. That feeling when you have recently been in a little momentary difficulty outdoors with your kids. I would never say danger, because come on. But a wobbly canoe in conditions that are windier than is really safe, with not just wind waves but a surprising swell on the wide Pamlico, still a river where we were, not yet the sound but with a fetch that allowed an unkind headwind full access to our every square inch. Meanwhile everybody wearing life vests, no less, and able to swim. 

But still. Scudding clouds, that 15-mph headwind that would turn the canoe sideways regardless of my wishes, a frustrated 10-year-old in the front seat working as hard as he could but still more sail than powerplant. A cheerful 7-year-old clutching the yoke, keeping low as he had been trained, shouting, "This is so fun!" as the swell lifted the front of the canoe, then slapped it down, sometimes wobbling widely enough that we all leaned hard counter-wobble. By which point I had stopped thinking it was fun one bit.

Anyhow: after about an hour of this we wrestled our craft safely to a dock, then to shore, and help came. We had the remainder of our day, about which more later, but -- every now and then, all afternoon. Gussie, 7, would pull me and his brother near, and instigate long, tight, hungry group embraces; Louie, 10, did not show his usual resistance. And I would see them walking, or playing, or talking to new friends, and suddenly that hollow feeling, and the elevator drop in my stomach, and we were in the water and it was windy and i wasn't sure if i could control the canoe and these are my babies and it's just the Pamlico and if we get blown to the other side we'll be fine but oh god my babies and again: no real genuine danger. But still.

So anyway, to the beginning of this last Lawson Trek adventure story.

Leigh Swain, who's in charge of things at Historic Bath,  has been a supporter of the Trek from the start, and she reached out as we neared the finish and asked whether, since Lawson himself co-founded Bath, owned properties there, and lived there for a while, we'd like to give the Trek a ceremonial finish by paddling in to Bath and addressing the assembled townspeople.

I came to love the idea, especially because it would allow me to bring along Louie and Gus and would, neatly, allow me to finish my undertaking by stepping out of a canoe, just as I had begun it by stepping into one last October. Lawson spent the first week of his trek in a canoe, making his way through the tidal creeks along the South Carolina coast before heading up the Santee River, where he and his companions quickly abandoned their canoe and took to the trails. He finished near what is now Washington, NC, a couple months later, and a few years after that helped to found and survey Bath, so Bath is probably the place most associated with Lawson in this world. They have a historical marker there for him and the Lawson Walk, a little dirt path on which grow several trees and other plants Lawson wrote about. They even have, if Vince Bellis is to be believed, a pile of bricks and stones that might be fragments of the chimney of Lawson's old home.

 But I was going to tell you about gratitude.

To my ears Leigh's idea that we paddle in initially had originally sounded a little overmuch to me -- I wished to end as Lawson had, at Richard Smith's land west of Washington. And I did, but all I did there was stop walking. Much as Lawson had, of course, but it lacked a certain sense of finality, especially as the very next thing I did was start walking again, to get to my car in Washington (I got a ride for the last couple miles from Russ Chesson of the Estuarium in Washington). Fortunately by the time of that slight anticlimax I had already arranged with Leigh to paddle in to Bath, so I had a new Finish to look forward to, and if it was a bit conjured up, well, isn't this entire enterprise a bit conjured up? 

So I planned for Bath, and my two boys wanted to come with me, which felt even more fun. They had stood on the dock and waved me out as I began this journey last October, accompanied by a guide and some bottlenose dolphins, and I liked the idea of steeping back out of the canoe with them along at the end. I gathered up canoe, life vests, paddles. Where to put in was a quandary. There was nothing authentic about the journey, so we could start anywhere. We considered simply going from Bonner's Point at the southern tip of Bath up Bath Creek to the community dock, but at less than a mile of paddling that seemed a little small. So I grazed Google Maps, finding various likely docks along the Pamlico, figuring that somewhere a mile or two upstream would be a pleasant dock and a family that wouldn't mind us using it to dump in. Once we saw that the weekend was going to be all over rain and wind, we gave up ideas of camping at Goose Creek State Park and decided to just drive down early Saturday, the day of our paddle.

