By the time the Lawson Trek finished its second segment it was one ecologist down; pal Katie Winsett had begun suffering enough knee pain that she peeled off at a nearby road, allowing Trek patron saint Kathie Livingston to send someone to pick her up. She continued helping and camping, but three walking days took it out of her.

This third segment brought along not a young ecologist but Rob Waters, a friend and colleague who had time to come along because he's retired. He and I walked together along roadways and on dirt paths through lovely old stands of live oaks and along fields some miles long.

But what was by far the best part of Rob's companionship was his age. That is, Rob is retired -- I'm 55, and he's a bit older than me, so we took our walking like people our age do: we stretched, and we rolled around, and we grunted, and we gimped along, taking things slowly enough that we didn't hurt ourselves. 

This had great meaning for me because it reminded me: when Lawson took this trek things were very different for him. And I don't just mean that I have the benefits of antibiotics, modern dentistry, and Buzzfeed. I mean Lawson began his trek the day after his 26th birthday. I'm more than twice his age, and to be honest all the Gore-tex  and Velcro in the world -- to say nothing of daily doses of ibuprofin, which I and all of my partners so far have gulped in big, Lawson-Trek-sized doses -- are not going to make 55 feel like 26.

Which isn't bad, and I'm not complaining -- I'm just pointing out. What Lawson undertook was a very physical business, and every Trek segment brings that home to me. That is, we're outdoors, all day long, every day. If it's hot and sunny, we hide under hat brims. If it's cold, we bundle up. If it's raining, we get all wet.

Which I love. The first two segments were all camping. We walked and canoed in heat and cold, in sun and rain. I set up a tent most nights. This third one involved no tents, since we stayed in the cabins at Santee State Park, which are, frankly, the lap of luxury. We ended each day with showers (!) and began each day putting one car at our stopping point, drove to our beginning point, and then walked, retrieving the first car with the second at end of day. 

This may sound like cheating to you, but remember: I have previously pointed out how Lawson clearly never paddled his canoe, and I will also point out that Lawson didn't carry much of his own stuff, either. The day he gets out of his canoe he describes "having hir'd a Sewee-Indian, a tall, lusty Fellow, who carry'd a Pack of our Cloaths, of great Weight; notwithstanding his Burden, we had much a-do to keep pace with him." He describes other Indian guides as he goes along and is less clear about who's carrying what, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect an English gentleman traveling with experienced traders and Indian guides to have kept away from most of the heavy lifting. 

Anyhow, all this walking is hard on a body, and had you hung around with us in our luxe state park cabin while we popped our ibuprophin and complained about our maladies you probably would have laughed. And that was after days of easy walking -- next segment I'll be back to carrying my house on my back, so we enjoyed our ease while we could, and it was a treat to spend the days of this trek very lightly laden: knapsack with extra clothes, journal, copy of Lawson; fanny pack with lunch and water; little belt pack, worn wrong-side-to, with map, notepad, pens, iPhone, and lens kit -- and, of course, trail mix. I'm not saying it was a walk in the park, but it was a walk along the road, which turned out to be very pleasant.

Just the same, here's a picture of me walking down the road during the second trek, just so you can see what I looked like fully loaded.

But that outsideness. When I walked with Katie, she was a champion at reading the forest roads and the lay of the land, perceiving the depression of a swamp from hundreds of yards, recognizing trees and mushrooms and plants. Rob is more of a bird guy, so I loved hearing him watch the skies: "Is that a buzzard?" he said once, as we watched a lone wingspan circling a thermal. "No -- that's more of a soaring bird," he said. "That's a red-shouldered hawk. Thank you. Thank you for the show."

That cheerful attitude never left Rob. After spending much of our first day walking along the asphalt of SC Route 375 we turned onto a dirt path through old fields, and though he admitted he'd be glad to be done, he took infectious joy in the dirt path, and we both just gloried in the loveliness of the last hours' passage. We were outside, in comfortable clothes, walking among trees and crops, seeing birds above and swamps below, passing beneath swaying beards of Spanish moss. It was not hard to just be happy, seeing the world.

