As I work my way through my writing of the book version of A Delicious Country, I have the pleasure or reliving some of my favorite parts of my journey retracing Lawson, though also sometimes in focusing on things not so pleasant. I've just been writing about my visit to the Native American Studies Center of the University of South Carolina Lancaster, where I received exactly the kind of welcome and hospitality Lawson did, though at the time (it was late March 2015) it was one of the stories I skipped telling because of its complexity. So reinvigorating my notes into narrative for the book has reminded me of both some vastly pleasant interactions and a rather terrible story. I'll briefly tell you about both.

Which he did, of course, and we had a large time. We walked along the old roads that had been sidling along the river since Lawon's time -- and long before, and he tole me how he wanted a new generation of leadership to emerge for his tribe. There's more to say, and in the book I say it. But though I was grateful at the time, only now, as I've been writing, have I spent any real time with Catawba history. Regarding which, oy. So just listen to this for a second.

Back when I was still doing the actual walking of Lawson's path, I wrote a post called "Greetings from the Anthropocene Suburban," describing things like the ecosystems I found in the roadside ditches that populated the  exurban climes I wandered. The little puddles lined with grasses and filled with frogs and dragonflies. The clovers and dandelions and buttercups. That was a moment when the concept of the anthropocene -- the new geological epoch defined by human activity -- was still something everyone hadn't heard of.

Not any more. Anyhow, just yesterday, scientists meeting at the International Geological Conference in Cape Town officially agreed: the Anthropocene is not just a clever name invented in 2002 by Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen (here's a great National Geographic piece that gives all the back history -- including that someone had thought up a human-centric geological epoch as early as the late 1800s). Here's a simple explanation of what the scientists decided: that we have clearly entered a new epoch, in which future geologists will be able to identify human influence. They're still discussing what will be the defining characteristics: radioactive elements flung throughout the atmosphere by nuclear bomb tests? The tiny pieces of plastic that have become utterly unavoidable from the top of Everest to the depths of the Mariana Trench? Chicken bones? (Seriously: domesticated chickens are as Anthropocene as tossed-and-forgotten plastic grocery store bags.)

The nice thing about sitting with my old pal Lawson and braiding our journeys together for the book project as I work on it now is that I get to work out little things I didn't even know I didn't know. For example: Lawson, talking about the ten-person canoe adventure that got the journey started, mentions that he has to get through "the Breach," a passage "Northward of Sullivans Island," where the water gets so low that even a canoe can't get over it if the tide isn't high enough. Lawson tells us all about the coast pilots nearby and a lookout right near the breach and how they have to time their passage. I just sort of shrugged it off, assuming the canoe must have gone out through Charleston Harbor, around Sullivan's Island on the ocean side, then headed into the tidal creeks thereafter.

What a dope. Of course that makes no sense. In the first place, Lawson himself describes "leaving Sullivans Island on our Starboard," which he could only do if he were passing out through the breach into open ocean, which made no sense. And in the second place, who on earth takes a heavily loaded canoe out into the open ocean when there are tidal creeks protected by barrier islands? Nobody, that's who. 

​Anyhow, I looked up the excellent Mills Atlas images of South Carolina from 1825, and a single glance shows the obvious route: Lawson crossed the harbor, went into the cove north of Fort Moultrie, and then wended his way through the tidal creeks, timing their passage over the breach to continue northeastward up the coast. Of course I checked with my old pal Val Green, who agreed: that's the way Uncle John (Val's term for Lawson) went.

A tiny thing. But it's fun noticing things I hadn't noticed I hadn't noticed.

So I shared the image above on Instagram and a couple archaeologists wanted to know why they haven't seen this writing before, and I will explain that. The answer, as it almost always is in matters of Lawson, is Val Green. I mean Val is why you see it now, not why you haven't seen it before. 

Here's the story. Since Lawson wrote his book, people have wondered who he traveled with. He tells us he began his voyage "being six English-men in Company, with three Indian-men, and one Woman, Wife to our Indian-Guide." He makes various references to his companions hither and yon, but basically nobody has ever come close to even imagining they could find information on who Lawson went with on his trip.

As I say, enter Val. Val, as I tell you in the piece linked above, is a retired sewer engineer in South Carolina who, forty years ago, received a copy of Lawson's A New Voyage to Carolina  for his birthday, got interested in where Lawson went -- I mean exactly where, step by step -- and began thinking and drawing conclusions. Val has been my guide, my source, my rabbi throughout this project; pretty much everything I know I know from Val, and regarding Lawson if Val doesn't know it, chances are nobody knows it. 

So one day, someone in the library of the Virginia Historical Society noticed that their collection included a manuscript by one Richard Traunter, who describes traveling between Fort Henry in the Virginia colony and Charles-Town, in Carolina, by land -- in 1698 and 1699, a couple years before Lawson's famous journey in 1700-1701. The manuscript was bequeathed to the library in 1999 with the collection of Paul Mellon and has been cited once or twice -- in Indian Slavery in Colonial America, for example, and The Goose Creek Bridge: Gateway to Sacred Places. But it's unpublished: if you don't go looking for it in the Virginia Historical Society, you don't read it.

Anyhow, someone at the library sent a copy of the typed transcript of Traunter's handwritten journal to Chester DePratter, archaologist at the University of South Carolina -- where it sat on the corner of his desk, possibly for years. One day when Val was in DePratter's office, according to Val, DePratter handed him the typescript, saying he wondered whether it might help Val with his ongoing Lawson research.

Well, you might say.

Val, as I have said elsewhere, does the kind of primary-source research that gets Ph.D.s for mere mortals, and Val started looking into things, and here's what Val has discovered, using Traunter's manuscript, letters between Carolina colonists like Thomas Cutler and eventual governor James Moore and the Lords of Trade that reside in the British Public Records Office, and forty years' worth of thinking. I should note right here: I've chased down many of the records Val cites, and I'm convinced. I think Val is right.

Here goes. Traunter, an Indian trader in the employ of Robert Byrd at Fort Henry on the falls of the James River in Virginia (it's Petersburg now), set out in 1698 for Charles-Town, for what he describes as two motives: one, "from a Naturall propensity I always had to travel; but more especially in untroden paths, thoroly to discover thye wonderfull workes of the Almighty brought forth by Nature, as well to Enlighten the Intellect, As to gratifie the externall Senses." His other goal, he says, was to "Apply my discoveris & Travels to the common Good of my Country, soe as to make them Usefull to the Traders to those places I passed through."

Traunter describes a 1697 attempt to make the same trip that met with catastrophe when the party was set upon by hostile Occaneechee Indians (who then still lived in Virginia), killing one of the traders and injuring an Indian slave of James Moore from Charles-Town, "Indian Jacke" (Lawson too rarely refers to Indians by their own names: Santee Jack, Keyauwee Jack, Eno Will and his son Jack; you don't even get your real name being just another sweet little piece of conquest). Anyhow, Indian Jack wishing to return to Moore, Traunter is just the fellow to make the journey with him.

So off they go. They make their way safely all the way down to Charles-Town, or anyhow to Goose Creek, where Moore hangs out, north of Charles-Town, arriving in September, 1698. Once there Traunter falls in with Moore and his associates, then planning a journey to the mountains looking for gold -- Moore had made such a journey in 1690, claiming to have found "seven sorts of ores or mineral stones," though what with the French and Spanish nearby he had thought it best to keep it a secret until 1699, when he reached out to the Lords of Trade asking for backing for further expeditions.

Traunter sails back to Virginia, then makes a second journey much like the first in 1699, ending up back in Charles-Town in October, 1699. 

Moore sends out that second expedition after gold, including one of the greatest Indian traders of the day, Jean Couture. It fails when one of the main explorers drowns.  Undaunted, Moore, sure that with the untold riches to come the Lords of Trade would want to back his scheme to send dozens of explorers and Indians to the mountains to look again for gold, sends that letter asking for backing.

Cutler was the guy Lawson met in London, and coming back with Cutler Lawson met virtually every connected person in Charles-Town. With their Lordships laughing at foolish chases for gold in the hills, Traunter and Couture -- two of the great Indian traders of the day -- would have been looking for what's next. Traunter's stated object of "opening A free passage for Trade betweene South Carolina, & Virginia, that never had any Communication before by Land," and "to render the Travelling to them more Safe than before had been," would certainly seem attractive -- to adventurer and to investor alike.