​Enter Seth Effron. An old friend from my days at the News & Observer, Seth and his wife, Nancy, have put up a house on a piece of the land Nancy grew up on -- and the house, which they planned to be staying at that weekend, was on Duck Creek, about a 5-mile paddle from Bath. Seth reached out to say they'd be coming to the event at Bath to hear me talk after we landed. Where did I plan to stay? Would I like to stay with them and put in from Nancy's brother's dock next door?

I would. Thus did three Lawson Trekkers bed down in their delightful house, breakfasting on eggs from next door, bacon from a pig who had been known to the neighborhood when he was still using the bacon himself, and toast with blueberry ginger jam Nancy had made herself. The day had dawned cool, drizzly, and windy. The breakfast helped.

We put the canoe on the dock, drove to Bath to leave my car there, enjoyed some of the activities, and headed back so Seth and Nancy could drop us in around noon, to arrive in Bath by paddle around 2 p.m.

Right. The paddle started nicely -- we put in on the Duck, Seth took our picture, and off we went. The Duck runs southwest towards its mouth, so though a strong breeze pushed us effortlessly down, I didn't worry.

blown towards the southwest shore of the Pamlico instead of paddling northeast towards the mouth of Bath Creek, a couple miles downstream. 

As I mentioned above, I took one picture while we were enjoying the tailwind, and once we rounded the point never took my hand off my paddle.  On the map it looks like where I finally called the coast guard -- Seth and Nancy -- was about 1.6 miles' paddle from the dock, but I'm going to guess it was at least 50 percent longer for all the being blown backwards. We got turned sideways and around enough times ("Whee! This is so fun, dad!") that I eventually doubted our capacity to make it another mile and a half to the Bath, to say nothing of another couple miles up the Bath. To say nothing of coming home and telling my wife, "Well, I made it to Bath and the Trek is done, and we have at least half as many kids as I started out with, so that's good, right?"

I wrestled us over to a dock, between whose slats the water would geyser up when the swell came by. I hauled the canoe up, then Louie and I hauled it to the actual shore. I called Seth and Nancy; Nancy took the kids for milkshakes while Seth and I got the canoe and loaded it onto my car. Nancy was not having any of this "we're done" business -- we were just going to put back in at Bonner's Point and the boys and I would paddle up the half-mile to the town dock like we had said we'd do.

Which we did, but not before another half-hour of precision canoe drilling, with me shouting Louie into the bottom of the canoe and even Gus getting that this was just way harder than it needed to be as we got blown backwards and clear across the creek.

But it ended well. I finally got us pointed right,  took advantage of a brief drop in the wind to get us across the creek, and got Louie to head us in, as reward for his hard work. "You have the bridge, Mr. Sulu" -- and he never looked prouder. A gathering on the shore cheered us in, and I can pledge to you that I have never been happier to step out of a canoe. Finished indeed.

Lawson had his own canoe misadventures -- he describes almost being blown to sea by "a tart Gale at N. W. which put us in some Danger of being cast away, the Bay being rough, and there running great Seas between the two Islands," and another time he tells how his "Canoe struck on a Sand near the Breakers, and were in great Danger of our Lives, but (by God's Blessing) got off safe to the Shore," and I am inclined now to believe he in no way exaggerated. And he had five friends and four Indian guides paddling -- and no children to worry about.

​I told the audience at Bath that I could see now why Lawson took his journey before he had any children to worry about, and I got a good laugh, but I wasn't kidding. We were never in danger. But I was scared. Those are my kids.

Anyhow. Then a delightful hour spent talking at and with a room full of fellow Lawsonians, a fond farewell to our various hosts, and a dinner with Val Green, my forever guide, and then we were driving home through more driving rain.

Lawson started his journey with unexpected friends in Charleston, was taken in and cared for by every group of settlers and Indians he met, and finished it with generous hosts near Washington. I started mine with the vast and unexpected generosity of Kathie Livingston and Nature Adventure Outfitters last October, met almost nothing but a constant parade of generosity, support, and kindness on the way, and finished the outdoor portion of this project with yet another outpouring of help unlooked for and enormous assistance at Bath. 