What was most fun with Rob was seeing the modern use of lands that had once been native farms and then probably rice plantations. We passed by an enormous broadcast antenna, and Rob said, "It's probably broadcasting a fundamentalist sermon even as we walk by." As for our less-constructed surroundings, we saw mostly tree farms and cotton fields -- actually, we saw almost nothing but tree farms and cotton fields, leaving us thrilled when one day we got to see some actual tree farming. Long before we noticed it we started hearing a grinding. We commonly came upon gated forest roads -- some of the gates have metal images of birds or deer on them, but the roads are all private and gated, and signs warn you off. The Lawson Trek does its best when possible to respect such warnings.

But the noise grew loud enough that we noticed it, and we kept approaching for more than an hour, and finally one gate lay open with  godawful noise emanating from within, so we had to creep in. We had seen clear cut fields, fields of new trees, and fields of uniform growth up to full size, but this was the only time we witnessed actual tree farming. And though nobody much likes a clearcut -- and the regular rows of a tree farm look like anything but nature -- a tree farm is still a bunch of pine trees, full of deer and wrens and woodpeckers, so we didn't complain. This Trek was rural pretty, not nature pretty.

All day long we had seen lumber trucks coming and going, loaded with a couple dozen narrowing trunks, or empty and on their way back. Rob recalled a summer he had spent back when they were still logging old growth timber near Seattle -- a single trunk of that old growth timber would fill the back of one of these lumber trucks, he said.

Anyhow, we heard the shrieking of the saws, we wandered in to take a peek, and I like nothing more than to watch a big old machine blithely do the work of dozens of people. The trees had already been cut and lay in piles -- we watched a front-end loader pick them up and pile them carefully for loading, dragging them through a machine that stripped them of branches and trimmed them when they needed it. The Lawson Trek will eventually become a book, and we may have this week walked by its future pages. 

We sat for lunch one day in front of a plantation called Longlands, which we are told is basically a 37,000 acre retreat for Du Pont heirs to hunt pheasant on, but we'll get more to you on that; until then I promise nothing. But we saw signs for Longlands on every side for miles, always reminding us that the place was patrolled by dogs at night and we were most unwelcome to trespass. Still, the place itself was quite lovely, so we were thoroughly interested in its background. We never seem to be able to raise anybody on the phone (supporting the assertion that it's a lot closer to a retreat than a working farm), but here's a picture, and we'll let you know when we find out more.

Anyhow. I've said it before, but if I've learned nothing more so far on this project it's that being outside, walking along the byways, experiencing what this world has to offer -- whether a nice walk on a sandy road or a glimpse into tree-farming practices or the sore knees, hips, and lower back that come from just walking around when you're twice John Lawson's age -- is its own reward. 

Coming up next: introductions to two marvelous people -- Peggy Scott, vice-chief of the Santee Indian Tribe, a descendant of the people who treated Lawson so kindly, and Val Green, chief of all the Lawsonians, who knows more about Lawson than anyone alive and has kept us on the path from the very start of this adventure.

Stay tuned. And take an ibuprofin. It helps.

As we walked down a footpath among the enormous trees populating Congaree National Park, Rob said, "This may be the most Lawsonian moment of your entire trek." And he may be right.

Congaree exists as the result of protection by private owners and then the government of the last and best old-growth bottomland hardwood forest in the nation. Much of it has never been logged, and some is virgin forest. In the swamps of the Congaree River, bald cypress and tupelo grow to enormous sizes: there are cypress trees of up to 16 feet in circumference and 127 feet high. On what amounts to rises -- a few inches above where the floodwaters usually stop -- loblollies grow to 150 feet or more, and it almost hurts your brain to look at them.

It's spectacular. I'd love to come back when it's green, and I'd love to come back to canoe into the back-back-backcountry, where the virgin cypress stands are. But even so: seas of cypress knees, boardwalks for miles through breathtaking view after breathtaking view, and it all is, yes -- very much like it would have been when Lawson walked through the territory not far from here.

