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?

By the time the Lawson Trek finished its second segment it was one ecologist down; pal Katie Winsett had begun suffering enough knee pain that she peeled off at a nearby road, allowing Trek patron saint Kathie Livingston to send someone to pick her up. She continued helping and camping, but three walking days took it out of her.

This third segment brought along not a young ecologist but Rob Waters, a friend and colleague who had time to come along because he's retired. He and I walked together along roadways and on dirt paths through lovely old stands of live oaks and along fields some miles long.

But what was by far the best part of Rob's companionship was his age. That is, Rob is retired -- I'm 55, and he's a bit older than me, so we took our walking like people our age do: we stretched, and we rolled around, and we grunted, and we gimped along, taking things slowly enough that we didn't hurt ourselves. 

This had great meaning for me because it reminded me: when Lawson took this trek things were very different for him. And I don't just mean that I have the benefits of antibiotics, modern dentistry, and Buzzfeed. I mean Lawson began his trek the day after his 26th birthday. I'm more than twice his age, and to be honest all the Gore-tex  and Velcro in the world -- to say nothing of daily doses of ibuprofin, which I and all of my partners so far have gulped in big, Lawson-Trek-sized doses -- are not going to make 55 feel like 26.

Which isn't bad, and I'm not complaining -- I'm just pointing out. What Lawson undertook was a very physical business, and every Trek segment brings that home to me. That is, we're outdoors, all day long, every day. If it's hot and sunny, we hide under hat brims. If it's cold, we bundle up. If it's raining, we get all wet.

Which I love. The first two segments were all camping. We walked and canoed in heat and cold, in sun and rain. I set up a tent most nights. This third one involved no tents, since we stayed in the cabins at Santee State Park, which are, frankly, the lap of luxury. We ended each day with showers (!) and began each day putting one car at our stopping point, drove to our beginning point, and then walked, retrieving the first car with the second at end of day. 

This may sound like cheating to you, but remember: I have previously pointed out how Lawson clearly never paddled his canoe, and I will also point out that Lawson didn't carry much of his own stuff, either. The day he gets out of his canoe he describes "having hir'd a Sewee-Indian, a tall, lusty Fellow, who carry'd a Pack of our Cloaths, of great Weight; notwithstanding his Burden, we had much a-do to keep pace with him." He describes other Indian guides as he goes along and is less clear about who's carrying what, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect an English gentleman traveling with experienced traders and Indian guides to have kept away from most of the heavy lifting. 

Anyhow, all this walking is hard on a body, and had you hung around with us in our luxe state park cabin while we popped our ibuprophin and complained about our maladies you probably would have laughed. And that was after days of easy walking -- next segment I'll be back to carrying my house on my back, so we enjoyed our ease while we could, and it was a treat to spend the days of this trek very lightly laden: knapsack with extra clothes, journal, copy of Lawson; fanny pack with lunch and water; little belt pack, worn wrong-side-to, with map, notepad, pens, iPhone, and lens kit -- and, of course, trail mix. I'm not saying it was a walk in the park, but it was a walk along the road, which turned out to be very pleasant.

Just the same, here's a picture of me walking down the road during the second trek, just so you can see what I looked like fully loaded.

But that outsideness. When I walked with Katie, she was a champion at reading the forest roads and the lay of the land, perceiving the depression of a swamp from hundreds of yards, recognizing trees and mushrooms and plants. Rob is more of a bird guy, so I loved hearing him watch the skies: "Is that a buzzard?" he said once, as we watched a lone wingspan circling a thermal. "No -- that's more of a soaring bird," he said. "That's a red-shouldered hawk. Thank you. Thank you for the show."

That cheerful attitude never left Rob. After spending much of our first day walking along the asphalt of SC Route 375 we turned onto a dirt path through old fields, and though he admitted he'd be glad to be done, he took infectious joy in the dirt path, and we both just gloried in the loveliness of the last hours' passage. We were outside, in comfortable clothes, walking among trees and crops, seeing birds above and swamps below, passing beneath swaying beards of Spanish moss. It was not hard to just be happy, seeing the world.

