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?

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. 

So anyhow, I'm back, and as Homer first reminded us -- and it was old news then -- the return is as great a challenge as the journey.

My office looks almost as though for a year I have been in it only to plan my next foray out of it or describe my last one, never to inhabit or organize it. Which is not to say it usually looks much better than this, but just so you know: after a year of either planning a Trek, taking one, or getting in a blog post so I could start planning the next one, this is what it looks like. I should be thinking of folders, drawers, and shelves, but I beg you not to blame me for instead thinking of kerosene and a household match. Hold on, there's the phone: "Me? What show now? 'Pile People'? I haven't heard of it. Let me get back to you."

Sorry.

The laundry -- my main indoor daily chore -- has become a thing of madness, though I am working my way back in. Fortunately we had a dry summer so the outdoor chores I was failing to do in some ways went unnoticed. In my other chores I have mostly been derelict, with the expected result that I have returned to a houseful of people who at the very least have grown used to doing without me and more often cannot fail to think "dereliction of duty" when they notice I am around.

A year ago we had a cat. Now instead we have two birds. One of the three fish, if he has not died, is floating rather more substantially with the current than was once his habit, and he is significantly less wedded to the notion of the top being up just all the time.

Both license plates have stickers, but it took a firm reminder from someone with a very fancy car to get there.

All of which is to say, I didn't have to shoot an arrow through a dozen axes and kill off most of the neighborhood, but coming home is never easy.

Lawson dropped his pack and there he was, instantly falling for the young Hannah Smith, daughter of settler Richard Smith.  Lawson had the benefit of being utterly unconnected in North America and thus able to walk into the bush in December and walk back out in February, saying, "Okay, I guess I'll live here now," and then just living there.

I'm not saying I envy him. I'm just saying that was his world. And if my world is somewhat less adventurous, it has its rewards. 

For one thing, it has the same constant barrage of amazing things to notice as the Trek does, though with Sunday school and dinner and bills and the vacuuming you have to remind yourself to notice a little bit more. That's not bad, but you do have to remind yourself.

So anyhow. Home, for the duration. If you're wondering, what I'm doing now is planning how to make a book out of this undertaking, and I'll have updates for you about that as necessary. In any case, as I begin writing, I'll keep sharing details that I didn't get the chance to put up here during the madness of the actual travel.