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.

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.

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?

So as you well know, Lawson spent two months taking this enormous walk, and then he, uh ... well, then came the rest of his life, and he was real busy doing things like cofound and survey the town of Bath, cofound and populate the town of New Bern, become Surveyor-General of the North Carolina colony, and then get killed by the Tuscarora, in 1711. 

But he did something profoundly important just before that -- in 1710: he gathered botanical specimens that he sent back to England, for one James Petiver, an apothecary "at the sign of the White Cross in Aldersgate Street, London." Collectors in those days were the equivalent of museum directors and scientific foundations now, sending agents all over the world to gather specimens or reaching out to travelers and asking them for any specimens they could provide. Lawson wrote to Petiver in 1701, after the completion of his journey, responding to an ad Petiver had run: "I design yr. advertismts. in order to for yr. collections of Animals Vegitables etc.," he tells Petiver. "I shall be very industrious in that Employ I hope to yr. satisfaction & my own, thinking it more than sufficient Reward to have the Conversation of so great a Vertuosi," vertuosi being what such collectors were called back then. In 1698 Petiver wrote to his apprentice, traveling through the West Indies, "Wherever you come enquire of the Physitians of Natives what herbs etc. they have of any Value or other use in Building, Dying etc. or what shrubs, Herbs etc. they have that yield any Gum, Balsam, or are taken notice of for their Smell, taste etc. and each of these get Samples with the names they call them by."

making a scientific name for himself, wanted to play. He even hoped his specimens would form what writer Marcus Simpson fully explains in an essay in the just-published The Curious Mister Catesby was going to be what Lawson calls "a foundation towards a Compleat History of these parts," which Lawson mentions in a letter dated October 30 1710. Of course Lawson was killed in 1711, so no Compleat History.

But a bunch of specimens, yes. About 300 total, according to Vince Bellis of East Carolina University, who got images of the specimens from the Natural History Museum in London, where they reside. You can see them all online through ECU, here.

Wait -- the specimens reside? Somewhere? Still? Like, I could actually go see them?

Yep. So that's what's up right now. See, Petiver's collection was so good that ubercollector Hans Sloane tried to buy it, and after Petiver died, Sloane did. Then, when Sloane died, he left his collection to England, which used it to begin the British Museum. In 1992 the botanical (and some other) stuff peeled off to become the Natural History Museum, its own entity. And at the Natural History Museum they have an herbarium.

Those, I get. I have been to the herbarium at Duke University. An herbarium is pretty much just a bunch of drawers full of plants, but they're of course climate controlled and organized and filed. In fact, the whole Duke Herbarium is basically a set of those sliding file cabinets that you work by cranks. As far as "archive museum old books sexy" goes, you might as well go to your public library's microfiche collection.

But once you start looking through folders it gets kinda cool. Duke research scientist Layne Huiet took me down to theirs and showed stuff off. Big on bryophytes and lichens, Duke also has 400,000 specimens of vascular plants -- of which 821 are Type Specimens. If you think of specimens as baseball cards -- and they are; the herbaria trade them to fill out their collections -- a type specimen is one that is the sort of king main specimen for a species. The first example of a new species, discovered and named? That specimen is likely the type specimen -- in this case called the holotype, though there are about a dozen types of type you can be.

The point: you can go into an herbarium and see all these cool original specimens gathered over the last half-millenium or so, and when you look at them you get that sense of being with a scientist as she or he gathers, prepares, dries, and presents a piece of the world for classification and understanding. 

I can't promise I'll gather any special information about Lawson, his time period, or his methods from looking at specimens prepared from his work three centuries ago. But it gives me a chance to commune with him, with the material of his world, and I'm looking forward to it. I'll keep you posted.

One of the loveliest pieces I've seen about Earth Day today is this one, from Mental Floss, about acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, who works to capture the sounds of nature, and especially the sounds of nature unaffected by human development.

Cool enough, but I'm not quite on board. One of the things I fear about the dichotomy between humankind and nature is that I think it's false. That is, if a beaver dam is natural, how is the Hoover Dam not natural? If the robin's nest in your yard is natural, how is the Empire State Building not natural? If the sound of water rushing down a creek after a rain is natural, how is the sound of the constant flow of the same water rushing through a buried storm drain not natural? One step further, if a deer pees in the woods and you hear it, that's natural, right? If you do? If you hear the soothing, constant trickle of the sanitary sewer beneath your street, is that natural? 

