The Lawson Trek
  • Home
    • About
    • Interactive Map
    • The Trek
  • Along the Path: Blog
  • John Lawson
    • "A New Voyage to Carolina"
    • The Carolina Colony
  • Talk to us!
  • Store
  • Press

Along the Path

Updates as we learned about Lawson's journey and times -- and reports from the trail as we progressed along it. Plus tales of the process of publishing the result.

Recordkeeping

8/8/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
So here's what happened: I lost a notebook. That's it there in the picture.

And the thing is I can't lose notebooks; I just can't. Notebooks are work and notebooks are records and I'm a writer, so where I write is pretty much everything. I can't lose a notebook.

I started carrying a notebook around in my pocket, for stray thoughts, things to remember, ideas, overheard quotations, and the like when I was in college, where I kept up the practice sporadically. Once I had a real job I recognized the need for a go-to place to make sure I didn't lose notes and I began the practice, at age 22 or so, of never not having a notebook with me. In those pre-cell phone days I put the phone numbers I used most often in the back, so that I could quickly refer to them. When I finished a notebook -- usually six to nine months -- I would copy the phone numbers forward into the new one, along with my address and phone number and of course the promise of a juicy reward for the notebook's return. I would go back through the book as I moved on to the next one and see if there were ideas or projects I had lost track of. Once I had a pile of them, I could go backwards and, by checking back pages, see who my best friends were in a particular period; here Sally enters, here Ver drops off, we never seem to not have David. 

When I got enough of them I of course numbered them so that I could keep them straight, though I numbered them only in the archive; in my pocket they were just my notebook. And this was all, mind you, in the early days, when I thought being a writer worked like this: you sat at a desk, holding a pen, stroking your chin and looking skyward. Then, aha! The idea! And then you wrote it down. That is, I hadn't learned about reporting, and I hadn't realized that those few descriptions of actual things -- a bus going by, kicking up grit; a clerk arguing with a man in a store; a woman adjusting her coat as she came out of a department store revolving door into a chilly Philadelphia December evening -- were actually the beginning of my work as a writer.

And I never, ever lost one. My friends would joke about "making the book" when someone said something funny and I wrote it down, or they would take note when a conversation sent me to a quiet corner to scribble. The point is, I had notebooks. They were important to me. And I never lost one. I thought of losing a notebook the way a carpenter would think of walking away from a hammer or a drill. Unthinkable.

And then one disappeared. I was wearing pants that had the kind of loose, shallow, crappy pockets that have become common, and at some point the notebook wasn't there. I scoured my room; I returned to places recently visited; I emptied briefcases. But nothing. I had lost a hat and sunglasses in the same period, so I wondered whether I was learning something about my changing capacity to manage myself. After a couple weeks I gave up and launched a new notebook, with a 3 x 5 card on the shelf at the end, noting that after the last finished notebook (number 68) a lacuna would appear in the record. Over the next weeks the sunglasses and hat returned from friends' houses or resurfaced from beneath kitchen table crap, but the one irreplaceable thing was gone. It turned out not to be the end of the world, of course, and I tried to shoulder up and not cry. But it shook me; I had done something I considered utterly unprofessional: I had lost notes.

Then the book came back. Scouring for a FitBit fragment, my wife found it deep under the bed, likely ejected there during a particularly disgusted episode of end-of-day pants flinging. I embraced it like a relative or beloved stuffed animal. Then I went through it -- it had been misplaced early in its tenure, and I would not have lost much beyond my sense of myself as a competent adult. A few notes, only a couple of them about Lawson or his trip or my attempts to make sense of that.

I'm glad it's back, if only so that I can now think of myself once again as someone who has never completely lost a notebook.  
More, though, it reminds me of the importance of original sources. As I finish the book version of A Delicious Country I'm trying to put Lawson into context, and that's hard work because of how little we know about him beyond what he put in his book.  We have a very few letters from him to James Petiver, the botanical collector and apothecary in London; we have a couple letters in which he is mentioned (British gardener George London calls him "a very curious person" and noted his recent book, high praise from a powerful man of science, and Lawson's surveying work receives praise from William Byrd in his Histories of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina: "Thus we found the Mouth of Nottoway to lye no more than half a Minute farther to the Northward then Mr. Lawon had forrmerly done....a very inconsiderable variance").
Picture
Here it is returned to its natural habitat, on the top of the pile to the right. The pile in the middle is unused notebooks. To the left are full-sized journals. What can I tell you -- I take notes.
We have his will (he left everything to his wife and children; good man, Mr. Lawson) and a few land transfer records, but that's about it. What we absolutely do not have are the notebooks he used during his journey -- assuming he took notes, that is.  

I would love to have those. To see his handwriting (like I did when I looked at his original specimens in the London Natural History Museum), to see his thoughts in the moment he observed a river, a new Indian tribe, a mountain. But no -- whether he lost them at some point on his travels after publication or whether they were destroyed during the Tuscarora War when Lawson was killed, his notebooks and all other records of his process are gone. 

