~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Jefferson, being the center of the universe that many of us believe it is, has always produced folks who are legends in their own time. Some of them have been widely famous (George Gallup comes to mind, Doreen Wilber). Most are simply exceptional people who go about their business here with little fanfare but a big following.
One of my favorites is Jane Sorenson, traveler extraordinaire.
Jane has been a model for me to emulate since I was 5 or 6 and she was a lifeguard at our municipal swimming pool in the late 1940s, early ’50s. She was beautiful. She is still beautiful, and she lives such a full life she leaves in her wake a raft of folks half her age who wonder at her energy and derring-do.
Jane has been a traveler since she was little. “My mom couldn’t read a map to save her life,” she said. “So when our family drove to Missouri to visit relatives, I got to sit in the front seat with Dad and follow along with the map, telling him where we were. I never got over maps.”
She and her family traveled in the U.S., to Colorado and throughout the west, and around the country. And then she and her husband traveled, including six weeks in the early days of their marriage spent in Amsterdam to set up a factory.
In 1979, she became a travel agent and started taking people on tour, a natural segue from what had long been her passion.
Jane left earlier this week for her 25th trip to Alaska. She’s been to New Zealand nine times. She’s been on 140 cruises that include the Queen Elizabeth II, the Queen Mary, Vikings line river cruises as well as a river cruise in Peru and a float down the Amazon on a “putt-putt” boat and a canoe to her destination of a stilt house in the watery wilderness. That was the trip on which she took pretty pins as gifts for the natives. “They wore only g-string-like things,” she said with a laugh. “So there was not much room for them to pin my gifts. The chief wanted my tee-shirt, so I thought, ‘Well, nobody here has a lot of clothes on so what difference will it make?’ I took off my tee and gave it to him. He gave me a machete.”
Into her seventh decade of travel, Jane spills stories out casually, with memories of fun shining out of her dark eyes. “I love Burma! Have you been to Vietnam? Oh, Africa. I’ve been there quite a few times. The trip to Sebastopol. . . ! And I can sell Australia to anyone, especially men; they like Australia.
“You know, sometimes people come in to plan a trip and then say, ‘Oh, maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll do this another year.’ I tell them to do it now. Don’t ever wind up old, thinking, ‘If only I’d done this.’ Just do it! Can you imagine staying home and watching TV?”
Her philosophy of her life’s work is this: “It’s about the journey — yours and mine, I tell my clients. We connect with others in other countries. It’s something we can do in this world where we can leave it for the better.”
With so many trips logged, Jane and her traveling charges have experienced the best and the worst; the worst being a death in which she had to convince the captain of the protocol she wanted; lost passports and luggage; crabby and critical and negative folks: “You know, where everything is too cold except the iced tea?” And a campout in the Amsterdam airport when the fallout from an Icelandic volcano grounded planes all over Europe. “We were bound for Greece but eventually just had to come home after five days of sleeping on cots with 3,000 other people.” She was quick to add that most of her clients, Midwesterners, “roll with it,” whatever hardships or inconveniences crop up. “I’m leading them,” Jane said, “so I try to get them to do something they’ve never done or might never do on their own. I’m game for anything and soon they are, too.”
She advises her travelers to limit themselves to small suitcases and not a lot of clothes. “It’s not a dress parade,” she said. “A nice pair of slacks, a good top, a jacket, good shoes. And a smile. A smile goes a long way.”
Jane keeps a quote from Tony Dungy handy, in her notebook, above her desk and in her mind: “It’s about the journey and the lives we can touch, the legacy we can leave and the world we can change for the better.”
Another Jefferson person of importance and goodwill, both at home and abroad — Jane Sorenson, beloved by her followers as she shows us all how to live a legacy, not just leave one.