What was most fun with Rob was seeing the modern use of lands that had once been native farms and then probably rice plantations. We passed by an enormous broadcast antenna, and Rob said, "It's probably broadcasting a fundamentalist sermon even as we walk by." As for our less-constructed surroundings, we saw mostly tree farms and cotton fields -- actually, we saw almost nothing but tree farms and cotton fields, leaving us thrilled when one day we got to see some actual tree farming. Long before we noticed it we started hearing a grinding. We commonly came upon gated forest roads -- some of the gates have metal images of birds or deer on them, but the roads are all private and gated, and signs warn you off. The Lawson Trek does its best when possible to respect such warnings.

But the noise grew loud enough that we noticed it, and we kept approaching for more than an hour, and finally one gate lay open with  godawful noise emanating from within, so we had to creep in. We had seen clear cut fields, fields of new trees, and fields of uniform growth up to full size, but this was the only time we witnessed actual tree farming. And though nobody much likes a clearcut -- and the regular rows of a tree farm look like anything but nature -- a tree farm is still a bunch of pine trees, full of deer and wrens and woodpeckers, so we didn't complain. This Trek was rural pretty, not nature pretty.

All day long we had seen lumber trucks coming and going, loaded with a couple dozen narrowing trunks, or empty and on their way back. Rob recalled a summer he had spent back when they were still logging old growth timber near Seattle -- a single trunk of that old growth timber would fill the back of one of these lumber trucks, he said.

Anyhow, we heard the shrieking of the saws, we wandered in to take a peek, and I like nothing more than to watch a big old machine blithely do the work of dozens of people. The trees had already been cut and lay in piles -- we watched a front-end loader pick them up and pile them carefully for loading, dragging them through a machine that stripped them of branches and trimmed them when they needed it. The Lawson Trek will eventually become a book, and we may have this week walked by its future pages. 

We sat for lunch one day in front of a plantation called Longlands, which we are told is basically a 37,000 acre retreat for Du Pont heirs to hunt pheasant on, but we'll get more to you on that; until then I promise nothing. But we saw signs for Longlands on every side for miles, always reminding us that the place was patrolled by dogs at night and we were most unwelcome to trespass. Still, the place itself was quite lovely, so we were thoroughly interested in its background. We never seem to be able to raise anybody on the phone (supporting the assertion that it's a lot closer to a retreat than a working farm), but here's a picture, and we'll let you know when we find out more.

Anyhow. I've said it before, but if I've learned nothing more so far on this project it's that being outside, walking along the byways, experiencing what this world has to offer -- whether a nice walk on a sandy road or a glimpse into tree-farming practices or the sore knees, hips, and lower back that come from just walking around when you're twice John Lawson's age -- is its own reward. 

Coming up next: introductions to two marvelous people -- Peggy Scott, vice-chief of the Santee Indian Tribe, a descendant of the people who treated Lawson so kindly, and Val Green, chief of all the Lawsonians, who knows more about Lawson than anyone alive and has kept us on the path from the very start of this adventure.

Stay tuned. And take an ibuprofin. It helps.

Not for the first or last time, I was glad she was along. The Lawson Trek has been committed from the start to getting people who know things to come along. This turns out to be very Lawsonian.

Traditional description of Lawson's trek involves some sort of assignment from the eight Lords Proprietors of the Carolina Colony. In the introduction to the current version of Lawson's A New Voyage to Carolina the author says thus: "Nothing is known of Lawson's sojourn in Charleston until December, 1700, when he was appointed by the Lords Proprietors to make a reconnaissance survey of the interior of Carolina." Interesting enough, but as we say in academic circles, nuh-unh. Lawson clearly took his journey, as his delightful book amply documents. Why he took his journey remains enigmatic. Lawson's family was well connected in London and could easily have had contact with people of that stature, and Lawson was quickly well connected with influential colonials like James Moore, who became governor of Carolina in 1700 and had before that made forays himself into the western backcountry. But we have no evidence that anybody paid, told, or even asked Lawson to go on his journey. We just know he went.

