| Newsday |
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How Would You Soothe The Soul? |
| by Warren Berry |
| There's this moment when you realize that time is passing.....that you'll never look quite right again in that short skirt. Or that you're more likely to find a basketball settled at your midriff than in the hoop. |
| You're primed for your very own mid-life crisis. Not to panic. This may be the perfect time to contemplate something you've always wanted - that sublime self-indulgence, from your secret fantasy car to the perfect, pampered vacation. After all, if you're going to have a mid-life crisis, why not make it a good one? That's what we asked a Newsday staff writer, Warren Berry to do: Pull out the stops, fantasize away. He writes: |
| During my first mid-life crisis, my boss caught me daydreaming over a yacht ad. "Never, never let me catch you even thinking of buying one," he said. "Every time I push off from my mooring my damned boat cost me $400 minimum!" |
| I didn't - and still don't - see much appeal in that. No, give me some mellow. I discovered my dream boat in a most unlikely place - a little museum in upstate Blue Mountain Lake. The Adirondack Guideboat has both history and beauty going for it. Often mistaken for a canoe because it is double-ended, this nearly two century-old craft began as the workhorse of the turbulent mountain lakes. |
| It was designed to carry a hunting/fishing guide and his wealthy client - "the sport," as he was called in the early 1800’s. With its low center of gravity and its seemingly over-long oars, the guideboat even proved itself in a 22-mile race in the open Atlantic off the Massachusetts coast. |
| But forget speed; it's the boat's delicacy that gets you. Some people call it "floating art," and as such it's attracted a diverse new class of "sports," including the CEOs of Rolls- Royce and Ford Modeling agency, and the man who writes about CEOs, management guru Tom Peters. |
| Today, this most up-country of boats is made by two down-staters who moved north…..Steve Kaulback, 57, who once taught design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and his partner, David Rosen, 58, who was raised in the South Bronx. From their shop in Vermont their dozen employees will build you a wonderfully agile guideboat made of Kevlar with cherry trim and lovely accessories for $3,900. |
| But the model that got one guy from Phoenix to buy one off the Internet, the one that gets Vogue magazine to come up to the Vermont workshop for a look, is the boat that has been compared to fine musical instruments and fine furniture. Only eight or so of the wooden boats are made each year and they're painstakingly assembled from strips of cedar and pine and cherry. This 16-foot rowboat can cost you $12,800. |
| The other day, Rosen sent down his latest batch of pictures of guideboats being used by contented men - and a distinctly beautiful woman. "For some," he says, "the operational definition of a mid-life crisis - or maybe it's a person's second mid-life crisis - is when you notice the boat more than the woman." |
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He adds, "I'm not at that point yet. But it’s getting close."
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