But -- okay, does that make it the most Lawsonian moment? I guess that brings up what I'm out here to do. Yes, it's amazing to see what Lawson would have seen. But I'm really out here to see what I can see now, so if you don't mind my saying, at the moment I think of the most Lawsonian moment of my trip so far as walking up SC highway 375 from the tiny town of Gourdin to the Lake Marion dam, where we had left ouf car in the parking lot of Randolph's Landing, Motel, Campground, Fishing Pier, and Filthy Restroom, with a sand parking lot and a chainlink fence and and a magnolia tree with a trucck parked under it and roosters that crow when you walk up.

I mean, that's what Lawson did, right? Was see what was out there and talk about it. I got a lot of satisfaction out of buying a caffiene free Diet Coke there and using that awful restoom (it was the women's! the men's was closed off!).

That is, much of this trek has been road walking, and when you walk along roads designed for you not to walk along them, you see the country in a way that it's not quite prepared for you to see.

I would title this segment, then, "Substations, Churches, and Crap." As Rob and I walked, what we saw constantly were the unprettified underpinnings of our world: electrical substations behind chainlink fences, and cable pedestals in front of houses set far back from the highway. Orange plastic pylons announced where, beneath us, communications cables ran, and above us we never laccked for eelectrical wires and cable. Sometimes that was all -- we wondered who "Henry" was, who wrote his name on a utility pole and the back of a stop ssign, but then our map told us we had passed Henry street, and that was as much signage as we got.

Or we learned a lot about the town of Santee when we noticed that a restaurant, less than 60 miles from the coast, served us linguini with shrimp that came frozen in a bag from Food Lion, but made sure they had what they called a Gentlemen's Club but you and I would call a strip joint attached to the back. That's what you do when you're walking through the country: you observe and you learn.

The second thing we noticed was churches. More churches than people, and by a long shot. We would walk along a neighborhood of beat little single-wides, the occasional neat brick ranch or even a row of them, and a series of atmospheric but utterly abandoned heaps, and then there would be a bright sparkling church, and then another. Our host the Guerry Family in Jamestown generously hosted us in their church; the friendly Nina allowed us to park in front of hers in Lane. Church people are the nicest people in thee world, but we heard from everyone that the little churches are dying. They don't look it, though the households often do.

Finally, trash. We joked about Bud Light being the sponsor of South Carolina's roadside littering community, but it's really not much of a joke. You just cannot fail to notice that people throw an awful lot of crap on the road. And though we might yearn for a nice deposit bill to encourage people to return their cans and bottles to the store, it is evident that in the absence of cans and bottles people will happily toss gigantic cups, fried chicken boxes, rags, and most anytthing else out the windows of their cars. I cast no blame -- I doubt it's better in any other state, and I know it's no better in North Carolina where I live, but it's awful. It just is. You can call that observation.

But we observed far more than that. For one thing, according to my notes, at 11:45 a.m., January 20, the Lawson Trek reached its first hill. That is, for the first time in our trek, we've taken a step towards the end of the Coastal Plain. About 50 miles along the Intracoastal Waterway all at, exactly, sea level, then about 60 miles or so up the Santee River, and we have begun to experience landscape variation, not just the pure flatland of the coast.

I'm not exaggerating when I say Rob and I were delighted to note this. Not that we were glad to get away from the coast -- just that we were excited to be able, by walking instead of zooming along at 60 mph, to actually notice what the land was doing. We came up to another dip later, and an actual road cut after that. We're making progress, no doubt about it.

And we saw more than just houses and trash. We saw vultures swinging in thermals in flocks of a dozen or more, red-shouldered and Cooper's hawks arcing above and zipping by us. Along the road we heard precious little birdsong -- though plenty of tree-farming equipment -- but when we got into the Santee National Wildlife Refuge on Wednesday and the Congaree on Thursday we encountered pileated woodpeckers, chickadees, cardinals, wrens, and even some feral pigs (bloodline: brought to North America by explorers starting with De Soto, with wild boar added by rich hunters with poor fencing capacities since the 1800s).

We saw great blue herons near our cabin at Santee State Park and heard barred owls in the middle of the day at Congaree. What's more, we just got to spend day after day walking, which is good for the soul in the way almost nothing else is.

