So I think I might have mentioned that of all the crazy things that have happened regarding this Lawson project, kind of the coolest and a little bit craziest is the exhibit about Lawson's journey and my own at the City of Raleigh Museum in downtown Raleigh. The exhibit compares Lawson's journey to my own, using maps, quotes from Lawson's book (and my own!), and even artifacts from my journey, from Sewee pottery sherds to roadside trash to an arrow given to me by one of my many guides to the backpack and shoes I wore on the project. It's awesome and I'm thrilled with it and hope you go see it (it's up through the end of March).

But one of the things that comes with things like exhibits is sooner or later someone is going to ask you to talk about them, so brace yourselves: January 23 at 7 pm at the City of Raleigh Museum I'll talk about all the stuff I usually talk about when Lawson comes up. 

I'll show you maps and I'll read from Lawson, and I'll read from my book and talk about the hell we've put our countryside through since Lawson's day. I'll run through some PowerPoint

slides and I'll cut some monkeyshines like I always do, and I hope I'll be entertaining. Above all, when the evening is through you'll have learned a bit about Lawson, and if this entire years-long enterprise does nothing else but make you more aware of Lawson, it will have been worth all the time I spent on it. 

So anyhow, come on out to the City of Raleigh Museum at 7 pm on Jan. 23. We'll talk Lawson!

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!

So I have two more book events coming up in the next week -- one at So & So Books on Person Street in downtown Raleigh (at 6 pm Sunday May 19) and one at Regulator Books on Ninth Street in Durham, Tuesday, May 21, at 7. 

I tell you about these not just to encourage you to come, though I definitely encourage you to come. It'll be fun! I tell you because I want you to get a sense of what these events are like, at least for me.

Here's the thing. Writing any book is a mug's game. You spend years -- years! -- of your life up to your armpits in interviews, travel, and research into a topic that almost by definition is arcane. I mean, if there isn't already a book on it answering any questions I could likely answer, it can't be that important, right? There's like a skillion books out there, and I'm not so smart. If I looked around and said, "hey, there ought to be a book about ..." it means nobody in all of recorded history has so far thought it important enough to write a book about before now. So it's not likely a topic that's keeping people up night wondering about it, right?

So take a topic that nobody's thinking much about, and then dive into it headfirst and splash around in it for, oh, say a decade. That's how long I messed around with John Lawson and his journey. I stumbled onto him in around 2008 or 2009, while I was researching On the Grid, my book about infrastructure. And A Delicious Country came out a couple months ago, so that's ten years plus I spent on this. Some of it walking the surface of this remarkable planet, to be sure, but an awful lot of it spent holed up in libraries and my office all by myself, poring over books and articles and maps and artifacts and God knows what all else, all with some, commonly tangential, connection to Lawson. With, again, no enormous community tapping their feet and pointing at their watches, saying, "Lawson! Dammit, where's our book on Lawson?"​

I love doing readings. I love when I finally get the chance to not just write about my thing but talk about it -- to stand up and pace around and gesticulate like a madperson and regale you with how excited I am about John Lawson and his  journey and his time and his contribution, and how much fun I had retracing his steps, and how I learned his surveying techniques and on and on and on. I love to make jokes in my PowerPoint or my list of points to make. I love to stop in the middle and answer a question and go off on a tangent. Which is the best, because there's me, yammering on about a topic I literally wrote the book on, and there's someone else, who is interested enough to say, "Wait a minute, explain." And, well, thats the stuff. Suddenly we're having a conversation, and that's way better than even my usual enormously entertaining palaver.

At bottom, for the tiny moments of readings, I get to live my preposterous dream. All I've ever wanted to do was write books, and now here I am, and I get to stand in front of people and wave in the air copies of ... my books. My first job in publishing was working at a bookstore. We were all nascent writers, and we used to get boxes of books from various publishers and distributors, and when it was time to put price tags on them we'd stroke them, hold them next to our cheeks, caress them. "One day," we'd murmur. "One day, someone will open a box and out will come MY book." And when I do readings I get to remember: that day has come. ​

So February 3 was evidently something called International Map Day, which is pretty much a bullshit made-up thing to benefit a map website, but because I like maps so much it gives us an opportunity to talk about maps, which is never a bad thing.

