Keith Lewis followed his father into the merchant marine and battled everything from balky equipment to foul weather as he sailed ships around the world.

He followed his father into the conservation movement, too, giving up much of his free time, and forgoing millions of dollars to preserve the family farmlands.

He even postponed his wedding twice to tend to conservation work.

But Keith says the toughest thing he ever did was get a bill passed by the Rhode Island General Assembly.

For six months in 1986, he gave up his work at sea and spent every day of an entire session of the General Assembly trying to convince legislators to pass a bill that would allow Block Island to tax the sale of property and use the money to conserve land.

Lewis was an unknown at the State House. He had no powerful friends, and he was up against the state real estate industry, which was openly hostile to his bill.

He showed up every day, often sitting in a red leather chair outside a committee hearing room, waiting to talk to anyone who would listen.

With a beard that followed his jawline and left the rest of his face clean-shaven, and an accent that sounded more Downeast Maine than Rhode Island, he seemed like a person from another place and time.

"The lobbying was the hardest thing I ever did. I'm not a schmoozer. That's not my personality," Keith said recently. "So I worked as hard as I could so I wouldn't have to do it again."

KEITH LEWIS grew up in his family's home on Meadow Hill, a high spot near Old Harbor that provides views of the town beach and the vast Atlantic Ocean.

He was 12 when he got his first job on the water, crewing on the Lillian D, a fishing boat operated by a family friend. His father crewed on the same vessel as a boy.

When he was 13, Keith and his father bought the Lillian D, and Keith ran a string of lobster traps. Keith routinely sailed alone the 9 miles to the mainland. During those years, local pilots would take him aboard ships they were guiding down Long Island Sound. He once skipped school to sail a ship to New Haven, Conn.

Keith first remembers worrying about the environment when he was a small boy. He was in the family's '46 Chevrolet, riding by an open field in the island's south end. Another boy in the car said, "Wouldn't that look great filled with houses?" Keith didn't think so. It bothered him at 8, and it bothers him now.

Like his father, he studied birds and nature with the eccentric Miss Dickens.

There is something more that Keith says he got from his father: an abiding spirituality deeply connected to the natural world. He always believed that there is a Creator, that the Creation is good and that "humanity is charged with the responsibility of caring for it."

Keith likens his sense of duty toward land conservation to the way he felt as chief engineer of a huge ship. When he went aboard, he said, the man he was relieving would say, "You got it," as he walked down the gangway, making clear the transfer of responsibility.

Working hard on maintaining the ship's machinery, Keith said, contributes to the success of that voyage and others to come. Failure to do his work would make his life easy but cause trouble later. "On future voyages, when things start falling apart, I'd be cursed long after I'm gone."

Keith said he wasn't trying to say the world is a sinking ship. "But we could be, if we don't address these problems. While the party rolls merrily on, individuals have to be willing to break away, roll up their sleeves and tackle these tasks."

KEITH'S SAGA with the General Assembly was triggered by the changes he observed each time he returned to Block Island from a voyage at sea. Land prices were spiraling upward. A building boom was under way across the country, and outsiders were spending lots of money to build summer homes on the island.

In 1983, Block Islanders overwhelmingly approved a $1-million bond issue to preserve land.

But Keith was sure it would not be enough.

In the early 1980s, he met Dorothy McCluskey, a Connecticut state representative who owned property on the island and was also interested in conserving land. Together they chaired a committee to study the legalities of protecting land. Keith in particular wanted to impose a conveyance tax of 2 percent or 3 percent on each property transaction on the island, with the proceeds to be used for land conservation.

The two drafted a bill and presented it to the New Shoreham Town Council. The Block Island Times reported that Keith had done such a good job briefing the council that, "There was nothing more to be said other than to thank Keith for a job well and thoroughly done."

With prompting from Keith, local legislators submitted a bill to the General Assembly in 1986.

PETER WOOD, former publisher of The Block Island Times and a longtime supporter of Block Island conservation, says one of the most important things Rob Lewis did, along with saving Rodman's Hollow, was to pass on his values and ideas to Keith.