I stepped in a canoe in Charleston October 12, 2014, and stepped out of one in Bath on Saturday, September 26, 2015. Every second -- well, maybe not the seconds where I was wondering whether I was going to drown my children, but every other second -- was a delight. It has been an honor to share Lawson's journey with you.

The Lawson Trek will be a book before it's done, and I'll share pieces of it as I produce it. In coming weeks and months I'll blog about people -- Val Green who knows more about Lawson than any other living person, John Jeffries of the Occaneechi, my many friends with the Catawbas, the people in the Lancaster and Boykin and Camden and Durham.  I'll blog about stories -- von Graffenreid's insane narrative of the founding of New Bern and the death of Lawson, for example. I'll tell you about science -- the missing apex predators like wolves, the new ones like coyotes, the destruction of the rivers of the Carolinas and the invasion of the invasives. 

And I expect I'll tell you about cool stuff I come across and about how good it feels to be just in my office writing, too.

Anyhow, the Trek itself is done, but the Lawson Trek isn't going anywhere.

Actually, let me say that again, because gracious, after a year of constant motion, it has a lovely sound: the Lawson Trek isn't going anywhere.

Jennifer Landin does not look at things -- she examines them. As we walk together along a trail through the lovely Lake Crabtree County Park in my home county of Wake, I see her assess the various pines, hardwoods, and even vines that we pass. She appraises them, narrowing her eyes, not yet satisfied. 

"I look for something that exemplifies the habitat," she says. She considers a droopy mayapple, dismisses the raft of loblollies. "I hate loblollies," she says.

Landin, a biologist, scientific illustrator, and science educator, teaches at NC State University through the biological sciences department, not the art department. That is, she is what I would call a nonfiction artist, and she teaches students to use illustration as a way not just of communicating but of seeing.  She has offered a couple hours of her time to do the same for the Lawson Trek, this day including old friend Angie Clemmons, herself an inveterate lover of plants who has taken courses in botanical illustration and is hungry for anything more to learn. We follow Landin like a pair of baby ducks.

Some grapevines seem like they might answer, or perhaps some bark, or -- wait a minute. "I know what I'm going to draw!" she yells with something approaching glee. She reaches up to the side of a tree and comes down with a smallish black beetle and our day is set. The three of us sit in a circle, place the beetle on an extra drawing pad, and for half an hour or longer we all draw and talk, with Landin leading the way, teaching us to see and represent what is before us.

Early in my understanding of Lawson, Landin had helped me to see the crazy illustrations in Lawson's book as a great demonstration of the edginess of Lawson's time. Not edgy in the fatuous sense we use the word now; edgy in the sense that Lawson explored the world when we were at the edge of a new kind of understanding.  Read Lawson's A New Voyage to Carolina and you could be reading a modern work of creative nonfiction: Lawson explains where he gets his information, quotes his sources (if sloppily), and uses the powers of observation offered by the nascent scientific revolution. 

On the other hand, look at the illustrations in his book -- few though they are -- and, as Landin told me, "they have more in common with medieval bestiaries than scientific illustrations."

"It's a technique called sighting," she said, "and nobody teaches it anymore." You hold out your pencil, then close one eye, then the other -- as the pencil seemingly moves in front of your subject, it measures it. "Then you have your unit," she says. It simply gives you something against which to compare the dimensions of your subject, to help you see it as an object in space rather than merely the impressions it leaves on your retinas, and once I did it I saw my beetle far better than I had moments before. It was this much longer than it was wide -- which sparked more comparisons: its legs were this long, the hairs on its mouth parts were this long in comparison to its mandibles, its legs came out at this angle from this portion of its abdomen -- or thorax? -- and had this many segments, which angled together in these ways.

And it's not just observation -- it's understanding. The more you know, the better you draw. Landin points out the beetle's shell-like outer wings, called elytra. "If you know that's a wing, you know it comes out of the thorax, so that's not the abdomen," she said of a segment of the body that both Angie and I thought was the abdomen. "Segmentation," Landin told us, "is really important."

To be sure. In any case, Landin perfectly develops her thoughts on drawing as an element of understanding here, in a post she did on the Scientific American website, and you should read it.

Following Landin, Angie and I were drawing away at our beetles and I at least was thrilled with the way I was representing something far more truly than I would naturally have done -- and I do make sketches in my notebooks, by the way. They'll be better now. 

