By James V. Horrigan

Just another day at Camp Takajo in Naples. An anxious mom is on the phone, relieved that her little camper’s fever is over but bewildered at what camp director Jeff Konigsberg did not reveal during his first call to her a week earlier. “I had no idea he was delirious, too,” she says about her son. “He’s just written me that Joan Lunden from Good Morning America has been putting a wet cloth on his forehead, stroking his head, and telling him he was going to be okay.”

Has the boy been hallucinating?

Konigsberg laughs. “I said, ‘As a matter of fact, I am dating Joan Lunden. She’s up here and she was stroking your child’s head.’” It does sound like a fairy tale—Maine summer camp director marries glamorous author and television personality.

Konigsberg’s first brush with Camp Takajo—a landmark since 1947, hosting 400 boys ages 7-15 each summer—was as a camper himself. In college, he graduated to counselor. In 1988, he took the plunge and bought the place outright.

Seven years later, he bought an adjoining lot on Long Lake for a house he hoped to build. On the day of closing, he invited his parents to lunch at a deli in Rye, New York, to celebrate. When he walked in, he spotted a familiar face.

“As clichéd as it sounds, our eyes met and it was such a warm connection I felt totally comfortable walking up and introducing myself. I can handle rejection,” he laughs, “but I can’t handle not knowing.” After all, he reasoned, “when are you going to get a chance to see Joan Lunden again?”

Looking back, the encounter seems fated. Lunden, who was having lunch with a friend and Sarah, the youngest of her three daughters from a previous marriage, pointed him out. “Why can’t I meet a nice guy like that?” she wondered.

They began dating and a few months later she paid her first visit to Camp Takajo. It was Valentine’s Day, 1996. “He rolled down the windows and said ‘Smell that?’”

“When I pull into camp,” Konigsberg says, “no matter what time of year, I roll down my window and smell the pines; it’s just invigorating.” What Lunden didn’t know then was that it was a test of sorts.

“It was important to me that Joan understood the seasons of a camp director. She had to grow to love not only me but my occupation, my way of life, and the state of Maine. If she didn’t embrace all that, we weren’t going to be together.”

“He had to know I would be comfortable here, become a part of it, and love it, because if I didn’t,” she knew, “it wasn’t going to work.” But it did. They married in 2000, and she’s now enjoying her eleventh summer on Long Lake. It’s also her eleventh summer as a camp widow.

“The delicate balance,” Konigsberg says, “is letting your wife know that no matter how much you love her, she comes second during the summertime. Camp comes first.”

Lunden understands and accepts the condition. “It’s Jeff’s job time—24/7 he’s on call, on duty.”

“I take this responsibility very seriously,” he says. “If someone’s going to be in my care, I’m going to be here.”

“It’s much more than his livelihood,” Lunden says. “It’s his passion; it’s in his blood, literally.” Konigsberg’s father was a camper at Takajo during that debut summer of 1947, and, like his son, later returned as a counselor. His sister, Leslie Konigsberg Levy, runs Tripp Lake Camp for girls in Poland, which he also owns.

During the seven weeks camp is in session, he won’t leave the grounds of the 100-acre facility. That’s not the case with his wife. “I make this my base during the summer,” she says. “But I go back and forth” to their home in Connecticut “roughly half a dozen times because I have work to do,” which these days can mean anything from television appearances to speaking at wellness seminars or going on tour to promote her latest best-seller. “I’m so used to the drive I don’t even think about it anymore.”

When here, Lunden uses the time to recharge her batteries and take advantage of all that Maine, Long Lake, and Camp Takajo have to offer. “Because I go from a hectic, fast-paced life and try to do as much work as I can during the wintertime, I try and do as little as possible during the summertime so I can enjoy it up here.”

Appreciation of her surroundings begins each morning when she and Konigsberg wake up in the attractive, timber-framed, shingle-style gambrel home they built several years ago on Sunset Cove, just north of the camp. “You feel like you’re waking up in the middle of a picture postcard. You’re probably sick of hearing me say it,” she teases her husband, “but I still say, ‘Look at that view!’ It’s so stunning.”

Konigsberg, however, is sick of neither hearing her say it nor the scenery she describes. “I think the time that I don’t notice how beautiful a sunset is or how magnificent this lake is, or how beautiful these towering pines are…when I stop appreciating that, I’m out of here. But,” he feels certain, “it will never happen.”

They are both proud of the number of trees they preserved when constructing the house. “I didn’t want it to be this gigantic clearing with this massive house on it,” Lunden says. “When you’re out on the lake you hardly see it, which is totally great. It’s part of the natural surroundings.”

Lunden knows that she, too, is now part of the natural surroundings. “When the Songo River Queen goes by,” Konigsberg says of the old-fashioned Mississippi River-style paddle steamer that brings tourists and locals up and down the eleven-mile-long, mile-and-a-half-wide lake, “you hear over the microphone, ‘This is where Joan Lunden lives.’”

“I could say, ‘Hey,’” she laughs, “‘give me my privacy.’ But in a way it’s kind of nice that I’m part of the tourism of Maine.” If all goes according to plan, she’ll soon become part of its economy, too.

“This is going to be my first year that I have my own women’s wellness retreat. It’s called ‘Reveille: A wake-up call for women, a wake-up call for life.’ Camp ends on August 10 this year, and you still have four or five magnificent weekends” left in the summer. “That allows women to have a tiny little window of opportunity to get together to share their stories, their failures, and their struggles, to leave their responsibilities behind.”

This year the retreat will take place over one long weekend. “We hope that in the years to come,” she says, “we will run four or five long weekends. Eighty percent of my career these days is involved in women’s wellness or general health care or children’s nutrition, and this is a perfect integration of what Jeff does and what I do. He has the facility; he knows how to run it. I represent women’s health. What more perfect combination of those two philosophies could you possibly come up with?”

Lunden, 56, wants women to “reconnect with their own sense of play, reconnect with themselves and their wellness…even with nature. Women are just so busy these days,” she hopes to “provide them with an opportunity to have some guilt-free ‘me time’ to just get up, smell the pines, look out at the lake, and exercise. We lose our sense of play when we grow up.” She hopes “to instill in them that there’s importance in the sense of play, whether they take a canoe ride or play tennis or climb a 50-foot climbing wall.”

Having fun exploring the area is something Lunden is now very good at. But when she first started coming to Long Lake, she says, “I was just here; I never left. But in the last three or four years I like adventuring out, learning my way around.”

With her husband tethered to Camp Takajo, Lunden often does so with Otisfield resident Beth Bielat, her friend and personal trainer. Last summer, they climbed Pleasant, Rattlesnake, and Bald Pate mountains. This year she hopes the women taking part in “Reveille” will join them.

She also has an agenda. “I want to take the ferry to Nova Scotia; I want to go to Acadia National Park and do some hiking.” She wants to take her kids to Portland Head Light, something she was “going to do last year but didn’t think they were really old enough to appreciate.”

She and Konigsberg have two sets of twins from a surrogate mother, the occasion for nationwide coverage in magazines including People and Good Housekeeping . Kim and Jack are two; Kate and Max just turned four. The older twins, Konigsberg says, “can’t wait to get up here” each year.

“They love it in Maine,” Lunden says, “love, love, love it.” Last year she and Konigsberg took them on the camp climbing wall; this year Max is looking forward to trying out his new fishing pole in Long Lake.

“In fact,” Konigsberg says, “as ridiculous as it sounds, Max’s first word was ‘Takajo.’”

© 2007 Portland Magazine Colin Sargent, Editor & Publisher editor@portlandmonthly.com Click here to subscribe