Add in that Londoner Netherton's wastrel son has arrived in Charles-Town, where he immediately sets about asking for money, according to a letter from Moore to Cutler dated Dec. 27, 1700, to pay for his freight and "to buy a servant woman," with whom "he had kept company all voyage." Moore irritatedly notes that "Mr. Netherton is by land on his way to Virginia."

You with us? 

That letter was dated Dec. 27, 1700. And we have Lawson's note that he -- traveling with five other Europeans and four Indians -- left on Dec. 28 for Virginia, traveling by land (though the first week had them moving by canoe). Couture, by the way, had made it to Charles-Town via the Savannah River and then up the coast, and Traunter, as we know, had made his way more easily to Goose Creek than to Charles-Town. So parts of the passage remained unresolved, which renders perfectly reasonable Lawson's group's choice to travel the first week by canoe along the coast, until they reached the Santee River, by which they would find Indian trails.

So here are Val's conclusions -- to which, once again, I wholly ascribe, and which nobody in this world before Val Green has drawn.

Lawson meets Cutler in London; Cutler tells Lawson, "Go west, young man" -- and sends him to Charles-Town to be introduced to Moore and everyone else. Meanwhile, there's Traunter, hanging around town, along with Couture looking for what's next. Lawson, Couture, Traunter -- that's three. Add in Netherton, traveling "by land on his way to Virginia" about the exact day Lawson started, and you're up to four. Traunter makes clear he never traveled alone, so poking around in various lists of traders from Virginia, Val finds one John Evans, Jr., also known as "Trader John Evans," who Val says eventually bought property in South Carolina. Which leaves room for only one more. Val believes that to be a member of the LeGare family, one of Charleston's founding families. Solomon LeGare, born 1670 and arrived in Charleston in 1686, would fit right in, especially since one member of the group, once they've passed through the swamps near the coast, decides he cannot continue but must return: "we went forward, leaving the poor dejected Traveller with Tears in his Eyes, to return to Charles-Town," Lawson says. And in a letter requesting a grant from the Lords of Trade, Traunter and  his associate Edward Loughton (by the way, brother-in-law of Cutler) include among the people they plan to go prospecting with Couture, Netherton, and Solomon LeGare.

So again, of these last two, like Val, I'm less certain -- one might easily include Smith instead of Evans, and LeGare, already a Charleston stalwart and part of Netherton and Coutur's prospecting cabal, could easily have chosen to go -- and then turned back. Val mentions another LeGare, one Simon, who he says shows up coming south with Traunter and also fits the bill. 

Nice enough, but what makes this stuff work for me is the corroborations you find within Lawson. Lawson frankly describes the general practice of the Indians providing bedfellows for the traders who want them, though most of his group appears to deny itself this pleasure. But he accounts with special glee one member of his group "having a great Mind for an Indian Lass, for his Bed-Fellow that Night" -- the same member having been frustrated among a previous group of Indians by an old and ugly woman who bunked with them, ruining his chances. That fellow purchases the services of his lady and off they go. Lawson and the rest go to sleep. Lawson describes what happens next:

"About an Hour before day, I awak'd, and saw somebody walking up and down the Room in a seemingly deep Melancholy. I call'd out to know who it was, and it prov'd to be Mr. Bridegroom, who in less than 12 Hours, was Batchelor, Husband, and Widdower, his dear Spouse having pick'd his Pocket of the Beads, Cadis, and what else should have gratified the Indians for the Victuals we receiv'd of them. However that did not serve herturn,but she had also got his Shooes away, which he had made the Night before, of a drest Buck-Skin. Thus dearly did our Spark already repent his new Bargain, walking bare-foot, in his Penitentials, like some poor Pilgrim to Loretto."

To me that sounds like every adventure of every wastrel son, sent by a frustrated father to his partner to make something of himself and instantly getting into trouble. Add in that, according to the record, Netherton the younger ultimately married a Virginia heiress and you're telling a story familiar to everyone who ever went to college with a screwup scion of some rich family who nonetheless, with privilege on his side, always seemed to have things work out just fine.