Obviously I think yes. So today for Earth Day I'm sharing some videos I've taken along my way, and I ask you to think of each one: natural? or not? Hempton notes there are fewer and fewer places you can go to where you can spend a few minutes without hearing the sound of (other) people. True enough. I have always believed -- and I believe more strongly with each step of this trek -- that true nature is harmony: it's not the absence of humankind, it's the appropriate presence of whatever is there. I have walked the last few treks more and more along enormous roads, built, because people have gone mad, without sidewalks of any sort. This is a terrible experience, but it's no more unnatural than walking down a deerpath, or an Indian path, or a hiking trail. It's lousy, but it's not unnatural.

So here are a few videos, following the lead of the excellent Mr. Hempton, who gathers sounds without humans. Mine were gathered without worry about that. Everyplace I have been there are overhead wires, forest roads, buried cables, bridges. I still love the sounds I hear. Here are a few worth sharing, and worth thinking about. What's natural to you? 

To me all these little moments sound like the natural world. I don't like the sound of leaf blowers, but I love the sound of people raking. I don't mind the sound of cars, but I hate the pointlessly loud blat of motorcycles. I hate the constant whir of air conditioners on a summer evening, but I find the buzz of an electric substation oddly comforting.

So listen. And think. That's what Lawson did on his trip, and what I'm trying to do on mine.

And take care of what you value, okay?

Today I fulfilled a dream that has been almost lifelong: I learned (in a sort of general way) to survey.

I did a newspaper story once about surveying, and though the trigonometry involved strained my brain's math app, I loved the idea: you are here. EXACTLY here, and once you know a few places you can find a way to connect every other place on the map. You can even make the map. (The trigonometry, by the way, is mostly involved in triangulation: you know various angles and lengths of sides of various triangles, and you use trig to fill in any lengths you'd like to know.)


So when I found out Lawson was a surveyor I was thrilled, and when I connected with Dale Loberger, a living history practitioner who reenacts seventeenth- and eighteenth-century surveying techniques, I realized: not only could I learn the basics of surveying, I could learn them in the simple way young men of Lawson's time would have learned them.

"Every educated man was taught surveying," Dale told me, dressed in his eighteenth-century garb and setting up the equipment of Lawson's time. "You're going to buy land, you've got to know whether you're getting what you're paying for.

"It was a practical skill that taught you all these concepts."

So naturally, the first thing I learned about surveying was, counterintuitively, what backbreaking work it was. Surveying, especially the newly divided land early colonial surveyors like Lawson would have surveyed, was usually covered with scrub, so just hacking your way through the brush took enormous effort. Then place yourself in Carolina, where it was nice and hot most of the year, to say nothing of bugs. Take a big honking knife, start whacking away, and there you are: surveying.

Next, amazingly, was how much surveying was done by people who DIDN'T know the math. The surveyor would use complex equipment like the circumferentor, a surveyor's compass that enabled the surveyor to sight a distant object through slots called an alidade.

He would look through the sights and call to his assistant, who would stand where the surveyor told him and perhaps blaze a tree, stone, or other object while the surveyor noted on the circumferentor the exact angle to the object from his starting point. Then the surveyor would carry his equipment -- a tripod and his circumferentor -- to the spot, send his assistant to the next spot he wanted to sight, and begin again

It only gets better. The chain gang measured by poking stakes -- called arrows, they were pieces of wood with a flutter of silk on the end, much like the stakes surveyors use even today -- in every time they reached the end of a chain. (Four rods per chain. The weird numbering comes because the surveyor's chain represents a genius-level metricization and combination of the ancient units of miles and acres. Long story; just trust me.)

Anyhow, the two assistants had quivers; the front one would have nine arrows, the back one none. The front one would stake an arrow into the ground at each chain, and when he ran out he would measure one more chain, then call "out," at which point the surveyor himself would note and track the out, whether on a special scorekeeper on his circumferentor or, lacking one of those, by moving a marker of some sort up the buttonholes of his waistcoat.

