The Lawson Trek made an awful mistake on Monday and failed to publicly celebrate Towel Day, the day on which all persons who travel -- that is, all persons -- celebrate the famous and utterly accurate representation by author Douglas Adams that the most valuable travel accoutrement is the towel. To wit:

“A towel, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.”

I thought of this because I was about to take a bike ride, and in my bike basket I always have a towel, of course, because you can use it to protect a bottle of wine that you buy, pat yourself off before lunch if you ride to meet someone, wrap up other purchases, or, I guess, ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the ... you get the idea.

Anyhow, I unconscionably failed to share the moment on May 25, the internationally celebrated towel day. Just the same I take comfort in the fact that by missing the date I celebrated as a writer the day I failed to celebrate as a traveler. That is, by missing the date I lived Adams' other most famous quote: "I love deadlines," he famously said. "I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

So I include a picture here of the small hand towel the Lawson Trek keeps with it at all times. Plus, celebrating perhaps the best piece of travel advice ever given (Lawson offers no such simple advice) seems like a great way to note that we've hit the halfway point on the Lawson Trek -- our next steps will take us into Charlotte, which back in Lawson's time would have been better known as "where a couple paths cross." There Lawson reached what he called "the Kadapau King's House," where he met not only the Catawba king but another traveler, one John Stewart, a 

trader from Virginia who was staying with the Catawbas despite having mostly run out of goods because, says Lawson, "hearing that Sinnagers (Indians from Canada) were abroad in the Country, he durst not venture homewards, till he saw us, having heard that we were coming above 20 days before." They refer, of course, to Senecas, members of the Five Nations of the Iroquois in the north. They were considered fierce warriors and conducted raids into the south. Lawson calls them "a Sort of People that range several thousands of Miles, making all Prey they lay their Hands on. These are fear'd by all the savage Nations I ever was among, the Westward Indians dreading their Approach."

Anyhow, Stewart joined up with Lawson at what we would call Charlotte, and the Catawba King expressed a good deal of dissatisfaction that Lawson and his friends did not care to consort with the "trading Girls" he provided for their entertainment: "his Majesty flew into a violent Passion, to be thus slighted, telling the Englishmen, they were good for nothing." I do not expect to be so feted in Charlotte, though I do expect to discuss barbecue there -- Lawson discusses it, and I happen to know someone there who knows all about barbecue.

There's lots to come as we turn towards the coast now, and lots to catch up on. You may expect to hear about the company where an enormous amount of the giant signs for auto dealerships all over the country happen to be made; of a woman who makes brooms by hand; of a bar where I passed one of the most pleasant hours of my life; and of my sojourn among those very Catawbas, who were very kind to me in South Carolina. So, Lawsonians: More to come, and plenty of it. Stay tuned.

And keep track of those towels.

I've talked a lot about various things Lawson saw on this site, and I've talked a bit about the tools I'm using to describe what I see as I follow his path. A good bit of how I'm going about that I learned 20 years ago, on a remarkable project called An Appalachian Adventure, which documented a sort of group relay through-hike of the Appalachian Trail, the  2,200-mile footpath that stretches from Georgia to Maine.

That project combined the resourced of five newspapers -- the Hartford Courant, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Maine Sunday Telegram and Portland Press-Herald, and the Raleigh News & Observer. It should tell you all you need to know about how important that project was to me that today, 20 years later, I could type in each one of those newspaper names perfectly, with hyphens and ampersands and so forth all correct. (The Atlanta paper, by the way, is so in love with its AJC abbreviation that to check the hyphen I had to go to Wikipedia -- I couldn't find the actual paper name on the website. But I checked, and it's right.) Each paper had reporters and photographers and artists hike a segment of the trail, in order, and report in once a week. All five papers ran every story -- 32 in total, if I recall correctly. As Backpacker Magazine noted, "the effort even ha[d] its own page on the World Wide Web." Gracious! The link is now dead, of course, and most of the stories live in that flickering half-light of the morgues of newspapers that just cannot figure out for the life of them some sort of way to put old stories online. Oh, if only there were some kind of technology for that! Here's a link to a summary story from the AJR, but if any of the rest is online I can't find it. It did become a book though. You can order it!

Anyhow, I even bring it up because to celebrate the 20th anniversary of our joint adventure, many of us fortunate enough to be paid to go hiking back in the day got together last week at Harpers Ferry to remember, walk, visit with the people at the Appalachian Trail Conference, and eat and drink, as you do. We had a large time.

We talked a good bit about changes in technology. Everything the Lawson Trek does instantly, alone, and on the spot -- updating blog posts from barrier islands, Instagraming from canoe in the middle of the Intracoastal Waterway -- the Appalachian Adventure crew had to do in ways far more complex and with a support staff of dozens.

