distant parents, “I was an angry kid, self abusive, drank myself into oblivion at times. I was sort of a yahoo crazy man at times in my life. I didn’t care about school, my health, anything. But that all changed, before I got sick even. Really, with the kids, no matter what, I was always a good dad.”

Huggins’ life is busy, running a successful building company and staying fit in mind and body, setting the tone for his family.

He doesn’t know what his future holds, health-wise, and doesn’t dwell on it. For him, it’s about the here and now – lessons learned the hard way.

“I guess I’ve got a heightened awareness of what matters,” he said. “And it’s relationships, it’s love, it’s your own soul, it’s doing the right thing. It’s being able to go to sleep at night with a good conscience.

“That’s what I think it’s all about.”

You’re in the zone – zooming down the highway, an endless conveyor belt of repetitive white stripes, inconspicuous mile marker signs, a steady green smudge of trees streaming by. Expressionless you appear through the windshield, the world of the commuter’s corridor as mundane and predictable as the sun-induced puddle mirage ahead that blurs into sky as you close in on it.

Suddenly, look though! It’s a red-tailed hawk soaring in, rising over a thermal updraft long enough to suspend itself until you approach. It breaks its overhead pause with a wing flap that sends it soaring right over you, almost like it waited there on purpose just for you to witness.

I know I am not alone in the driver seat with my excited reaction – a gasp, a flutter, an outstretched neck – because hearing Vinny Milone from the Mass Audubon Blue Hills Trailside Museum speak passionately about raptors, I sense he gets just as excited over such a sight.

For Milone, a teacher and naturalist, learning about and caring for animals is his calling. On July 7, Milone shared his particular fondness for the feathered species during the Birds of Prey event at the Marion Natural History Museum.

Belonging to the class of “birds of prey” are the hawks, eagles, falcons, owls, and osprey, to name a few.

Birds of prey are a specific class of birds knows as raptors. Raptors are predatory birds possessing particular physical characteristics that make them the highly specialized hunters that they are – sharp strong talons, keen telescopic eyes, wings tailored to pursue the type of prey they hunt, and sturdy curved beaks for tearing apart flesh.

Milone says the best way to learn about an animal – in this case a raptor – is to study these features, which help us learn the most about them, for each animal has its own individuality, its own thoughts, its own life, and as the “compassionate species,” we humans can observe our animal co-inhabitants of this planet and help them survive.

One of the major functions of the Blue Hills Trailside Museum is to rescue injured animals and those that, for whatever reason, cannot survive in the wild on their own. Sick or injured animals are nursed back to health and some become permanent residents of the museum. Just like the raptors Milone brought with him on Friday night, the animals become part of the community outreach educational programs at the museum, helping to cultivate an interest in the species, build knowledge, and spread awareness.

The first raptor introduced was a broad-winged hawk that was rescued as a baby after some humans began feeding it and then left the home, as well as the baby on the porch awaiting food that would never come. The hawk, as well as all the animals at the museum, has no human-designated name, “Just so we remember that they are from the wild,” said Milone. “Not that we don’t care about them.”

When Milone carefully withdrew the peregrine falcon from its carrier, the room let out a collective enraptured “aawww!”

“This is the fastest animal that we know of in the history of the Earth,” said Milone, impressing the audience. The highest recorded speed of a peregrine, in fact, was 242 miles per hour.

During the 1950s, the use of the pesticide DDT resulted in a rapid decline in peregrines, as well as pretty much all other raptors. Raptors, being higher up in the food chain, would consume rodents that consumed insects tainted with the deadly chemical. The raptor eggs in the nest would crush beneath the weight of their parents, the eggs’ structural integrity compromised by the chemical pesticide. By 1960, there were zero peregrine falcons left this side of the Mississippi River.

Naturalists like Milone essentially saved the species by pushing to ban the dangerous pesticide, and resettled pairs of peregrines into cities. The peregrine thrives in cliffside habitats, but peregrines could not yet reestablish their numbers in their natural habitat. Their main predator, the great horned owl, would repeatedly wipe out the transplanted residents, which had to be brought to the cities where they could still hunt from tall buildings but without the presence of predators.

There are currently 16 peregrine pairs in the State of Massachusetts, thanks to those like Milone.