"An out was a unit of measure," Loberger told me. "You'd have one out and one arrow," he said, giving a possible measurement. So again: the chain gang did nothing more complex than count from one to nine (or ten, depending on whether you include "out"), and the design of the chains and links meant that simple multiplication yielded areas in acres. "The whole idea," he told me, "was to remove the mathematics." Being that the strong back was a bit more important than the strong mind. In places like Carolina, in fact, where brush was heavy, surveying crews often used half-chains instead of full chains so they could stay close enough to see and hear each other well enough to do their work. A half-chain is 33 feet, or a little more than ten yards. Which means it took a hooked machete, several pieces of equipment, and a crew of at least four to get a first down. Add in a guard and an instrument bearer and a couple guys to hold the staffs that were used for sighting to (and measuring smaller distances) and you can see that surveying took up a lot of energy of a lot of people.

An entire seized continent isn't going to carve up itself, right?

But that's not even the cool part!

After demonstrating the use and lore of the circumferentor, Loberger pulled out the plane table and proceded to entirely blow my mind. With the plane table and a procedure called resection, a surveyor could map an entire area by taking sightings from two positions and end up with a perfect map of the area without leaving those two spots.

It's kind of insane, but let me explain. You take your plane table -- a flat surface on a tripod, basically -- and orient it towards the north. You may not need a compass -- you may just use a "needle box," a narrow box with 20 degrees of play or so for a compass needle. You orient the plane table, arbitrarily mark a spot on the paper on the table, and sight from there to several points, drawing a long pencil line along the straight edge of the alidade. Loberger demonstrated by sighting to the corners of the shelter in which we stood.

Then move the plane table, orient it exactly the same with the needlebox, and sight to the same spots, from a second arbitrarily chosen point on the paper. Your pair of pencil lines to each point will cross, and then you use a straightedge to connect the points where they cross.

Voila! You've mapped your site. Measure the distance between your two sighting spots, compare it to the distance between your sighting points on your map, and you've got your scale.

Mind blown.

I could go on. Well, okay, I rather HAVE gone on, have I not.

Blame me, I dare you. Loberger also demonstrated the use of a sextant, with which observers on sea (or on land, with an artificial horizon, which I'd explain but your head might explode) could determine their position by measuring the height above the horizon of various celestial objects. (A predecessor to the sextant was the forestaff, which required you to squint directly into the sun as you measured its height above the horizon; ever wonder why pirates wore eyepatches? They were burning out their eyes. I am completely not kidding.)

The point is this: using technology available in 1700 and mathematics he would surely have known, Lawson was able to determine his position and, later, when he became the Surveyor-General of the Carolina Colony, parcel out land and design the towns of Bath and New Bern.

The point, really, is the do-ability of all this stuff. It wasn't magic -- it didn't require modern total stations and thousands of dollars of computing equipment. It required only the mathematics a young gentleman would know, a few pieces of equipment, and a little bit of want-to. You and I could do all of it with a pocket compass, a pencil, a pad, and a tape measure and come up with maps and measures that weren't all that ridiculous.

The world is amazing; the world Lawson wandered was perhaps even more so, because people hadn't yet forgotten that you could understand it so well by using mostly your brain, your hands, your feet, and your back.

Lawson's trail reminds me of all that. People like Dale Loberger stay reminded of that and try to remind the rest of us. You can still get the lay of the land.

I'm sitting at a picnic table across from Dale Loberger, a GIS professional who also is a living history practitioner about surveying and mapmaking (the term "cartography" postdates the 17th century).

Dale slept in a mid-18th century tent,is wearing period clothing, and will spend the rest of the day teaching me to use period surveying tools. Dale is another in a long string of Heroes of the Lawson Trek who is giving time and energy to help us understand what life would have been like for Lawson.

Anyhow Dale tried manfully to get a fire going this wet and humid morning with flint and steel and charcloth, but no soap. We couldn't even make fire with my lighter, though when we finally used Dale's candle we got things going. Dale cooked sausage and potatoes. I made coffee on my gas camp stove.

It's been that kind of morning. In between starting fire and eating with his knife like a proper explorer, Dale takes calls for his work and at one point pulled out his laptop to send someone a spreadsheet. Meanwhile I document everything with my phone and now sit and type with my keyboard and tablet. This feels far from inauthentic -- it feels perfectly true and valid. We are here now.

