I saw my first Adirondack guideboat at the age of 23, in the spring of 1958. It was love at first sight.  I had just moved to the mountains to seek my fortune (a tremendous strategic blunder), and been hired as a laborer at a mysterious place called “up t’ the lakes.” Everybody who used the phrase spoke it with the reverential tone usually reserved for “Shangri-la.” My boss was named Bill Broe. He was an elderly guide impeccably dressed in Pendleton and Woolrich togs, and he drove a polished green Jeep with a Packard hood ornament. This was clearly to be a cut above by usual employment. “Bring your toothbrush,” he told me, “and anything else you’re going to need, except for food. I’ll bring that. We ain’t comin’ back out for at least a week.”  

       We let ourselves through a locked gate and slowly drove over three miles on a dirt road following the crystalline upper Ausable River. Finally we topped a rise. Spread out ahead of us lay a gleaming lake hemmed in on both sides by black granite cliffs; below us, at the foot of the lake, stood a large, clapboarded boathouse with a broad dock. We pulled up, got out, and carried our gear and food for a week’s stay up onto the dock.

       “Let’s take the big boat,” said Bill, as he opened one of the sliding barn doors of the boathouse. There before us was displayed one of the wonders of the world: three tiers of beautiful old wooden guide-boats, many of them varnished like old violins, and others painted in distinctive family colors. Bill’s “people,” as he called them, owned three boats painted in light gray.

       We took the biggest boat from the bottom tier, a beamy 18-footer, slid it into the water, and loaded our gear into the middle. Bill set the oars into a pair of locks up near the bow, settled himself into the stern seat, and told me to go ahead and row. “Be careful, though, boy!” he cautioned. “The oar handles cross in the middle, and I don’t want you crippled up even before we get there.”

     I could scarcely believe how that big boat, loaded with me and Bill and a couple hundred pounds of gear, slid through the water. The oars were spruce and quite long. Bill had made them, slender as reeds and quite supple. They bent in arcs as I leaned back, then snapped straight at the end of the stroke with a slight sucking sound. In no time at all, it seemed, we were entering the mouth of the river at the end of the lake. Here Bill grew nervous; there were rocks there, and he made it quite clear that we were not to so much as touch one. He laid a hand on each gunwale, the left one with a cigarette between two fingers, and indicated with little gestures which way to bear as we threaded the river. We left the boat there, slid up into an open boathouse, and carried the gear across a one-mile portage with an old-fashioned one-wheel L.L. Bean deer carrier. At the end of the carry, we piled into yet another gray boat for the voyage up a second lake. It was the beginning of a love affair that has lasted for four decades so far.

        For thousands of years, before roads were built almost everywhere, small boats were the fastest and most practical means of transportation. Each part of the world, depending on the needs of its natives and the materials available to them, developed its own unique watercraft. The kayak and umiak of the North were built of bone, driftwood, and aquatic mammal skins; the currach of the Irish coast of sticks and skins, and later tarred canvas; and the dugouts of the tropics of huge hollowed-out trees. In the Adirondacks, where perfectly straight-grained softwood lumber was everywhere and every man was a carpenter, the wooden boat was a natural development.

         The early woodsmen needed boats that were light enough to move easily on land, stout enough to carry substantial loads, shallow of draft and easy to build. If they happened to be swift as well, that was an additional benefit. Nobody knows who built the first guide-boat, because there was none. It’s simply a name that over the years became attached to the small craft used by the early Adirondack guides. As sportsmen began to visit the mountains in ever-increasing numbers during the 1840’s, these boats were already evolving into a specialized design that was pleasing to the sports’ aesthetic sensibilities as well as responsive to their needs.  

       When a current guide-boat owner carries his boat on the roof of his vehicle, passersby will occasionally call out, “Good-lookin’ canoe!” And it does look a little bit like one- if you discount the tumblehome stem, wide-flaring gunwales, and two sets of oarlocks. But it isn’t one; and more important, it’s not descended from one. The native American bark canoes were entirely different in structure and shape, and were not built much in the Adirondacks, if at all, mainly because of the lack of suitable birch trees. The guide-boat is clearly the invention of men who had some experience with 18th-century salt-water wherries and dories and lumbermen’s river bateaux. They were familiar with the technique of building a boat of planks attached to a flat bottom board and curved ribs. So this was the method they used to transform a mundane necessity into an art form.

      Woodsmen, whether splitting and stacking firewood, hunting deer, or performing carpentry, are as competitive as anybody else. The most able of them became the most famous (and the best-paid) guides before and after the Civil War. The descendants of those men are still guiding today, but mostly at the private clubs of the Northeast. Their woodsheds are as neat as guestrooms, their pot roasts are ambrosial; and their varnished boasts, pulled up onto their special sloping docks in the sunshine, gleam like Stradivari violins.

       Traditional Adirondack boats could hardly have been built anywhere else, for they utilized the unique features of two native trees, spruce and pine. Old-growth Adirondack pines were the giants of the forest. Not far from our hunting camp in the Town of Keene stands an old-timer fully six feet through at the butt. Long ago someone began to attack it with an axe, and was either dissuaded or gave up; the tree survives. Native white pine was clear, straight-grained, and easy to work – not to mention the delicious aroma it lends to a workshop. Kenneth Durant, in his definitive work, The Adirondack Guide-Boat, still available in paperback, describes what just one tree could do for a builder:

        Warren Cole…about 1901…came upon a great pine, near the Long Lake West Road, measuring six feet across the base. He bought it for ten dollars. The lumberman told him he was wasting his money on an unmanageable monster; the tree butt log was too large for any local mill. Cole split it in half with wedges. From the two half butts and five additional 16-foot logs, all quarter-sawn, came several thousand of clear planks, which lasted Cole to the end of his boatbuilding career.

