In the publishing and movie businesses they call it a “high concept” — the idea of walking around the entire Mediterranean Sea following the adventures of Odysseus, Homer’s mythical hero.
That’s exactly what Redding native Joel Stratte-McClure has spent the last 14 years doing, trekking the Mediterranean coasts of Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey and Morocco and writing about it. His first book, with the self-deprecating title “The Idiot and the Odyssey,” was published in 2008; he’s now holed up in west Redding writing volume two.
His love of Greek myths and heroes goes back to an illustrated clothbound book, “Myths and Legends of the Ages,” he read at age eight with its tales of Pandora, Circe, Phaeton, Daedalus and Icarus, Echo and Narcissus.
“I used to run to that book as soon as I got off the school bus,” he remembers. As proof, its well-thumbed pages are stained with what he says is rocky road ice cream.
Life-changing book
Another book that changed his life: Robert Fitzgerald’s classic 1962 translation of “The Odyssey,” bought for $6.95 while Stratte-McClure was in college. “That was a very small price to pay for a lifelong muse.”
Even before he began his epic trek, Stratte-McClure had gotten around — after Redding (Shasta High class of ’66), he earned degrees from Stanford and Columbia University, worked as a reporter for Time Inc. in Africa and Europe, briefly published a newspaper in Paris, and raised a family in the south of France.
In all he’s visited some 100 countries. In just the past three years he’s been to Tibet, China and the Galápagos Islands, in addition to spending at least four months a year hiking and researching in southern Europe. “It’s become my life. It’s all I do professionally,” he said of his Mediterranean odyssey. He’s racked up more than 5,200 miles so far and is less than halfway around the Mediterranean. He sees a third volume eventually, with the quest taking 20 years in all.
On his latest trip to Europe, he swam the Hellespont (aka the Dardanelles), the famous Turkish strait that divides Europe from Asia Minor. (Lord Byron described his four-mile swim, in 1810, in his scandalous satirical poem “Don Juan.”)