The food tastes like the fire. The coffee tastes like plastic. "If Lawson only had mobile hotspots," Dale says. You mean he didn't?

My travel this segment takes me from Lancaster into Pineville, NC, about 32 miles. To give myself enough time to spend today learning with Dale, I walked 24 miles yesterday. That's a lot of walking.

The last few miles came as I slogged my way through briars in a not-recently-maintained right of way along a power line. That was Plan B; Plan A was following a trail drawn by my absolutely trustworthy source for Lawson's route, Val Green. I suspect I might have been able to follow Val's trail had I had energy and spirit, but for the last couple miles of a 24-mile day I wasn't prepared, and when the going got rough I headed along the power line -- at least I knew where that would take me.

I hadn't expected the briars, though, and I was in shorts, and it was late and I was just powering along, scraping my legs and saying, "Damn, you, Val!" pretty frequently. Here's the thing, though. As I followed that power line, I crossed the kind of indentation that, from my trip near the Catawba last trek and my walks along other roads Val has sent me on (and Dale has explained to me), I was able to instantly recognize as old roadbeds. That is, the place is crawling with old roads. People have been trying to get from hither to yon for generations, for centuries, and the signaures of their efforts remain on the land. One of them may have been the exact trail Lawson followed. I'd have never seen these without following Val's suggestions. So ok, Val -- not damn you. Still: briars.

Anyhow, this breakfast is by far the best the Lawson Trek has enjoyed, and it's about time to go learn to survey the way Lawson would have.

Also -- today, April 14, at 4 pm, the Lawson Trek will do a live stream on Periscope. Look for a stream from either @huler or @lawsontrek (i can never tell which I am; Twitter makes me crazy) at 4 pm. Sign on, listen in, and heart the crap out of us. See you then!

By the way -- I got a flame started myself, using flint, steel, magnesium shaving, and saved dryer lint. It was cool: my first no-match flame. But once you've used mined magnesium shavings and dryer lint, I'm not sure that flame qualifies as less technologically advanced than a match. Just saying.

You want to know how things have changed since Lawson's time? Look at the land; if I'm learning anything on the Lawson Trek it's that it all comes down to the land.

I spent my last trek focused on Lancaster, SC, where the Native American Studies Center of the University of South Carolina-Lancaster was holding, coincidentally, its annual Native American Studies Week, and the Lawson Trek got to play. As ever, I'd rather be lucky than good. I'll tell you about that soon, and about the welcome I received (again, like Lawson) from the Catawbas themselves.

Sun City Carolina Lakes is a development for adults 55 and older, and it could not be more different from the landscape it replaced. To see that land, we spent a morning walking with Jimmy White (a member of the Nisbet family), Barry Beasley of the Land Trust, and Chris Judge, of the Native American Studies Center. We walked along the Catawba River, at least a quarter mile wide and rarely more than knee deep; we saw bluffs of that piedmont granite overlooking the river. We saw eagles nesting in snags, the sites of old Catawba and Waxhaw towns, the remains of an old mill, and piles and piles of empty plastic bottles and other flotsam that comes down the Sugar Creek, which drains Charlotte and enters the Catawba just upstream. Barry told us that one dedicated paddler has pulled more than 17,000 basketballs out of the Catawba in recent years.

"It's the typical story," Barry told us. "People move into the panhandle [the portion of Lancaster County also called Indian Land] for a better quality of life." As more people come, the sprawl they fled follows them. In the early 1990s the county added sewer and water services, and once you've done that, land is easy to develop -- and mostly gone. "Now it's Charlotte," Chris says of the way northern Lancaster County has connected to the Charlotte amoeba.

Which was why Jimmy was so pleased as he showed us the territory his family owns (and even some his family sold, though with easements on it protecting the river). Until the late 1950s the Catawbas operated a one-car ferry where route 5 now crosses the river, but the new road ended that. The more than 3 miles of riverside the Nesbits own at least give open land a fighting chance. Jimmy walked us to a site that had once been a Catawba town, and doing nothing more difficult than idly kicking around dirt he unearthed 18th-century pottery fragments that he gave to me -- a connection with centuries past.

Not that the land as it is now, with lovely second-growth forest and old mills and town sites and such, would have been as it is now when Lawson passed. "The coastal plain would've been magnificent longleaf pine forests," Barry reminded us, as we followed old Waxhaw paths and double-tracks as old as horse and buggies along the conserved land.

