What you see above is a thing I think is very remarkable. It is a roombox, about 12-inches-by-24-inches-by-11 inches, created by Cincinnati miniaturist Robert Off. Above the mantel is a painting of sea captain and scientific pioneer Sir Francis Beaufort, and in the words of Off, the roombox is "my rendition of what Sir Francis Beaufort’s study may have looked like in England around 1800. The inspiration for the Roombox that I created was your book Defining the Wind."

I'm going to let that sink in for a moment. An artist -- clearly as good as it gets in his chosen art of making miniature rooms -- created this astonishing piece of artwork. And he did it because I wrote a book.

Well, he did it because Sir Francis Beaufort was an amazing character, whose eponymous wind scale is a thing of scientific and poetic beauty that has been inspiring writers and artists for centuries. It's so amazing -- as is Beaufort's life; among other things, he's the guy who put Charles Darwin aboard the HMS Beagle -- that I wrote an entire book about it, called Defining the Wind, which Mr. Off has read and says he liked very much. He liked it enough, obviously, that he created this astonishing thing. Here's another look at it.  

I bring this up for two reasons. First, I just heard about it. Off just sent me an email telling me he had made this unbelievable thing and that there was going to be an event at the Cincinnati Mercantile Library, itself a place of almost unendurable awesomeness, on March 23, at which this piece of artwork was going to be unveiled and writer and library director John Faherty would discuss Beaufort and my book. And, anyway would I be willing to autograph and provide three copies of the book -- one for the eventual owner of the artwork, one to be raffled off at the event, and one for Off himself ? Off would gladly pay postage and for the books themselves.

The hell he will. He will have those books from my own hand, and he will not have to pay postage because I will go to Cincinnati and attend the event, you just see if I don't. I'll even talk if they'll let me. (Spoiler: he told me they would. Here's a description of when I did.)

Now, here's the second reason I'm telling you all this. It's because this week, after all the negotiations and discussions and contractual madness, I have signed a contract to write a book about the Lawson Trek, to be called A Delicious Country and to be published by the very wonderful University of North Carolina Press.  SO, yay, right? It'll be a lot of work for not much money, but that's the nature of books and book writing and it's what I've chosen and I'm grateful, right?

Except.

You write these books, and there's a couple years of your life, and one day a truck drives up with a box and you open it up and oh my God it's the greatest day and there's your book, and here or there -- in the best case, sometimes here AND there -- you get a review, or a note, or someone talks to you for 11 minutes on the radio, and you go to a bookstore and do monkeyshines and people laugh and a few buy your book. And, um, in about a month or so, the end. To be sure, there are authors whose books sell like crazy and who get royalty statements that have numbers not in parentheses and all that, and God bless them, but they are not me and I am not them. I write the kind of books that get loving reviews and then not too many people buy.

Which, again, ok -- I get paid (mostly) to do work I love and I'm not complaining. But whatever you say, and however much I do love it, book writing is an unlovely business, and it's wearying and takes a long time and sometimes you wonder why. Here comes a year of just plain hard work, and then eventually a month of pretty much fun, and then it's in the library like it never happened. You get the occasional letter from someone else who utterly shares your passion, and that's wonderful. But mostly the book is out there and that's just that.

So you can understand when I tell you that seeing this piece of artwork is thrilling and inspiring in a way I can scarcely express. 

One chapter of Defining the Wind, in fact, discusses artwork based on the Beaufort Scale. 

ideas I found so lovely in the scale were themselves sort of moving forward through time, finding expression through various artists and writers as years went by. The cartoon above, for example, was put up just this January, and new children's books have come out since my book came out (The Rising of the Wind, at left is older; I discussed it in the book), and as a result of my book Robin Harris, director of the wonderful NC State Dance Department actually choreographed a dance based on the scale. So you do get a sense that maybe you're helping these ideas reach people, move forward through time, and find their expression.

But even so, you can feel a little lonely and like the enterprise borders on pointless.

So I need to tell you: seeing this miniature room is satisfying in a way I can barely express. Especially that Off's room is not a mere expression or illustration of the Beaufort Scale but is instead a kind of love letter to the life Sir Francis would have led. Which is what my book turned out to be, so here it is -- something wonderful, made by someone who was affected by my own affection for Sir Francis and the scale he created. An addition to our world, our culture -- an improvement to the world. In which my work played a small role.

Given which, toiling to write a book about John Lawson's little-known adventure suddenly feels like it might be worth doing. That is, my work might have a point. Can art do anything greater than give us a belief that it might be worth carrying on? Thank you, Robert Off. Thank you.

And guess I'd better be getting on with it.

I'll be brief.

What I love more than anything about Lawson and those like him is his focus on getting the word out -- finding things, learning things, sharing things. Surely for his own sake, whether material gain or notoriety or just the sense of having contributed, but also, I feel certain, for its own sake. Lawson just wanted to move the conversation forward. He wanted people to know things because knowing was good, wanted to understand the Indians and the land and the wildlife because that was just good, and if you learned things and shared them you never knew what might come of it.

Thus in that spirit I'm enormously proud to share the artwork above, created by my friend Jim Hallenbeck, from his interpretation of an image I shared on the Lawson Trek Instagram feed about a month ago. 

Anyhow. Lawson took a walk in 1700-1701 and wrote a book to spread the news. I took a walk to do the same -- including the news about Lawson himself. I've spread the news hither and yon, and Jim saw this and now is spreading the news in his own way. I love being a link in a chain. Thanks for the great work, Jim.

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.