When the Ethiopian goat smugglers offered him a boat ride to Yemen, Eric Hansen was not a writer. He knew he would have to walk ten miles through the soft sand of the Yemeni desert after the honorable thieves dropped him off, so he brought water, a compass and a sailor’s chart, but he could not justify bringing his notebooks. Instead, he wrapped them in plastic and buried them on the uninhabited desert island where he had shipwrecked several days before.
Hansen began a reading in the Knight Library Browsing Room on Wednesday with this unlikely tale because three stories in his new collection, “The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers,” came from those notebooks, which he recovered ten years later. However, many of the other stories by the renowned travel writer represent a change of focus.
“I want to do some stories that are a little closer to home,” he said.
It makes sense that Hansen should begin to look next door rather than across the ocean for his stories, since he said he has always been driven to travel less by a curiosity about places than by a curiosity about people.
“I have a habit of letting people be who they are,” he said.
This openness to strange and surprising characters was the catalyst of “Bird Man” and somewhat explains the attraction of his earlier books.
Associate Dean of Humanities Wendy Larson, an audience member who has read all of Hansen’s previous works, described his appeal.
“It always has to do with the social world,” she said. “He grasps the interest of social life in a way I find very revealing and very enlightening.”
Hansen read from the title chapter of the book, which tells the tale of a friendship between a “pear-shaped,” middle-aged bird and slug enthusiast and a group of strippers. Early in the story, the birder explains at length the elaborate mating rituals of the banana slug, whose body and genitalia are both more than half a foot long, and which follows hours of “foreplay” with a day and a half of intercourse. Later the chapter adopts a more contemplative tone as Hansen introduces the strippers, whose complicated stories challenge the assumptions that made the theme of the story so intriguing.
Hansen expanded on the story at the reading, describing the close relationship he developed with one of the strippers, who had called the author out of the blue when her daughter suddenly fell gravely ill. Hansen held her hand through a 92-day ordeal of hospitalization, and he shared with the audience his wonder at where a story about a slug fancier had led him.
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there,” he said.
Hansen’s last book, “Orchid Fever,”
inspired the Oregon Humanities Center to invite him to Eugene for the first time in 2002. The event was hugely successful, drawing a large crowd and selling several copies of the book. Two years later, as Hansen prepared to publish “The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer,” he “sent me galleys and a note,” said Julia Heydon, associate director of OHC. In that, the idea for Wednesday’s reading was born.
The OHC co-sponsored the event with the University Bookstore. After the success of the previous reading, the bookstore’s author event coordinator, Brian Juenemann, was eager to have Hansen back.
Juenemann described Hansen’s uniquely personal perspective as he introduced the author: “The most impressive thing about Eric is not where he’s been but what he does when he gets there.”

Thomas Munro is a freelance
reporter for the Daily Emerald