Regarding Couture, Lawson says of one of his travel partners, "That one of the Cabins was his Father's-in-Law; he call'd him so, by Reason the old Man had given him a youngIndian Girl, that was his Daughter, to lie with him, make Bread, and to be necessary in what she was capable to assist him in, during his Abode amongst them." A trader with this strong of a relationship with the Indians near Charleston of course doesn't need to be Couture -- but Couture fits the bill. On his journey Lawson often mentions the opinions of traders, so he was clearly traveling with some. Couture and Traunter? Why not? Lawson mentions that the wild fig grows in Virginia, which he has from "a person of Credit, and a great Traveler in America;" and few in South Carolina would have then known as much about Virginia as Traunter. When speaking of buffalo, which Lawson has not seen, he describes them but cites "a Traveller of Credit," which might describe Couture, who had traveled with LaSalle and was familiar with lands as far west as the Mississippi. In a letter to the Lords of Trade John Smith describes Traunter as "one of the Greatest Travellers amongst the Indians"; in the letter asking for a grant, Traunter and Loughton call Couture "the greatest Trader and Traveller amongst the Indians for more than Twenty years."

Yes: to be sure; this is conjecture. And yes, if you work at it you can probably poke holes.

But let's start with the basics: with a couple exceptions, nobody has tried to gain anything from Traunter's narrative for 300 years, and starting with that Val Green has drawn amazing conclusions. Second, given how Lawson and Traunter follow so much of the same path, it seems absurd not to conclude that Traunter traveled with Lawson. Once you've included Traunter and recognized that the group was planning an enterprise together, Couture and Netherton follow almost certainly, especially since we know Netherton left for Virginia at exactly that time. LeGare? Well, he was in the group planning, so... ; as for Evans -- or Smith -- there's plenty of question. But until Val Green came along we had Lawson and five question marks. I'm pretty convinced we've now got Lawson, Traunter, Couture, and Netherton. As for the other two we'll see. In any case, I say hurray for Val Green.

A friend shared on Facebook that she no longer shops in any store that sells assault weapons. 

First, just, my God -- that that sentence even makes sense. Assault weapons? You can not only just buy them but can buy them at so many stores that you have to decide which stores to boycott? But here we are.

So anyway. She's stopped patronizing the Cabela's and Gander Mountains and Bass Pro Shops of this world. And good for her, and I'm following along. It seems like the very least you can ask of the store where you buy your camping socks and stove fuel and tent waterproofing that they not make any of their money selling weapons of mass destruction to madpersons. So I'm following along and from now on staying away.

​And I thought, being that the time is right and all, I would share an incident that happened last summer as I walked through Cary, NC, and stopped in a Gander Mountain myself -- I think to get a strap for my glasses, if I'm not mistaken.

Anyhow, I stopped there for a few minutes for whatever reason, and I remember three powerful impressions: Guns, pink, and fakey-fake country music about small towns. 

I left that store in a powerful funk that took me miles of walking to clear.

It started I think with the cretinous modern country music pouring from the speakers, telling let's-pretend stories about the wonderful homespun small-town lives we good ol' rural real Americans are living. Remember, I had spent much of the previous year walking through those small towns -- empty, dusty, decrepit, collapsing small towns in rural South and North Carolina. Towns with no industries and no jobs and no young people and no future and no hope. I'm not talking about small-town values, whatever those are. I can say my own experience is you find plenty of kindness and plenty of hatred wherever you go. 

I'm talking about small towns. And I wanted to scream at those speakers: You are lying. The small towns you pretend to love? Those towns do not exist, and if you spent even one hour every month outside Nashville or LA or wherever you write this crap, you'd know it. Worse, maybe you actually do know it -- you're just writing music that will sell. 

