About the Author
Peter S. Sanford
Writing is not my first career. It is my third career after full careers as a journeyman cabinetmaker and industrial energy engineer. In truth, writing should have been my first career, scaling the academic ladder in literature like so many good professional writers, but it was not to be. My first "success" as a writer was an essay published in a local newspaper when I was a sophomore in high school. It talked about the role of our town, Roswell, Georgia in the Civil War for the town's centennial celebration.
I loved doing the research for that article, interviewing descendants of the residents of antebellum homes and pouring over old references. A second essay appeared in a local Corvallis, Oregon newspaper in 2019 about why Atlanta, Georgia did not burn during the civil disobedience of 1964. I have been writing mostly for myself all along but now I am pursuing it as a career with as much gusto as I did pursuing cabinetmaking and industrial energy engineering. But for this career, I am starting with more than a half-century of self-teaching and experimenting with points of view, person, and trying to copy the writing styles of great authors.
I live in Corvallis, Oregon with my wife Susan and cat Freyja. I garden and sing in my church's choir, a basso. I have two sons, both in successful careers of their own, and two gregarious grandchildren. We live simply and read a lot. Freyja seems to like books about mice. And no, I have never sailed on a wind-powered wooden ship.
I read as needed for the project I am researching at the moment. Oftentimes a piece of well-written fiction describes a situation better than non-fiction. Some research is possible on the internet, though not all references there have the necessary provenance.
The Otter Adventure
Did you ever have one of those days when everything, but everything in your life goes to hell at once? In 1842 Bill lost his father suddenly to cholera so he had to leave college, and then he got fired from his brand-new job. His childhood home in Boston was sold to pay overdue bills. He was rapidly running out of money and only had “borrowed” places to sleep. He was desperate. So he did the only logical thing. He shipped out to collect sea otter pelts in Alaska. Not so easy. He was shipwrecked in the remote wilds of Alaska, caught at spear point by Tlingit Indians, captured by a Russian man-o-war, and thrown into its bilge-dungeon. He escaped, sinking the man-o-war, and made it to China to sell the pelts only to be chased by naval officers bent on revenge and murder. In China, he fell in love with Delphinia, daughter of the American Consulate. Then he had a couple of tons of silver and a soon-to-be wife to rush out of China under the noses of local thieves and murderous naval officers out for revenge.
Back in Astoria they came across Indians from the Oregon Country who had lost 95% of their fellow Indians to “white man’s diseases.” The few survivors were desperate, living without adequate shelter off the scraps from the white man’s village. Bill and Delphinia felt compassion for them and worked with the Indians to make an adequate shelter, which quickly grew into a full-blown village. Over time they made friends and found the personal fulfillment they had been looking for all along. They were taught the values of immersion in village life, rituals and sustainable living by the Indians.
However, two groups of “whites” independent of each other were out to steal the fortune in silver, the financial base for the village. Will either of them succeed?