Not, mind you, that it's wrong to develop housing subdivisions, or that it's wrong to sell your land when your land is your only resource. But what the Land Trust does, with and families like the Nesbits, is preserve an earth that can retain its memories of the Lawsons and Waxhaws and Catawbas (and Nesbits!) of this world. There's an enormous value to that.

After all, you need somewhere to dock your kayak when it's time to gather the basketballs. 

Lawson, as he goes about his business, speaks mostly of visual observations. Of the Indians he meets, he describes their clothing (they almost always wear "match coats," a sort of toga-style piece of fabric worn connected over one shoulder):

Their Feather Match-Coats are very pretty, especially some of them, which are made extraordinary charming, containing several pretty Figures wrought in Feathers, making them seem like a fine Flower Silk-Shag; and when new and fresh, they become a Bed very well, instead of a Quilt. Some of another sort are made of Hare, Raccoon, Bever, or Squirrel-Skins, which are very warm. Others again are made of the green Part of the Skin of a Mallard's Head, which they few perfectly well together, their Thread being either the Sinews of a Deer divided very small, or Silk-Grass. When these are finish'd, they look very finely, though they must needs be very troublesome to make. Some of their great Men, as Rulers and such, that have Plenty of Deer Skins by them, will often buy the English-made Coats, which they wear on Festivals and other Days of Visiting. Yet none ever buy any Breeches, saying, that they are too much confin'd in them, which prevents their Speed in running, &c.

He describes the forests and greenery he encounters, in this part of the world noticing an end to the Spanish Moss: "From the Nation of Indians until such Time as you come to the Turkeiruros in North Carolina, you will see no long Moss upon the Trees," and he's exactly right -- we saw Spanish Moss at the beginning of the trek that took us from the High Hills of Santee to the town of Camden, and I haven't seen a strand of it since. He notices that the Indians have a special mark of respect:  "At Noon, we stay'd and refresh'd ourselves at a Cabin, where we met with one of their War-Captains, a Man of great Esteem among them. At his Departure from the Cabin, the Man of the House scratch'd this War-Captain on the Shoulder, which is look'd upon as a very great Compliment among them. "

Something about that shoulder scratch appeals to me; Lawson mentions it more than once, and it seems like such a lovely predecessor of the vaguely uncomfortably two-guy sidehug or the performance level shoulders-touching-two-thump handshake that it reminds me: Lawson was a guy just like I am, and the people he met were just people. Just like the people I meet.

Joanna Craig gave us a mile-a-minute explanation of the history of Camden, which, founded in 1732, was the first inland Carolina town settled by Europeans. King George II was looking to get the Indians off prime riverside land and spread English settlement. The town was first planned as Fredericksburg, right on the Wateree River, then called Pine Tree Hill, then finally put in its current spot (actually rather swampy; it still floods, Joanna assures me) in 1758, when Joseph Kershaw arrived from England, established a store, and got things going. The town was called Pine Tree Hill until it was renamed after Lord Camden, a supporter of colonial rights. Its downtown main street -- Broad Street; Lawson would have walked the Indian trail on which it's lain -- is filled with buildings designed by Robert Mills, the designer of the Washington Monument and many other neoclassical buildings, to say nothing of the author of the 1825 Mills Atlas of South Carolina, from which the wonderful description of the rock house near Forty-Acre Rock comes.  The revolutionaries lost the Battle of Camden, by the way, lost it big time. Cornwallis took over the Kershaw house and imprisoned its owner for the duration; "hundreds of unhappy prisoners" of the revolutionaries had the same fate penned in the yard.

So anyhow, into, and through, and past, Camden we went, and in Camden as in Charleston and in McClellanville and in Jamestown and in Horatio we found friends to help us out. I've already mentioned Joanna Craig, who helped and organized and gave us warm and dry sleeping quarters, but at Books on Broad we met owner Laurie Funderburk, who organized a meet-and-greet that was absurdly well attended, the Camdenites coming out and introducing themselves en masse and in all ways making the Lawson Trek feel welcome. 

So we wandered. A day into Camden, a day in Camden, then another day north, partway to Lancaster. We visited Boykin on our way into town, where we met Susan Simpson, the broom lady, going about the business of making brooms in a little cabin that had housed slaves in 1740, and saw the mill pond, there since 1792 and the church built six years earlier. 