Above this text you see the combined images of a standard Google map with the map that Lawson published with his book georeferenced onto it, showing two combined things. One is just how awesome map and library people are (Philip McDaniel, the GIS librarian at Davis Library at UNC, made this for me).  The other is how accurate Lawson's map was despite his limitations. Actually, maps have been accurate for a very long time—the first map of the Carolina coast, made by John White in 1587, is instantly recognizable as the Carolina coast today. You can learn more about NC maps in the video below and read about them here. 

of beauty just the same, what with the cartouche dedicated to the eight Lords Proprietors (no fool, our Lawson, right?) and the compass rose and whatnot.  It reminds you, though, that though Lawson spent years in North Carolina, he spent a couple months in Charleston, arranged his expedition, and pretty much never returned. I bring this all up not just because it's cool and it's always a good day to show off some cool stuff, and certainly not because of some foofaraw about Map Day. 

I bring it up because as we near the date of publication for A Delicious Country, I'm at work creating a poster of Lawson's journey, with Lawson's map (with Lawson's-- and my -- route shown thereon) at its center. I hope this will be a cool thing for schoolrooms and kids and anyone who wants to keep Lawson in mind. More, we're also at this moment designing a museum exhibit that will show up first at the City of Raleigh Museum in October 2019. It'll have maps and images and artifacts and explanations of Lawson's life and journey, as elucidated by my own retracing. It should be enormous fun. Designing it sure is. Plan on coming to see it -- or on pestering your local museum to host it after it's been in Raleigh for a few months. It'll travel! It's about Lawson -- travel is in its DNA. With all those maps, maybe it'll even know where it's going.

You guys it seems to have happened again. After a decade or so engaged with a topic, after years of walking along roads and talking to people and trying to make sense of a person, a time, an enterprise, a whole long-gone world. After trying to look at our own world the way we would have looked at that one, after comparing and contrasting and all the usual stuff, after writing and rewriting and proofreading and all that, it seems like we have a book. 

In March 2019 it will be in bookstores, but starting this very second you can order it online right here. If you want to see what the publisher,  the University of North Carolina Press, has to say about it, click the link. If you want to see what they have to say about me, click here. It ain't much. If you're hungry for more information about me and my other work, try my home website, here. I'm very interesting.

Of more account, here are some initial responses to this book, by writers I deeply admire and whose praise means an enormous amount to me.

"An absorbing read. Huler's experiences during his modern trek do not, of course, duplicate what John Lawson found so long ago, but forms of beauty and dispossession rhyme down the centuries in thought-provoking patterns."
--Charles Frazier, author of Varina
 
"It's been said that one of the only true plots is this: A man goes on a journey. In A Delicious Country, Scott Huler demonstrates why that narrative arc retains such strength. His retracing of John Lawson's epic circumnavigation is thoughtful, relaxed, humorous, and generous. It retrieves for us a lost world of discovery and wonder and reminds us that the goal of every departure is to learn to value home."
--Maryn McKenna, author of Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats
 
"An eye-opening journey through the contemporary South. As he does in his other excellent books, Huler reminds us in A Delicious Country that the present and the past coexist all around us. He writes with great specificity about each topic at hand, but he never loses sight of the larger human story. The book excels as a work of exploration, history, and science. It is also simply what reviewers like to call 'a rousing good read.'"
--Michal Sims, author of The Adventures of Henry Thoreau
 
"From the boggy salt marshes near Charleston to the parking lot of the Charlotte Motor Speedway and beyond, Scott Huler has breathed new life into the English explorer John Lawson's all-but-forgotten 1700 journey through the Carolinas. While much of the physical landscape has changed over the centuries, the characters who inhabit it are still vibrant, still contradictory, still completely unforgettable. Only a storyteller as warm and witty as Huler could wrangle such a sprawling, complex natural history into an engrossing travelogue that leaves the reader wanting nothing but more."
--Bronwen Dickey, author of Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