I won't bore you with comparisons, though I'll show you our drawings. Landin coached us in all the ways of observing like an artist. "As you start looking, you start having questions," she said. "Those little hairs," she noted, around the beetle's mouth. "All insects are covered with those," and they're called setae. On and on. We all wondered what the beetle was -- some kind of stag beetle? It had an awesome sort of horn on its head, but ... "sometimes I'll draw something I don't know so I can go home and look it up," Landin said.

Which, this time, she did. Our pal turns out to be a patent leather beetle or a horned passalus-- odontotaenius disjunctus when she's being formal. "She" because Landin and Angie both just sort of felt she was a female, and who was I to chime in? I had no opinion on the matter.

I have to say I never looked so closely at a beetle in my life -- nor did I ever see one so well. I could show you ten million photos I took, but instead I'll show you our pictures. 

And so you see. Compare my photo with this drawing. Is it crazy to say the photo has captured that beetle, but Landin's drawing has captured that plus patent leather beetle-ness? Like George Bush and Vladimir Putin, I think through her observation Landin has seen into the soul of that beetle.

Landin told me that Charles Darwin, in a letter to his father, offered this advice to his nephew: "Tell Eyton as far as my experience goes let him study Spanish, French, drawing, and Humboldt." Alexander von Humboldt, of course, was an explorer who, almost exactly a century after Lawson, traveled Central America and described it in scientific terms; Darwin deeply admired him. 

Darwin deeply admired drawing, too, and you can see why. Drawing forces your eye to adjust to the reality of the situation -- a bug can't have an indeterminate number of legs when you're drawing it: it has six, and they come out ... just exactly ... here, and then there are these tiny hairs, and on and on. Even a photograph doesn't connect you to a subject the way drawing does.

I'm sorry Lawson didn't draw -- I'd like to see how that would have affected his observations. I'm glad I did, at least this little bit, for it's certainly improved mine.

As for Jennifer Landin, I simply suggest that you go to her blog and study and enjoy it. You didn't get the lesson that Angie and I did, but you'll learn a lot. You may do as you like with French, Spanish, and Humboldt. But take my advice and study Landin. 

Honey, I'm home. But, as perfectly capped a long and rather unusual journey, the final steps were somewhat circuitous. Let me explain.

Let's start at the charming, art-filled Greenville home of Vince Bellis, retired professor of biology at East Carolina University, who at his retirement took on Lawson as something of a project. (Vince was responsible for getting photos of all of Lawson's botanical specimens in the Natural History Museum in London online in 2002, just a bit more than 300 years after Lawson's journey.) We talked about the unique ability of our friend Val Green to sort of sniff out an old road, especially the roads that comprised Lawson's route. Val of course is the man who has spent 40 years of his life figuring out where Lawson slept every night, and Val has guided my journey virtually every step. He drove me along a river road in South Carolina once, narrating: "You see here? to our right? that's the plateau; on our left? It slopes down to the river. That area would flood occasionally. That's why the road is here -- it's always been here." 

And he was right -- he was teaching me how to see a road, whether it's gone from animal trail to Indian trail to trade path to wagon road to railroad or concrete or asphalt, like the one we drove on, or one that's remained a sand road for pretty much its whole history. Like Tom Magnuson and Dale Loberger, two other finders of the old ways, Val has just developed a nose. Vince and I wondered at it. To Vince, Val once described his pursuit of Lawson as "searching for the Ashes of Mr. Lawson's Campfires," and Vince wrote an unpublished paper about the end of Lawson's journey with that exact title. He gave me a copy, which does a great job of explaining where Lawson "came safe to Mr. Richard Smith's, of Pampticough-River, in North-Carolina; where being well receiv'd by the Inhabitants, and pleas'd with the Goodness of the Country, we all resolv'd to continue."

Agreeing with many before him who have believed that Lawson crossed the Tar River in the neighborhood of Greenville, Vince followed Lawson past "a deep Creek" that was most likely the Grindle Creek. Lawson says he walked about 12 miles before reaching the Smith place, and it is indeed about 12 miles from the eastern edge of Greenville to the east shore of Grindle. What's more, Vince found a land patent granted to Smith in 1706 that describes him already living on "Smith's Neck," which lay between two creeks. Now called Clark's Neck, the land between the Grindle and Tranter Creeks just to the east of Washington answers perfectly. Vince showed me where Smith would likely have lived, and I planned my next day's walk, which it turned out would actually be only a few miles.