Anyhow I saw it, and if you've driven five miles off the interstate, you've seen it too. Our small towns are dead. Family farms bought up by agribusiness, most manufacturing gone for cheaper labor and even less regulation, and it's not coming back. Cry about this, rail about it, do something about it -- but the worst thing you can do is romanticize it and pretend those towns still exist. They don't. I've walked through them by the dozen. They're gray, dead relics of what once were little towns, and even the locals drive to the bypass to get cheap bacon biscuits. That is just over, and pretending it's not is childish and dangerous.

And what killed small towns? Unregulated corporate capitalism, combined with a terrible lack of education? All the guns in those stores cannot protect you from it. 

​And yeah, the guns. The place has two full walls of guns, including used guns. And yeah, there are guns that you're about as likely to use for hunting as a can opener. I don't mean people-hunting, like in Orlando or any of the depressingly long litany of other place names we can all now recite. I mean the kind of hunting where you patiently wait for a deer or a turkey and shoot it and field dress it and eat it or give the food to your friends. That's great stuff, that hunting. But you don't do it with assault rifles.

Those rifles are the Saturday-night Specials of a new century. Built only for destruction, they offer nothing but danger. I'm sorry we're such a mess as to continue to allow you to buy those as a culture, but do me a favor: don't pretend you're buying one for hunting. You're buying it for one of three reasons: 1. You just like to shoot stuff up and make a lot of noise. My opinion? You can do that without an assault rifle. 2. You plan to kill a bunch of people. In which case, welcome to the country of your dreams. Or 3. Your thinking is so disorganized and you understand so little of statistics or public health that you genuinely believe that you will use that gun to protect yourself in your home, despite the fact that all the statistics say it's much more likely you'll use it on your wife, or your toddler will accidentally use it on you or one of the neighbor's toddlers.

No matter where you go on that assault rifle, you're telling yourself a lie no less preposterous than the ones in those country music songs. I'm thinking it's about time we quit with that lying.

As for the pink, I seem to remember something about girls' guns, though when I went back today to check though I saw plenty of pink, the only thing that really caught my eye was a section of little pink camouflage overalls for toddlers. Which I don't think would camouflage you successfully outside of Barbie's Dream House, And mind you as far as I'm concerned any toddler can wear anything he or she desires, so I'm not against pink camouflage overalls in principle. But I do think there's some kind of fantasy of a girly-pink gun girl going on in this, and all I'm really saying as that, combined with the other lies, this pink stuff gave me the willies.

So, here we are. Another madman goes on a rampage with an assault rifle and we're wringing our hands about guns again, and once again nothing will change. I spoke a bit about Lawson and the guns of his time here (in response to the Oregon community college shooting) (and here's a link to all of 2015's mass shootings), and I remember that when I walked through Cary and into that Gander Mountain I wanted to rage about the lies we tell ourselves about guns and small towns but feared I was just being churlish.

​Well, I am being churlish, for sure. But I'm also right.

​Still, this post will make no difference. Nobody who still defends the rights of citizens, with almost no regulation, including those on watch lists, to get their hands on these weapons of mass destruction is paying a lick of attention to facts, or science, or statistics -- or to the tears of the bereaved left behind by whichever mass shooting is nearest to your memory when you read this. I write it only to raise my voice. I don't know what else to do.

We return our attention to the hollow rocks, the area now between Durham and Chapel Hill which Lawson tells us about in January, 1701, when he visits them in the company of his final guide, the good Enoe Will, who led him to the finish of his journey. Lawson describes the rocks thus: 

 The next day, we went over several Tracts of rich Land, but mix'd with Pines and other indifferent Soil. In our way, there stood a great Stone about the Size of a large Oven, and hollow; this the Indians took great Notice of, putting some Tobacco into the Concavity, and spitting after it. I ask'd them the reason of their so doing, but they made me no Answer. In the Evening, we pass'd over a pleasant Rivulet, with a fine gravelly Bottom, having come over such another that Morning.

We return our attention to the hollow rocks because this past week a grand opening proclaimed that those hollow rocks, which we discussed here, will now be available to adventurers less intrepid than the Lawson Trek had to be to find them. They'll now be part of a new park, described here by the great News & Observer reporter Joe Neff. 

