Principles of Navigation
Author
Peter W. Fong
Author Bio
Peter W. Fong is a writer, editor, photographer, and fly-fishing guide. His work has appeared in American Fiction, Gray’s Sporting Journal, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Yale Angler’s Journal, and many other publications, including the anthologies In Hemingway’s Meadow (Down East Books), The Best of Seasonable Angler (Fly Fisherman), and Tight Lines (Yale University Press).
He won the 25th Anniversary Fiction Prize from Soundings East magazine and took second place in the 2005 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. He is also the recipient of an individual artist’s fellowship from the Montana Arts Council and a former Moran artist-in-residence at Yellowstone National Park.
Peter graduated from Harvard College with a degree in biology and earned a master of fine arts in creative writing at the University of Montana. Over the past fifteen years, he and his family have lived in Montana, Vermont, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Aruba. He has been head guide at Mongolia River Outfitters (www.mongoliarivers.com) since 2006.
Description
Peter W. Fong’s Principles of Navigation is the winner of the inaugural New Rivers Press Electronic Book Series Competition.
Set in the Florida Keys, the book charts a love story between an aging fishing guide and the childless wife of a track veterinarian and former college athlete. As one New Rivers Press editor remarked, the novel uses the setting so vividly that he wished he could be down in Florida with them instead of stuck back in Minnesota. The story is told from the points of view of both lovers, with forays into the worlds of big-game fishing, professional football, horse racing, and the 1980 Mariel Boatlift.
“Peter Fong’s novel of trouble in paradise is vivid, deft, and absorbing from the get-go. The bluest water has its sharks, and Fong knows where they lurk.” —Deirdre McNamer, author of Red Rover, My Russian, One Sweet Quarrel, and Rima in the Weeds
“A tense and gripping romance simmering in a South Florida pressure cooker of infertility, infidelity, burned out fishing guides, faded football players, and the unsavory back paddocks of for-profit horse racing.” —James R. Babb, editor of Gray’s Sporting Journal
“Wow. Once we started reading we couldn’t put it down! It’s a great story . . . about love, and choices, and – for anyone not here at the time – a vivid chronicle of life in South Florida in the mid to late 1990s.”—Dawne Richards, editor of Pompano Today
Book excerpt
from Chapter 3:
Rigger sat in the passenger seat for the first hundred miles, eating the chicken down to the bone and then tossing the scraps out the sunroof. That was a great feeling: chicken grease on his fingers and lips, the air thick with the salty swamp smell of the Everglades, Jenna with one hand on the wheel, bare shoulder and bare thighs and her belly warm to the touch. When he threw a drumstick it would fly straight up for a moment, then run slam into the slipstream and blow back behind them as if someone had yanked it on a string. Rigger would laugh and Jenna would laugh and maybe lean away from the wheel to kiss him.
At Homestead they stopped to stretch their legs. Rigger watched as Jenna reached toward the sky, both hands clasped over her head like a fighter who has just been declared champion of the world. What there was of her shirt rode high on her breasts and the skin beneath them was smooth and white. She caught him staring at her and smiled. He looked down at the backs of his hands, wrinkled by salt and shellacked by sun—an old fisherman’s hands. He rubbed his face gently, just to test the feel of the old tanned hide, and it was all roughness: hand, cheek, the stubble on his chin.
Jenna didn’t want to drive anywhere near her home in Pompano, so they passed up the Turnpike for the Okeechobee road. They practically floated through the swampy heart of the ’Glades, more water than land. Rigger took the wheel while Jenna napped. He’d wanted to ask her if this was the first time she’d cheated on The Fencepost, but then cheated didn’t seem like the right word. And what did it matter, anyway?
She was still asleep when they got to Lake Okeechobee, thirty miles from the coast at its closest point, but only fourteen feet above sea level. Rigger thought about the weedy, tea-colored water falling fourteen feet to the deck of his boat, and it seemed like they hadn’t gone very far at all. He figured Orlando was three hours away. They would check into a motel tonight, Magic Kingdom tomorrow, and then what?
Jenna opened her eyes for a moment and smiled absently at him. A hollow ache tunneled into his gut, the same ache that he got when the line went slack on a fish and he saw it jump far off, a big fish free in the air, his connection with it a thing of the past.
He considered calling Bally, to let him know what was going on. But what would he tell him? That he’d lost his bearings? That he didn’t know when he’d be back? That he was in love with Bally’s sister and taking her to Disney World?
The sad part was that he didn’t want this ride to end. Not that he thought he deserved it: no matter how you cut it, the knot in his head wasn’t terminal.
Still, when they were past the south shore of Okeechobee, he ignored the sign for Orlando and kept going west. He realized that they should have been heading north, but he didn’t want to turn around and go back. He held his foot to the accelerator, opened his window and gulped the breeze. He was on the wrong road, and the faster he drove, the further they went astray.
Author Website
http://peterwfong.blogspot.com/
