Honey, I'm home. But, as perfectly capped a long and rather unusual journey, the final steps were somewhat circuitous. Let me explain.

Let's start at the charming, art-filled Greenville home of Vince Bellis, retired professor of biology at East Carolina University, who at his retirement took on Lawson as something of a project. (Vince was responsible for getting photos of all of Lawson's botanical specimens in the Natural History Museum in London online in 2002, just a bit more than 300 years after Lawson's journey.) We talked about the unique ability of our friend Val Green to sort of sniff out an old road, especially the roads that comprised Lawson's route. Val of course is the man who has spent 40 years of his life figuring out where Lawson slept every night, and Val has guided my journey virtually every step. He drove me along a river road in South Carolina once, narrating: "You see here? to our right? that's the plateau; on our left? It slopes down to the river. That area would flood occasionally. That's why the road is here -- it's always been here." 

And he was right -- he was teaching me how to see a road, whether it's gone from animal trail to Indian trail to trade path to wagon road to railroad or concrete or asphalt, like the one we drove on, or one that's remained a sand road for pretty much its whole history. Like Tom Magnuson and Dale Loberger, two other finders of the old ways, Val has just developed a nose. Vince and I wondered at it. To Vince, Val once described his pursuit of Lawson as "searching for the Ashes of Mr. Lawson's Campfires," and Vince wrote an unpublished paper about the end of Lawson's journey with that exact title. He gave me a copy, which does a great job of explaining where Lawson "came safe to Mr. Richard Smith's, of Pampticough-River, in North-Carolina; where being well receiv'd by the Inhabitants, and pleas'd with the Goodness of the Country, we all resolv'd to continue."

Agreeing with many before him who have believed that Lawson crossed the Tar River in the neighborhood of Greenville, Vince followed Lawson past "a deep Creek" that was most likely the Grindle Creek. Lawson says he walked about 12 miles before reaching the Smith place, and it is indeed about 12 miles from the eastern edge of Greenville to the east shore of Grindle. What's more, Vince found a land patent granted to Smith in 1706 that describes him already living on "Smith's Neck," which lay between two creeks. Now called Clark's Neck, the land between the Grindle and Tranter Creeks just to the east of Washington answers perfectly. Vince showed me where Smith would likely have lived, and I planned my next day's walk, which it turned out would actually be only a few miles.

And then we talked about how I could recover from the misdirection that had guided my last day or two's hikes.

Val has been my constant guide. We have spoken in restaurants and on trails, in cars and trucks and state parks and on the phone. And as I've come to each segment of my journey he's given me his interpretation of Lawson's route and helped me draw it -- in pencil -- on my DeLorme map book. And then I photocopy the requisite pages for each journey, and then off I go.

So when it was time to make my final journeys, I spent time with Val organizing my pencil lines, and then I confidently made my way. And when I sat with Vince, just to talk Lawson and get any final information I could about exactly where Lawson stopped before I made my final day's hike, we discovered I had wandered off. "Val has him walking right through the campus of ECU," Vince mentioned, and I shook my head. "Oh, no," I said. "Val has him walking south of Greenville, through the fields, and then up through Ayden and then north across the Tar, and then southeast into Washington." Or that's what I had on my book.

When I called Val to get to the bottom, Val sided with Vince: I had been somewhat off the exact track, if there is one, for the last couple days. We can't explain why, and we both remember our conversation in which we painstakingly penciled a line from Wilson, NC, to Washington, which is the end of the journey. We cannot for the life of us imagine how it came wrong. But it seems that I must have had an early version of Val's course; he says he's gone through several of those DeLorme books, and people used to believe Lawson had gone as far south as Goldsboro before heading north. So I suspect Val has been iteratively moving Lawson north, and I got  version 5.3 instead of 5.5 or 6.0. In any case, when I went back to compare the two routes, with the exception of the river crossing in Greenville, the two routes passed through almost identical territory: flat, broad farms. As Lawson said, "the Country here is very thick of Indian Towns and Plantations." He also mentions how in this area some of his companions, invited by Indians, went to visit their town: "but got nothing extraordinary, except a dozen Miles March out of their Way." You guys, I'm hip.

I solved my problem -- if it is a problem -- by going back over, mostly by car, the alternate path. Much of a muchness -- with the exception of the crossing in Greenville, the terrain is the same: farms, vast acres of crops, old houses and barns. It's a beautiful place. In Greenville you cross the Tar by a greenway or a downtown park, then walk east on a long exurban street with the same kind of empty buildings and decaying sprawl I've seen throughout the Carolinas outside the cities and towns; in the long run I'm glad I ended up spending more time in the country.