And then we talked about how I could recover from the misdirection that had guided my last day or two's hikes.

Val has been my constant guide. We have spoken in restaurants and on trails, in cars and trucks and state parks and on the phone. And as I've come to each segment of my journey he's given me his interpretation of Lawson's route and helped me draw it -- in pencil -- on my DeLorme map book. And then I photocopy the requisite pages for each journey, and then off I go.

So when it was time to make my final journeys, I spent time with Val organizing my pencil lines, and then I confidently made my way. And when I sat with Vince, just to talk Lawson and get any final information I could about exactly where Lawson stopped before I made my final day's hike, we discovered I had wandered off. "Val has him walking right through the campus of ECU," Vince mentioned, and I shook my head. "Oh, no," I said. "Val has him walking south of Greenville, through the fields, and then up through Ayden and then north across the Tar, and then southeast into Washington." Or that's what I had on my book.

When I called Val to get to the bottom, Val sided with Vince: I had been somewhat off the exact track, if there is one, for the last couple days. We can't explain why, and we both remember our conversation in which we painstakingly penciled a line from Wilson, NC, to Washington, which is the end of the journey. We cannot for the life of us imagine how it came wrong. But it seems that I must have had an early version of Val's course; he says he's gone through several of those DeLorme books, and people used to believe Lawson had gone as far south as Goldsboro before heading north. So I suspect Val has been iteratively moving Lawson north, and I got  version 5.3 instead of 5.5 or 6.0. In any case, when I went back to compare the two routes, with the exception of the river crossing in Greenville, the two routes passed through almost identical territory: flat, broad farms. As Lawson said, "the Country here is very thick of Indian Towns and Plantations." He also mentions how in this area some of his companions, invited by Indians, went to visit their town: "but got nothing extraordinary, except a dozen Miles March out of their Way." You guys, I'm hip.

I solved my problem -- if it is a problem -- by going back over, mostly by car, the alternate path. Much of a muchness -- with the exception of the crossing in Greenville, the terrain is the same: farms, vast acres of crops, old houses and barns. It's a beautiful place. In Greenville you cross the Tar by a greenway or a downtown park, then walk east on a long exurban street with the same kind of empty buildings and decaying sprawl I've seen throughout the Carolinas outside the cities and towns; in the long run I'm glad I ended up spending more time in the country.

But I did reach the Tar, if a few miles east of where Lawson probably did. And I did cross it, and then, east of the Grindle Creek, I began casting about. For a half mile or so the terrain is swamp; once it raises up a tad you start to feel a sort of firmness beneath your feet, and you feel it: this is a place people could stay. They could make a home here, clear land, grow food, hunt. This is a good place. 

I can't say I found for sure the Smith place, though the little double-track dirt road leading into the bush felt perfect, and when I went to the other side of the creek and found a similarly "homey" place, it turned out to be exactly across the river. And when I walked down Clark's Neck Road, through the land that Smith surely owned, it felt much the same. This was home. This was the Smith land. This is where Lawson stopped. And it was where I stopped too.

For a minute. 

Because the active walking part of this trek is over, but lots more remains. For Lawson the next years were about making his way in a new world. He found ways to be helpful to the powerful and the connected. He stayed with the Smiths -- he even evidently took Smith's daughter, Hannah, as his common law wife and had a daughter with her. He co-founded Bath, North Carolina's first incorporated town, and then New Bern, which eventually served as de facto capital. All that land-grabbing and town-founding eventually got him killed, but that's not the point now. The point is after his long walk, Lawson got -- and stayed  -- busy.

So will I. My next steps will be to organize the records of my journey, both on this website and as a book. I'll keep the blog posts coming as I do that, sharing information I find, stories (so many!) I have not had time to share as I've walked, and keeping you posted on the development of what will I hope be a book worthy of Lawson's original. 

In any case, for now, I'm done walking. I won't miss the blisters, but I'll miss the countryside. I'll miss the people, and the hills, and the farms and fields. I'll miss the rivers and creeks and cypress-tupelo swamps. I'll miss the sound and the coast, the ocean and the sandy pocosins nearby.

And I'll see some of you at 2 pm in Bath on September 26 for the (free!) Smithsonian Magazine Museum Day Live, for which the Lawson Trek will make a ceremonial canoe into town and tell a story or three.

But for now all I can say is what I presume Lawson said when he first saw the comely Hannah:

I'm home.

You guys, I am just so tired. I have been walking, on and off, since October. If I'm staying indoors and have a car helper I have been walking around carrying 15 pounds of notepads and lenses and lunch and candy and knife and compass and pens and books and water. If I'm camping and have little support? Think 45 pounds at least.

Anywhere from 10 to 20 miles per day, each time I head out for anywhere from a day to a week.

Sometimes it is hot: it's been summer, and as you may have noticed it's been something of a hottie; the National Weather Service in Raleigh at one point tweeted that the asphalt temperature was 145 degrees, and I've walked an awful lot of asphalt. I'd find the tweet for you, but did I mention? I'm tired so screw it.

It has gone down to 10 degrees (my water bottle froze in my sleeping bag) and rained enough to make whoever invented Gore-tex just want to apologize for the whole thing, since high-tech rain gear or not I was slick down to the skin.

This has been going on almost a year and I am just beat; beat to hell. Add in that since my hiking shoes wore out and I replaced them, in the last couple weeks I have developed blisters here and there -- blisters the approximate size and shape of the state of Delaware. 

I whine to you thus because as I set out for my last walk today I feel far less excitement about the culmination of this long trail than pure gut weariness. That seemed important to share. I've been thrilled to meet people, learn from descendants of Lawson's hosts, spend time among the pines and oaks, seeing creeks and deer and snakes and turtles and herons, walking beneath the grasses and grasshoppers and the vaulting sky. I've felt fortunate and thrilled and happy and challenged and I've been having enough fun that I'm embarrassed about it, but I'm also just so tired.

Naturally there's lots more to say. I spent last evening with the very delightful Vince Bellis, professor emeritus of botany  at East Carolina University. As something of a retirement project, in the late 1990s, as the 300th anniversary of Lawson's journey approached, Bellis became a Lawsonian. Already interested in Lawson's botanical contribution, Bellis got to wondering about where Lawson ended -- where, that is, lived this Richard Smith, at whose settlement Lawson dropped his pack.

Vince has shown me exactly where that is -- it's rather west of Washington, much closer to where I am than I had expected, though I'll walk into Washington anyhow because that's just what you do. Moreover, in conversations with Vince and my ever-present guide Val Green last night we discovered that to at least a certain extent my last 60 miles or so have been somewhat at variance with what Val and Vince's best and latest estimates are for Lawson's actual track.

Though for context, Vince started our conversation thus: "Lawson disappears after Hillsborough." That is, after Lawson's visit to the Occanneechi village, of whose location we are quite certain, Lawson's descriptions become vague, his directions far less certain than they were previously, and his locations by and large a matter of pure speculation. Even the falls of Wee Quo Whom, which I visited a couple treks ago, turn out to be far less certainly where we thought they were, raising only the next in a never-ending series of questions about where the hell I am and where the hell Lawson was. This is how it is when you try to get directions from a guy who last visited the area 315 years ago. I know where he ended, though, and that's where I'll end today. The enterprise was to go out like Lawson and see what's up, who's out there, and get the lay of the land -- so if we've been a mile or two at variance recently, that's not going to be a bother.

Especially since other elements of the description do still hang. Lawson mentions that he "went on, through many Swamps, finding, this day, the long ragged Moss on the Trees, which we had not seen for above 600 Miles," and yesterday, right on schedule, I came across Spanish Moss again. I find that kind of thrilling, just as I did last week when after reading his description 

I walked through Wilson and Greene Counties last week, and I want you to know that Wilson and Greene Counties are the sweetest-smelling county in North Carolina.

