After a long dusty day in the summer’s sun, we found ourselves at the local watering hole. It was a seedy, downtown joint that looked bad and smelled worse. The coarsely textured walls and acoustic ceiling were nicotine yellow, the carpet stained with the excesses of one, two or three too many; the scarred bar top reminded many of high school detention. We loved it there; it felt like that home-away-from-home we long for.
We were nursing a couple of icy cold beers at the bar and addressing, if not actually solving, many of the world’s problems. For a moment, the subject turned to the spate of new houses—mansions, really—that were springing up all over this picture-perfect part of Southwest Montana.
At the turn of the last century it seemed like everybody with a stock broker and an unrelenting memory of A River Runs Through It wanted a 20- or 40-acre piece of paradise they could call their own—with or without a stretch of blue-ribbon trout stream.
Many, if not most of those country palaces were handsomely crafted from hand-hewn logs and reclaimed barn wood, and each would become a second, third or fourth residence for their owners to call home for a week or two each year. While it created a construction boom that benefited the local economy—jobs for the trades, suppliers, equipment operators and artisans, as well as various members of the service industry—it also parceled lands that knew no boundaries or fences only a generation or two back.
This big-monied movement far out-paced any desire for a little cabin in the woods, a lakeside cottage, or even a pied-à-terre in some exotic distant city where business or pleasure might frequently beckon…Prague, Florence, Lisbon, Des Moines.
My friend in this discussion was a retired pharmacist who referred to himself as a drug dealer. He was a funny guy, elfin-like in looks and demeanor. He zoomed enthusiastically around town on a red Vespa. I used to tell him that he was my favorite Republican. He never reciprocated the sentiment. Perhaps there were Democrats he liked better.
“I have a favorite picture,” my friend offered as he took another swig from the long-necked bottle. “It hangs on a wall in our living room and I get to look at that picture every day when I come home. If I had other homes, I don’t know where I’d hang that picture.”
Despite our political differences, the drug dealer and I shared a profound concern for the plight of the desperately rich. We worried about their well-being and fretted about the art work that might decorate their walls.
We ordered another round and wondered aloud: How does one manage two, three, four properties? The bills, the taxes, the upkeep and maintenance present challenges that must be overwhelming in both scope and execution.
We shook our heads, wiped away a tear and downed the beer.
Sadly, my drug-dealing friend and I never got around to addressing the serious issues of yacht management.
He passed away without ever hearing the name Betsy DeVos, although he was probably familiar with Amway, the company that created the concept of “multi-level marketing” to be the euphemistic replacement for “pyramid scheme.”
The DeVos family, whose patriarch founded Amway in 1959, is widely credited with honing a sales concept that calls for the subcontracted manufacture of nutrition, beauty and household cleaning products (all of which need frequent replenishing) to be vended by an unpaid sales force (20,000 strong as of this writing) whose only chance at profit is to expand the sales force by recruiting salespeople who report to (and pay) them. The concept is so confusing that thousands buy into it just because they have no idea what’s happening but are convinced that they will be part of the one percent who succeed. They probably won’t be.
The DeVos family has done well with this scheme for almost 60 years. The family’s net worth of $5.3 billion is ranked somewhere in the top-100 of America’s richest families. The company ranks thirtieth in the U.S. with annual sales in the neighborhood of $10 billion.
Betsy, the current administration’s Secretary of Education who wants our current system of public education to be supplanted by a Christian doctrine that seems to have little to do with Christianity, married into the DeVos family and has become the reigning matriarch of a clan that owns 10 yachts, all of which sail under the Grand Cayman flag to avoid paying American taxes.
The fact that her family owns 10 yachts did not come up during her confirmation hearings which, as you might remember, were so fiercely contested that for the first time in American history the vice president had to cast the deciding vote in a cabinet appointment.
We first learned of Secretary DeVos’s yacht when her $40 million, 163-foot-long boat, SeaQuest, was set adrift from its moorings at Lake Erie’s Huron Boat Basin, a not-so-exclusive (as yacht people go) parking lot for boats just west of Cleveland.
I’ve only known a few people who have owned yachts—few meaning exactly three. I like(d) each of them a lot and admire their hard-earned success. I also like the concept of yachts and yachting. It seems like a comfortable way to explore the world.
Despite their vast wealth, the DeVos family lacks imagination when it comes to yacht placement. I mean, really…Cleveland, aka, the Mistake by the Lake? One can only guess the reason behind that decision. Maybe it’s because it’s just a short helicopter (the family owns two of them) ride from their home on Lake Macatawa in Holland, Michigan, where yet another yacht is kept.
I’ve spent several hours thinking about how to help Betsy find more exotic locations for her family’s remaining eight yachts.
Stateside, I would opt for Newport Beach, California. It’s full of Betsy’s political types and features one of the largest recreational boating harbors on the West Coast. The city hosts an impressive Christmas Boat Parade that dates back to 1908.
The Caribbean comes to mind next. The closest I’ve been to the million-square-mile area is Miami, which I didn’t really like. But among the 7,000-plus islands dotting the region, there is no shortage of opportunity for the adventures one could pursue from a yacht of almost any size. The climate is nice, except during the six-month-long hurricane season. No place is perfect, but three of her yachts could find homes in Nicaragua, Havana and Puerto Rico.
A few years ago Geri and I spent a week in Rapallo, Italy, a town of about 30,000 south of Genoa on the Ligurian Coast. From our hotel balcony we could see then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s yacht moored in the middle of the harbor. There are lots of yachts there, but the little basin paled by comparison to Portofino, a quaint fishing village at the end of a peninsula south of Rapallo, where no fisherman could ever afford to live.
We spent an afternoon there, mostly marveling at how much money some people are willing to spend on such luxury items as coffee. $8 for a shot of espresso seemed a bit steep in 2010, as it does now. I know it’s no Cleveland, but I think Betsy and her clan would love it there.
If Geri had her druthers, she’d have a sailing yacht in Seychelles, an archipelago of 115 islands some 900 miles off the east coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean. It looks pleasant enough. The weather is a constant 85 degrees and it rains an average of 85 inches a year. Being out in the middle of the ocean, as it were, the diet is pretty much limited to seafood, which Geri refuses to eat, although she claims to like the shrimp cocktail at the Lakeside Golf Club in Toluca Lake, California. I don’t know if Betsy likes seafood.
Yacht number seven belongs in Saint-Tropez on the French Riviera, just because anybody who is anybody needs to spend quality yacht time there.
Mostly because I’m fond of Greek food and culture (Zorba the Greek is on my top-10 list of favorite movies), yacht number eight belongs in Santorini, one of the Cyclades islands in the Aegean Sea. I’ve never been there, but it looks nice. I’m sure Betsy and the clan could find something about it that would remind them of Cleveland.
Grilled Swordfish
4, 6-ounce swordfish steaks, about 1” thick
½ cup extra virgin olive oil
Strained fresh juice of two lemons
1 Tb. chopped fresh oregano
Salt and pepper, to taste
Whisk together the oil, lemon juice, oregano, salt and pepper.
Add swordfish steaks and marinate for 30 minutes.
Prepare grill and, when hot, char the steaks for about four minutes per side.
Serve with parslied rice and wedges of fresh lemon.
Photography by Courtney A. Liska