A New Voyage to Albion, I: Making Ready

Lawson's A New Voyage to Carolina made quite a splash in England in 1709 -- his publisher even slipped it into print before something already on the schedule of A New Collection of Voyages and Travels with Historical Accounts of Discoveries and Conquests in all Parts of the World, a sort of anthology series of dispatches from explorers hither and yon. Lawson showed up in London in 1709 and James Knapton, of the "St. Paul's Church-Yard," the title page says, slipped Lawson's work right into the schedule. I'm jealous of this editorial treatment even from 315 years away.

They stuffed Lawson into print just as fast as they could once he showed up. Someday maybe that will happen to me. A fellow can dream, right?

Anyhow, Lawson's work did great in the anthology and was eventually printed, we know, as A New Voyage to Carolina, with all its attendant histories and a single page of weird drawings and all the rest. 

Another thing I'm jealous of, though, is that Lawson had going for him that nobody knew anything about his territory. Carolina was pretty big news if you were a London gentleman hanging around a coffee shop with time on your hands. Not so much now -- I'm rediscovering everything I find. If occasionally I cast a bit of new light on something that's fine, but it's like Ecclesiastes says -- there's nothing new under the sun. 

Given which, thank goodness for little kids. 

As I mentioned, to see some of the botanical specimens Lawson gathered, I'm going to England, to the Natural History Museum, where they remain. But speaking of new discoveries, my wife, June, and I will be taking along two very scientific young men -- my sons, Louie, 10, and Gus, 6.  I profoundly hope they add a spirit of first-viewing to what we see there, and I thought it would be worth looking at our travel in the kind of observational spirit the

Lawson Trek has undertaken for this whole enterprise. Here, then, is a look at our preparations for a New Voyage to Albion, with Observations by Scientific and Unusual Youth.

Thing one is passports. I have a deep love of passports, and getting passports for my sons was, though something of a pain in the patoot, an emotional experience for me. Once you have a passport, you can go anyplace, and that's a kind of threatening thought when the passport holders are in elementary school.

Just the same, it's thrilling, too. A passport is a document, a souvenir, a create-as-you go memoir, and I gaze at my old passport with a fondness bordering on the absurd. 

For one thing, I'm in favor of actual things. Of paper things, of things with stickers and stamps, with initials and dates and signatures and embossments. A passport carries more than thousands of years of history of international border control. Lawson would likely have had nothing in the way of passport, though he might have had some sort of letter of introduction. Not so today, with our tight focus on borders, but that's not a bad thing at all. A passport carries with it a memory of your actual physical movements on an actual physical planet. A passport is real. Which, today, is no small matter. Electronic ticketing means that instead of colorful stickers on steamer trunks or even cardboard seat-assignment stubs, most travelers return with no document more romantic than a folded sheet of copy paper. In this dreary virtual universe, of paperless voting and checkless bills, of correspondence without stationery and reading without pages, the use of a passport -- a real honest-to-goodness travel document, which a real person will stamp with real ink -- seems stabilizing and even comforting.

Mine is in its little cover, but the boys' and June's are just there. Passports! My babies! I took out my old passport to show the boys -- visas to Nepal, India, Turkey; stamps, signatures, all kinds of stuff. They didn't even try to feign interest. I hope their own stamps will prove more exciting.

And we'll be using these things. Yes, I always have a bag full of my vitals that, like the secret service supposedly does with the briefcase fulll of nuclear bomb codes, I call "the football" and try never to lose track of. But passports and cash? Those stay on my person, around my neck. Call me crazy.

With watermarks, microprinting, hidden inks (hold a passport under a black light -- whoa, dude!), and sticker visas topped by stamps topped by signatures topped by endorsements, passports are now almost as hard to counterfeit as money. A passport, just as it ought to, has meaning: It's a note, from the Secretary of State, asking "all whom it may concern" to give "aid and protection" to you while, far from home, you hold it. A passport is the direct relative of the note from the king mentioned in the Bible (Nehemiah 2:7, "If it please the king, let letters be given me to the governors beyond the River, that they may let me pass through, till I come unto Judah") -- and those romantic letters of transport that Humphrey Bogart hid inside the piano in Rick's American Cafe. To be sure, nothing will bring back the romance of travel back when travel was travel, before your and everybody's grandparents started going on safari to Kenya, but just the same, it's worth remembering that when you go even to Canada or Mexico, you're leaving the country. Passport control may remind you of that.

Which is another important benefit. Picking up passport stamps is a worthy and satisfying goal. You can show them to your friends upon return, compare them while you travel, flip through pages of them as your airplane descends into foreign territory and you anticipate passport control, a foreign language, the need to find transportation, lodging, food. Your passport stamps remind you: I've done this before; I can do it again.

So I'm thrilled my boys will get their first passport stamps, their first "I've been theres." And their first international money, too -- pounds sterling in Britain and Krona in Iceland, coins of which will hopefully litter their treasure boxes for the rest of their lives.

So we're planning now. We've got the folder of every single printout, itinerary, receipt, and schedule, which we always know where it is -- something of a wonder in our house. Little piles are appearing: bathing suits here, raingear there, a little travel diary for each kid, with pens, pencils, sharpeners. We're getting ready to go somewhere. It's not undiscovered, but it's new for us.

We'll keep you posted.

P.S. A little note -- parts of this post appeared in somewhat different form in 2007 in a freelance story I wrote for the News & Observer. If there  were a way to link to it, I'd do that in a second. No such luck. Man, newspapers are just charging ahead in this digital universe, are they not?