You guys, I am just so tired. I have been walking, on and off, since October. If I'm staying indoors and have a car helper I have been walking around carrying 15 pounds of notepads and lenses and lunch and candy and knife and compass and pens and books and water. If I'm camping and have little support? Think 45 pounds at least.

Anywhere from 10 to 20 miles per day, each time I head out for anywhere from a day to a week.

Sometimes it is hot: it's been summer, and as you may have noticed it's been something of a hottie; the National Weather Service in Raleigh at one point tweeted that the asphalt temperature was 145 degrees, and I've walked an awful lot of asphalt. I'd find the tweet for you, but did I mention? I'm tired so screw it.

It has gone down to 10 degrees (my water bottle froze in my sleeping bag) and rained enough to make whoever invented Gore-tex just want to apologize for the whole thing, since high-tech rain gear or not I was slick down to the skin.

This has been going on almost a year and I am just beat; beat to hell. Add in that since my hiking shoes wore out and I replaced them, in the last couple weeks I have developed blisters here and there -- blisters the approximate size and shape of the state of Delaware. 

I whine to you thus because as I set out for my last walk today I feel far less excitement about the culmination of this long trail than pure gut weariness. That seemed important to share. I've been thrilled to meet people, learn from descendants of Lawson's hosts, spend time among the pines and oaks, seeing creeks and deer and snakes and turtles and herons, walking beneath the grasses and grasshoppers and the vaulting sky. I've felt fortunate and thrilled and happy and challenged and I've been having enough fun that I'm embarrassed about it, but I'm also just so tired.

Naturally there's lots more to say. I spent last evening with the very delightful Vince Bellis, professor emeritus of botany  at East Carolina University. As something of a retirement project, in the late 1990s, as the 300th anniversary of Lawson's journey approached, Bellis became a Lawsonian. Already interested in Lawson's botanical contribution, Bellis got to wondering about where Lawson ended -- where, that is, lived this Richard Smith, at whose settlement Lawson dropped his pack.

Vince has shown me exactly where that is -- it's rather west of Washington, much closer to where I am than I had expected, though I'll walk into Washington anyhow because that's just what you do. Moreover, in conversations with Vince and my ever-present guide Val Green last night we discovered that to at least a certain extent my last 60 miles or so have been somewhat at variance with what Val and Vince's best and latest estimates are for Lawson's actual track.

Though for context, Vince started our conversation thus: "Lawson disappears after Hillsborough." That is, after Lawson's visit to the Occanneechi village, of whose location we are quite certain, Lawson's descriptions become vague, his directions far less certain than they were previously, and his locations by and large a matter of pure speculation. Even the falls of Wee Quo Whom, which I visited a couple treks ago, turn out to be far less certainly where we thought they were, raising only the next in a never-ending series of questions about where the hell I am and where the hell Lawson was. This is how it is when you try to get directions from a guy who last visited the area 315 years ago. I know where he ended, though, and that's where I'll end today. The enterprise was to go out like Lawson and see what's up, who's out there, and get the lay of the land -- so if we've been a mile or two at variance recently, that's not going to be a bother.

Especially since other elements of the description do still hang. Lawson mentions that he "went on, through many Swamps, finding, this day, the long ragged Moss on the Trees, which we had not seen for above 600 Miles," and yesterday, right on schedule, I came across Spanish Moss again. I find that kind of thrilling, just as I did last week when after reading his description 

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.