We walked by the enormous Longlands Plantation, whose thousands of acres are patrolled by dogs, their signs constantly warn (we'll learn more about what they do there and share it) and the beautiful suimple house below, where they have laundry flapping on the line. Is there anything as lovely and calming as laundry flapping on the line as you walk by a house?

Lawson notices at one point further on that he's stopped seeing Spanish moss, and we're looking for that, but so far we're still seeing it, and also things like reindeer moss, which we crowd-sourced.

We also crowd-sourced a pecan plantation (seriously -- the pecan tree in my back yard looks totally different, so I was led astray) and an absolutely stunning bacterial film on some of the many cypress tupelo swamps we saw that would be disgusting if it were pollution, as we originally believed, but since it's just Mother Nature having her fun it's pretty neat.

We took a walk. We saw the countryside, from the churches to the trash to the restrooms tto the turkey vultures and barred owls and cypress swamps.

It's good to be walking along.

Do you remember that I bought an inflatable boat I stupidly hoped to use in our efforts to cross the creeks and streams in the Francis Marion National Forest on the second part of the trek?

Well, whether you remember it or not, I did that, and it became evident that trying to place the boat and then walk to it and then inflate it and so forth was stupid even by my standards, to say nothing of the fact that we would have crossed onto land owned by people other than the National Forest, and those people build fences and have guns.

Anyhow, that boat was still in my trunk. So when after the first day of the third trek hiking partner, Rob Waters, and I found ourselves resident in a cabin in the Santee State Park on Lake Marion, South Carolina, you can imagine what I thought.

I can tell you that after a half-hour of inflating and the construction of oars, the maiden voyage of the S.S. Lawson (maybe the P.R. Lawson, for Paddle Raft?) was a complete success. I paddled out through young cypresses not ten yards from our bacin door and floated into the middle of a little cove and lay on my back, spinning around and trying to catch the eye of Venus, the evening star, with every revolution. It was a lovely moment, though somewhat reduced in satisfaciton by the fact that I was spinning on a lake that by every law of God and man should not be there.

Lake Marion and Lake Moultrie are twin lakes dammed in 1942 by the Army Corps of Engineers for a series of purposes. They feed the Santee Cooper hydropower plant, owned by the State of South Carolina, which helped electrify rural eastern South Carolina, no doubt a good thing. And they provide wonderful recreation, beloved of fisherpersons and the Lawson Trek alike.

Regrettably, as far as the ecology, culture, and landscape of the region goes, they were disastrous.

Lawson spoke of the Santee River being more than 36 feet above its usual level when he hiked along its banks. That's of course preposterous -- Lawson's numbers are commonly bizarre exaggeration. But that the Santee was regularly in flood and quite unmanageable there is no doubt. At the time, the Santee had "the fourth greates discharge of any U.S. East Coast river," according to "The Santee-Cooper: A Study of Estuarine Manipulations," which you can find on your shelves in your copy of Estuarine Processes, Vol. 1, 1976.

The Santee was a flooding mess. It overflowed its banks all the time, and the silt it carried barred the river and made it useless as a port. Yet upstream, where it was more navigable, residents a century later saw that it offered access to the farms and settlements of inner Carolina. Meanwhile, the deep Cooper River, which flows by Charleston, petered out not far from the Santee, across a single ridge. In fact, in 1800 the first summit canal (up and over) connected the rivers, allwing river traffic to go up the Cooper, over to the Santee, and deep into Carolina, though the canal languished after the railroads came.

But people couldn't quite give up on fixing what Mother Nature hadn't thought was broken. "The Corps's work is never done," said Bob Morgan, heritage program manager for the Francis Marion National Forest. In the 1930s, along with electrification, planners had the idea that if they combined the two rivers -- the Santee and the Cooper -- and poured them mostely into the Cooper River outlet, they could kind of get a two-for-one. All the extra water would sluice out pollution from the Cooper and keep silt from building up there, and meanwhile the Santee, much smaller, would putter along as a milder, more tractable version of its formes self, unlike the unruly beast that kept Lawson "upon one of these dry Sponts," while most of his compatriates went looking for help by canoe, where "had our Men in the Canoe miscarry'd, we must (in all Probability) have perish'd." (They didn't, by the way.)

