His Ship Has Come In on Keuka Lake

HAMMONDSPORT, N.Y. — The last of the steamers that used to travel Keuka Lake from Hammondsport to Penn Yan and back burned at her dock in 1920. By then, cars, trucks and trains had so changed the patterns of tourism and shipping that nobody had the will to build a new steamer.

I grew up looking at the old photographs of the Mary Belle and the Steuben and the Halsey. I tried to imagine what it must have been like to watch any one of them come tooting up the lake at twilight, crowded with day-trippers and the sounds of laughter and music floating across the water.

Stanley Clark, who grew up just around the corner from me in Hammondsport, had obviously had the same dreams. He is just enough older to have at least faint childhood memories of the real thing to inform the dreams. Stanley did something about them.

He is a machinist, now 70-ish (his true age is nobody’s business but his, he says), who built his hand skills into a large and profitable metal-working business and an equally profitable boat livery, which he’s run for 40 years.

In the late winter of 1986, up the inlet from the lake a little way, Clark started building his own 300-passenger, 100-foot-long steamer, the Keuka Maid.

It was called Clark’s Folly, even by those who wanted to see it succeed. As one of the two dozen workman who helped build it said the other day, “It got to be 10 below zero but we kept at it.” Except for some of the trim and the decorative paddle wheels, which will be in place before the summer is over, Clark finished the Keuka Maid in 14 months and it had its maiden cruise, suitably christened with some local champagne, on June 28.

At twilight on the day we arrived at my sister-in-law’s cottage for a visit, the cry went up, “She’s a-comin’!” and we rushed down to the dock. There indeed, thrumming along at a majestic five knots, came the Keuka Maid.

It looks like a floating condominium, flat-topped and rectangular, with two enclosed decks and a canopied top deck. It rides on steel pontoons rather than a hull, and its width and breadth give it a rock-solid stability even in a brisk wind, as I discovered on board a couple of days later.

A brass bell signals the approach of the Keuka Maid, and although the steamer (actually powered by twin diesels) is undeniably Now rather than Then, seeing it on the lake still has something of a dream about it, especially for those of us who grew up embracing the dream.

Clark is a white-haired, slow-talking, no-nonsense man with an extreme reluctance to use more words or reveal more information than he has to. He looks a bit like certain photographs of Thomas A. Edison.

The cost of the Keuka Maid is also nobody’s business but his own, but local estimates have ranged from $300,000 to $750,000, and one enthusiast has said she would have cost $1.5 million from a commercial builder. The main deck is handsomely paneled in mahogany, the second deck in spruce, with well-stocked bars on each.

Clark has also had to build a wide pier running 300 feet into the lake and a floating galley that is berthed alongside the Keuka Maid. There are lunch cruises and dinner cruises daily and night cruises Friday and Saturday nights with a local rock band. The fares range from $10 to $25.

Business started slowly; the uncertainty about when the vessel would be ready limited the promotion. But by mid-August the weekend cruises were sold out and reservations were in order.

I went on a luncheon cruise the next week, a fine family reunion with cousins. We shared the voyage with a jolly busload of visiting English Rotarians. The food, buffet-style, wasn’t half bad. But those of us who grew up on the lake spent as much time as we could on the breezy top deck, seeing the familiar cottages and the vineyarded hills from a relatively fresh and unfamiliar perspective--leisurely as a canoe but an interesting 21 feet above the water.

When we eased back to the pier, Clark was standing there in shirt-sleeves, overseeing some of his workmen as they built the supports for the paddle wheels.

“Rides a little heavy in the nose,” Clark said, “but I expect the paddle wheels will even her out.”

He is licensed by the state Department of Recreation to operate from May 1 to Nov. 1 (by which date the ride on the open top deck might be a very bracing experience indeed).

Confounding his doubters (who wanted to be proved wrong anyway), Clark appears to have made the Keuka Maid a working, paying proposition. The local wineries draw about 100,000 tourists a year and they are all candidates for a lake cruise. I ran across an ancient clipping which reported that one of the earlier steamers, the Halsey, carried 116,000 passengers in 1890, nearly a half-million between 1887 and 1891.

Watching the passengers debark, it occurred to me that Clark belongs in that remarkable American tradition--the pragmatic visionary, the practical dreamer--who has learned, or always known, that making some dreams come true requires only a little will, patience and know-how.

What seemed uncommonly thrilling was that his Keuka Maid had made a very old dream of mine come true as well.