Once it was time for the peregrine to return to its carrier box, out came the tiny, elusive, kill-you-with-cuteness eastern screech owl, no bigger than a pint of beer. His feathers a little ruffled, the tiny owl opened its eyes one at a time and greeted the audience with a facial expression that straddled a fine line between sleepiness and surprise.

Little masters of camouflage, the screech owl is virtually invisible in the wild, blending in perfectly with the bark design of the tree trunk in which it dwells, facing out from a hollow, watching all unnoticed from its perch. In fact, most of us, said Milone, probably pass at least one screech owl every day and never even realize it.

Most of the time, the only evidence of the presence of a screech owl is its spooky monotonic shrill and haunting, descending trill after dusk.

“I’ve been told,” Milone added, “that every time you see a robin there’s a screech owl around.”

There is so much we can learn from the animal world, Milone said. The best place to explore animals, and Milone’s favorite place to be, is outside in the woods in their natural habitat. There are simple skills one can acquire out of curiosity, even if we are no longer children.

“There’s still so many things to learn and ways to train our senses,” Milone said. “All it takes is a little practice.”

And because we have this ability to learn of them and from them, we have the ability to help them, the choice to help them.

Milone called the human species the “compassionate species.” Sometimes that can be a tough one to believe in, but who can really say for sure besides the person looking back at you from the mirror whether or not we are the compassionate species? And even then during times of doubt, we look to people like Milone for reassurance that we as a species do indeed deserve the designation.

By Jean Perry

Like all good museums, when you enter their interior spaces you are swept into collections and exhibits that transport you to another place or another time, allowing you to explore and imagine in new ways.

And that is the impact the small, but mighty, Mattapoisett Historical Society Museum has on its visitors with each new season. The 2017 season exhibit, “Mapping Mattapoisett – Tracing Our Place in the World,” opened on July 6. The exhibit of maps with informational plaques will, figuratively speaking, send you around the globe.

Curator Jeffrey Miller wanted to share something new, something that had not been exhibited within the diminutive walls of the museum. “While I was looking around finding materials that had not been shown before, it occurred to me that maps could be arranged in a meaningful way, providing the visitor with an opportunity of viewing maps in a whole new way,” he explained.

Miller said modern day people interact with maps in a whole new manner versus how we had in bygone eras. “The basic elements of mapping are the same, but the maps themselves are different,” he said. Thus, the maps on display allow the visitor access to a time well before computer imaging while demonstrating how map making has evolved over time.

It is a multi-media exhibit, debuting maps that date to the early 1800s juxtapositioned with a laptop displaying Google Earth. While paper maps illustrate places, roads, rivers, property names, boundary lines, even the history of land ownership, they are mono-dimensional tools versus technology such as Google Earth, which is in nearly 3D.

Since the beginning of written languages, mankind has used the visual sense to direct the mind beyond a fixed position. The MHSM exhibit excels at doing just that.

Kathleen Damaskos, the museum’s treasurer said, “Jeff has been very thoughtful in telling the story of each map.” She said the plaques accompanying the maps enhance the visitor’s experience, their understanding of the maps, while asking questions that inspire one to take a deeper look at each item on display.

The maps themselves are a mix of old hand-drawn pieces that illustrate boundary lines for property owners, coastlines with navigational elements, and even advertising pieces produced for the mass markets that began to emerge in the early twentieth century.

One map was drawn in 1870 by an Ansel Weeks, who updated it for the next twenty years as property changed hands, while another was printed in the 1920s by Electric Railway and shows the routes of local trains in those days. And still another map takes the viewer far away into a battlefield.

One such map, a field relief map tucked on the outside edge of the exhibit, seems as powerful today as it must have been when it was drawn decades ago. It is an early attempt at dimensional modeling. The map was carried home to Mattapoisett by a returning soldier after World War I. The map depicts Paris and the surrounding area when the Germans were attempting to invade the city.

The exhibit ends in August, but maps and other historical documents and materials are available for viewing by appointment during the off-season.

You can also visit www.mattapoisetthistoricalsociety.org for more information on collections, including accessing the new online collections database. Cataloging and database development was funded in part by grants from the Mattapoisett Community Preservation Committee. Damaskos said the museum is also partially funded by the Mattapoisett Cultural Council, as well as through private donations and memberships.

The MHSM is open during July and August, Wednesdays through Saturdays, from 1:00 to 4:00 pm.

By Marilou Newell