What emerged was a triangular platform with 2x8 planks on edge surrounding it - to keep us from falling out The mast was stepped in a wooden block, and stayed with odd pieces of wire - probably wire clothes line. This had to be built of material at hand - planks, framing lumber remaining from the building of our house a year or two earlier. We decided to put together something to carry that rig, and see what we could do. We did have the rig of my father's sailing canoe - strictly Old Town, vintage 1913. Our immediate problem, now that our appetite was whetted, was what sort of boat could we build, with our limited resources and complete lack of facilities to enable us to even dream of a craft like “Jack Frost”, or even a miniature of her. Rogers' reminiscences of sailing and racing on the Hudson opened our eyes to a really terrific sport - plagued by the vagaries of weather, as always, but truly terrific when it could be done. The title was simply “Ice Boating”, but the contents included articles by most of the leading sportsmen of the time, including the famous Archibald Rogers, owner of “Jack Frost”, last winner of the Ice Yacht Challenge Pennant of America. First he bought us a litte book - as it turned out, one of the best books on the subject that existed at that time - about 1920.
Right here is where my father's support became what made it all happen. It didn't take me long to identify with the local hero - but how to begin? The story was a typical boy's book - the hero built his own boat, and finally beat the rich boy who had a fancy professionally-built boat, but didn't know how to sail it very well. Clearly this was my undoing - or doing, which ever way you look at it. I found a book by Ralph Henry Barbour entitled Iceboat Number One in the school library. So here is a ten-year-old, excited about winter and all it has I to offer up there in the country, and also an avid reader. The folks knew, of course, that double-runner skates are an abomination, and that holding someone's hand is really no help either until after one reaches puberty! Then the motivation is quite another story. Of course it took a few minutes to get the hang of it - but by mid-afternoon I was waddling around the rink on my own - no holding of parental hands.
Both my parents were excellent skaters - I recall at the age of five I was equipped with a proper pair of single-runner skates firmly attached to shoes, taken to a rink in New York, given a little push and told to "Skate!" Of all the activities that Lake Mahopac offered, those I loved the most were those of Winter. The entire experience of growing up by the side of a beautiful lake which provided swimming, fishing, sailing, skating and eventually iceboating colored my life from then on - I was eight when we moved there, and twenty-seven when we were forced to abandon the place by the implacable march of the Great Depression. Suddenly my mother's voice calls down from the house, and I have to abandon my scientific research into how ice really forms - but I had seen enough so I have never forgotten it. In a few minutes, the frozen film is actually thick enough to lift - very carefully - but of course it is delicate and fragile. First the surface stops moving, becomes smooth and still - then, suddenly, it wrinkles up into sheets of frozen surface-film, with long crystals spreading out all over. Spread-eagled on the extreme end of our dock, I am fascinated by watching the lake start to freeze.
It is a quiet, cold evening in December 1918.