After attending the 16th Annual Travel Writer’s Conference at Book Passage (bookstore) in Corte Madera, CA in August, 2007:
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 at the Presidio taking a 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, spiritual warriors and seekers came for a dose of enlightenment. 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 jostling tram, taking it 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 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 company of some 125 travel writers 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.