Sure! Dam two rivers, combine the flow, and send it the wrong way. What could possibly go wrong?

Almost immediate after the rivers were dammed and combined, the enormous flow carried down the Cooper all the silt that used to fill up the Santee, "with extensive shoaling of Charleston Harbor beginning immediately following diversion," according to the article, which somethow surprised the people who had moved heaven and a hell of a lot of earth to make it do exactly that. And with its vastly diminished flow, the Santee ecosystem shifted from fresh (Lawson describes it as fress all the way to the sea) to salt. Barrier islands began eroding. Trees died. On the positive side, though, the new salt water ecosystem provided a perfect home for clam and oyster beds, and a significant industry grew up.

What's that Bob Morgan said? Oh, yeah. By the late 1970s the Corps decided to unfix what was never un ... whatever. It decided most of the water needed to go back down the Santee. Cool enough, but instead of just opening the hold on the Lake Marion dam bigger, it dug an entirely new canal, called -- I love this -- the Cooper River Rediversion Project -- and the Corps's page about it crows that it saves $14 million per year in dredging costs in Charleston Harbor, which being honest, is exactly like the money a protection racket saves you in avoiding arson costs. Oh, yeah -- the renewed freshwater flow destroyed the clam and oyster industry that had grown up, too, as the freshwater moved further downstream again towards the sea. Our friend and guide (and clam farmer) Eddie Stroman told us about that, and he lived it.

No disrespect to the Corps -- you win some, you lose some.

But according to author Richard Porcher, even the ecological catastrophe was hardly the worst of it.

"It was a cultural and ecological abomination," he says. You get that cultural came first, right? He's involved in a project right now, trying to document the history of the people, mostly African American, who lived on the land before it was drowned, especially beneath Lake Moultrie. Ecologically, he compares the area beneath Moultrie to the famous ACE Basin, a portion of South Carolina near Beaufort protected from development and considered a natural treasure. "This would have been the equivalent," he says. "You lost 150,000 acres of longleaf pineland, riverland, creek land.

"But the main thing is the history of the people was not recorded."

He recites place names like Raccoon Hills and Hog Swamp, the names all that's left of places that, because of the poverty and excluded nature of their inhabitants, never even made it onto the map. "Santee Cooper did not document one African American settlement, not one interview, not one photograph," Porcher says. Which, honestly, we've heard before. Our host on our previous segment, Jean Guerry, told us of her daddy driving her through the area so that she could see what was going to be lost. Homes and plantations and other buildings were disassembled and sold for parts.

So, anyhow, here we are: floating in inflatable boats and staying in a pleasant cabin on an absolutely lovely lake. Because of which the Santee River that Lawson followed -- rising and falling according to nature's call -- is gone for good. And so is most of the history of the poor people who lived here, though Porcher hopes to resolve that.

You win some you lose some.

Not for the first or last time, I was glad she was along. The Lawson Trek has been committed from the start to getting people who know things to come along. This turns out to be very Lawsonian.

Traditional description of Lawson's trek involves some sort of assignment from the eight Lords Proprietors of the Carolina Colony. In the introduction to the current version of Lawson's A New Voyage to Carolina the author says thus: "Nothing is known of Lawson's sojourn in Charleston until December, 1700, when he was appointed by the Lords Proprietors to make a reconnaissance survey of the interior of Carolina." Interesting enough, but as we say in academic circles, nuh-unh. Lawson clearly took his journey, as his delightful book amply documents. Why he took his journey remains enigmatic. Lawson's family was well connected in London and could easily have had contact with people of that stature, and Lawson was quickly well connected with influential colonials like James Moore, who became governor of Carolina in 1700 and had before that made forays himself into the western backcountry. But we have no evidence that anybody paid, told, or even asked Lawson to go on his journey. We just know he went.

