Hi Ho!

From the first time I stuck out my thumb at age 14 headed north on the Merritt Parkway out of New York City and found my way seamlessly, after numerous rides, to a teacher’s farmhouse in Northern Vermont, I held a cocky pride in my “great sense of direction.” It took 38 years and several circumnavigations of the globe to have this pretense shot to hell by a short drive from San Francisco International Airport (SFO) to Marin County.

I was familiar with the Bay Area. In 1999 I spent a month living on the forested grounds of the Presidio, at the northwest tip of San Francisco, to take an interesting but pretentiously titled course accredited by Goddard College: “Sustainable Ethical Enterprise Design.” Five years earlier I spent more than a year in Sonoma, just an hour’s drive north of the Golden Gate, managing a 200-acre conference center ranch where, under wide-limbed grandfather oaks, amid colorful organic gardens and in mission-style cottages, I welcomed spiritual warriors and seekers. So I thought I knew my way around when I arrived at SFO and rented a silver-colored PT Cruiser to drive to Book Passage in Corte Madera, on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge, for a four-day Travel Writer’s Conference. No problem.

I didn’t factor in that for the past six years I have lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a 400-year-old city of 70,000 people where sitting through two red lights constitutes a traffic jam and strangers still wave at one another as their cars narrowly pass on winding dirt roads. Even as a real estate broker whose job entails driving all over the county to show property to prospective buyers, I log less than 11,000 miles a year and my car’s computer read-out shows an average speed of 17 m.p.h. I live at a meandering speed, waking to the whooping of raven’s wings and falling asleep to the high-pitched yapping of coyotes in the juniper-dotted valley as they congregate for their nightly feast on a helpless jack rabbit or someone’s unfortunate kitty-cat.

After landing at SFO with a single rolling carry-on bag, I trudged a long corridor to a tram, jostling five stops to the rental cars terminal, then an elevator up and a stairway down and another hike through the dark, low-ceilinged concrete garage, expecting “Deep Throat” to appear from behind a dirty pillar. Once in my car zooming the freeway toward Corte Madera at 65 m.p.h., I realized I was headed south toward Pacifica, not north toward the Golden Gate. I turned around at some overpass, sheepishly considering the adverse impact of the passage of birthdays and, more-philosophically, what is known and knowable, what needs to be learned or re-learned. Disoriented in my new-found humility, and gripping the retro-styled steering wheel to maintain my place amid 5 lanes of bridge traffic, I made my way to the conference and into the welcoming company of more than 100 travel writers, editors and photographers.

I may have lost confidence in my unerring sense of direction, but I gained it in reconnecting to the world of travel writing, a world from which, I thought, I had unwittingly disconnected two decades ago.

Throughout my teens and twenties, devoid of parental supervision, common sense and a safety net, I took off at the slightest enticement of self-support coupled with adventure. This led to a marvelously silly resumé which included modeling for the university art department in Guanajuato, Mexico (no self-respecting Mexican girl could be found), driving a cheese-delivery truck in London (these were the days when English working women were secretaries and nurses and wore sensible shoes, so the East Enders who owned the company were amused that a woman would apply to drive a and gladly paid me 100-quid a week under the table); cooking for eight guys on a herring tender in the Bering Sea (where my vegetarian self learned the difference between a rib, a butt and a breast – from the meat in the freezer, not the fishermen!); bartending at a cavernous, disco ball-lit taverna in Athen’s Plaka (filled with black-suited men emulating John Tavolta in “Saturday Night Fever”); drawing illustrations for Greek textbooks on Crete; painting exterior trim on houses, between rain storms, in Puget Sound; selling carpets in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar; editing American publications to the Queen’s English in Sydney…and that’s just the half of it.

In 1982, attempting to replenish my always-meager reserves, I returned to Alaska for another fishing boat job and discovered the American market had tanked, due to regulations from the Department of Fish and Game and a pervasive “recession” in the Midwest that sent displaced workers in droves to “The Last Frontier” seeking their fortunes. I ended up with a newspaper reporter’s job at a weekly in Seward, the end of the road south from Anchorage. In the days of teletype and linotronics, darkroom photo development and waxed strips of copy, I learned the basics. A year later, I moved to a daily in Kailua-Kona, on the Big Island, as lifestyle and wire-service editor, and a year after that I was an on-air news director at a radio station in Hilo. The unrelated but sequential events of Mauna Loa’s eruption and my older sister’s wedding brought me to Denver, where I landed a job as editor for “Colorado Business” magazine and the following year met David, a handsome, talented home builder whose gift of a new Macintosh computer set me on the road of desktop publishing, before the term was coined.

We bought a sweet log chalet in Evergreen, 20 miles west of Denver, where elk and deer wandered through our aspen-covered acre, and I cried, thinking this was the end of my travels. But larger events, like the savings and loan debacle (remember Neil Bush?) and the oil industry slump of the late 1980’s forced us to sell the house, buy a 30-foot RV and head to California. For three years we worked and traveled the country and into Baja. As always, since I was eight-years-old, I kept journals, and I sent quarterly newsletters, which included correspondence with Noam Chomsky and Sam Keen, to my mailing list of friends around the world.

I loved the compact, efficient living of our remodeled gypsy wagon, our “Mobile Mansion,” but David, who maintained the house-on-wheels, saw it as an “Aluminum Slum” on the days it broke down or when he was frustrated from lack of his workshop and drum set and the roots some people find comforting. So we bought some land in Colorado in 1993, as the economy was turning around, and built a few houses at 10,500-feet elevation, “above the law,” as the local bumper stickers proclaimed. And after three years, with magnificent images of turbulent weather emblazoned in our minds, we moved to where mail and newspapers were delivered to our house, snow removal wasn’t a full-time job and we could walk up a flight of steps without get winded or wind blown.

No sooner had we begun remodeling a tract home on the west side of Colorado Springs, I discovered an internet travel auction site and won a great deal on a trip to Paris. A week later, David, who had never been overseas, and I were in the City of Lights. As a builder, he was overwhelmed by the history, beauty and grandeur. As we returned, our plane descending to the post-war ticky-tack houses of Colorado Springs, he turned to me and asked earnestly, “Can’t we live somewhere more architecturally interesting?”

And so it came to pass that we moved in 2000 to Santa Fe, its distinctive Pueblo architecture impressing with every differentiation of light and cloud, built a beautiful “Santa Fe style” home, started a new business and began traveling once or twice a year “for architecture.” Sydney, Auckland, Barcelona, Florence, Amsterdam have been seen, albeit for an all-too-brief week or two, or month or two. Each trip has been planned to death, as I researched on line, wrote to friends of friends and prepared for the next adventure. And all the while, taking photos and writing essays, I have thought I wasn’t traveling – not nearly as much as I wanted — and I thought I wasn’t writing, just because I didn’t bother to submit anything for publication.

How funny that a missed turn on Hwy 285, driving from SFO to Marin County, could cause me to question not only my sense of direction, but the direction of my life. And just as I simply turned around and arrived safely at the Book Passage Conference, so, in looking back on the years, I found my life has been filled with travel and great stories waiting to be transcribed and shared. Despite a missed turn now and again, I do have a “great sense of direction.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 1st, 2007 at 6:53 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.