I started in Wilson proper. I had spent the night at a little motel and was headed out of town on one of the roads south. Walking along a warehouse, I smelled something so delightful, so delicious I wished there were an Instagram for smells. It was, of course, a tobacco warehouse. Out front was parked a truck full of cured tobacco -- harvested, cured, and baled. I chatted with the two gentlemen out front for a while and asked if I could go in and take a picture. They preferred that I did not -- nothing they were ashamed of, but these are days when people in the tobacco business very strongly prefer to have as little attention as possible.

But as I walked the two-lanes between tiny towns like Speights Bridge and Lizzie and Scuffleton, the tobacco harvest was my constant companion, as was the overwhelming smell. It's everywhere. I also saw harvests of sweet potatoes and seed corn, so the week has been an orgy of pre autumnal bounty, to say nothing of big machines doing cool stuff.

But tobacco is the star of the show. I've been watching the fields ripen since I entered tobacco country in the eastern Piedmont, and the green leaves have begun going gold, one field at a time.

overwatered cabbage. Then I'd see the harvesters disgorging their loads onto the backs of repurposed school buses -- already mostly just a flatbed with a light body, so they work perfectly. Then the buses drop the leaves at the modern equivalent of the old tobacco barns we all love. 

Family members no longer tend to tie the leaves to hang on rods and cure (my friend Cynthia Collins told me about wearing bandannas while doing this because her hands would get sticky from the resin and she didn't want to get it in her hair). These days farm workers -- mostly the immigrants busting their butts to feed their families that certain politicians seem to hate so much -- use a kind of fork arrangement that skewers a pile of leaves and holds them in the metal shed to cure. The fans pumping air through the sheds means the area around them smells beautiful.

After curing is done new trucks take the bales to warehouses -- most tobacco is produced directly for companies now, I'm told, so tobacco auctions are becoming rarer. The video below was made with shots I took in the past few days simply as I walked down the road in Lawson's footsteps. This is just what's going on now. 

Now as I walk I see little twists of cured tobacco lying by the side of the road as well, and they smell wonderful too. I have videos of sweet potato harvest by big noisy machines and of seed corn harvest by big noisy machines too. How jealous are you?

Greetings from Wilson, North Carolina, where the Lawson Trek is four hiking-days from its arrival in little Washington and the completion of this journey. 

I want to tell you all about Wilson, a small city struggling to reinvent itself in the wake of the loss of tobacco farming and other traditional rural vocations that made it a coastal plain capital. Wilson is working hard on its downtown, encouraging the arts, and looking forward. 

I want to tell you about Clayton, a smaller city (Wilson has close to 50,000 people; Clayton is closing in on 20,000), which is trying to combine a downtown focus on small business with the advantages it has by being part of the metropolitan Raleigh tech hub. I want to tell you about how it's felt to walk away from even the last hills and into the coastal plain, where the clouds put on a show every day and the land spreads itself out before you like a beach blanket. I want to tell you about the fried bologna sandwich I had in Papa Jack's, in Buckhorn Crossroads and the barbecue I ate at Parker's in Wilson, about what seems to be Lawson's crossing of the Neuse River and what may or may not have been Wee Quo Whom, a waterfall whose location has always presented a significant problem for route tracers.  

And yet instead I need to address an issue I thought we had resolved already. I'm talking, once again, about the possible hanging tree in Salisbury, which sparked a discussion -- a highly respectful discussion on all parts, I might add -- about the confederate flag and the history of racism in the Carolinas. (I updated things a bit here.)

Once again: by far the most delightful aspect of this discussion -- at least in these pages -- is the decency with which it's been carried on. I have spoken with people who vigorously support the flying of the confederate flag and people who think (as I do) that the flag represents a legacy of hatred and white supremacy. And we shook hands and we kept our voices modulated and we listened and smiled. We didn't change our minds much, but we engaged in civil discourse.

So then yesterday I got this comment on the blog.

I hate to allow Mr. Mathews, whoever he is and wherever he comes from (the return address on his comment came up as "server unknown" or some such), to kidnap this discussion, but I found it so heartbreaking that I wanted to put it out there rather than bury it: I've always believed that you expunge corruption by exposing it, not by hiding it.