Keith attended the Block Island School and graduated in 1964, in a class of six.

He enrolled in the Maine Maritime Academy, hoping to follow in his father's footsteps as a merchant marine officer. But a test detected a slight colorblindness that would prevent him from working the bridge. Deck officers must be able to discern the colors of buoys and light signals.

Keith called his parents, who were shattered by the news. A couple of days later he received a letter from his father -- the only one he ever got from him. (Usually his mother, Alyce, handled the family correspondence.) Keith said his father laid out three choices: Drop out and feel sorry for yourself. Continue taking engineering courses. Pursue an entirely different career.

"He told me that disappointments sometimes lead to better things," Keith recalled. "The choice was mine, he said, but I must not allow disappointment to be an excuse for failure."

Keith decided to stay in school and concentrate on becoming a ship's engineer. He would still see the world, but he would pay a dear price by being obligated to work in hot, dirty engine rooms.

On a steamy morning on the first of June, 1968, the day after he graduated from the merchant marine academy, Keith boarded his first ship, the Flying Cloud. It was bound for India -- an 11,000-mile trip. He had a 3rd engineer's license.

One night both boilers on his ship lost their fire. "We were dead in the water; the engine room was pitch black. With no electrical power, there was no ventilation; the engine room temperature soared. I don't know how high, but it had been 130 or 140 before the blowers shut down. The heat was dreadful; sweat poured out of our bodies. We drank that bad potable water and hustled to get the plant lit off again. We worked in the darkness -- worked, vomited, worked, vomited. Three or four hours later we got the plant back on line. It was an awful experience."

When Rodman's Hollow was threatened with development in 1972, prompting Rob Lewis to form the Block Island Conservancy, Keith and his sister, Nancy, became early charter members, contributing $1,000 each. Both were in their early 20s.

Keith came home and stayed for several months to help his father and his community, studying land records at Town Hall. They were in bad shape. Keith became the first person to use individual records to draft a plat map of the hollow.

But more than that, at just 23 years of age and not yet able to afford a car, Keith began to acquire Block Island land.

He took out mortgages on 70 acres that his uncle, William Lewis, had put on the market. His father gave him 14 acres.

Keith said he would have preferred the freedom to strike out on his own back then, and maybe even to live someplace else. But his father and uncle knew he would protect the family farm. It was a responsibility he accepted, he says, with mixed emotions.

"Starting with my great-grandparents, there was a commitment to hold the land together. Every generation incurred debt to hold the land together," Keith said. "In my grandfather's generation, they drew straws to see who would take care of the farm. For me, it's been a burden."

Keith traveled to Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, Connecticut -- anyplace where people were setting up trusts and conserving land. He was learning how it was done, and making connections.

By the mid-1980s, Rob Lewis had cut back on his conservation work. He still wrote letters to the newspaper about pressing issues, but he was settling into retirement with Alyce.

Keith had taken over as president of the Block Island Conservancy. He was working with the state Department of Environmental Management, the Audubon Society of Rhode Island, and two national groups, The Conservation Fund and The Nature Conservancy -- a group that was spending vast sums around the country on land conservation.

"He really sacrificed his young adulthood working on these projects," said Kay Hall, who married Keith in 1987. "He was tied down with all these financial burdens. He'd be away at sea for three to five months at a time, and even when he was home, we weren't together that much. He'd spend the last few weeks before going to sea, doing deals.

"But once I saw the land he was saving, I understood Keith's determination to keep it the way it was," Kay said. "We realized he could have made millions by developing it, but that was unthinkable."

Because he didn't enjoy managing the land he had accumulated and because he wanted to keep The Nature Conservancy involved in saving Block Island, he offered the organization a great deal.

Keeping 7 acres around a cluster of farmhouses and a barn for himself, Keith sold the conservancy about half of his remaining land to preserve. The price tag: $90,000, just what he needed to pay off the mortgage and the lawyers' fees.

He sold the conservancy another 8 acres for about $35,000 and relinquished the development rights to another 33 acres.

The appraised value of the land he gave up was $6 million.