Lawson met tremendous hospitality among the Catawbas (as he did everywhere), though not long after Lawson passed through things got less cheerful. King Haigler, a revered Catawba chief, would have been an infant when Lawson passed through -- he was born in 1700, so Lawson may have chucked him under the chin or dandled him on his knee. In any case, in 1754 he became chief, and he was evidently much beloved: he's considered the "patron saint" of Camden and he's in the South Carolina Hall of Fame. His image is everywhere in Camden. 

Fat lot of good it did him. He's the chief who signed the treaty that supposedly provided a 15-square-mile reservation for the Catawbas in South Carolina. That didn't work out too well (long story, but the Catawbas finally regained federal recognition in 1993), and Haigler was killed by a band of Shawnee. 

Lawson talks a lot about the land he's passing through, and every time he faces something unusual he keeps us posted. He talks about the Santee temple mounds: "A Mole or Pyramid of Earth is rais'd, the Mould thereof being work'd very smooth and even, sometimes higher or lower, according to the Dignity of the Person whose Monument it is. On the Top thereof is an Umbrella, made Ridge-ways, like the Roof of an House," and we saw just such a mound -- they're part of Mississippian culture -- near Lake Marian.

And it was of just such mounds that I thought as I walked, through the rain, into the first major town the Trek visited since leaving Charleston: Camden, which by coincidence happens to be the first inland town in South Carolina, founded in 1732 as part of an effort by King George II to establish settlements on the rivers, further pushing away the Indians (who had been defeated at great cost in South Carolina in the Yamassee War decades earlier).  So we encountered in Camden history of the Revolutionary War period, many years after Lawson's day. Among other things, through the good offices of Joanna Craig, executive director of Historic Camden, we got to sleep in the basement of the rebuilt Kershaw House, the original of which survived the Revolution but was burned in the Civil War. The Battle of Camden, by the way, was a big fat loser for the colonists -- their biggest land loss of the war, as it happens.

Anyhow. As interesting as all that is, what fascinated me about Camden was the lay of the land. I walked into Camden in the rain on a quiet morning, and to get there I had to walk along a big four-lane highway, and that was the good road; on that I had to walk under Interstate 20.

And the first thing I thought of was those Mississippian Indian mounds.

So you can't fail to notice, right? The Indian mound and the highway embankment at the base of the bridge 50 miles to its north could be twins. The same slopes, the same general design. One used for burying chiefs and erecting temples, the other used to bury costs and erect temples to automobiles, but still. Once people get up to building earth mounds, they're going to look about the same. 

I checked with an engineer who works with highways and he said that's right on. You can have a slope of 4 or even 3 to 1 (that's run to rise, so the smaller the first number, the steeper the slope) and you're okay. But go any higher and you need special reinforcement -- you can't even get grass to grow, to say nothing of the kind of erosion that a slope that steep will suffer. 

The other thing I noticede -- could not fail to notice -- on my way into Camden was that the roads I walked on had utterly no interest in my passage. I did not belong there, nobody thought about my needs, my safety, or my experience. That intersection is for cars, not for people, and if you happen to be a person trying to cross it, too bad.

I wondered what the people in cars would make of me, teetering along with my knapsack and my camping hat. Double-takes from windshields? Delighted children waving from the back seats? 

Nope -- worse. Nobody noticed me. Nobody noticed me at all. In an environment designed for big things moving at machine speeds, not a single person even glanced at me, a small thing moving at human speed. I scurried across lanes of traffic one direction at a time, and I crossed exit and entrance ramps only when I could see nobody was near; drivers slowing down or speeding up appear especially preoccupied with things other than vulnerable pedestrians. 

The interstate highway itself gave a moment of shelter from the rain -- and a drip line where the bridge shed its water. Along west side of the road, once I passed the interstate, was the Big Pine Tree Creek, and behind one of the several vast parking lots with a little gas station and convenience store in the center it was entered by a nameless tributary. As ever I love seeing the way tiny little microclimates set themselves up: creekside, by the pipes in ditches were tufts of grasses; a dirt road entered 521 that I could have driven be 200 times without ever noticing; the post and pylons of infrastructure systems were everywhere.

