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    No Fixed Destination: Eleven Stories of Life, Love, Travel (Townsend 11 Vol 1)
    No Fixed Destination: Eleven Stories of Life, Love, Travel (Townsend 11 Vol 1)
    No Fixed Destination: Eleven Stories of Life, Love, Travel (Townsend 11 Vol 1)
    Ebook116 pages3 hours

    No Fixed Destination: Eleven Stories of Life, Love, Travel (Townsend 11 Vol 1)

    By Townsend 11

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    About this ebook

    This collection of 11 personal essays, memoirs, and true stories from Townsend 11, a group of award-winning writers, takes readers on emotional journeys and adventures from California to Croatia to China and back, Ethiopia to Egypt, England to New England, and Hawaii to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Laugh out loud on a family camping trip with an irascible dad, travel down the Nile and through history, take a hilarious and poignant peek inside the airline industry, race a motorcycle across a Chinese desert. You’ll discover a hidden lake Jane Austen would have loved, feel the bittersweet memories of a summer romance turned dangerous, meet an inspirational woman gifted with wisdom, courage, and boundless love, chortle at the funny case of mother-daughter mistaken identity, and enjoy the misadventures of a dog trainer training a chicken. A Peace Corps Volunteer decides not to embrace a unique man and a strange country forever. A daughter bonds with her father. Life. Love. Travel. Humor. Lessons Learned. If you like to read the stories published in Travelers’ Tales, Lonely Planet, and other creative nonfiction anthologies, you’ll love No Fixed Destination. The following Townsend 11 writers have contributed their works to No Fixed Destination: Jennifer Baljko, Carol Beddo, Jacqueline Collins, John Dalton, Larry Habegger, Dana Hill, Barbara Robertson, Bonnie Smetts, Jacqueline Yau, Bill Zarchy, and Y.J. Zhu. For more information, visit our website: Townsend11.com.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTownsend 11
    Release dateAug 12, 2011
    ISBN9781609520601
    No Fixed Destination: Eleven Stories of Life, Love, Travel (Townsend 11 Vol 1)
    Author

    Townsend 11

    Townsend 11 is a collective of eleven writers (including one who’s been living in Barcelona for several years) who meet monthly in a converted brick warehouse on Townsend Street in San Francisco. We are committed to sharing stories that enlighten, entertain, and inspire. Our work is an eclectic mix that has been widely published in major magazines, newspapers, and books, and has earned numerous awards. Now, in this age of e-books, we’re launching a series of works to engage you.

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      Book preview

      No Fixed Destination - Townsend 11

      No Fixed Destination

      by

      Townsend 11

      11 Stories of Life, Love, Travel

      Copyright © 2011 Townsend 11

      ISBN: 978-1-60952-060-1

      Smashwords Edition

      Contents

      Introduction

      Larry Habegger

      Feet Up on the Dash

      Airline Stories

      Dana Hill

      Choices Rejected

      Carol Beddo

      Finding My Rock

      Jennifer Baljko

      Summer Paramour

      Bill Zarchy

      The Ladies Pond on Hampstead Heath

      Jacqueline Collins

      Living Well, Dying Gracefully

      Lessons from Aunt Marlis

      John Dalton

      Just Us Chickens

      Barbara Robertson

      Day Use Only

      Bonnie Smetts

      The Age-Defying Benefits of Exercise

      Jacqueline Yau

      Taklamakan Desert Moon Ride

      Y.J. Zhu

      Up a Lazy River

      The Nile reveals glimpses of ancient and modern Egypt

      Larry Habegger

      Acknowledgments

      About Townsend 11

      Introduction

      Townsend 11: Writers Telling Stories of Life, Love, Travel

      Larry Habegger

      One truth about people is we all love stories. Hearing about the experiences of others, whether from their travels or daily lives or reflections on their past, can enlighten and delight us. We seek these interactions every day in our encounters with friends, the mail carrier, the people we see as we make our usual rounds.

      Stories can be the simplest things. For instance, in August 2004 I was heading into the Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference a little frazzled because I was late. Halfway across the parking lot, I had the thought that I’d forgotten to turn off my headlights after driving through the morning fog. I retreated far enough to see that my taillights appeared to be off, then turned to head into the bookstore when a wave caught my eye. A woman making her way through the lot approached and said, Do you know your lights are on?

      I thanked her, hurried back to my car, shut off the lights, and knew I’d been saved from an enormous hassle at the end of the long day. The woman had disappeared, but I soon saw her again in my morning session on writing the personal essay. And, of course, that wasn’t the end of the story.

      Barbara Robertson impressed me with her quick grasp of concepts, her easy participation in discussions, and her writing talent. Little did I know that I’d be discussing her writing with her year after year, and now seven years later, we’d still be at it.

