October 29, 2024

Dylan Thuras ’04 knew he wanted to attend Bennington when he came from his home in Minneapolis with his parents for a tour of the campus and a naked student paraded down the Commons lawn as the tour walked by. It was a sign that Bennington was a different kind of place where students were truly independent and open to explore the world in their own unique ways. 

THE BEGINNING 

At Bennington, he thrived. He met his wife Michelle, and though they didn’t date during college, they became best friends. “We loved the size of it, we loved the scale, we loved the sense of community,” said Thuras. “We are still so close with dozens of people from Bennington, even people I didn’t know that well while I was in school there. When I run into anyone who has gone to Bennington at any point in their life— they could be 40 years older than me, or at this point, 15 years younger than me—it’s an instant sense of connection and understanding. One of the great gifts of Bennington is this community follows you through your whole life.” 

Dylan learned video and animation from Sue Rees, who he calls “a kind of mad woman,” and sculpture from Jon Isherwood and John Umphlett. His advanced work was on the history, structure, and creation of the narrative form. When he graduated, he went to New York City and used the skills he learned during technical courses at Bennington to start work as a freelance video editor. 

“I’m a big believer in this idea of marrying theory and classic humanities work with more highly technical skills.” 

He recommends current students find ways to blend the two. As an example, he suggests someone who’s interested in literature learn about data systems capable of analyzing huge amounts of text, so they can pull out interesting connections. “Maybe that’s not what you thought you’d be getting into, but it’s a cool tool. It’s an interesting way of analyzing that work. And then you’ve got a new skill.” 

FOUNDING ATLAS

Two years after Thuras graduated from Bennington, blogger Josh Foer put out a call for help to produce an event celebrating Athanasius Kircher, a 17th century German Jesuit scholar and polymath, who published major works of comparative religion, geology, and medicine. Thuras volunteered to help with the event, and the two hit it off. 

In 2009, they founded Atlas Obscura. It began as a website that offered suggestions for travelers looking to visit weird and wonderful places around the world. “We felt that the world was still this huge, bizarre, vast place filled with astounding stuff,” Thuras said. Since its founding, Atlas Obscura has expanded to employ 50 people and to include an app, podcasts, books, trips, and events. They recently threw a big festival in Hot Springs, Arkansas, for the eclipse. 

THE PLACES

A quick scan of the website or the New York Times bestseller Atlas Obscura, which Thuras co-wrote with co-founder Joshua Foer and Ella Morton, inspires a sense of wanderlust. Contributions have been added by staff writers alongside local experts from around the world. They range from the Museum of Counterfeit Goods in Bangkok and the Sacred Crocodile Pond in Ghana to the World’s Largest Chess Board in Manhattan and the Rock of Ages Granite Quarry in Barre, Vermont. 

Thuras has visited more than thirty countries and nearly 600 places. There are still hundreds of places he wants to visit. One of the sites that has stayed with him is the Q’eswachaka Rope Bridge in Peru, which spans 118 feet and hangs 60 feet above the canyon’s rushing river. The bridge of woven straw is remade by the people of four villages each year. The Incan women braid thin ropes, which the men of the villages combine into large support cables, much like those that support modern suspension bridges. For Thuras, the bridge meets his criteria for a memorable site. “You’re walking across this crazy swaying bridge over this river,” he said. “And you’re kind of like, is this safe? I don’t know. It was really cool. I love the history. I love the culture of it. It was beautiful. It was adventurous. I went there a long time ago, but I still think about that place a lot. It is this direct tie to the Incan empire, this empire of rope and fiber, where even the census data was kept in fiber, in quipu.” 

Another site he quickly recalls is the Buzludzha Monument in Kazanlak, Bulgaria, which was falling into disrepair after the fall of the Soviet Union. An Atlas Obscura contributor and expert on the building helped get recognition by UNESCO. This is one of the reasons that Thuras does the work he does. “There are these two major things you see over and over again in tourism. Places like Venice get like 60,000 people a day during the high tourist season. That’s more than the total number of residents. On the other hand, incredible places disappear for lack of attention or an economic model.” 

He continued, “we’ve been in touch with a lot of the small museums and the art projects that we list, and the ability to divert even a small amount of attention to them relates to money in the form of tourism. To provide that to places that deserve it, but aren’t getting it, feels like valuable work to me.” 

CULTIVATING WONDER 

At the heart of Atlas Obscura is a philosophy: “wonder is a value we can cultivate.” He says it’s easier to do when you’re dropped in a new country with a different language and customs, but it’s worth doing in your own community. He recommends that people “get lost,” even close to where they live, or challenge themselves to become a tourist in their hometown. When you visit a place, even a familiar one, he challenges, “assign yourself to write a story. Imagine you have to write 2,000 words by Tuesday. What is your story about? Having a mission and having a sense of what you’re seeking is really powerful. It’s powerful, not just in travel, but in life. Try approaching the world with a journalist’s eye or a seeker’s eye or a collector’s eye.” 

BACK TO BENNINGTON 

Thuras’s experiences of and love for wondrous places all over the world has not diminished his appreciation for Bennington College. For Thuras, Bennington is more than its beauty; it provided an early example of the power of place to shape experience. “I remember wandering across the Commons lawn late at night and the stars are out. There are other people crossing in the dark. Maybe you can hear something happening, a little gathering in one of the other houses. The lights are on…. I have these memories of traversing the campus at night and feeling this sense of magic. You’re just this pocket of people. It feels like you’re in the middle of nowhere. (You’re not really; you’re close to a relatively large population center of Vermont, as far as Vermont goes.) But you feel like you’re on this kind of magical island or mountain top or something. The small-scale geography, the way the houses sit on the Commons…. There’s just something about it that creates this sense of a tiny little kingdom. It is this tiny little world unto itself.” 

THE NEXT GENERATION 

While Thuras understands the what he calls the “careerist” approach to higher education, he’s at odds with it too. Approaching a career, he said, “can’t be the only reason you go to school, because it assumes that you want to lock in.” At Bennington, he said, “You’re not just getting a chance to explore yourself creatively. You’re getting a community that will truly follow you, that will build your life. To be given four years to hang out with interesting people and figure out what you’re interested in is a gift on a scale that you don’t get offered very many times in your life. For me, the case for Bennington is very strong. I have two kids—a 9-year-old and a 7-year-old—so who knows?”