So naturally I want people to read my book, and of course to buy it and enable me to send my sons to college and all of that stuff. And I like telling stories and I like making books and all of that. I liked the hiking and I like the research. But at bottom, if there's one thing I think is really important about this project, it's that it will share the story of John Lawson, which is criminally unknown. I've said a million times: John Lawson should be North Carolina's William Penn, yet he's barely known. 

​Well, now there's an exhibit about him at the City of Raleigh Museum.

This all came about because I saw a piece in Outside Magazine about an exhibit created by an Appalachian Trail hiker who had done a lot of drawing. The exhibit had drawings, but it also hung a backpack on the wall, produced the maps the hiker had used, and even a bandanna. The sort of thinginess of the exhibit appealed to me. It just seemed to evoke the spirit of backpacking more than any other representation I'd ever seen. 

So I got to thinking about this Lawson project, and all the maps, and the backpacks, and the shoes, and the stuff -- feathers and rocks and shells and roadside ditch trash -- that along with the writing and the images made the experience so rich for me. So I reached out to a couple museums and almost instantly the City of Raleigh Museum came on board. Their exhibits follow an approach they describe as "then, now, and next," and that's of course been the Lawson Trek's ethos from the drop. So over the last many months we met, wrote, shared images, rethought, rewrote, and came up with something. The first time I saw it was when they sent me a picture of what they had worked up.

They -- I guess we, actually -- came up with an enormous map of the Carolinas, with 20 spots on it where either Lawson or I, usually both, did or saw something interesting. Each of those spots corresponded to a hanging banner, and each banner had a quote from Lawson, some explanatory text from me, an image from my project, and an image representing Lawson's observation.

In addition, it had my backpack and the pair of trail runners I wore out on the trek, leaning there against a display cabinet filled with objects from my project. There's an arrow given to me by John "Blackfeather" Jeffries of the Occaneechee, and a turkey feather that I found along the way. The arrow has flights made from similar feathers, so I like the two together. There are shards of granite from a quarry that sits today where Lawson described an enormous granite outcropping. There are Sewee pottery sherds from coastal South Carolina and Catawba shards that one of the owners of Ivy Place south of Charlotte dug up simply by scraping his boot heel in the dirt; that's how present the past is even today in the rich Carolina earth. A modern piece of Catawba pottery is in the cabinet too. There are even crushed beer cans, which we saw a lot of.

To be honest, it was pretty amazing to see. It didn't look much like the exhibit Outside Magazine article described, but I think it does a great job of describing the project. More, it does a great job of putting Lawson into modern context, and when I think back on it, that's exactly what I was looking for when I first heard about Lawson and went in search of a book connecting his world to ours.

And I would sort of root for it: "Don't just read whatever else is on this page; turn the page! Turn to the rest of my article!" And if they did, I would get an absurd jolt of pleasure at having engaged them. Watching people make their way through this exhibit was just like that. They were doing what I had set out to do ten years ago: learning about John Lawson and putting him in perspective in our own time. Book, poster, pins, patches, blog, blah blah blah. The point of this entire enterprise has been, really, to wake people up about the amazing John Lawson. And now for six months the City of Raleigh Museum is doing exactly that. And then, we hope, the exhibit will travel to other museums all over North and South Carolina. I'm no John Lawson, but it feels like that's at least a contribution.

It's a weird thing, this business of telling things to people. About ten years ago I got interested in telling people about John Lawson, and a lot has happened since then. 

So A Delicious Country has been out for around six months, and it's been one thing and another since then, almost all enormous fun. I've talked about Lawson and his journey and my own to people at bookstores and colleges, state parks and arts councils, museums and bars. And there's another several months to go in this little parade: I get to go this month to the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, which is as far as I'm concerned the best book festival there is. You can see the whole rest of the schedule here. 

But today I want to tell you about what's above these paragraphs: a poster. From the beginning of this project I've tried to give it everything it needed to succeed. It has its website -- here you are, yes? -- which gives history about Lawson and his journey and updates about me and mine. It got the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT to support it. As the website provided updates on my progress, I also kept a supply of pins and patches to share as I went along, distributing them to people I met exactly as Lawson shared beads and tobacco and other treats with the people who helped him along. 

And of course ultimately out came A Delicious Country, the book distilling everything I learned about Lawson and the Carolinas on my trek. It's been a treat to share that. 

​But from the start I believed this project needed one more thing: a poster. Between Lawson's map and the trail of my own series of campsites and adventures on his trail, between the wonderful images from his book and the stream of Instagram pictures I left in my wake, a little story attached to each and every image, it just seemed like a poster needed to exist. 

So here's the poster. My genius friend Lacey Chylack is a designer, and she worked with me to create this poster. It has Lawson's map with highlights of our journeys marked on it. It has images from my journey and maps and pictures from his book and his time. I'm thrilled with it, and of course it's now available from the store page of this site. 

I'm not sure why I felt this was necessary. But it seemed like a way to summarize this enterprise of mine, and Lawson's, and to put it all together in a way that would look nice on a wall but would also interest teachers and schoolkids. Getting people to know about Lawson has, after all, been at the center of this undertaking from the start.

It's a weird business, this belief that people need to know things and you need to tell them. Once I was on Lawson's trail, everything else seemed to just follow: the website, the pins, the patches, the book. And now the poster is here, and that's just about it. 

Except oh yeah -- Friday, Oct. 4, an exhibit opens up about this enterprise at the City of Raleigh Museum. 

​

Do you see this stuff? It's all the exhibit designed by the folks at the COR Museum. I worked with them and provided copy and connections with Lawson and things like arrows and rocks and other artifacts, but I'm kinda blown away by what it looks like they've done. I can't wait to see it in real life.

Real life. Again, the exhibit, called A Delicious Country, just like the book (taken of course from Lawson's own description of Carolina) opens First Friday, Oct. 4, from 6 to 9 pm at the Museum, and runs for a few months.

The Museum will have copies of the poster and of course copies of the book, to say nothing of the pins and patches, so if you want you can come home with an armful of every single Lawson thing we've produced for this enterprise. 

I'll be honest -- I'm a little overwhelmed. I'm used to seeing books in print, though that's always a thrill. Then seeing the poster was pretty amazing. Now seeing this exhibit ready to launch, to sort of sound the starting gun for the next few months, probably the last few months of major support for the book, is amazing. I can't wait to see it set up in person, mixed with the artifacts they've prepared for viewing too. Come on out: I'll be there Oct. 4 from 6 to 9, though the exhibit will be on display for months every minute the museum is open. See you there!