She was a boon to the enterprise. She pointed out resurrection ferns on one Live Oak: "They look dried up now, but when they get wet they come back to life," she said -- they can lose up to 97 percent of their water, shrivel up, and still come right back with wetter weather. Same with a moss she saw near the roots, looking wizened: "It'll wake up when the water comes up." Then she pointed out lichens and moss growing on the tree. "Sure, you see them, but look closer," she said, counting different types. She got to six before stopping, point made: there is a lot more going on if you look closely. "The interesting stuff is the small stuff," she said.

She reads the country like a tracker, too. We found our first cypress swamp when an hour or so into our first day of hiking she narrowed her eyes and said, "That drops off quickly," pointing to a line of trees evident to her but not to me. We left the forest road, descended a few feet, and yes -- there was a swamp: a low bowl, with the obligatory bald cypress knees, tupelos with spreading bells at their trunk bases, and water rendered black by the tannins from leaves, bark, and pine needles.

Katie's descriptions are not always as literary but are every bit as pleasant. When I asked more about those microscopic slime molds, she corrected me. "They're not microscopic so much as teensy," she said, and until you have had a scientist describe something to you as teensy you have not spent enough time with scientists. She is very interested in scale -- she says a big part of her job is training her students to see scale as more gradual than they see it. "They see three levels: big, small, and microscopic. But nature doesn't work that way." Nature is comfortable on many levels. Katie recommended to me the classic The Scale of Nature, by biologist (and slime mold expert) John Tyler Bonner, which discusses nature from the scale of galaxies to subatomic particles and has become my bedside reading.

We lay one night in the darkness, each in our own tents out of evening rain, our voices murmuring back and forth across various tent and rainfly walls. A full moon hung in a sky of scudding clouds, shadows of swaying pines scratching illuminated nylon as drizzle occasionally spattered down. Katie free-associated about cypress intraspecies variation: If an animal drags, say, an unusual seed into one bog and not another, the two differ. "Each individual bog develops a personality," she said, with particular species of microorganism in the water -- and water samples from the same bog will differ significantly in the life they contain depending on whether you take the sample from open water or from beneath leaves at the shore, a foot away, she said. "When you work with microorganisms you get a sense of how complicated things are the smaller you get. All those swamps we saw would be considered cypress/tupelo, but each one had a little different character for whatever reason.

"It's not just about deer and squirrels. It's not just a longleaf pine forest. I think it's more interesting what's going on down in the soil. On the level of the microorganisms.”

The rain stopped awhile and we heard only the wind high in the pines. The slime molds we had seen could grow in a short warm spell. “They fruit very quickly,” she said. “But I’ve never seen them in January.” 

More silence. “I like that it’s all more complex than we can really organize in our minds,” she said later.

Overnight we heard owls. The next day we learned the lake we slept near was full of hibernating alligators. 

She brought us into her immaculately clean home: wide hardwood floors, oriental rugs, traditional wooden furniture. Even the books on the bookshelves were neat, though the copy of Lawson Jean had been reading in preparation for our meeting lay open on the sofa.

Jean made us coffee and brought out a bundt cake. “Welcome to Jamestown,” Douglas had said, “population 74 -- when Mark and I come home it goes up to 76.”