There are dozens of hollows in the rocks like the one Lawson described, and we have no more sense of why the Indians spit in them or put tobacco in them than ever, though it's nice to think people will be able to visit them more easily now that they've been enclosed in an actual park. We'll politely correct one of Neff's sources, though. He said Lawson (who came to the area in 1700 and hung around, mostly, as we know, until he was killed by Tuscarora in 1711) described having a picnic with the Occaneechi on Hanging Rock, a formation in the park.

Nuh-unh. Lawson described the area as quoted above. After that he came to an area called the Lower Quarter, and think less "picnic" than the worst camping trip you ever took: 

On the other side of this River, we found the Indian Town, which was a Parcel of nasty smoaky Holes, much like the Waterrees; their Town having a great Swamp running directly through the Middle thereof. The Land here begins to abate of its Height, and has some few Swamps. Most of these Indians have but one Eye; but what Mischance or Quarrel has bereav'd them of the other I could not learn.

Nasty smoaky holes, in swamps, populated by Indians who mostly have each lost an eye. I guess we all have our own definition of picnics. In any case, it's nice to have Lawson's territory back in the news. I hope when they relocate the little store they plan to use as a historical interpretation center they go directly to A New Voyage to Carolina.

Okay, meet Val Green. 

​I have mentioned Val Green like a million times, and I'm always promising to eventually give you the whole Val Green story, and today's the day.

He was hooked. As the next years -- and decades -- passed, Val spent more and more time chasing down spots that correlated with Lawson's descriptions. Many weren't terribly hard -- Lawson, guided by Indian traders and Indians, kept to well-worn Indian paths, like the famous Trading Path that runs from Georgia to Virginia, running northeast through the Piedmont from Charlotte towards Hillsborough. It got to Charlotte from the south in two parts -- the part Lawson followed came up from Camden, and another fork came from somewhat further west, towards what is now Augusta, Georgia. 

me, though, required serious investigation. Val has pawed through colonial papers, gone up to his armpits in plats, deeds, maps, and property records. He's worn out many DeLorme Atlas & Gazetteers of South and North Carolina as he has traced, retraced, and improved his route. He has scrapbooks filled with maps, photographs, deeds, plats, and drawings. And by the end of his work, Val had understood, pretty much exactly, where Lawson had gone, though like any good researcher he's always willing to reconsider in the light of further evidence. Over the course of my journey Val visited me on the trail at least a half-dozen times, more than once taking me by the hand and guiding me. I make no exaggeration when I say that without Val I simply would not have been able to undertake this project.

And then Val moved on. Lawson led him to the Spaniards -- Hernando de Soto and Juan Pardo -- who wandered the same area a century-and-a-half before. In some cases the Spaniards used the same paths Lawson eventually used, and Lawson's trail is what led Val to the Spaniards. ​

Lawson, his times, his journey, and his surroundings. ​But however you shake out the list of the Lawsonians -- I include Vince Bellis of ECU; Tom Earnhardt of Exploring North Carolina; Tom Magnuson, of the Trading Path Association; Dale Loberger, of more things than you can shake a stick at; and Wayne Hardee of the Grifton Museum, among others -- Val Green is its leader.

Anyhow, now you know.

What you see above is a thing I think is very remarkable. It is a roombox, about 12-inches-by-24-inches-by-11 inches, created by Cincinnati miniaturist Robert Off. Above the mantel is a painting of sea captain and scientific pioneer Sir Francis Beaufort, and in the words of Off, the roombox is "my rendition of what Sir Francis Beaufort’s study may have looked like in England around 1800. The inspiration for the Roombox that I created was your book Defining the Wind."

I'm going to let that sink in for a moment. An artist -- clearly as good as it gets in his chosen art of making miniature rooms -- created this astonishing piece of artwork. And he did it because I wrote a book.

Well, he did it because Sir Francis Beaufort was an amazing character, whose eponymous wind scale is a thing of scientific and poetic beauty that has been inspiring writers and artists for centuries. It's so amazing -- as is Beaufort's life; among other things, he's the guy who put Charles Darwin aboard the HMS Beagle -- that I wrote an entire book about it, called Defining the Wind, which Mr. Off has read and says he liked very much. He liked it enough, obviously, that he created this astonishing thing. Here's another look at it.  