       The white pine boards, quarter-sawn for close grain and planed to a quarter-inch thickness, provided the feather-weight shell of the boat. Spruce had quite a different function. Loggers in a stand of spruces, felling during the winter, typically left waist-high stumps. The boat-builders salvages these stumps, especially the roots, which they grubbed out of the ground with axes, saws, shovels, crowbars and splitting wedges. The curved grain, from roots up into trunk, were sawn into slabs whose natural bend provided light, slender ribs and stems. Today, curved spruce roots of sufficient size are pretty much a thing of the past, and builders instead laminate ribs and stems with softwood strips and marine epoxy glue.

       Simplifying the construction to its elements: the builder starts with a pine or cedar bottom board, usually no more than three-quarters of an inch thick, about eight inches wide in the middle and tapering to points at the end. He imparts a slight “rocker” to the bottom towards the ends to add responsiveness in handling and to help the boat rise to waves. To this board he then fastens between two and three dozen pairs of delicate curved ribs, widely flared in the middle and narrow at the ends, to give the hull a fine and hollow entry at the bow and stern. Then the “siding” is added: thin pine boards tapered to a feather edge and overlapping in traditional boats, and narrow strip planking fastened with epoxy in modern ones.

        Trim boards and accessories are often cut from fine hardwoods. My own boat, designed and built by Steve Kaulback at Adirondack Guide-Boat in Charlotte, Vermont, is trimmed in cherry- gunwales, seats, oars and risers – and is an inexpressible pleasure just to look at. The seats and seat backs are caned, the center seat back curved for comfort and adjustable for either reclining or fast rowing. There’s also a little notch carved into the top of the rear seat that neatly receives a fly rod for trolling and assures that the rod won’t go overboard if a big fish strikes.

        So much for the visual impact. The real proof of these beautiful boats is in their use. Most people approach an empty guide-boat the way a greenhorn approaches a skittish horse. And not without reason; some of them are known to be cranky. Charlie Broe, old Bill’s brother, and the guide for whom my boat is names, said once, “You can chew gum all right when you row one of them boats, but you want to have a wad in each cheek!” That’s a slight exaggeration. I’ve rowed hundreds of miles in guide-boats and never come close to dumping one – except a little 12-foot beauty on the Lower Ausable Lake built in 1874 with the old wineglass stern. That one gave me some anxious moments. But even in my present debilitated condition, with artificial knees, and the center seat only four inches off the floor, I can get in and out of my boat with relative equanimity.

        The first thing you notice, after you sit down, is that the oar handles cross in the middle of the boat, right in front of you. This takes almost no getting used to, and the leverage it produces is vastly greater than that of the short oars most of us are used to. It also means you’re not straining your pectoral muscles, with you hands spread wide apart. The second thing you notice is that the oars bend – a lot. But when they straighten at the end of the stroke, and the boat leaps forward faster than you’d think possible, you’re hooked.

        I love to fly fish from my boat. Leaning back in the curved seat, oars ready to make any adjustments for wind or current, and my landing net by my left hand, is about as good as life gets. The seat of my pants is right about water level, so there’s no awkward bending down to net the fish as they come alongside. I can release them easily without lifting them from the water.

       All this near-perfection doesn’t come cheaply. A 15-foot guideboat in fiberglass or Kevlar sells for about $3,800, and the wooden model close to $13,000. Clearly, for most of us it’s a pretty heavy commitment. I waited 40 years to get one, myself – 40 years of wishing I had the money and knowing I never would. And then, a couple of summers ago, I visited an old friend on Chateaugay Lake who had a fiberglass model made by Steve Kaulback. I fished from it all one afternoon; it was like dancing again with a long-lost love. And just by coincidence, a few months later, I encountered a beautiful, varnished wood model at a small-boat show in Fairlee, Vermont. David Rosen, Steve Kaulback’s partner, saw me admiring it, and invited me to take it for a spin.

        The boat just flew through the water. It took me all the way back to 1958. I was a young guide again, working for Bill Broe and zipping down the lakes to pick up our people’s mail. And I thought, “Dammit, I’ve been waiting 40 years to get one of these things! I’ll never have the money for it. But in just a few more years I’ll be too old and sick and stupid to even pick one up! The time has come!”  I ransacked my savings, sold a canoe, and made a deposit on a Kevlar boat.

      David called me, “We’ve had a meeting here at the boat shop, and we’ve decided that you’re not a Kevlar boat. You’re wood. Let’s see if there isn’t some way we can get you into a wooden boat.” Well, gathering the money wasn’t easy, and the wait was almost interminable, but the following spring David rumbled up my driveway with my new boat. I had ordered it painted like the old timers’ boats – see the Winslow Homer painting “The Blue Boat” – and with its varnished interior and cherry fittings, it was so beautiful that I just gazed at it for literally three days before I dared move it from the garage floor to the top of my truck.

       So the Adirondack guide-boat is still alive. Like many highly developed and specialized organisms, it fills but a tiny niche in the world. But it fills it beautifully.

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