You cannot help wondering, even as you walk into a lovely little town like Camden, rich with history and filled with kindness (more on all that tomorrow): what kind of culture erects roads on which people cannot walk? Along which you travel without noticing ... anything? I say it over and over, but just walking the surface of the earth fills you with questions and ideas minute by minute. I'm sorry we all zoom by it so quickly.

Before I got into Camden proper I walked by two fast food restaurants and three convenience stores. It's not wrong to have so many of those; we have to fill our cars and our bellies. But lord have mercy, there are an awful lot of them. 

Anyhow, next time you get onto or off a highway, slow down and turn off your phone. It's improbable, but you might see someone walking.

Here's the story, according to sources more modern than Lawson (I trust Exploring the Geology of the Carolinas for my info and suggest you do too). We've encountered rock and hills because we're crossing the fall line between the flat coastal plain and the hilly piedmont. "Granite forms when a body of magma rich in silica cools slowly deep underground," Exploring tells me. And some 300 million years ago, Gondwana, containing parts of what are now Africa and South America, banged into Laurentia, which contained what is now North America. Together they formed the supercontinent Pangea (think of Cream and Traffic whanging together to form Blind Faith). Anyhow, what with all the pressure and heat of two such enormous bodies you end up smashing and heating the earth's crust, which, "rich in silica," cooled to form granite -- in this case what's called Pageland granite, after the nearby town of Pageland. Because the granite is so tough, it weathers much more slowly than the surrounding earth and you get big pieces of it sticking out -- like here on Flat Rock Road or like on Pilot Mountain or Hanging Rock State Park (both in North Carolina). And I loved eating my lunch on the same flat rock on which Lawson would have sat (it likely extended beneath the road and formed the rock that has since been quarried). 

But what I loved even more was Forty Acre Rock Heritage Preserve, an outcropping of the same granite a few miles away. There the rock -- it's actually only 14 acres, but who's counting -- spreads out and shows its face, collecting water in low places and creating pool ecosystems that support plants like elf orpine, a tiny plant "strictly limited to vernal pools on hard, crystalline rock." It has red berrylike structures, but you don't need me to tell you that; Lawson himself mentions "growing upon it in some Places a small red Berry, like a Salmon-Spawn, there boiling out of the main Rock curious Springs of as delicious Water, as ever I drank in any Parts I ever travell'd in."  Not sure I'd drink of these pools, but the orpine is all over Forty Acre Rock, and I found those vernal pools some of the loveliest microclimates I've ever seen. Take away the graffiti and this is very much like what Lawson would have seen. 

Yes, the rock face is sadly covered in many places with graffiti, and Brent Burgin, the archivist at the Native American Studies Center of USC-Lancaster, who guided me around what he called one of his favorite places, wished aloud he could chase down some of the cretins who defaced the rock with their initials, just to see if they really did last 4-ever with whichever girlfriend those initials were.  He didn't call them cretins, by the way -- that was me.

Anyhow, Brent judged me worthy and took me off the beaten track to what he called the rock house, a place he promised I would never find on the Forty Acre Rock territory if left to my own devices. He provided this description, from the Mills Atlas of South Carolina from 1825:

"We must not omit however the extraordinary rocks in the Lancaster District, which are thus described by an intelligent traveler.

“We proceeded on horseback along the low lands up the creek, proposing first to visit a place called the rock house. After having advanced two miles, we descried at the head of a deep valley, in which we rode, a beautiful cascade of water tumbling from the side of the hill, on which this rock-house stands. This spot is highly romantic. The rocks rise in rude piles above the valley, to the height of about two hundred and fifty feet; crowned occasionally with red cedar and saving. About half way up the hill, is the rock-house, resembling the roof of a house. And at the lower end of it is an aperture, from which a small stream of clear water issues forth; falling over the rocks below into the valley.  We clambered up the side of the hill to the source of the cascade, and found the rock-house to be composed of two large flat rocks; leaning against each other at the top; forming a complete shelter from the sun and rains. The area of this shelter may be about ninety feet in circumference, remarkably dark and cool;  at the bottom, the stream forming the cascade, brawls along over the rocks, and approaches the steep part of the hill, and is precipitated down its side. Upon the whole the cascade of Juan Fernandez, celebrated by circumnavigators, may be more beautiful; as that of Niagra is more grand and sublime; but still this rock and cascade would rank high in ornamental gardening with all those who either for pleasure or pride covet the possession of these natural beauties. "