We had a lovely time. We discussed that in South Carolina, whose legal system is based on English Common Law, only the coroner is empowered to arrest the sheriff -- regrettably, the point had become germane recently. We talked about whether the misguided commingling of the waters of the Cooper and the Santee hadn’t accidentally protected the Santee from development, keeping much of the land of the national forest pristine. We talked about the area churches -- the first recorded Episcopal clergy appeared in 1687 (Lawson talks of being assisted across the creeks by “very officious” French settlers, “whom we met coming from their Church”), though no trace of that church remains. A newer one went up on the old Georgetown road in 1768 -- it’s a red brick church that still stands on the old dirt road, with lovely cylindrical brick columns and cypress pew boxes. Jean told us that in its early days mistrust between the French and English settlers obtained: “the Huguenots used the back door -- the English used the front.” We discussed the Peachtree Oak, a live oak hundreds of years old on the nearby Peachtree Plantation, which stood until the 1930s, when it died. “If it hadn’t,” Jean said, “Hugo would have got it.” You can’t talk for more than 15 minutes in South Carolina without Hurricane Hugo coming up. 

Anyhow. We probably stayed with Jean and Douglas and Mark (and Mark’s daughter, who showed up for a bit) for a couple hours. We ate cake and drank coffee, and we even chatted about political and social topics about which we very agreeable didn’t particularly agree. I would call it one my most delightful afternoons ever -- exactly what I left home for. Probably why Lawson left home, too.

Anyhow, I've known Loberger on email for some time -- a mutual friend introduced us when he learned of our mutual interest in old maps and trails. And when I got interested in Lawson, Dale began telling me about his interest in uncovering the old roads in the Charlotte area where he lives: the Great Wagon Road, the Trading Path, and other ancient trails that lead through the area -- trails which Lawson almost surely trod. As someone skilled in GIS, he knew how to take the old maps he was familiar with and link them to modern maps, but he still wondered how he could find his way to the actual spots where the original roads lay.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Loberger said, something like the Great Wagon Road "was less a name than a description." The Road referred to various ways leading, in general, from Philadelphia in the northeast down into Georgia, generally following the eastern edge of the Appalachians -- and, not coincidentally, the Trading Path, which existed before the Wagon Road, and the animal paths that probably existed before that. Roads were moving-around things in those days before significant paving -- they moved to accommodate new towns, to avoid swamps or ditches, to solve the needs of new kinds of wagons.

More, he says, the maps were meant to be nothing like we think of maps now, and returning to old maps trying to get specific pathways from them is a game of "teasing information from maps never designed to give that information." Speaking in an 18th century museum house in Raleigh, Loberger used a highly 21st-century ArcGIS Explorer* presentation while wearing his 19th-century surveying garb (don't worry, he assured me -- he has plenty of eighteenth-century gear more appropriate to Lawson's time). To understand those maps Loberger learned to survey. Most educated men of the 18th century would have learned surveying -- less as a job skill than as a way to truly learn math and computation. (Seriously, every educated man. Surveyor joke: What does a surveyor say when looking at Mt. Rushmore? "Well, there's three surveyors, but who's that other guy?" Teddy Roosevelt was the non-surveying president.) And surely Lawson knew surveying -- in 1708 he ended up as the Surveyor-General of the Carolina colony. Surveying in those days, Loberger has learned, often focused to a level of detail no greater than a single link in a surveyor's chain (7.92 inches) or even a single surveyor's pole (16.5 feet). Once you realize that the original surveyors figured that three person-lengths ("Smoots," to MIT students) was close enough, you're going to feel a little foolish trying to apply your phone's calculation of your position in degrees to 14 decimal points.