"I like money," Keith would say. "But it's not everything."

He went back to sea.

KEITH DECIDED in 1986 that he would take a year off and get the General Assembly to pass the bill he wanted. "A lot of people couldn't believe he wasn't getting paid [for his work that year]," said his wife.

"Since I know the legislative process, I went with Keith," Connecticut legislator Dorothy McCluskey said. "We introduced ourselves. We talked to the leadership in the Senate and the House. We got a formal reception. Politically it was obvious: The House Corporations Committee would be the big hurdle. The real estate industry was very opposed. One community tried a year before and was turned down."

But islanders backed Keith. Island children wrote letters. Island realtors testified at hearings. The Block Island Chamber of Commerce backed the bill.

On April 2, the Senate approved his bill 46 to 0.

But the bill languished in the House Corporations Committee for another three months. Keith never gave up. Four days a week he posted himself outside the House chamber, always ready to buttonhole another legislator with his positive arguments.

Finally, the bill cleared Corporations, and at 8 p.m. on June 20, 1986, the House passed the legislation, the first land trust bill in Rhode Island.

Former Warwick Mayor Joseph W. Walsh, a lobbyist for the Rhode Island Builders Association, credited Keith's knowledge, perseverence and personality.

"He obviously cared a lot," Walsh said. "And he didn't turn anybody off."

Keith, with his maritime background, remembers thinking: "Eight bells. Another watch begins." Time to move on to something else.

That summer, Gov. Edward D. DiPrete visited the island for a ceremonial bill signing and the dedication of a public overlook at Mohegan Bluffs.

At a Special Town Meeting, voters set the tax at 2 percent, which, they calculated, would have raised $316,000 the previous year. The voters elected Keith to head the new land trust. (Unlike Rob's Block Island Conservancy -- a private, nonprofit organization -- the land trust is an arm of town government, charged with collecting and administering the transfer fee.)

That 2-percent tax has raised $14.7 million since then, money that has been used to buy land all over the island for conservation.

ACCOLADES for Keith Lewis poured in.

In 1985, while he was still preparing to lobby the legislature, The Block Island Times gave him its Bayberry Wreath Award, saying his efforts on behalf of conservation were "truly extraordinary."

Keith received the Chevron Conservation Award -- $1,000, a bronze plaque and dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C. -- in 1986.

"Under tremendous pressure from developers of vacation homes, Mr. Lewis has led local residents in the fight to preserve this unique ecosystem for future generations by donating most of his inheritance -- land that had been in his family for generations -- to the Conservancy," reads the plaque. "An individual who follows the dictates of his conscience, Mr. Lewis has been an extraordinary example of what one person can accomplish in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles."

Save the Bay gave him an environmental achievement award in 1986 for getting the first land trust bill passed.

In 1987, Keith and Kay were married in Providence, in the church where they met, First Baptist Church in America.

They married on a Friday in the summer. To make it easier for their friends to join them, they avoided a Saturday wedding because that's the busiest day of the week for islanders dealing with the comings and goings of renters and day-trippers.

It was their third attempt.

"When you postpone your wedding twice because of conservation meetings, you know where you stand," Kay said recently, as she smiled at Keith. She quickly added, "That's one of the things that attracted me to you."

In 1991, Keith resigned from the Block Island Land Trust. He said he had to go back to sea to earn a living and would be forced to miss too many land trust meetings.

He had adopted his father's practice of writing letters to keep the community up on what was happening. One, to The Block Island Times, thanked all the voters, residents and friends for supporting the land trust.

"The result is a neat little institution that helps to preserve the island's landscape and community quality of life; an institution that draws upon strengths in the economy to protect and perpetuate the very factors that make the economy strong in the first place. It's something we did together, in the typical Block Island tradition," he wrote.

Board members responded with a letter, saying that when it comes to the land trust, "You not only built the ship, you have also been both her pilot and captain during her maiden voyage.

"Your gifts to the island -- the land acquired through your efforts -- will be appreciated by generations of those who value natural beauty and open space."

Keith went back to sea for another eight years.

But duty would call him back to Block Island for good.