Just can’t sit still
Our interview starts with a chilly tour through the many boat sheds on his prop- erty; a private museum of boating history. My hatless, gloveless guide identifies each dusty hull, apparently oblivious to the afternoon’s bone-chilling temperature; it’s not until my lips get too numb to form coherent sentences that he takes pity and leads me to a smaller (heated) outbuilding.
38 SEAHORSE
As we settle into a cosy sitting room
Steve Clark explains that he and his wife Kim lived here while their main house was being updated. ‘Reminds me of a narrow boat,’ I say, which launches him into a fond memory of sailing on the English Broads and why it should be my very next destination. It’s the first of many digres- sions from talking about his own achieve- ments, so forgive me if I miss a few.
As Carol Cronin finds out… Steve Clark is truly a renaissance man: 71 years old, heart attack survivor and now a grandfather, he’s still tweaking and modernising whatever comes his way
Island upbringing Steve grew up on a tiny sideways comma of an island that protects the inner harbour of Marion, Massachusetts, from Buzzards Bay. ‘If you could do it on a boat my dad did it on a boat,’ he says. ‘I don’t remember learning to sail’ or rather, ‘I don’t remember ever not knowing how. ‘But at probably age nine I was pretty much off the leash. I could take any boat that we had, any day of the year, and go sailing. It could be the middle of winter, and my mother would say, don’t get wet. It could be blowing 40mph in March. It wasn’t even a question of asking; you just went.’ When he was about 15 he took the
family’s 40-footer out with a bunch of friends for an overnight race around Buzzards Bay. Afterwards he remembers
his mother saying, ‘It’s a little bit more complicated than you thought, isn’t it?’ ‘I loved the fact that there was always
more to figure out.’ He learned to work on boats too. ‘Mostly fibreglass, with poly- ester resin. And screws and bolts and nuts. But even then my brother used to give me constant shit about customising things.’ What he wasn’t good at was structured
education: ‘I sucked at school. If you haven’t figured out, it’s ADD, and they didn’t know about that. Well, actually, they did know about it…’ And we’re off on an opinionated historical tour of Attention Deficit Disorder, which he claims was dis- covered just up the road from his prep school many years before he was born. (I didn’t take the time to fact-check that one!). ‘I was a good boy. We’d come home
from school, have a cup of tea, I’d go upstairs to my room and try to sit at a desk – and be unable to do my homework. They had these parent awareness slips: Stevie hasn’t done his homework. I’d take one home every night, and my mother and father would bawl me out. And I keep get- ting them, and they keep bawling me out.’ But ‘My mother was action-packed
with issues… one of the things that you couldn’t tell her was that there was
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