Next come all the inevitable moments of weirdness that come with publishing a book One day a truck comes to our house, and then there's a box of books. And you open the box and there it is, and there's your work, and there's your name, and it all seems a little embarrassing, and you want to apologize that you've put everyone to so much bother. I worked in a bookstore when I was just out of college, and we were all writers of course, and we used to open the boxes of books, glossy book covers of Michener and Stephen King, and smooth shiny paperbacks, and we would clutch them, rub them against our cheeks: "One day," we would murmur, "one day, this will be me. ..." And then one day is here again, yet once again without the trumpet voluntary and footmen in livery that seemed so likely back when it was only imaginary. 

Then will come bookstore events with unpredictable attendance, and media appearances where I sound like a knucklehead and how could they have gotten so much wrong, and reviews of some other book the reviewer must have mistakenly conflated with mine, and then the occasional panel discussion and festival where the author next to me will have a line of well-wishers out the door and my handler will say of my few greeters, "Oh, this always happens! But you were up against [almost anyone else], so please don't feel bad" and then will disappear out of awkward embarrassment into her  or his mobile phone.

I have been here before. But I must also say: of these many years of work I will now have a record, and those authors above, august company indeed, consider it worthy of comment, and so for the moment, at least I will say only, like that creepy tall guy said in "Twin Peaks," It is happening again. Let's all hope for the best, shall we?

There is much to love about writing books. You get to choose a topic, something you love so much that you want to engage with it for several years at a time. Something that you care about, something that fascinates you. In this case, the life and journey of John Lawson. That's been a treat.

You get to spend hours, days, weeks in research. You go to cool libraries, you find yourself in the basement offices of academics who know enormous amounts about the topic you love. You get to travel, to talk to other people who know much about either your topic or topics ancillary to your topic. You become in a tiny way an expert on a thing, and you get to have the kind of thoughts experts have.

You get to do ordinary reporting, where you talk to people and hear their stories and ask them nosy questions in their yards, on their porches, their farms, their city offices and homes, interesting in themselves. And then you get to gossip about it in blog posts. And on a project like this one, you get to spend hours, days, weeks outdoors, walking the surface of this amazing planet, breathing air and seeing birds and clouds and cars and telephone wires. It's a privilege to walk this miraculous world of ours, and to have the job of describing it.

Then of course you have to write, and people will tell you that's hard. And it is, mind you, but I'm one of those rare writers who actually loves the act of writing. I love sitting at a desk, with a million notebooks open, and library books, and texts, and index cards in different colors, with post-its on everything but my kids and sometimes even on them. You get to take months, years of reporting and researching and distill it into piles: does this go with this? How about this? Which pile goes where? What can I absolutely not fail to get in this book; what can I, as it turns out, do without? What is essential to the story I'm trying to convey? What is utterly fascinating -- but just not part of this story? You spend months like that, a year or more, and your pile of things you must not omit gets smaller, and the pile of things you have organized and expressed gets larger, and then one night at 2:34 AM or thereabouts you finish a sentence and realize that that's not just the end of a paragraph or a passage or even a chapter. It's the end of your book. Then, tired, dreamlike, and a little insane, you go outside and in the cone of a streetlamp you do the touchdown dance, because once more it turns out you actually did it, and you wrote a book.

​Then you send it to your editor, and if you're lucky you have a good one -- this time, gracious, but I did -- and they turn it around and then you have many weeks of work to do, getting rid of mush and fluff and blather, resolving confusion and strengthening your points, and cutting everything you can live without. Then the editor says okay and you're done, and then you relax for thirty seconds and it comes back from the copyeditor, who has caught errors in spelling, grammar, syntax, structure, organization, and through-line so deeply embarrassing that your body goes into involuntary total cringe, but you thank them, solve the problems, and send it back.

These are all steps, and every one you either love, like, or courageously endure.

And then: proofreading.

