Thirty years ago, I had a nifty big house on Hamburg Cove, on the Connecticut River near Lyme. My daughter Ranie got married at the old Congregational Church, across the harbor. I rowed her over in this lovely Whitehall Skiff and her new husband rowed her back. Today, that same skiff is out in the exercise barn, up here in the Berkshires, next to all The Practical Navigator stuff… such skiffs are prominent in the book. Using the past, man … the novelist’s raw material. I wallow in it, with pleasure.