It's scarcely worth pointing out the tide of irrationality in his comments -- he seems to think that his ancestors stole the land of the United States from the Indians fair and square (and tried to seize it again through treason) so that means those of us who don't share that background are somehow, I don't know -- well, gutter degenerate filth, so the United States is his country and not ours. We see so much of this now and I find it heartbreaking. I will point out that the word "gutter" is commonly attributed to Louis Farrakhan about Judaism (whether he ever said it or not is another entire question. And meanwhile, the Nazis famously despised "degenerate" art, so once you're using code words like degenerate and gutter, you're aligning yourself with some pretty troubling things.

I need to tell you this: I have sat across from Peggy Scott of the Santee Indians, who was kind and decent and delightful, across from John Jeffries of the Occaneechi, who was kind and decent and delightful. (I haven't been able to tell you about him yet, but take a look at this until I can.) If anyone -- anyone -- could complain about people showing up and ruining a country -- well, you know. The point is, Mr. Mathews is spewing a kind of vicious, ignorant, cowardly hatred that pollutes everything it touches, and it hurt my spirit to leave it rotting in the comments thread of this blog, and it hurt even worse to delete it, as though I were afraid of it. 

So I'm sharing it here. And in that spirit I also say, once more: the vast majority of people with whom the Lawson Trek has interacted -- in fact, simply everybody else -- has shown such kindness and generosity that this ugly attack so near to the end of the project serves only to underscore that. I am grateful for that more than I can express.

To cleanse the stain of Mr. Mathews' vileness from our spirits, I will do something I should have done much more of throughout this project but only just thought of literally this very second: I'm going to share a bunch of photos and captions to show what it's looked like from the Lawson Trek the least couple hikes. Thanks for reading. And as for Mr. Mathews and his ilk, I suggest we just do what his favorite song asks us to do anyhow: look away.

My planning projects get shorter, my book stack gets higher, and my calendar gets slimmer.

That is, the Lawson Trek is nearing its conclusion -- at least the Trekking part does. 

I've made it my practice as I've walked this path not to plan too far ahead -- I like just kind of figuring things out as I go, which strikes me as highly Lawsonian and in the spirit. But as I near the end of the path and have to organize my final Heroes of the Lawson Trek, I've started planning my routes, and -- hokey smokes! -- I discover that I'm a bare five days of walking until I reach little Washington, where Lawson stopped and so shall I, sort of. I expect to hit Washington September 17. 

But wait there's more! Because of the fabulous interest shown all the way through this project by the people at Historic Bath, the Lawson Trek is going to make a small extra step. Lawson ended his journey at Washington, and so shall I, though of course in Lawson's day it was not called Washington. The town's namesake, George Washington, was himself not born until 1732, so if the "town" was called anything in those days it was called "the place on the tip of the Pamlico Sound where that British dude lives." Washington was actually founded in 1776 -- rather precocious town-naming, if you want my opinion; it was the first town named for General Washington. Bath, meanwhile, had been around since 1705, when it was founded, surveyed, and laid out by -- well, you guessed: by John Lawson. Bath was North Carolina's first incorporated town. It has several colonial houses, three of which you can tour; the state's oldest church, begun in 1734; and gardens and a visitors center.

So on September 26, Bath is participating in Smithsonian Magazine Museum Day Live, a sort of gift from Smithsonian Magazine, encouraging museums and historic sites to waive admission fees for a day. You can get tickets to the Bath Site houses free here. As part of that daylong celebration -- there'll be living history, rope making, corn husk doll making, colonial games, all kinds of cool stuff -- the Lawson Trek will make its final advance, canoeing up Bath Creek into town at 2 pm. After that I'll talk a bit, answer questions, and take a deep breath before beginning to write the book about Lawson's journey, and my own.

Which, by the way, will still be documented on this website. I'll keep sharing cool stuff I find, even if it's found in books and interviews rather than along the path. Plus I'll be filling in the many, many gaps the complexity of planning, trekking, and updating have caused me to leave. So if you gave me your time in an interview and I took a million pictures and videos and you haven't seen any evidence of it on this site, trust me -- you will. 

Anyhow: five walking days! A pretty-much certain end date in Washington! A guaranteed certain canoe-in date to Bath, nicely bookmarking the trek, which began last October with a canoe trip out of Charleston. 

Hope to see you there.