For one tiny second you enjoy the fact that your book exists. On pages! It has numbers and running heads and chapter titles and all kinds of book-looking things, but: you have to proofread it. You have to read this thing, one more time, character by character, word by word, page by page, from once upon a time to happily ever after, and you'd rather die, and you probably wish you would. I know I do.

You have to, character by character, trace the errors of your reporting, the insufferable flaccidness of your prose, the unendurable tiresomeness of your voice. And that, my friends, is how I spent the last few weeks.

And I tell you now: it is over. I have proofread A Delicious Country. It will come out in March 2019, and then there we will be. We have a cover image, which I cannot show you until we have a preorder page, because obviously you will want to overlook my many flaws and begin preparing to read it. Right?

And I'm thrilled about that -- delighted. But mostly exhausted. And, truth to tell, sick beyond imagining of my own voice telling you or me or my editor or anybody at all about Lawson and his world and his journey and me and mine. But I have done it: I have read. I have proofread. I have caught and corrected errors. And I have returned pages to UNC Press, and for the love of God it's their problem now. 

So I thought you should know. I mean, callooh callay, to be sure. But mostly, there we are. A thing is done. And we'll talk about it more soon, or anyhow I will and if you come to a bookstore or listen to a radio or maybe watch TV you might see me doing it. But for now, done. Done. I shall go to sleep now. So very nice to have met you.

So I'm checking the copyediting of A Delicious Country, which actually has a publication season and a subtitle now, about which more in a moment. Anyhow, the copyeditor has done a wonderful job, catching my inconsistencies and fixing my spelling, capitalizing things that need capitalization and removing the occasional horrific solecism (only the horrific ones, mind you; the merely irritating solecisms he has wisely presumed to be just what I do, and if UNC Press bought it, he just shrugs and lets me dig my own grave). Anyhow: a thing of beauty.

But as I go through the typescript, I occasionally see something that even the copyeditor didn't question, because he'd have had no basis to question it. This is just about the last time I can correct such errors, so I'm open to them. One thing that caught me was my description of crossing "the Elmore Hodee bridge." Hodee? Really? I doubted that; it sounded like a mistype of "Hodge," yes? Well, I could have pawed through my notes from three years ago, but that sounded pretty awful. So I looked up "Elmer Hodge" and found something in a list of North Carolina bridges, but it was "Hodges," not "Hodge." Well, now what? Now I pulled up Google Maps, got down to street view, and looked at the god damned sign. It was the L. Elmore Hodges bridge, and it's right in the book now, but honestly: Do you not despair with me that we'll ever find another reason to leave our houses?

The copyeditor has also noted, for example, that I occasionally mention a book in text that does not show up in my bibliography, urging me to include it. Fair enough, a good point, to which i happily accede. At this point we all know of course that I do not need to go to the library to gather the information for such an inclusion; I don't even need to walk over to my bookcase and find a citation in the bibliography of one of my other sources. Not only can I find a full citation online -- I can find the entire book online, most times. For example, I mention Mark Catesby's famous Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands, published in London in 1771.   And not only can I find the text of that seminal volume online: I can find the entire book, scanned page by page, in the University of North Carolina Libraries digital miscellany page.

work online, then drive into Charlotte or Raleigh or Columbia or Charleston every week or so to check into a real library for resources not yet available. This is good, right? And yet. I have a shelf full of books -- I think about 150; I beg you not to ask me to count them -- that I have bought for this project, and about five instantly came to hand for reference checking, plus two more just about Catesby; one a series of researched essays about his contribution, a coffee table book filled with beautiful color prints (though not of the little owl), the other an inexpensive but thorough reprint of Catesby's entire book. So I could easily have found my information in any of those books. Is it a good thing that instead I engaged, at my desk, with a high-resolution scan of Catesby's actual work, and stumbled on the little owl? Or would it have been better to have my fingers on pages, looking through my beautiful color book or my informative monotone one, sitting in the armchair by my bookcase? I'm not asking rhetorically; I genuinely wonder. I have been able to consult dozens of rare sources for this project because of scanned books and various online resources, from UNC to the Library of Congress to Google Books to private map collections. That's great. On the other hand I have traveled to some of the world's great libraries, and looking at original books and maps, right there in front of your own face, touching them with your own fingertips, is not to be tossed aside lightly. I wrote about that experience with Lawson's own book here.

