The first time Jack Perkins visited Maine, NBC sent the veteran journalist to Bar Harbor to profile a new writer who was making waves.

That writer was Stephen King.

Perkins spent a week with King and his family. “He's a lovely man,” Perkins said in a telephone interview June 6. “I was so taken by the warmth of the people,” he said, describing the small-town feel he and his wife Mary Jo missed after living in Los Angeles for so long.

Two years later in 1983, the pair found an uninhabited island off the coast of Bar Harbor. By '86, they had moved to Bar Island full time and left their lives and Perkins' career behind.

“I thought, I've done what I've done,” Perkins said. “I had received acclaim, done a lot. Why should I keep doing the same thing? What's that going to teach me?”

Perkins' new book, “Finding Moosewood, Finding God,” is an exploration of his faith and the 13 years he and his wife spent on a parcel of land they called Moosewood. “We weren't getting away from something,” he said. “We were finding what we could be in that environment.”

Perkins is a former NBC correspondent and host of A&E's “Biography” series. When asked if he had to leave journalism to find religion, he said, “I had to leave journalism to find myself.”

A typical day on Moosewood involved a lot of time spent outdoors.“The beauties are surrounding and overwhelming,” Perkins said.

Because the island is connected to the mainland by the “bar” that helps make up Bar Harbor's name, the Perkins' had to time their lives around the tides.

Along with chores and planning energy consumption around their solar panels, they used the time for creative pursuits. “I was writing, my wife was doing her art,” he said.

Perkins and his wife left the island in 1999 and sold their 12-acre parcel to the National Park Service.

But he still remembers the island as well as he remembers reporting at the 1968 Democratic Convention riots or the work he did as a correspondent during the Vietnam War.

Perkins described the process of writing the book as if he was doing a “Biography” episode on himself. “You’re a little reluctant, but the purpose is to expose yourself to get others to consider making their own (religious) journey.”

He still has a strong connection to nature, but just in a different setting.

He and his wife now make their home on another island: one of the barrier islands off the coast of Sarasota, Fla. Mary Jo Perkins volunteers with a sea turtle rescue group and he gets outside a lot in his pursuit of his photography.

A connection to nature isn't the only similarity to their former lives in Maine. The Perkins' closest neighbor on the Floridian isles?

Just a small-town Mainer who still makes the occasional wave … Stephen King.