      This is Townsend 11: eleven writers (including one who’s been living in Barcelona for several years) who meet monthly in a converted brick warehouse on Townsend Street in San Francisco and are committed to sharing stories that enlighten, entertain, and inspire. Our work is eclectic, we have been widely published in major magazines and newspapers and books, we have won numerous awards, and now in this age of e-books we’re launching a series of works to engage you. In No Fixed Destination you’ll take a trip down the Nile, peek behind the curtains of the airline industry, suffer through the chill of the Ethiopian rainy season, find summer love and learn that it comes with a price; you'll try to train a chicken, pass yourself off as your mother, race a motorcycle on the world’s most demanding endurance course in China’s Taklamakan Desert, and much more.

      Later in the same conference, I met Bonnie Smetts and Jennifer Baljko. Bonnie was in my small group session on editing and impressed me with her artful commentary. Jennifer participated in my personal essay sessions and sparkled, not just with enthusiasm but also intelligence and ideas. The year before, I’d met Bill Zarchy when he queried me on some pieces, one of which I later published as an Editors’ Choice on the Travelers’ Tales website. Seeing that we were both Dartmouth grads, I asked if he’d like to meet for coffee sometime; we did, and soon after, he joined my original writers group. His writing was always fluid, insightful, and entertaining.

      As these people came into my life, I began to pick them out as writers I’d love to bring into the writers groups that I was starting each year after the conference. I didn’t actively recruit them but was pleased when they signed up, and I got tremendous satisfaction from helping them hone their craft.

      John Dalton came at the recommendation of Barbara and Bonnie. He had a large portfolio of photo work and many stories of adventures in the outdoors that he began to share with enthusiasm and skill. Jacqueline Yau gravitated to the group from the corporate world where her creativity was channeled into marketing. I knew from publishing one of her stories at Travelers’ Tales that she could be very funny and I soon learned that she had a superb capacity to write from the heart. Jacqueline Collins attended one of my one-day seminars and responded to an email I sent announcing a new advanced class. To it she brought soulful tales of England and elsewhere, and a young-readers novel that still has me on the edge of my seat.

      Dana Hill attended my morning session at a later Book Passage conference, and one day, long after, when I was extraordinarily busy, sent me an email asking if I’d give her some feedback on a story. My impulse at the time was to ignore the message until later, but for some reason I didn’t. I took a deep breath, thought about my sessions at the conference, and decided to read her story and send her a few thoughts. I found her piece entertaining and wistful, and the experience created a friendship that continues to this day.

      Carol Beddo snagged me a few years ago with her taut, evocative, and poignant writing about her time in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia in the 1960s. Her work began to appear in Travelers’ Tales books, and one day she asked if she could join my writers group. Of course I was delighted to bring her aboard.

      Y.J. Zhu signed up for one of my workshops a few years ago. A Beijing native who immigrated to the U.S. in her teens, she had never taken any sort of writing class and her first piece was rough in its language but compelling in its ideas. Quickly I began to see that she had an agile, curious, and intellectual mind, and mostly what she needed was help cleaning up her English. Soon her ideas and experiences began to flow brilliantly onto the page.

      Seven years now the core members of this group and I have been meeting to share and discuss our work. We started with straight travel essays and over time explored many genres, from memoir to humor to young-adult fiction to literary fiction. And we are exploring them still.

      In my almost 20 years as executive editor at the award-winning publishing company Travelers’ Tales, I’ve read thousands of essays and published many hundreds. We always seek out the best stories to publish, and this collection fits the pattern. I take pride in presenting this inaugural volume of work from Townsend 11, a collection of fresh, engaging stories filled with heart and wisdom.

      Feet Up on the Dash

      Airline Stories

      Dana Hill

      The queen’s eyes glittered with amusement and, yes, malice as she circled the tall thin man in the blue-checkered jacket. He lowered his chiseled face, looking down with obvious discomfort, and she knew she had guessed right. He was one of those. Slowly and deliberately she reached into her elaborate headdress and withdrew a long plumed feather. She smiled as she reached toward him, writhing with delight and cooing seductively. The air reeked with her perfume.

      It was Friday night at SFO and the drag queens were on their way to Vegas for the weekend. Working girls, they arrived for every Friday’s 5:00 p.m. flight dressed to kill in glitter and feathers and spike heels, wearing at least a pound of makeup. Their spirits were high, anticipating a lucrative assault on the City of Sin. Now one of them was assaulting our supervisor Dieter, a stoic German with a limited sense of humor concerning his dignity.

      Should we start boarding? I spoke quietly to Dieter, trying not to smile as the queen’s feather caressed his chin. It was fifteen minutes early for boarding.

      "Ja, he replied through tight jaws. Let’s get these girls out of town." He hadn’t failed to notice the curious grins of our other passengers, nor our colleagues rushing into the back room to guffaw out of his line of sight. A flush of red crept up his neck.

      * * *

      In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I worked at the airport ticket counter and departure gates for a major airline at San Francisco International Airport. Guiding customers through the ticketing and boarding process was a truly stressful job, and that was even before security lines and terrorists using airplanes as weapons became a reality. Most people were afraid to fly to start with. Add to that the stress of getting to the airport on time, maneuvering the labyrinthine parking

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