I know, I hear it too -- as I write it emerges: this is an all but unqualified good. Even Google Maps, which seems in some ways to urge us not to leave our homes, really doesn't do that unless you're the type who thinks not leaving your home sounds good. After all, I only looked up the L. Elmore Hodges bridge because I went out there and experienced it myself in the first place. A scroll along the entire route of Lawson's journey on Google Maps would be an entertaining if lazy afternoon. My walk along his route was a year of adventure and surprise. 

So I'm glad I raised the question, just to dismiss it. It can indeed sometimes feel like there's no reason to leave your house. Everything is online. But everything online is two-dimensional. I myself -- as I hope you do -- prefer the more satisfying three, to say nothing of the fourth dimension of time, through which we all move forward, online or out in the wind and rain. I hope you like these blog posts, and I hope more that when it comes out in spring you like A Delicious Country: Rediscovering the Carolinas Along the Route of John Lawson's 1700 Expedition, which by the way is its title and I told you I'd get back to that. Until spring, though, get out of the house and take a walk.

Or at least go to the library. 

Hey you guys! What with having a job and raising kids and having to spend every stinking free moment out in the streets demonstrating to save the nation from mad persons, you could lose track of things, right? And yet somehow, scrape together evenings, weekends, a lot of long nights, one weeklong vacation spent mostly in the Flying Pig Coffeehouse on Oak Island, and a monthlong break from work last fall, A Delicious Country turned into first a draft, then a manuscript, then a revised manuscript, and now an actual book project in press at UNC Press. 

Don't run to your bookstore just yet. We'll go through copyediting and page proofing and art placement and book design. We'll make decisions on things like running heads and chapter opening spread design and we'll spend an enormous amount of time thinking about things like the subtitle (open to suggestion!) and cover design (whenever I get involved it seems like I mess things up) and where to put the art and what to do with it before we put it there. Then we have to actually print books and all that. But then one day a truck will drive up to my house and throw a box on the porch, and when I open it up, there will be, you know. A book and everything. We expect A Delicious Country to exist in corporeal form in March 2019. I've had this project on my desk in one form or another since around 2011, so that starts to seem like an awful lot of fuss.

Just the same. When you turn in book the people at your publisher act like they think you're a big deal, and they treat your work with respect, which is empowering. And we were talking about whether this book needs an index, and my editor, the fabulous Mark Simpson-Vos, said, "we need it for future researchers." Did you catch that? With the value of blogs like this, the facility of ebooks, and the very uncertainty of these madpersons-in-charge times, one can fall into the habit of not having a lot of hope for the future of things like books about obscure explorers. But Mark not only has the cool head to think of the future, he thinks enough of this project that he can envision future researchers finding this work valuable. I have spent the last most of a decade poking around in books written by other people who have looked into Lawson, his time period, and the workings of history, science, anthropology, and various other aspects of this marvelous broken world of ours. It's nice to think of this being valuable to future researchers in something like the same way those books have brought value to me, and I hope to my readers.

It's easy to fall into despair; things are going so rough. But here's to Mark, who believes in the future, and to the future researchers who may find value in A Delicious Country. Here's to readers who read books because they think the world is interesting and beautiful and worth understanding as best we can. Here's to all the people who have helped this project in so many ways (I just finished the acknowledgments; they went on for pages). Here's to the readers on this site who have kept me going. And here's to us all meeting in a bookstore sometime about a year from now, talking about Lawson and the Santee and the Sewee and the Catawbas and the Occaneechee and the Tuscarora and the Huguenots and Charleston settlers and dugout canoes and alligators roaring and biological specimens in the London Natural History Museum. Let's just all move forward as though that will all happen, right? 

​Working on a project like this, a project that takes years and if it generates money doesn't generate much, is finally a vote of confidence in the future. If it offers nothing else, it offers my effort as a token of belief that it's worth working hard to understand the world. It's worth sharing that understanding. And it's worth believing in the future. So anyhow thanks for believing in this project, and see you in a bookstore in a year or so. 