But not so fast. Loberger didn't give up. "These are not documents of truth," he says of old maps. But "they're documents full of secrets." He reasoned that the roads drawn on early maps were closer to legend images, like picnic tables for parks or big question marks for information centers, than actual representations of specific paths: all they did was say, "Charlotte and Salisbury are connected by road," not "the road from Charolotte to Salisbury looks like this." Just the same, the paths had to exist -- and if they did, they'd do what roads always did. They'd go the easiest way possible from point of interest to point of interest -- village, watering hole, mountain pass -- following the most sensible path: choosing solid places where you can easily ford a creek, following dry ridges where you can avoid insects and moisture plus not constantly climb and descend, traversing open land where you didn't have to wrestle through underbrush.

through the brush if they could easily avoid it? Same with hilly terrain -- horses and wagons are just as dangerous on slopes as an 18-wheeler, so Loberger included slope, soil type, proximity to landmarks, and other elements as he began to develop a sort of diagnostic tool for terrain. It ranks places on a 0-10 scale for road suitability. And as he's begun to apply it to old maps and old descriptions -- he hasn't published his results yet -- he's found, at least anecdotally, that his method works. 

Hoping to come within a mile of somewhere a road's original travelers would have walked, he describes a road he looked for near Charlotte. He found a road that he thought was likely the exact spot and felt certain that, given the uncertainties of old surveying methods and the assumptions of his model, he was probably in the ballpark, within 15 or 16 miles of Charlotte. After he once explained what he had done, someone approached him with a question. "Would you like to see one of the markers?" And took Loberger to a granite stone, marked "XV To C." Loberger wasn't sure whether a Roman "I" followed the "V," but the guy assured him. "That's 15," he said. "I know where 16 is" -- it had been used in a fence.

We're hearing a lot about the centenary of the death of the last passenger pigeon -- her name was Martha, and she lived in the Cincinnati zoo, and she died September 1, 1914. Apart from the wonderful discussions found elsewhere -- in National Geographic, in the Times, in books, on video, in various other places -- this is a moment to turn to our own John Lawson as well.

For those new to this site, John Lawson was the first European settler to explore the Carolinas and describe them in detail. The passenger pigeon extinction centenary reminds me exactly why we're undertaking this project of retracing his journey. Because Lawson, it turns out, left one of the best early descriptions of what those monstrous flocks of pigeons looked like in 1701, when Lawson wrote these words:

"In the mean time, we went to shoot Pigeons, which were so numerous in these Parts, that you might see many Millions in a Flock; they sometimes split off the Limbs of stout Oaks, and other Trees, upon which they roost o' Nights. You may find several Indian Towns, of not above 17 Houses, that have more than 100 Gallons of Pigeons Oil, or Fat; they using it with Pulse, or Bread, as we do Butter, and making the Ground as white as a Sheet with their Dung. The Indians take a Light, and go among them in the Night, and bring away some thousands, killing them with long Poles, as they roost in the Trees. At this time of the Year, the Flocks, as they pass by, in great measure, obstruct the Light of the day." [A New Voyage to Carolina]

Returning to the words of those first observers gives us opportunities to re-gather their data, to see again what they saw and compare it with what we see now. Recent years have seen scientists return to the observations of Thoreau, to document the effects of climate change; to the works of environmentalist Aldo Leopold to document what he would have heard (Stanley Temple has tried to recreate the sounds he would have heard in the morning); to the Grinnell-Storer transect of Yosemite to see how the animal populations had changed in the century since the original observations. Climatologists have for years been returning to ships' logs to gather data from centuries ago about wind, temperature, and current.

So it's a sad time to recall the extinction, through pure human madness, of a creature whose numbers once, in passage, would "obstruct the Light of the day." But it's a good time to be returning to the trenchant observations of Mr. Lawson, whose entertaining book will inspire us for months of journeying.

I expect to begin our first segment of the journey in mid-October in Charleston, by the way. Stay tuned.

I am setting up the Lawson Trek website, idling beneath a ceiling fan in my living room. June calls this room the den -- living room to her intimates a formal room of uncomfortable furniture set up in rectilinear fashion. Ours is filled with craigslist furniture and repurposed bookshelves; soft and lived in. The room sometimes feels as though it is upholstered in grandmas.

Different word choices, perhaps because June is a native to Raleigh, and words like dinner and supper and living room have long associations with a rural past i do not share. Perhaps it's nothing of the sort. In any case let's call this a blog post.