No Man’s Lands, by Scott Huler
mark beyer
Who hasn’t at least begun reading Homer’s classic epical adventure, The Odyssey? Even if you never finished, the reward is some of the best narrative you can find in literature. Sure there’s some repetition (the oft-spoke lines “the sun’s rose-tipped fingers rose above the horizon” are as indelible to my mind as the Our Father is to a Catholic), and Odysseus (Ithaca’s island king who fights for the Greeks at Troy ten long years) doesn’t even appear until near-midway through the damned story. Yet the wit Odysseus displays in his methods of escaping island captors, or cheating death over and over, is to understand just how effective story can be to our imaginations once the bubble in which we live is popped.
If you’ve traveled to Greece, or just around the Mediterranean, you’ll have come upon “sites” that claim, pretty much, “Odysseus slept here!” In fact, entire travel troops devote itineraries to tracking the path that Odysseus tread from Troy following the end of the war (chronicled, of course, in Homer’s The Iliad) back to Ithaca — a ten-year journey interrupted by sea-storms, shipwrecks, the deaths of many of O’s shipmate-warriors, fights with Cyclops, and several hostage situations where Odysseus was held captive by goddess-nymphs for their, eh-hem, pleasure.
The rub to tracking Odysseus’s home-bound adventure is not that we today don’t know quite sure of his path, but that there exists far too many routes proposed by historians, writers, self-described Odyssey sages, and just plain folk, past and present. In fact (again!) some historians interpret clues to the named islands and stop-off points in the story that lead them far afield from the Troy-to-Ithaca geography we can today simply trace our fingers across a standard globe. Frenchman Gérard Pillot wrote with certainty that Ogygia, the island on which Calypso held O captive, was Iceland. Other theorists claimed Ogygia lay in Romania (as too went its theory that The Odyssey was a land journey)—or Ogygia lay in the Indian Ocean, or north of Scotland, or off Portugal in the Atlantic, or even in Japan.
Author Scott Huler gives us this back story in No-Man’s Lands, his own epic tale of travel as he retraces O’s shipwreck-to-hostage trek, along with finely honed analysis of The Odyssey, wrapped in humor, guile, and a true adventurer’s spirit. Huler’s wit serves him greatly throughout his journey, a trekking adventure that is half homage to Homer’s tale, half sightseeing adventure to stand where Odysseus is claimed to have stood, with a lot of travel narrative potpourri thrown in that makes the book enjoyable to read. Of this route controversy, Huler opines,
To understand the cynics’ view, imagine bringing the same zeal to a search for the sites Dorothy visited in The Wizard of Oz. People searching for the “real” Munchkinland would gather data on Kansas tornado frequency, speed, and direction […]; they would estimate the weight and aerodynamics of Dorothy’s house; and they would claim that Munchkinland had thus got be … exactly, just … here.
With an agreeable authorial voice, set within easy prose, Huler proves once again that a travel narrative is (almost) all about tangents: veering from the path while maintaining the general direction, so finally getting to Point B or C — or to X and Y — with your wits intact. And Huler needs all the wiliness one can bring on a trip, because he determined to visit each of the fourteen stops that Odysseus describes. From Turkey (the site of Troy) to North Africa, Malta to Corsica, and Rome to a little rock in the Aegean Sea, Huler scuttles up dusty paths to see ruins, over sandy beaches to find a cave, through teeming Athens streets and pleasure cruise dining rooms, in these places we learn the lessons that Huler learns as a go-as-you-are backpacker, the same lessons Odysseus learned as shipwrecked visitor and captive to isolated points on the map.
Along the way, Huler gives us full doses of The Odyssey story and how it relates to the place he’s at, and the people he meets. In Malta, the “navel of the Mediterranean,” Huler finds a place so remote that he doesn’t have to wonder why Odysseus is homesick or cries on the beach looking out to see, far from Ithaca. Nevertheless Huler speaks with a Maltese, Narcy, who is more interested in asking questions about Huler’s travels than in talking about the history of his island home: ‘You have to understand,’ Narcy said, ‘we live on an island. We wait for people like you.’” This is the same lesson we learn from Calypso’s desire to keep Odysseus with her for seven years: “He was somebody to talk to, somebody new, somebody fresh.”
There are lots of asides to this story—Huler’s and Odysseus’s. We learn about Mentor, Odysseus’s … well, mentor. In Rome, Huler takes us to the Church of the Immaculate Conception, where as the feel of death is all around him, a monk offers a postcard showing Michelangelo’s fresco where God reaches across space to Adam, giving him life. On Sicily, at Taormina, we find the same cattle described in Book XII as “forbidden cattle”, and a small Duomo whose claim to fame is the thirty-two types of marble used in its façade.
Huler’s imagination is a joy to follow as he follows O’s path:
From the tour of the Gran Cratere I returned to one of the great breakfasts of my life, a breakfast so satisfactory I stood on my chair to look down and take a picture of it. Espresso, with cream and sugar; plums and other fruits; a madeleine; and a huge chocolate croissant with a dusting of cocoa, all arranged on a floral tablecloth by the bikini-clad Rosie, on a table under the tiled breezeway. Odysseus may have received better hospitality during his month with Aeolus, but I couldn’t see how. All you have to do in this world is ask for help—and then, when it’s offered, not blow it.
In the overall, the best lesson of any adventure through every adventurer, is that long-term travel (be it forced or wanted) is for the young, and when it becomes a burden, as it ultimately does, the best place to be for the rest of your life is at home, safe, with your wife and children. It’s the place and attitude for which we all come to yearn. Each of these lessons shows basic human feelings, all the more poignant if looked through the lens of history vis-á-vis Odysseus: in his time war, famine, disease, and death were omnipresent, and often imminent for someone you know.
One thing we can be sure of upon reading The Odyssey and after Huler’s own bracing adventure (and even perhaps the great adventure you have taken—and survived!): adventure is as adventure is sought. Huler had one hell of a ride, to which we should all be so lucky. And if you’ve yet to strike out on your lonesome, count this book as one you’ll read before embarking on that odyssey.
No Man’s Lands, by Scott Huler
Crown Books
286 pages, $24.95
