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Advance Praise
“This novel keeps alive not only the memory of my brother, but the vitality of his huge talent. I can hear his voice on every page – his quiet and sneaky wit, his wide-armed embrace of life’s wobbliest characters, and his heartfelt fascination with why good people make the wildly improbable choices they do.”
— Carl Hiaasen, best-selling author and brother of Float Plan’s author
FLOAT PLAN
FLOAT PLAN
Rob Hiaasen
Copyright © 2018 by Rob Hiaasen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission from the publisher (except by reviewers who may quote brief passages).
First Edition
Casebound ISBN: 978-1-62720-199-5
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-62720-200-8
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62720-201-5
Printed in the United States of America
Design by Apprentice House Press
Edited by Carmen Machalek
Cover photo, titled “Sid Skiff,” by Ingrid Taylar, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Published by Apprentice House Press
Apprentice House Press
Loyola University Maryland
4501 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21210
410.617.5265 • 410.617.2198 (fax)
www.ApprenticeHouse.com
“A float plan lets your family and friends know your whereabouts…
should a trip come to grief.”
— BoatUS
“The only joy in the world is to begin.”
— Cesare Pavese
Foreword
I knew what my husband was up to.
We’d be decompressing from our work weeks, chatting over Friday night wine on the deck or in the family room. I’d lodge my latest complaint about the bureaucracy of public education, and suddenly he’d plant his glass and grab pen and paper (often a New Yorker cover or subscription post card tucked inside the magazine).
“Say that again,” he’d say.
He’d flare his left eyebrow and scribble my line, then swing right back into our conversation. Another piece of string for his novel, Float Plan.
While this book fulfills one of Rob’s lifelong dreams (he called it a preoccupation that haunted him in a journal he kept for our then infant son Ben in 1989), Rob’s wish with Float Plan was simple. He hoped to craft a touching yet comic story about a man who loses his footing in life when his wife up and leaves, a story that reflected the ambiance of Annapolis and conveyed truths about our common struggle to love and to adapt to disappointment and sudden change.
Of course, the task of writing such a book was not so simple. He spent nearly a decade drafting Float Plan, gathering string from observations at work and his private life, then revising and re-revising in hopes of producing something marketable. With a hellish weekday commute to Annapolis from our northern Baltimore County home, weekends proved to be essential writing opportunities.
Permit me to set the scene. Saturday mornings as I awoke to coffee and a short stack of high school English papers to grade in the kitchen, I’d hear Rob on his laptop in the living room, tapping out his narrative. We were a dining room apart yet together in spirit, attending to work that mattered to us, still mindful of the need for the restorative properties of a weekend together. Saturday morning independent work sessions typically yielded to some joint chore (trip to Lowe’s for hydrangeas) followed by something more fun (biking on the NCR Trail at Gunpowder Falls State Park followed by dinner at his favorite rib joint). Sunday mornings, Rob would return to his writing, making the most of the solitude I generously provided him as I fed my weekly Wegmans addiction.
There’s an imprint of our pattern in Rob’s two main characters, Will Larkin and Parker Cool. But, I offer that level of domestic detail in hopes of explaining that while Rob pursued writing this novel passionately, he was not a workaholic. He never demanded time sequestered in separate writer’s quarters. He valued our marriage and our family too much for that. Instead, he seized and used creative writing opportunities when and where he found them, filling moleskin notebooks with reporterly observations and writing whenever he could.
As one of Rob’s close friends told me recently, “Rob had it all figured out. He knew what was important in life.” It sounds a little pat, yet it rings true. Through decades of marriage, parenting, and career chasing, Rob believed people, relationships, and emotions mattered. The reporters and students he mentored saw it. I hope readers will see it here, particularly in the way Rob injects the value of poetry into this novel.
I should note that in typical Norwegian fashion, Rob was largely stoic and determined to achieve his goal of completing a successful work of fiction. But not always. He’d spend months not talking about the book, and then reveal the contents of a candid emailed critique he had solicited. A time or two, he even announced that he wanted to quit the book all together. Weeks or months would pass. Sure enough, I’d hear him back in that living room, tinkering with the portrayal of his protagonist, Will, the math teacher challenged to face the reality that not every problem can be solved by a tried and true formula.
“So, what makes Will Larkin happy?” asks Parker Cool, the woman he is drawn to after his wife ditches him.
“When life adds up.”
“How’s that been working out for you?”
“Not tops.”
Indeed. Early on, Will’s misguided (and farcical) reaction to his wife’s rejection lands him in trouble with the local authorities (There’s a chainsaw involved along with serious property damage.) Later, Will loses his classroom to a fledgling teacher and must “float” to the classes he teaches. Before long, his challenges include adjusting to life with his new girlfriend’s child and his father’s Alzheimer’s disease.
Of course, nobody would take a chainsaw to a neighbor’s property in frustration over a broken marriage. But isn’t it tempting to laugh at such ridiculous options even as we pursue the sublime responses to life’s vicissitudes? Rob – in touch with his inner child, and I have the silly emails to prove it – certainly thought so. No doubt, he adopted this attitude as he struggled with his own disappointments (toiling over a book that didn’t seem to be going anywhere and losing his father as a teenager, to name a few).
I may be scaring you into thinking this is a dark or maudlin novel. Rob, practical optimist and avowed romantic, would never have written such a book. Two of his sayings come to mind as I reread Float Plan. One is, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” which Rob probably remembered from John Lennon’s song “Beautiful Boy” in 1980. Obviously, what I’ve described already qualifies Will as living proof of this maxim.
Another of Rob’s favorite sayings is a line he repeated often during our 33 years together, one he wrote in the journal he kept for our youngest child, Hannah: “The purpose of life is to give birth to yourself.” I believe Dickens’ David Copperfield inspired that one, and I know Rob held it close to his heart. In the bedside notes for his novel, he actually wrote, “Will wants to succeed at being myself” (sic). The mistake in the reflexive pronoun is a telling