Pictures at an Exhibition

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.

Lots of quotes from Lawson and quotes from me. A big map of where he and I went. Lots of images, and plenty of stuff I plucked up along the way. Even my backpack and shoes!

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.

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It opened on Friday, Oct. 4, and it was an enormous charge to watch people go through the exhibit. In the first place, it was just great to see my friends and just regular people actually looking at all this stuff that has been so important to me for about a decade. More, I saw person after person browse around, look here and there, and then go to banner one, then proceed to banner two, and continue on their way.

That reminded me of what I used to call "rooting for the jump" when I wrote for papers and magazines in Philadelphia. I used to not uncommonly find myself on the train or subway, standing in the aisle, and noticing someone reading something I had written. I would watch and wait until they got to the end of a segment of the story, and find the "continued on page ..." line -- journalists call the next part the jump.

A couple of my friends -- one is Rob Waters, who walked some of this trek -- stand between the map and the display case. You can see the arrow and other artifacts.

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.