She was a boon to the enterprise. She pointed out resurrection ferns on one Live Oak: "They look dried up now, but when they get wet they come back to life," she said -- they can lose up to 97 percent of their water, shrivel up, and still come right back with wetter weather. Same with a moss she saw near the roots, looking wizened: "It'll wake up when the water comes up." Then she pointed out lichens and moss growing on the tree. "Sure, you see them, but look closer," she said, counting different types. She got to six before stopping, point made: there is a lot more going on if you look closely. "The interesting stuff is the small stuff," she said.

She reads the country like a tracker, too. We found our first cypress swamp when an hour or so into our first day of hiking she narrowed her eyes and said, "That drops off quickly," pointing to a line of trees evident to her but not to me. We left the forest road, descended a few feet, and yes -- there was a swamp: a low bowl, with the obligatory bald cypress knees, tupelos with spreading bells at their trunk bases, and water rendered black by the tannins from leaves, bark, and pine needles.

Katie's descriptions are not always as literary but are every bit as pleasant. When I asked more about those microscopic slime molds, she corrected me. "They're not microscopic so much as teensy," she said, and until you have had a scientist describe something to you as teensy you have not spent enough time with scientists. She is very interested in scale -- she says a big part of her job is training her students to see scale as more gradual than they see it. "They see three levels: big, small, and microscopic. But nature doesn't work that way." Nature is comfortable on many levels. Katie recommended to me the classic The Scale of Nature, by biologist (and slime mold expert) John Tyler Bonner, which discusses nature from the scale of galaxies to subatomic particles and has become my bedside reading.

We lay one night in the darkness, each in our own tents out of evening rain, our voices murmuring back and forth across various tent and rainfly walls. A full moon hung in a sky of scudding clouds, shadows of swaying pines scratching illuminated nylon as drizzle occasionally spattered down. Katie free-associated about cypress intraspecies variation: If an animal drags, say, an unusual seed into one bog and not another, the two differ. "Each individual bog develops a personality," she said, with particular species of microorganism in the water -- and water samples from the same bog will differ significantly in the life they contain depending on whether you take the sample from open water or from beneath leaves at the shore, a foot away, she said. "When you work with microorganisms you get a sense of how complicated things are the smaller you get. All those swamps we saw would be considered cypress/tupelo, but each one had a little different character for whatever reason.

"It's not just about deer and squirrels. It's not just a longleaf pine forest. I think it's more interesting what's going on down in the soil. On the level of the microorganisms.”

The rain stopped awhile and we heard only the wind high in the pines. The slime molds we had seen could grow in a short warm spell. “They fruit very quickly,” she said. “But I’ve never seen them in January.” 

More silence. “I like that it’s all more complex than we can really organize in our minds,” she said later.

Overnight we heard owls. The next day we learned the lake we slept near was full of hibernating alligators. 

The morning after his stay with Mons. Gallian, Lawson was ferried across the engorged Santee by an Indian guide, whereas Katie and I just walked across the Route 17A bridge, though the river was plenty high for us too. As we continued walking we stumbled into some kind of farm development that included horses and a lake that was completely not on the map and had to scramble around to figure out where the hell we were. At approximately this point Lawson too found himself stuck. With the Santee in enormous flood, his group of six explorers and their lone guide (they had left their four canoe guides behind when they began walking) disputed about the way to the home of Mons. Gallian the younger, evidently one Barthelemy Gaillard,.

Lawson and two associates remained behind on a knoll, while the others paddled along to see if they could find their way. "We had but one Gun amongst us, one Load of Ammunition, and no Provision. Had our Men in the Canoe miscarry'd, we must (in all Probability) there have perish'd," Lawson says.

Six hours later the Indian did come back in the canoe -- "being half drunk, which assur'd us they had found some Place of Refreshment." That place was Mons. Gallian the younger's, where one drunken canoe ride later ("several Miles thro' the Woods, being often half full of Water") Lawson found "our comrades in the same Trim the Indian was in." They passed a merry evening there. 