The photographers all talked about souping film in hotel room sinks or dropping it off at Walmart, then picking up the negatives and using scanners to ship chosen images to photo editors. Reporters recall using early laptops like the Toshiba T1000 (a svelte 9 pounds!) and wiggling telephone plugs to make decent connections to download stories to the editor. We all had drivers who would pick up our stuff and drive it along to our next weekly stops. The News & Observer even had a telephone service by which I put tape-recorded sounds (hiking, interviews, even playing the recorder I think) onto a system readers could dial in and hear. Quel interactive! I even carried a camera for a local TV station on our first trip, which meant bringing back a camera, having them look at the video, setting it up, and then interviewing me in a local park while they showed the video. I had to comment on it without watching, because having me and the anchors see the video at the same time was just too crazy.

It's all obviously different now. I live-stream with Periscope, share photos instantly with Instagram, automatically update pages on Facebook and Twitter, and carry nothing heavier than a tablet that weighs less than a pound, though even then I rarely use it -- I carry my phone, a Bluetooth keyboard, and  a set of lenses that stick to the phone, and I'm prepared to shoot, edit, produce, upload, and instantly publish words, images, sounds, and video. I joke that like Lawson I'm hiking from wifi hotspot to wifi hotspot, but the reality is I'm doing journalism in a way that wasn't even possible a few years ago.

On the other hand, the journalism itself hasn't changed, and we should all remind ourselves of that. My job is still to tell the story as clearly and honestly as possible. I still need to get my facts and names straight, still need to tell a story somebody wants to read, watch, or listen to, still need to respect my story, my sources, and my medium. If my stories CAN go up faster, that doesn't mean they DO or they SHOULD. Sometimes I blog while I'm on the trail, but I found out early on that blogging daily was more than people wanted to know, so I blog only a couple times a week while I'm traveling, and sometimes less than that while off the trail. More than, say, 4 Instagram images a day is just overkill, so I very rarely do that (and when I do I am usually wrong for doing it).

When we did Appalachian Adventure, all five papers got together and set up a loose agreement on topics for each week's story -- that is, I wasn't just hiking: I was hiking and thinking about geology, and I was presumed to have done s bit of research before leaving home. That way we avoided 32 weeks of "Woohoo, look at me! Here I am on the Appalachian Trail!" and made sure certain pieces of information we needed to get in there got in.

I've done much the same. Whether it's maps or wayfinding or Native Americans or the French Huguenots or the swamps or the plants or old roads or Lawson's background or his technology or anything else, I did research before leaving, I try to drag interesting people onto the trail with me, and I try to avoid too much "Woohoo! Look at me! I'm on Lawson's Trail!" Now as then, the most interesting things to write about are the people I meet. Now as then, I am enormously behind in telling you things I haven't got around to telling you yet. Now as then, I'm the storyteller -- and the narrator. I'm your eyes and ears, bringing you to the story. I'm not the story. I forget that at my own peril.

Anyhow. It was a treat to see a bunch of wonderful journalists 20 years after we did something of which I'm still very proud. I'm still pretty impressed that they even let me hang around with them back then. And I'm hoping one or more of them will join me on the Lawson Trek before all is said and done. I'm grateful for all I learned from them, and I'm grateful to be on the trail again.

As Lawson would have said had he had the reason and the capacity, stay tuned.

James Petiver, the man to whom Lawson sent his botanical specimens from Carolina, was an apothecary -- what we would call a pharmacist but was actually in the early 1700s some combination of a pharmacist, a doctor, a scientist, and a museum director. 

Hans Sloane, whose collection founded the British Museum, was a physician who had apprenticed as an apothecary. Petiver, who had dozens of corresponding collectors and whose contribution made up more than a third of Sloane's final collection, was an apothecary, "at the White Cross, near Long Lane in Aldersgate Street." The apothecary was where people went for help with their health, for information on their world. 

You may have already sort of known this, but once you start following the flow of information -- and botanical specimens -- in the old days, it amazes you. I went to the Natural History Museum to see the results of the flow of information through Petiver and Sloane's apothecary habits, and I went to Long Lane and Aldersgate Street in London to see where Petiver's apothecary once stood. It's a pretty boring intersection now. 

On the other hand, I also traveled to the Chelsea Physic Garden, right on the banks of the Thames. There I found myself in a place I would never have known of had I not traced up from Lawson to Petiver and Sloane. Founded in 1673 by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, the Chelsea Physic Garden is, besides  the Oxford Botanical Garden, founded in 1621, the oldest botanical garden in England. Its guide describes it as "at its peak, during the 1700s, the most important centre for plant exchange on the planet."