I bring this up for two reasons. First, I just heard about it. Off just sent me an email telling me he had made this unbelievable thing and that there was going to be an event at the Cincinnati Mercantile Library, itself a place of almost unendurable awesomeness, on March 23, at which this piece of artwork was going to be unveiled and writer and library director John Faherty would discuss Beaufort and my book. And, anyway would I be willing to autograph and provide three copies of the book -- one for the eventual owner of the artwork, one to be raffled off at the event, and one for Off himself ? Off would gladly pay postage and for the books themselves.

The hell he will. He will have those books from my own hand, and he will not have to pay postage because I will go to Cincinnati and attend the event, you just see if I don't. I'll even talk if they'll let me. (Spoiler: he told me they would.)

Now, here's the second reason I'm telling you all this. It's because this week, after all the negotiations and discussions and contractual madness, I have signed a contract to write a book about the Lawson Trek, to be called A Delicious Country and to be published by the very wonderful University of North Carolina Press.  SO, yay, right? It'll be a lot of work for not much money, but that's the nature of books and book writing and it's what I've chosen and I'm grateful, right?

Except.

You write these books, and there's a couple years of your life, and one day a truck drives up with a box and you open it up and oh my God it's the greatest day and there's your book, and here or there -- in the best case, sometimes here AND there -- you get a review, or a note, or someone talks to you for 11 minutes on the radio, and you go to a bookstore and do monkeyshines and people laugh and a few buy your book. And, um, in about a month or so, the end. To be sure, there are authors whose books sell like crazy and who get royalty statements that have numbers not in parentheses and all that, and God bless them, but they are not me and I am not them. I write the kind of books that get loving reviews and then not too many people buy.

Which, again, ok -- I get paid (mostly) to do work I love and I'm not complaining. But whatever you say, and however much I do love it, book writing is an unlovely business, and it's wearying and takes a long time and sometimes you wonder why. Here comes a year of just plain hard work, and then eventually a month of pretty much fun, and then it's in the library like it never happened. You get the occasional letter from someone else who utterly shares your passion, and that's wonderful. But mostly the book is out there and that's just that.

So you can understand when I tell you that seeing this piece of artwork is thrilling and inspiring in a way I can scarcely express. 

One chapter of Defining the Wind, in fact, discusses artwork based on the Beaufort Scale. 

ideas I found so lovely in the scale were themselves sort of moving forward through time, finding expression through various artists and writers as years went by. The cartoon above, for example, was put up just this January, and new children's books have come out since my book came out (The Rising of the Wind, at left is older; I discussed it in the book), and as a result of my book Robin Harris, director of the wonderful NC State Dance Department actually choreographed a dance based on the scale. So you do get a sense that maybe you're helping these ideas reach people, move forward through time, and find their expression.

But even so, you can feel a little lonely and like the enterprise borders on pointless.

So I need to tell you: seeing this miniature room is satisfying in a way I can barely express. Especially that Off's room is not a mere expression or illustration of the Beaufort Scale but is instead a kind of love letter to the life Sir Francis would have led. Which is what my book turned out to be, so here it is -- something wonderful, made by someone who was affected by my own affection for Sir Francis and the scale he created. An addition to our world, our culture -- an improvement to the world. In which my work played a small role.

Given which, toiling to write a book about John Lawson's little-known adventure suddenly feels like it might be worth doing. That is, my work might have a point. Can art do anything greater than give us a belief that it might be worth carrying on? Thank you, Robert Off. Thank you.

And guess I'd better be getting on with it.

When Lawson visited some of the remnants of the Santee Indian nation, a week or so into his journey, he said that "they made us all welcome; shewing a great deal of Joy at our coming, giving us barbacu'd Turkeys." He mentions wild turkeys a lot, and he talks even about the uses for their feathers: "their chief Doctor or Physician, ... was warmly and neatly clad with a Match-Coat, made of Turkies Feathers, which makes a pretty Shew, seeming as if it was a Garment of the deepest silk Shag."

My point, tiny though it may be, is that in them days, turkeys was everywhere. EVERYWHERE. The place was crawling with wild turkeys, and then as now: good eating.