Val tells me that this house -- of Bartholomew Galliard -- was soon inhabited by a young woman who married Bartholomew. A daughter of the Guerry family, into whose family the house passed. Which is to say, there's great likelihood that the blood of Bartholomew Gallian (or Galliard) and his Guerry wife flowed through the veins of our hosts as we drank coffee and ate cake.

I suppose it's not an enormous deal, but it feels like one to me. We didn't get drunk with the Guerrys -- Lawson and his party were so drunk leaving their party that as they walked that night towards a Santee Indian camp, one of his compatriots fell off a log that was the only way across one of the creeks -- probably what is now called the Wee Tee. Lawson, "laughing at the Accident, and not taking good Heed to my Steps, came to the same Misfortune: All our Bedding was wet." Served him right, of course, but a cold northwest wind blowing "prepar'd such a Night's Lodging for me, that I never desire to have the like again." Which makes our snug night safe from downpours on the padded pews of the St. James Church all the more delightful in retrospect.



I set out along Lawson's path to see if I could have the kind of fun he did. I had no idea.

She brought us into her immaculately clean home: wide hardwood floors, oriental rugs, traditional wooden furniture. Even the books on the bookshelves were neat, though the copy of Lawson Jean had been reading in preparation for our meeting lay open on the sofa.

Jean made us coffee and brought out a bundt cake. “Welcome to Jamestown,” Douglas had said, “population 74 -- when Mark and I come home it goes up to 76.”

We had a lovely time. We discussed that in South Carolina, whose legal system is based on English Common Law, only the coroner is empowered to arrest the sheriff -- regrettably, the point had become germane recently. We talked about whether the misguided commingling of the waters of the Cooper and the Santee hadn’t accidentally protected the Santee from development, keeping much of the land of the national forest pristine. We talked about the area churches -- the first recorded Episcopal clergy appeared in 1687 (Lawson talks of being assisted across the creeks by “very officious” French settlers, “whom we met coming from their Church”), though no trace of that church remains. A newer one went up on the old Georgetown road in 1768 -- it’s a red brick church that still stands on the old dirt road, with lovely cylindrical brick columns and cypress pew boxes. Jean told us that in its early days mistrust between the French and English settlers obtained: “the Huguenots used the back door -- the English used the front.” We discussed the Peachtree Oak, a live oak hundreds of years old on the nearby Peachtree Plantation, which stood until the 1930s, when it died. “If it hadn’t,” Jean said, “Hugo would have got it.” You can’t talk for more than 15 minutes in South Carolina without Hurricane Hugo coming up. 

Anyhow. We probably stayed with Jean and Douglas and Mark (and Mark’s daughter, who showed up for a bit) for a couple hours. We ate cake and drank coffee, and we even chatted about political and social topics about which we very agreeable didn’t particularly agree. I would call it one my most delightful afternoons ever -- exactly what I left home for. Probably why Lawson left home, too.

Woke up this morning in the house of my hosts Eddie and Martha in McClellanville, SC. Soon we'll be ferried to the Francis Marion National Forest, where we'll pick up where I left off after my canoe journey.

Lawson spoke about the help he received from the Huguenot settlers as he picked his way through the swamp -- the ferried him across creeks in their dories. We've chosen a route that gives us options -- we can walk around or let our above-and-beyond supporter, Kathie Livingston of Nature Adventure Outfitters, canoe us. We've even secreted an inflatable dinghy on one forest road. We'll see what we need.

Last night we gorged on oysters at the Seewee Restaurant. "They slept last night in the bay," we have been instructed to say for fresh. Lawson spoke of eating the same -- also "clamps," as he called them.

Eddie fas clams, and Martha showed us a necklace he had made for her out of a pearl he found in a harvested clam.

I never wanted two months to go by between my first and second trips. But we were urged by the NFS to avoid the forest until January 2 on account of hunting seasons with dogs and such. Yesterday while deopping off cars we saw lines of men holding rifles or shotguns idling along the road on the last day of the season. They release the dogs and hang around hoping they flush deer in their direction. We're told the spectacle of the hunters using homing devices to search for the radio collars on their dogs afterwards is a more active spectacle.

We're not a bit sorry we waited until the end of the season.