But I did reach the Tar, if a few miles east of where Lawson probably did. And I did cross it, and then, east of the Grindle Creek, I began casting about. For a half mile or so the terrain is swamp; once it raises up a tad you start to feel a sort of firmness beneath your feet, and you feel it: this is a place people could stay. They could make a home here, clear land, grow food, hunt. This is a good place. 

I can't say I found for sure the Smith place, though the little double-track dirt road leading into the bush felt perfect, and when I went to the other side of the creek and found a similarly "homey" place, it turned out to be exactly across the river. And when I walked down Clark's Neck Road, through the land that Smith surely owned, it felt much the same. This was home. This was the Smith land. This is where Lawson stopped. And it was where I stopped too.

For a minute. 

Because the active walking part of this trek is over, but lots more remains. For Lawson the next years were about making his way in a new world. He found ways to be helpful to the powerful and the connected. He stayed with the Smiths -- he even evidently took Smith's daughter, Hannah, as his common law wife and had a daughter with her. He co-founded Bath, North Carolina's first incorporated town, and then New Bern, which eventually served as de facto capital. All that land-grabbing and town-founding eventually got him killed, but that's not the point now. The point is after his long walk, Lawson got -- and stayed  -- busy.

So will I. My next steps will be to organize the records of my journey, both on this website and as a book. I'll keep the blog posts coming as I do that, sharing information I find, stories (so many!) I have not had time to share as I've walked, and keeping you posted on the development of what will I hope be a book worthy of Lawson's original. 

In any case, for now, I'm done walking. I won't miss the blisters, but I'll miss the countryside. I'll miss the people, and the hills, and the farms and fields. I'll miss the rivers and creeks and cypress-tupelo swamps. I'll miss the sound and the coast, the ocean and the sandy pocosins nearby.

And I'll see some of you at 2 pm in Bath on September 26 for the (free!) Smithsonian Magazine Museum Day Live, for which the Lawson Trek will make a ceremonial canoe into town and tell a story or three.

But for now all I can say is what I presume Lawson said when he first saw the comely Hannah:

I'm home.

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 

My planning projects get shorter, my book stack gets higher, and my calendar gets slimmer.

That is, the Lawson Trek is nearing its conclusion -- at least the Trekking part does. 

I've made it my practice as I've walked this path not to plan too far ahead -- I like just kind of figuring things out as I go, which strikes me as highly Lawsonian and in the spirit. But as I near the end of the path and have to organize my final Heroes of the Lawson Trek, I've started planning my routes, and -- hokey smokes! -- I discover that I'm a bare five days of walking until I reach little Washington, where Lawson stopped and so shall I, sort of. I expect to hit Washington September 17. 

But wait there's more! Because of the fabulous interest shown all the way through this project by the people at Historic Bath, the Lawson Trek is going to make a small extra step. Lawson ended his journey at Washington, and so shall I, though of course in Lawson's day it was not called Washington. The town's namesake, George Washington, was himself not born until 1732, so if the "town" was called anything in those days it was called "the place on the tip of the Pamlico Sound where that British dude lives." Washington was actually founded in 1776 -- rather precocious town-naming, if you want my opinion; it was the first town named for General Washington. Bath, meanwhile, had been around since 1705, when it was founded, surveyed, and laid out by -- well, you guessed: by John Lawson. Bath was North Carolina's first incorporated town. It has several colonial houses, three of which you can tour; the state's oldest church, begun in 1734; and gardens and a visitors center.

So on September 26, Bath is participating in Smithsonian Magazine Museum Day Live, a sort of gift from Smithsonian Magazine, encouraging museums and historic sites to waive admission fees for a day. You can get tickets to the Bath Site houses free here. As part of that daylong celebration -- there'll be living history, rope making, corn husk doll making, colonial games, all kinds of cool stuff -- the Lawson Trek will make its final advance, canoeing up Bath Creek into town at 2 pm. After that I'll talk a bit, answer questions, and take a deep breath before beginning to write the book about Lawson's journey, and my own.

Which, by the way, will still be documented on this website. I'll keep sharing cool stuff I find, even if it's found in books and interviews rather than along the path. Plus I'll be filling in the many, many gaps the complexity of planning, trekking, and updating have caused me to leave. So if you gave me your time in an interview and I took a million pictures and videos and you haven't seen any evidence of it on this site, trust me -- you will. 

Anyhow: five walking days! A pretty-much certain end date in Washington! A guaranteed certain canoe-in date to Bath, nicely bookmarking the trek, which began last October with a canoe trip out of Charleston. 

Hope to see you there.