So here's what happened: I lost a notebook. That's it there in the picture.

And the thing is I can't lose notebooks; I just can't. Notebooks are work and notebooks are records and I'm a writer, so where I write is pretty much everything. I can't lose a notebook.

I started carrying a notebook around in my pocket, for stray thoughts, things to remember, ideas, overheard quotations, and the like when I was in college, where I kept up the practice sporadically. Once I had a real job I recognized the need for a go-to place to make sure I didn't lose notes and I began the practice, at age 22 or so, of never not having a notebook with me. In those pre-cell phone days I put the phone numbers I used most often in the back, so that I could quickly refer to them. When I finished a notebook -- usually six to nine months -- I would copy the phone numbers forward into the new one, along with my address and phone number and of course the promise of a juicy reward for the notebook's return. I would go back through the book as I moved on to the next one and see if there were ideas or projects I had lost track of. Once I had a pile of them, I could go backwards and, by checking back pages, see who my best friends were in a particular period; here Sally enters, here Ver drops off, we never seem to not have David. 

When I got enough of them I of course numbered them so that I could keep them straight, though I numbered them only in the archive; in my pocket they were just my notebook. And this was all, mind you, in the early days, when I thought being a writer worked like this: you sat at a desk, holding a pen, stroking your chin and looking skyward. Then, aha! The idea! And then you wrote it down. That is, I hadn't learned about reporting, and I hadn't realized that those few descriptions of actual things -- a bus going by, kicking up grit; a clerk arguing with a man in a store; a woman adjusting her coat as she came out of a department store revolving door into a chilly Philadelphia December evening -- were actually the beginning of my work as a writer.

And I never, ever lost one. My friends would joke about "making the book" when someone said something funny and I wrote it down, or they would take note when a conversation sent me to a quiet corner to scribble. The point is, I had notebooks. They were important to me. And I never lost one. I thought of losing a notebook the way a carpenter would think of walking away from a hammer or a drill. Unthinkable.

And then one disappeared. I was wearing pants that had the kind of loose, shallow, crappy pockets that have become common, and at some point the notebook wasn't there. I scoured my room; I returned to places recently visited; I emptied briefcases. But nothing. I had lost a hat and sunglasses in the same period, so I wondered whether I was learning something about my changing capacity to manage myself. After a couple weeks I gave up and launched a new notebook, with a 3 x 5 card on the shelf at the end, noting that after the last finished notebook (number 68) a lacuna would appear in the record. Over the next weeks the sunglasses and hat returned from friends' houses or resurfaced from beneath kitchen table crap, but the one irreplaceable thing was gone. It turned out not to be the end of the world, of course, and I tried to shoulder up and not cry. But it shook me; I had done something I considered utterly unprofessional: I had lost notes.

Then the book came back. Scouring for a FitBit fragment, my wife found it deep under the bed, likely ejected there during a particularly disgusted episode of end-of-day pants flinging. I embraced it like a relative or beloved stuffed animal. Then I went through it -- it had been misplaced early in its tenure, and I would not have lost much beyond my sense of myself as a competent adult. A few notes, only a couple of them about Lawson or his trip or my attempts to make sense of that.

I'm glad it's back, if only so that I can now think of myself once again as someone who has never completely lost a notebook.  

We have his will (he left everything to his wife and children; good man, Mr. Lawson) and a few land transfer records, but that's about it. What we absolutely do not have are the notebooks he used during his journey -- assuming he took notes, that is.  

I would love to have those. To see his handwriting (like I did when I looked at his original specimens in the London Natural History Museum), to see his thoughts in the moment he observed a river, a new Indian tribe, a mountain. But no -- whether he lost them at some point on his travels after publication or whether they were destroyed during the Tuscarora War when Lawson was killed, his notebooks and all other records of his process are gone. 

It's too bad. Lawson was one of the greatest first observers among the European settlers of North Carolina; I wish we had the first impressions of those first observations.