So, kinda cool place.

His profits funded his continued collection. (Long after his death a chocolatier took possession of his milk chocolate recipe and also did rather well with it. You may have heard of Cadbury's.) His home became famous among collectors.

Sloane wrote up his travels in Jamaica, in a 1696 catalog and a richly illustrated full Natural History published in 1707 and 1725.

But again -- that whole notion of collecting, of bringing to you the wonders of the age, of learning and displaying the secrets of nature, was the big takeaway for me. Sloane's house was visited as something of an invitation-only museum in his lifetime, and some of those specimens remain on display in the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum, spookily floating in jars. 

And I couldn't help noticing that we've retained that adoration of the apothecary as a place of mystery and wonder as I visited the rest of London. If you go to the Making of Harry Potter Studio Tour (and you should!), you'll get to walk down the original set for the famous Diagon Alley. And there, among the quidditch shops and wand shops, among all the fancy and wonder, you'll find two examples of only one kind of business: Apothecaries, with Mr. Mulpepper competing -- right next door! -- with Slug & Jiggers, both with windows full of jars, potions, and specimens that could have come right from the Darwin Centre. We went to the Museum of London as well (also recommended!), where the Victorian Walk allows you to wander a London street from the late nineteenth century. 

Yep. Apothecary. Turns out that once stuff is cool, it just stays cool. Ancient specimens, animals in spirit, a garden full of the plants of the world -- and hot chocolate.

Lawson was onto something.

We have a letter, in the British Library, from Lawson to James Petiver from October 1710: "I have sent a small box of Collections ...," he says; "I hope they are come safe to you." He notes he has more specimens collected, "but of books being not full I omitt sending them untill compleated." In July of 1711 he sent another letter, hoping that "long since you have Received ye Collection of plants & Insects in 4 vials wch I sent for you." Which is the last we hear from Lawson, being as he is killed by the Tuscarora less than two months later.

So -- off I went to England, to see the specimens that Lawson left behind.

I arrived at the Natural History Museum to meet with Charlie Jarvis, a historical botanist who does research into the original collections of Hans Sloane and James Petiver, among others. Jarvis took me up an elevator to the top of the spectacular Darwin Center, the building that elegantly houses and preserves the original collections that formed the British Museum, from which the Natural History Museum eventually spun off. The plants are kept in volumes of books organized by HS numbers (Jarvis says HS stands for hortus siccus, or "dry garden" -- think horticulture and desiccated, for root words; not, as some would have it, for Hans Sloane or Herbarium Sloane). There are 265 of these volumes, of which four contained enough Lawson material to be worth bringing out. They reclined, open, on those foam cushions archives always use for books they want to treat nicely.

something like works of art, and just being near them reminded me of the audacity of not just Lawson's journey but of the undertaking it represented. The old civilizations of Europe had discovered a new world at the very same time emerging Enlightenment scientific sensibilities gave them the very tools they needed to begin understanding the world better than ever before. Ray's Historia Plantarum was between volumes 2 and 3 of its publication; it was Ray who established the "species as the ultimate unit of taxonomy." (Petiver helped in that endeavor by publishing illustrated works in the 17-teens.) Sloane's collection was the greatest of its time, perhaps ever; the work of Linnaeus, establishing the naming conventions we use even today, was decades in the future, and he used Sloane's collection when he did it.

Lawson's specimens (300 or so) are just a tiny portion of the collection -- Sloane had more than 300 named collectors, though some of this is just a specimen here or there from a traveling physician or clergyman. Petiver's collections constitute more than 100 of the volumes in Sloane's collection, and Petiver himself had dozens of correspondents. 

He called Lawson "a very curious person" after the two met in London in the summer of 1709, probably at Petiver's shop, "at the sign of the White Cross in Aldersgate Street, London." That sign would have been "near Long Lane," so I had to visit the intersection. It's a couple of office buildings now. 

But the highlight of course was Lawson's specimens. He included "the celebrated snake root," which supposedly cured snakebite. It doesn't. A recent article in the digital journal Phytoneuron very thoroughly describes Lawson's specimens, connecting them to their current latin names, though some remain uncertain. Most important to me, though, was just to be near Lawson's plants -- to know they were gathered by his hand, labeled with his ink, and survived the centuries because people believe it's worth trying to understand this world around us. I also could not help noting that, like all wonderfully useful things, the pages were absolutely lovely. 

There's lots more to say about what I found in London pertaining to Lawson, Petiver, and so forth. More tomorrow!

All images used by permission of the Natural History Museum.