© Scott Huler
NPR correspondent Scott Huler’s fifth book No Man’s Lands: One Man’s Odyssey Through The Odyssey hit the book stores in April and received rave reviews from the press. Following the author’s travel adventure as he aims to repeat Odysseus’s every step, No Man’s Lands teaches us that we can plan how our journey begins, but we can never know how it will end.
“Huler tells the story in a breezy, entertaining style, deftly mixing historical and literary backstory with what happens on the road, making us laugh while introducing us to places we’ve never seen and people we’ve never met (but with whom we somehow feel connected). Recommend this one highly to fans of adventure memoirists like Bill Bryson and Tim Cahill.”
-David Pitt, starred review in Booklist
To learn more about Scott Huler’s journey, the best moment on the trip, good things about traveling alone, his future project and what places he’d like to see, read on!
E.J: When did you get the idea to write No Man’s Lands?
S.H: I got the idea to make the trip after I fell in love with the Odyssey. Comparing the Odyssey with James Joyce’s Ulysses had by that point become almost a full-time obsession with me, and I suddenly realized that though every year people go to Dublin to retrace the steps of Bloom and Dedalus from Ulysses, you never heard of people doing the same with Odysseus. So it sounded suitably ridiculous, and I decided to do it. As for writing about it, I’m a writer, so whenever I get involved in something like this I usually end up writing about it in one way or another.
E.J: Why do you think people regularly retell the story of the Odyssey?
S.H: I think it turns out to be the fundamental human story: a guy is one place and he wants to be someplace else, and it takes everything he has — and help unlooked for — to get there. Isn’t that everybody’s story? He misses his wife, misses his kid, hates his boss, hates his job, has an awful commute (it takes him ten years to get home!). That sounds like the world I live in, right? So I think we return to this story over and over because time after time when we go there it has something new to tell us.
One of the things I loved most about the research, rather than the travel, portion of this project was seeing how many of the episodes in the Odyssey show up in culture after culture: the clever guy outwits the man-eating giant; the dreadful dilemma; the witch who holds the hero in sexual thrall; the helpful god in disguise. These stories are like dandelions: they grow wild, and wherever people are, versions of those stories show up. So the Odyssey pulls them together and gives them to us all on one riot of a bouquet. What’s not to retell?
E.J: What was the best part of your journey and why?
S.H: People always ask about the best moment on the trip, and I usually try to say something about the moment I kayaked out into the Strait of Messina, between Scylla and Charybdis, or tell the story of how on the isle of Aeolus (in my case Vulcano, in the Aeolian chain north of Sicily), like Odysseus I asked for help and got more than I bargained for (he got that bag full of wind; I got a bed and breakfast from two girls in bikini tops).
But the more I look back on the trip, a moment that for some reason stands out for me was really the first or second night of my travels. I had taken a little van to Troy and back, and I had an evening to kill in Canakkale, the little Turkish town right on the Dardanelles. There was some kind of celebration going on in town, so there were street vendors and lights, people milling this way and that, but I made my way out to the jetty and sat on the rocks, dangling my feet in the Dardanelles. People have been fighting over that channel since the dawn of time (the Trojan War and the battle of Gallipoli are only the most famous examples), and to be sitting there, watching the sun sink into the Mediterranean, my feet in the same waters that have hypnotized people for millennia … I don’t know. It just gave me chills. I can’t say I felt Odyssean, and my trip had barely started, but maybe with the thrill of seeing Troy earlier in the day I was just open to everything. My whole journey lay before me, and I just remember that happy moment.
Italian Coast © Scott Huler
E.J: How did it feel to travel such a long distance on your own? Did you ever doubt your decision?
S.H: I doubted my decision constantly. I had left my pregnant wife back home, and my self-conscious pilgrimage often felt ridiculous and preposterous — yet by committing to it I had made a decision, and I determined to stick with that commitment, which is I guess a variation of what we do with any commitment: marriage, a job, a softball team, a rock band. It’s always easier to give up — that’s why finishing something, anything, feels so remarkable.
As for traveling alone, I have loved traveling on my own since I started doing it in college. You can get a bit lonely, and you have to be so cautious about the sudden best friends you always seem to make when you’re obviously independent and far from home, but traveling alone is tremendously freeing. You walk all day, going wherever you like, eating what and when you like, visiting whatever you wish. You stay in town as long as you care to, and when you leave you go wherever you think you should go next. You can feel truly unanchored, which is both a good and a bad thing, though I think that feeling of absolute uncertainty of what would happen next is what I went out seeking. So I was glad to find it.
E.J: Was the trip like you imagined it would be?
S.H: Actually, given that once I had determined to take the trip my wife suddenly became pregnant, so I had to basically rush out the door like my hair was on fire, I never got a chance to imagine what the trip would be like.
Before I was sure I would go I imagined it would take years of research and interview and then several trips of a few weeks each, so in that way the trip was nothing like my imagination: I had only a month or so to get ready, and then it was get busy, get moving, and get home. Just the same, I think that actually proved valuable. By being so uncertain and ill-prepared I had a trip much more like that of Odysseus, who was, after all, going from place to place with no clear sense of where he was going or what he was doing. That’s sure how I felt most of the time, waking up on some night train from some-damn-where to some-damn-where-else, and just thinking, “What on earth have you gotten yourself into now?” That felt very Odyssean.
E.J: What will you write about next?
S.H: My next book is about infrastructure — pipes and wires and roads and bridges and tubes and reservoirs and pipelines and so forth. I’ll start with my own yard and follow upstream to find out where my fresh water comes from, my electricity, gas, and so forth, and also look downstream to see what happens to wastewater, garbage, storm water, and so on. I’m after context for all these incredible systems that make our lives so absurdly convenient.
E.J: If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?
S.H: If I haven’t been there, I’d like to go there. I haven’t yet seen Australia or New Zealand. I’ve missed Eastern Europe. I haven’t seen Venice. St. Petersburg. Japan. Singapore. Jakarta. Most of Africa and South America. Plus, in the U.S.A., I still need to see Alaska and North Dakota, to say nothing of Utah (I was only in the Salt Lake City airport, so that one may not count). Odysseus felt done when he finished his travels. Not me. I still have a long way to go.
Editor’s Note: For more pictures and information of Scott Huler’s journey, visit www.scotthuler.com.
You can purchase your own copy of No Man’s Lands: One Man’s Odyssey Through The Odyssey through Amazon.