Then we Euros hung around a while and pretty soon, along with the passenger pigeons and the Carolina parakeet, they were about done. Come around 1900 the parakeets were gone and the pigeons were on the way out. The turkeys were down to some 30,000. Think, current populations of polar bears, as explained in this excellent story in the Cool Green Science blog of Nature. 

Fortunately, Theodore Roosevelt and other conservationists got the message. Habitat setasides worked; so did game laws recognizing that the birds were not limitless. Hatch-and-release programs didn't work -- you raise a bird in a barnyard, then fling it into a forest and say "Good luck"? Nuh-unh. But catch and reintroduce into new protected territory programs did. Nowadays wild turkeys number in the millions, with a conservation status of least concern. Hunters love them, and they are notoriously difficult to shoot, being mistrustful and sharp of eye.

Anyhow. Hunters and conservationists working together -- a story of people finding their common goals and working on them. The wild turkey is considered the greatest conservation success story in the nation, if not the world, and it shows that as bad as things are, we can still make change. A worthy thanksgiving thought, I think. 

A final thought. Of course, we all know that Benjamin Franklin thought ill of the bald eagle as a national symbol: " He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly," preferring to steal from other fishers. More, "like those among Men who live by Sharping & Robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides he is a rank Coward," easily frightened by the small King Bird. The King Bird, by the way, goes by the Latin name Tyrannus tyrannus. So let's see if we can think of any modern applications: a bird that  looks very big but is terrified of something very small that it allows to tyrannize it. On the other hand, Franklin goes on to say, consider the turkey: "For in Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America… He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on."

​So let's see if we've got this straight. One bird bird bullies other birds and steals their food, though the eagle himself can be bullied by something very small he ought not to give a moment's thought to. Another bird, though a bit vain and silly, is brave and has made his way back from the brink of extinction with the help of good and decent people.

And we take as our symbol the bully bird who proves a coward. As we celebrate a holiday about thanks and sharing at the same time seemingly half our population trembles in fear of refugees, that symbol seems sadly apt. 

As for me I stick with the turkey feather. I believe I may adopt the turkey feather as my own personal symbol. Maybe I'll stick it back in my hat.

Anyhow. Happy Thanksgiving from the Lawson Trek. 

The Lawson Trek's cameras have come down.

It's no biggie -- with the help of zoologist Roland Kays of the Biodiversity Lab at the the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (especially ace young scientist Troi Perkins) we put up a couple camera traps. One in Umstead Park, a state park in Raleigh, the other in Crabtree Creek Nature Park in Morrisville, NC. The Umstead Park one early on gave us a couple bucks in velvet (he stopped in periodically; that's him above, I think), and the Crabtree Creek one was keeping us updated on the activities of a raccoon that seemed to come by most nights.  The camera got it coming and going.

Eventually the Crabtree one stopped working, which meant a day that I had to find its coordinates and slog my way back into the squish to retrieve it and figure out what was wrong. We figured it had probably drowned in a rain event -- the cameras do fine in the rain, but nothing electronic likes to be underwater, no matter how waterproof(ish) its casing. I'm told it's working again back in the lab, but that doesn't give us any information on how that raccoon spent the remainder of its summer.

The big buck at the top of the page is one of the last images we got from the other camera, which Troi went to gather back up last week. Enough was enough, and the camera wasn't catching too much, though I was glad to see the buck a last time or so before the camera was liberated. 

Kays's lab is part of the eMammal project, with the Smithsonian Institution, that uses camera traps to spot, track, and learn about mammals in the field. He's published research on camera trap use: last year this piece in Methods in Ecology and Evolution on using cameras to quantify levels of animal activity and just this fall this piece in Landscape Ecology about the use of volunteer-run cameras (like ours!) as distributed sensors. Now our cameras, however interesting they were as observation posts, were not part of any experiment. As Roland rightly pointed out, we put ours where we hoped we'd see animals. Actual science would have been putting many cameras randomly over an area to see where the wildlife showed up.

So farewell, cameras -- thanks for being our eyes in the forest, giving us a glimpse into the peregrinations of raccoons and bucks and a glimpse into how the big kids do science.