Peter van Arsdale

Vita

Peter Van Arsdale is very good with his hands. A boat builder, massage therapist and Victorian house restorer at one time or another, he now pokes needles into his Berkeley acupuncture patients and also makes lovely violins from virgin old-growth maple and red pine plucked from the icy depths of Lake Superior.

Cut from logs that sank maybe two centuries ago as they were being floated to frontier settlements, the wood -- rot-free because there's almost no oxygen in the cold waters where it was preserved -- has a richness and density rare in younger timber, Van Arsdale says. He recently used this superior Lake Superior wood to carve a fiddle, modeled on a 1693 Stradivarius, for John Sherba of Kronos Quartet.