I will not debase this lovely description with unequal words of my own: "brawls along over the rocks" -- who could write that? Lawson, perhaps, but he never saw it, and I would not have either, had I not had a generous guide. The state of South Carolina would love to create a trail leading to the rock house, but with the constant assaults on Forty Acre Rock by vandals, one can understand their reluctance to proceed. I agree, and thus I tell you about it -- and I will provide images -- but I will not tell you how to get there. If you're good, we'll see later on.

The best part about this segment of the trek leading through boulders -- besides the people, of course; more on Brent and his ilk later -- was that most wondrous of hiking souvenirs, a piece of stone. Every hiker picks up a pretty piece of quartz or some such as a lucky stone, and the right stone hasn't yet presented itself. The rules expressly forbid taking a piece out of a park of any sort, and most natural stones are where they are because Nature wants them there, and Nature I trust and try not to defy.

But in front of Georgia Stone on Flat Rock Road were large pieces of that granite set on edge to keep people from driving onto the property (or into the quarry, I think), and around them were countless shards of rock. (A broken piece of old pottery, I learn, is a sherd, or potsherd, not a shard; I'm pretty sure I'm right on the rock, though.) Without fear that I was defrauding the company, I gathered up a few. A couple went to my wife and sons. A small one (I am scarcely looking for much extra weight) will walk the rest of the way along the Lawson Trek. 

A big part -- an enormous part -- of the Lawson Trek has nothing to do with Lawson and everything to do with telling stories, and as I read over what I've written and shared so far I feel I've underrepresented that. We'll have more cool stories about Indians and wildlife and such later. 

But one thing I have to worry about that Lawson did not have to worry about is what tools to use to document my journey. Lawson had pens, likely made from the quills of the turkeys he and his companions constantly ate, and he had notebooks. And that was it. Eight years later when he got over to England to visit, he published a book about his experiences, and that was about the usual order of things: something happened, and then eight years later a book came out and people got to hear about it.

That's not quite how it is now. Lawson did not, as I commonly suggest, have to make his way from wifi hotspot to wifi hotspot, constantly looking for a decent signal so he could update his blog or his Instagram feed. I do, though. I update Instagram several times most days -- every day when I'm on the trail -- and try to blog once or twice a week. So anybody who wants to know about the Lawson Trek is never more than an internet connection away from what's up, not just lately but right now.

So last night, through the good offices of the Science Communicators of North Carolina (SCONC) and the UNC Science and Medical Journalism Program I was invited to share my methods, which I did, and here's a video of that.

The good news is, yay, video! An hour's discussion of all the issues -- connectivity, equipment, frequency, audience -- that the modern one-person band who is both journalist and publishing company needs to consider. The bad news is the sound is pretty awful throughout, for some reason, and in a way that's a great object lesson. We used a YouTube streaming process, which I've never used before, and we learned by doing. One of the things I learned is that the sound quality needs tweaking -- whether there's a way to do this I do not know. 

Another little glitch is that no matter how many times YouTube tells Weebly (my blog editor) that it wants the video to start at 38 seconds, Weebly starts the video at 00, which gives you 38 lovely seconds of blackness to scrub through before you get to watch the video. This is the kind of stuff you find out by doing it -- much the way I learned that Instagram, not Twitter, was my sharing tool of first resort. Using Twitter made sharing with other apps complex, whereas Instagram plays well with everybody -- to say nothing of giving me lots of caption space. One single Instagram post and voila! Instagram, two Twitter feeds, two Facebook pages, and my blog landing page all have a pretty picture. You do and you learn.

We'll figure out YouTube's psychological issues and we'll move forward.

I know for live-streaming I can now use tools like Periscope and Meerkat -- I've tried them and they work.  I'm especially interested in Periscope. So if you're a fourth-grade teacher, or a journalism class, or a group from anyplace else that thinks it would be cool to talk to the Lawson Trek from the trail (or a science journalism fellowship at the greatest technical university in the world), drop a line -- we'd love to try it out.

And anyhow, whatever else you do, try out these iPhone lenses. They're amazing.