It's too bad. Lawson was one of the greatest first observers among the European settlers of North Carolina; I wish we had the first impressions of those first observations. 
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    January 2020
    October 2019
    May 2019
    February 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    August 2017
    May 2017
    August 2016
    June 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014

    Categories

    All
    Adventure
    African American
    Angie Clemmons
    Anthropocene
    Apothecary
    Appalachian
    Archaeologists
    Archaeology
    Army-navy
    Art
    Artifacts
    Atlanta
    Backpack
    Banking
    Barbecue
    Barry Beasley
    Bath
    Beaufort
    Beckee Garris
    Beetle
    Beginning
    Ben Franklin
    Berm
    Bill
    Birds
    Blister
    Book
    Bookstore
    Boston
    Botanical
    Boykin
    Breach
    Brent Burgin
    Brownlee
    Buck
    Buffer
    Cabelas
    Cambridge
    Camden
    Camera
    Canoe
    Canty
    Catawba
    Chain
    Charleston
    Charlotte
    Chelsea
    Chocolate
    Chris Judge
    Church
    Cincinnati
    City Of Raleigh Museum
    Civilization
    Coe
    Comment
    Community
    Concord
    Confederate
    Contentnea
    Cornwallis
    Country Music
    Couture
    Crawford
    Creek
    Croatoan
    Cutler
    Cypress
    Danger
    Davis
    Death
    Delightsome
    Delk's
    Denton
    Devices
    Drake
    Drawing
    Drunk
    Duck
    Durham
    Eagle
    Earnhardt
    Earth Day
    East
    Ecologist
    Effron
    Embankment
    End
    Error
    Evans
    Exhibit
    Expeditions
    Facebook
    Feather
    Fern
    Finish
    Fire
    Flag
    Flintlock
    Flood
    Francis
    French
    Gaillard
    Gander Mountain
    Garden
    Geology
    Gimpy
    GIS
    Google
    Great Wagon Road
    Green
    Greenville
    Grifton
    Guerry
    Gun
    Guns
    Haigler
    Hallenbeck
    Hampton
    Hanging
    Hannah Smith
    Harris
    Hartford
    Harvest
    Heat
    Hempton
    Highway
    Hillsborough
    Hips
    Historic Bath
    Hollow Rocks
    Home
    Homeness
    Hortus Siccus
    Hospitality
    Huguenots
    Huntley
    Indians
    Instagram
    Interstate
    Island
    Ivy
    Ivy Place
    Jamaica
    Jarvis
    Jennifer Landin
    Jered
    Jimmy White
    John Jeffries
    John White
    Journalism
    Kadaupau
    Kannapolis
    Katawba Valley Land Trust
    Katie Winsett
    Kayak
    Kershaw
    Keyauwee
    King
    Knife
    Lame
    Land
    Language
    Lawson
    Lawsonians
    Lecture
    Legacy
    Legare
    Legislators
    Leigh Swain
    Lenoir
    Lenoir Store
    Lenses
    Library
    Lichen
    Lies
    Loberger
    Locke
    London
    Longleaf
    Lost Colony
    Lynch
    Lynching
    Magnuson
    Mansplaining
    Maps
    Mass Shooting
    Match-coat
    Mathematical
    Meerkat
    Memorial
    Mental Floss
    Mill
    Millstone
    Miniature
    Monkeyshine
    Moonshine
    Museum
    Museum Day Live
    Musings
    Nancy
    Nascar
    Native American Studies Center
    Natural History Museum
    Nature
    Nesbit
    Netherton
    Neuse
    Newspaper
    Nonfiction
    Notebooks
    Occaneechi
    Orlando
    Pack's Landing
    Palmetto
    Pamlico
    Park
    Patent Leather
    Pedestrian
    Peggy Scott
    Periscope
    Petiver
    Photography
    Physic
    Pig
    Pig Man
    Pittsburgh
    Pocket
    Poinsett
    Polo
    Potsherd
    Pottery
    Preparation
    Presentation
    Press
    Process
    Proofreading
    Property
    Publishing
    Raccoon
    Racing
    Racism
    Racist
    Raleigh
    Rape
    Ray
    Readings
    Reconsideration
    Records
    Revolution
    Richard Smith
    Richardson
    Rights
    Riparian
    Rivulet
    Road
    Roadness
    Roanoke
    Robert Off
    Roland Kays
    Rolling Stone
    Roombox
    Rules
    Salisbury
    Santee
    Sapona
    Sassafras
    Scan
    Sconc
    Seneca
    Seth
    Shakespeare
    Sir Walter Raleigh
    Slavery
    Slime Mold
    Sloane
    Slope
    Small Town
    Smith
    Smithsonian
    Snow
    Sore
    Sounds
    Spanish Moss
    Specimens
    Speedway
    Spencer
    State Fair
    Steve Grant
    Stewart
    St. Mark's
    Suburban
    Sumter County
    Surveying
    Swamp
    Tar River
    Technology
    Textile
    Tide
    Tobacco
    Toms River
    Tool
    Towel
    Trade
    Trading Ford
    Trading Girls
    Trail
    Trap
    Traunter
    Tree
    Tree Farming
    Trek
    Trilobite
    Troi Perkins
    Truth
    Tryon
    Tupelo
    Turkey
    Tuscarora
    Twitter
    Ugly
    Unc
    Val
    Val Green
    Virginia
    Virginia Dare
    Virginia Historical Society
    Walking
    Washington
    Waxhaw
    Weather
    Website
    White
    Writing
    Wrong
    Yadkin
    Yoga

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly