Interview with Scott Huler author of Defining the Wind and A Delicious Country

**Update: Audio Issues Fixed Aug. 19 2025**

I was in the local branch of my public library and I came across the title, Defining the Wind. I had never heard of the title, nor the author, Scott Huler. I was blown away by Scott's seemingly bottomless interest, his total commitment to investigation and understanding, and his equanimity when the universe doesn't deliver on expectations. I reached out to Scott with gratitude for the good read, and asking for some advice for an aspiring writer. He was fireworks in response, knife sharp and funny. This was the beginning of our correspondence. 

I later read A Delicious Country, another book of full of curiosity and commitment. Scott retraced one of the earliest published accounts of a European trekking through the Carolinas. By this point I had started the podcast and knew Scott would make for a phenomenal chat. He did not disappoint. Scott is full of writerly wisdom, and you are going to love this conversation.

• Scott Huler's Website
• Show notes and full transcript on my website
• Other Episodes
• Check out our Instagram @BookSciencePodcast
• Support the show & get bonus content: Patreon.com/BookScience

Transcript

Tripp: This show was recorded in Narrm, Melbourne, Australia, where the traditional custodians include the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and we pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging. I'm Tripp Collins, and this is Book Science. The podcast explores how the best science books are written and why they matter. Today I'm talking with Scott Huler. Scott is an author, editor, and producer of written and audio content. 

He is the walking embodiment of curiosity. He kept me laughing throughout this conversation, and I've learned so much from Scott, from his books and from this conversation in particular. You can find out more about Scott at ScottHuler.com, and I hope you enjoy this conversation with this absolute legend. So today we are talking to Scott Huler. Scott is a man of many talents. He's a writer and a producer of audio and video content. He's the author of many nonfiction books, at least six by my account, including two that we'll focus on today, which are Defining the Wind, the Beaufort Scale, and how a 19th century emerald turned science into poetry. And Defining the Wind recently celebrated a 20-year anniversary published in 2004. 

We'll also be talking about a delicious country rediscovering the Carolinas along the route of John Mawson's 1700 expedition, published 2019 by the University of North Carolina Press. So, Scott, thank you so much for joining me today. 

Scott Huler: Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. 

Tripp: So bear with me for a second, because I'm going to do a little work now to sort of set up the conversation. You have referred to Defining the Wind as a book-length love letter to the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force. Yeah, the book isn't about Beaufort per se. The book is sort of about your obsession with language. 

And satisfying your curiosity of how this prose came to be, you uncover all this like fascinating history and science. And then there's Delicious Country, about but not about another historical figure, John Lawson, born exactly a century before Beaufort. And in Delicious Country, you retrace Lawson's path all the while contrasting your observations with his from 300 years prior. 

You're listening for and you're finding these echoes from the past and rhymes in history. I think part of what makes these like Huler projects is that they're not really easy to give like a short synopsis or define them in a single sentence. I think you have to actually go into them and experience them for yourself. And I think this reflects sort of how you work. So you throw yourself into a topic. I mean, you absolutely immerse yourself. Then you carefully observe and you document your journey. And then you report back to us much, much like Lawson himself. So do you agree with this assessment? And how would you characterize it? 

Scott Huler: I agree with that very much. I think that's very accurate and very observant. What I would say is that most of what I do and we can go into each of these books is very different. But if there's a through line through all of my work, whether it's my books or, you know, my radio work or journalism, anything like that, underneath all of it is the exhortation to pay attention to what is happening around. 

I think I say in the Beaufort book that the universe is whispering its secrets into our ears and we're telling it to shut up because we're too busy looking at our phones. And what I love to do is find something that I didn't know about that surprises me and then dig into it. And the people who fascinate me and both Beaufort and Lawson were absolutely great examples of this were people who were paying very close attention, who were taking notes, who were trying to explain what they see, who were trying to understand what they experienced. And trying to share that with other people, both Lawson and Beaufort were not just people who were doing amazing exploration. 

They were people who wanted everybody else to understand that. As you say, the language is such a fundamental part of it to me. I'm a writer. I love language. I love working with it and manipulating it and thinking about it and being delighted and surprised by it. And that's how really, in a way, that's how my entire work as a writer started was by stumbling onto the Beaufort scale and falling in love with it first as a piece of writing and then ultimately as a scientific tool. 

Tripp: When you were paying attention, like you did when you first read the Beaufort scale, how do you separate the week from the shaft? How do you know that something is worth paying attention to? 

Scott Huler: Well, what a great question. It's, I guess, which Supreme Court justice was it about pornography? I know it when I see it. The best way I would tell you how anybody is listen to yourself, listen to your heart rate, wait for the hair in your arms to stand up. When something, wait, actively hope for your mind to be blown. 

And when something blows your mind, just stop and be there for that moment. So with the Beaufort scale, what happened was I was a copy editor at a publisher about computer systems. This was like before when fax were just coming out in the early 80s. And I was excited because our copy editing office was a little, was perceived as kind of an ivory tower. We sat there and we tinkered with prose. We didn't, our job wasn't to understand the technology. Our job was to understand the, and to fix it. Get the words spelled right, get the clauses straight, get the sentences straight. 

I always like to say that you start with letters. You know, if this word spelled right, then you move on to the words, okay, does this clause blow? And then does this clause, does it fit into the sentence in which it resides? 

Then that sentence. There's a paragraph. And that paragraph is part of a passage. That passage is part of a chapter. That chapter is part of a book. The copy editor's job is to make every piece of that thing. You want to get rid of anything that doesn't do a job. 

E.B. White famously said that a good sentence has no extra words for the same reason that a machine has no extra parts. Because if it's not doing a job, it shouldn't be there. That doesn't mean language shouldn't be beautiful or a machine shouldn't be. It means that if it's not doing work, why is it there? 

And you should think about that. So I loved the work of understanding language and how it works. You know, language is technology. Language is a machine. And figuring out how it worked was great for me as a copy editor. And I like to tell people that a copy editor, the relationship between a copy editor and their dictionary is a little bit like the relationship between an adolescent and like a playboy magazine. Less that’s known the better. 

The relationship is a little too intense for outside eyes. But you read the dictionary. If a copy editor considers himself a night errant, him or herself, which most do and they should, because copy editing is God's work on earth. The dictionary is your squire. The dictionary is the person working with you. And so I would just, we would read the dictionary when we had a few moments. 

You would just rip through it. You have this wonderful relationship with your dictionary. And one day I opened it up and here's the Beaufort scale. And I'm reading it. And I'm stunned by not just the beauty of the language, the language of the Beaufort scale is beautiful, but by its efficiency. The Beaufort scale, it's 110 words long. 

I've counted. And it tells you everything that the wind can do from zero smoke rises vertically. Think of what a powerful piece of descriptive prose that smoke rises vertically. You know, instantly, if you're looking at a chimney or something and the smoke is going straight up, there is not a breath of because it takes no wind at all for the wind to, for the smoke to drift. So smoke is rising vertically. 

Wow. And also smoke rises. I love that sentence. 

Subject, verb, adverb. What a beautiful, and you've learned so much. And then, you know, sentence after sentence, it would take you somewhere and it was using all of your senses. 

The sensory data is what blew my mind about that. Two, one, by their direction of wind shown by smoke, but not by wind. Two, wind felt on face, leaves rustle, ordinary vein moved by wind. That's already using four of your senses. Right. If assuming you could smell that smoke, you're looking, hearing, you're feeling wind felt on face. 

Who hasn't had that experience? This is a scientific, a linguistic scientific instrument for explaining what the wind is doing and you're getting this poetic stuff. And then of course you get up to five fresh breeze with the small trees in leaf begin to sway. Well, as you know, in English, Iambic is our natural rhythm. Small trees and leaf begin to, that's Iambic tetrameter. 

And then crested, wavelets form on inland water. That's iambic pentameter. Oh my God, you're just reading this and you're like, this is the best home I've ever read. What, what's going on here? And I'm showing it to the other people in the copywriting office. Oh, that's kind of nice. 

Nobody's, nobody's experiencing the sort of paroxysm of joy that I am. So I'm like, okay, this is special for me, but I need to know more about. And that's where I think it turns out that I didn't know it at the time that I'm a natural reporter. That's what I am. 

I'm a, I'm a researcher. I, my entire life. Who's, who's more lucky than me? My entire life is indulging my A student tendency. And I get to be a student who, who researched so deeply and found something. 

I remember turning in a paper to a professor in college and I remember him writing in the margin after some fact I had found said, I did not know this. That's it. That's it. I'm on Mark's more. 

If I told my professor something he didn't know before, that means I'm there where I need to. And so here's this Beaufort scale. And I start, well, I want to know the story of the Beaufort and who's Beaufort and how was the scale written and all this kind of stuff. 

Well, as you well know, there's a 245 word book out there telling you far more than you could possibly care about the Beaufort scale at this point. But I spent years of my life, many years trying to do it on the fly, right? Trying to, like I would get a job as a reporter in some newsroom and I would, when it was late at night, I would sneak an international call and call like the British Museum and ask them some question and they would tell me something and then I would do more researching in libraries and then I would have to call again and it was just dreamly love research. And I really couldn't get, I read the, I read the biography of Beaufort that was out there, Beaufort of the Admiralty. My, now my wife then, my girlfriend would see me with that and she would say, Beaufort of the... Yeah. 

It was a great thing. And that didn't really, it talked about the Beaufort scale, but it was clear that it wasn't written the way I fell in love with it in 1806 when Beaufort wrote it. And Beaufort died in, you know, what, 1857 or something like that. And they're leaving out part of this story and it turned out that nobody had really thoroughly written that. 

So it was out there for me to write, which was an absolute thrill for me to take something that I thought was so beautiful and so important and be the person who got to share it with the world in a, not like it wasn't shared before, but in a way that they could learn the story. Yeah. 

Tripp: I want to react to a couple of things here. So I just think it's amazing that you sort of were attuned enough with your sensibilities to pick up on that lightning bolt when you came across it. And I guess that's what paying attention means is feeling yourself react to something and not ignoring it. 

But then also you were sort of the right person. You had the right sensibilities and you noticed all those, the intricate structure of the language, whereas other people might not have seen that at all. It is remarkable though, because it conveys more information than the words should. The words by themselves only carry so much meaning, but the way that they're packaged together, full of imagery and sensory information, it is quite remarkable. You got this spark. 

How did you sustain this project? And you sort of touched on this. You said you sort of carried it around with you. But at some point you knew this was a story that sort of belonged to you, that no one had told. Well, for a long time, 

Scott Huler: I think I thought the problem was that I couldn't figure out, you know, that there was a book out there that told the whole story and I couldn't find it or that everybody knows how the Beaufort scale was made and where, you know, I'm just such a bad researcher that I couldn't get to it. And I worried about, I don't know if you know the joke about the pancakes, the lady with the pancakes, that I was, it's an old, old, old joke where a lady is sitting in front of a psychiatrist and she says, and he says, okay, well, why are you here? And she said, well, my children said I needed to come. And he said, well, why? And she said, well, because I love pancakes. And he said, because you love pancakes, I love pancakes. That's no reason to go to a psychiatrist. I love pancakes myself. And she says, you do, you must come to my house. 

I have 40 trunks of them in my attic. I felt like that was me, uh, about the Beaufort scale, like people would come to my house and I would mention the Beaufort scale and they would say, wow, that sounds kind of cool. And I'd say, okay, wait, wait, wait. And I would run up and I would get this burdening folder and start spreading things out that I had photocopied from these different sources. 

And they would get this look on their face where they're like, okay, back away slowly. And, um, but I just believed that there was something there. And now part of what it was was the beauty of the language. But another part of it, as I've come to realize as my life has gone, is that I call Beaufort in, in Define in the Wind, I call him the last 18th century. 

And I realize that I'm a modern person who yet looks back at the 18th century enlightenment way of looking at the world. That's my natural. We can understand this. We can figure this out. We can solve this. We can move forward. 

We can leave things better than we found them. We have this obligation. We have this responsibility. 

Let's do this. We can all just make things better. And like the world is understandable. A broken process is repairable. A situation is perfectible. Now, of course, much of that turns out not to be true. 

I regret to say, as we're noticing recently, but that both 40 and cents, the more I learned about Beaufort, the more I realized that he was like me. I just want to understand everything. I want to read everything. I want to see everything. I want to explain everything. I call my office the explainatorium because it's just, it's where I go to try to explain things. 

Of course, ask my kids how fun that is to be around. What are you looking at? Well, let me tell you, and they're like, oh, no, oh, no. 

Oh, here it comes. I finally got to a point where I could tell there is, as you say, there is a story here that has not been, I didn't find the key until I had already sold the notion of the book and was really researching the book. It was only when I could really say, this is my job is researching this project, that I finally got to all the different places I needed to and found the 1906 paper written by a cadre of engineers that had the beautiful book. 

Tripp: At some point, you were able to center that work in your life. Right. 

Scott Huler: I spent many years as a reporter. Now, I didn't want to, I didn't set out to be a reporter. I set out to be a writer, which you should think ruffled, leave, cut, and a quill pen. You sit around and stroke your skin and then you think, ah-ha, in a light bulb or maybe like a whale oil lamp appears over your head and then you begin writing your deathless prose. Of course, that turns out not to be how it works. I started selling little things and found that, hey, if you write things for newspapers and magazines, they give you money and you could make your living doing that. 

So I stumbled into journalism as a pure features writer. I was never like your cop shop guy. I was never the guy up to my armpits in FOIA requests. 

Right. I was always the guy when I was on staff at a newspaper or magazine, I was the guy who like if your cat could play the violin, I was the guy you would. So I fell into this love affair with writing features because their job, if you're a features writer at a newspaper or magazine or at a radio station, your job is to find weird stuff going down and then go there and ask the people, why are you doing that? How's that work? Tell me more about that and then you get to explain it to people and then you're on to the next. It's the best job in the world for somebody who's naturally curious, who likes language and who's the boring guy at the dinner party who makes everybody at the table listen to some stupid things. I stumbled into book writing when I got tired of newspapering and would sell one, you know, I'd do this book or that book and it was great. 

I loved it. And then one day I was looking at the Beaufort stuff and thinking like, you know, maybe that's a book, maybe there's a way to do it. And I wrote a whole proposal for it and sent it to my agent and I don't know how many different ways to say no, there are things. But she was, yeah, I don't think so. 

No. And so I threw it aside. We came to a point where now my wife, then my girlfriend, she moved away for a while and left me kind of stranded in Nashville. It was a strange way to say it. But I was living and I didn't have many friends around and, you know, I had my job and I was basically alone a lot of the time. And so on the spur of the moment, I decided to apply for a journalism fellowship, a mid-career journalism. And when I was doing the application, I said, well, what would you do if you get this fellowship? What will you do? 

You'll have a year and the resources of the University of Michigan of the Knight Wallace Fellowship, one of the great fellowships. You know, I would finally get to the bottom of the book. I pulled out the old proposal that my agent had scorned. I looked at this and I thought, you know, I kind of still believe in this. And I asked my agent, I said, do you mind if I showed it to a couple other people? And she was like, knock yourself out. 

And you could see in the thought bubble above her head, here's Huler crawling back. Nobody wants this thing. And I reached out to a few agents. I think I reached out to five agents. Every single one of them wanted to represent the book. Amazing. 

I think what happened was longitude. You have a silver bullet? Yeah. 

Yeah, yeah, of course. And it sort of invented the kind of pocket history genre where I'm going to take a weird little thing that you haven't thought about and I'm going to tell you how it changed the world or whatever. When I have ultimately wrote the Beaufort Scale book, they kept saying at the crown, well, what's the subtitle? We need to show how it changed the world. And I was like, it didn't change the world. 

It's just cool. It didn't change the world. We can't say it did. And maybe that's why the book didn't sell there as well. That's why I always tell people that go to a bookstore and say, I'm looking for a well-reviewed book that didn't sell well. And I go, OK, Huler, under H, we have a whole cell full of books that's not good reviewed but sold like dogs. But at any rate, suddenly I had a new agent who wanted to represent this book. And at the same time, the fellowship actually came through. 

It moved forward. And I was just like, suddenly I have all of this fellowship money and then I have book advanced money. And I was like, for a year, all I need to do is research this. And I went to England and I went to South America to, I sailed on a square rigger. 

I mean, with resources behind you, you can do things. And this was the first time that this was a new experience for me. My wife said a very funny thing at that point. She said, Monday morning, find out whether I got the fellowship. And then Tuesday, there had been enough interest expressed in the proposal that they were selling this book at auction. 

And Jenn said, Wednesday is going to be boring. Very funny. My wife. You know, suddenly the Beaufort scale was my life. And I'll never forget in the fellowship interest that got me the fellowship, one of the people on the board of the fellowships was from the nursing. And she said, so the Beaufort scale, if you get the fellowship, you're going to work on the Beaufort scale. 

What's that? Well, as you can well imagine, I was off like a shot and I was playing and talking. And she said, oh, it's a diagnostic tool because think of it from a nurse's perspective, all nurses do all day long off. All, you know, medical people do is say, does it hurt a lot? 

Does it hurt a little? What, you know, they're trying to get your subjective experience into a scale that allows those of them to understand exactly what is happening to you. That's the Beaufort scale for wind. And I was like, of course, you're right. 

That's exactly right. And then the two of us were like looking at each other and talking. And the rest of the board were like, if you would put your hand between our eyes, it would have gotten burned. Close, we were looking at each other. That was the intensity of communication. And I walked out and I was like, I believe I'm going to get this. 

Yeah, yeah. And there were a wonderful dozen of us on the fellowship. A wonderful 18 of us, a dozen American and six from the rest of the world. It was a wonderful experience. 

It was so much fun to watch the other writers, these other journalists, learn about the Beaufort scale and bit by bit be convinced into it. And I'll tell you one story. You know, once or twice a week, we would have dinners and then people would come and speak to us, you know, somebody visiting the Michigan campus or one of the Michigan professors who had done something, they would come and talk to us. And we would have these wonderful conversations. But at the beginning of those, the director of the fellowship would say, well, each of you introduce yourself, say where you're from, what you're working on. And so I would, you know, somebody would say, I'm so and so I'm from the times and I'm working on this during my fellowship year. And I would say, I'm from Nashville Public Radio and I'm working on the Beaufort scale of Wind force. 

And two of the other fellows developed a hand signal for they made a scale of response to the Beaufort scale when I would talk about it. Like some people would say, oh, okay. And then they would move on to the next person. They would like put on their cheek a little, their, their thumb and as a little circle, like zero, sorry, bad, or somebody would say, the Beaufort scale, tell me about that. And once and somebody would say, oh, wow, tell me more. That sounds really interesting. And they're like, that's a, that's a four. 

You could go from zero to four on the Beaufort scale of Beaufort scale response. I felt like that was one of the moments where I felt like I am on to something. People get this, they like it. They understand that it solves a problem and that it gives you a way to perceive the world and to explain, to share that perception. Because that's what we need to communicate to. 

Tripp: Did you finish the book in that one year time? 

Scott Huler: Did I got to Ann Arbor in early September of, I guess it would have been 02. We had, my wife was writing a novel. So she sat in the kitchen and wrote a novel and I used the extra bedroom as my office. And I sat there and wrote and, you know, I would travel or I would go to the library. 

I took a meteor, meteorology course, you know, just to, I wanted to look at this from every angle. When I left Ann Arbor in August, I had finished a draft of the book. It was the most incredible year to just live in this book. You know, when I was writing the, the other books I had written beforehand, I never had that amount of time and I never had that amount of resource. So I was having to do lots of other things. This time, all I was doing was writing. 

Tripp: How do you differentiate like a book idea versus an article idea? Is it that, like the level of reaction when you come across something and that paying attention, what do you like about the book project format? 

Scott Huler: I think a book idea has to have enough import, enough beauty, enough complexity, and enough different angles that to deserve a book. Not long ago, I wrote a piece about our miniatures for Esquire magazine. And I loved that story more than any story I've done in years. But it was a nice 5,000 word magazine story. That's what it was. 

If I had gone deeper and deeper into it, I just would have been beating it to death, you know, going on. What I love about the book form is that just like I was saying that iambic is our natural rhythmic beats motion, I think that the book is a unit of human understand. It's a unit, it's a natural unit, some kind of natural unit, just like we all recognize. There's the 750 word column. There's the 1500 word short feature. There's 3,000 word long feature. 

There's the 5,000 word blowout feature. I think that a book is a unit of information that makes sense to how much music fits on a CD. I can tell you the answer is when they were designing the CD, they said what is the biggest piece of music that people will want to listen to without having to share to change out a CD? And they said Beethoven's 9th. The music compact disc is one Beethoven's 9th unit of music. And which is an unbelievable thing to have learned, but it and it turns out to be the book is the same thing. 

It is as much information about a topic as a person can hang with and not have to, you know, get a master's degree, but also not feel feel hungry when you finish it. Right. You know, there's million things about the book that are great. It's solar powered. It's, you know, it's a perfect information storage and retrieval system that doesn't degrade over time unless it's long time. It works. It's a technology that works perfectly turning a page. You know where to find the page number. You know how to it's interactive. You can write on it. 

You stick post it in it. It's perfect. It works so well. I love a book. And also on the other hand, I grew up reading book. I was a bookish kid. Books are the thing I love more than anything else. 

Tripp: Yeah. And there's something to the length of a book. You have to spend time with it at the risk of sounding old. Like there's something about spending hours, days, a week, a month with material, marinating in it. It's not just reading the words. It's taking your time with it. Absolutely. 

Scott Huler: And you go back to it and you cross reference within a book and a book is something you carry around. There's physicality to a book. It just works. There's there's no other way to say it. As I said, I think it's an informational unit that works. 

And also it's physically sad. They talk about it might have been Corey Dockcher. I can't remember who it was who talked about the invention of the Internet and then the sort of clarification of how the Internet should work. 

Where I don't think we're there yet because I think the Internet is still filling up. They came up with movable type. And then that didn't really change anything. And then they came up with folio. You could fold a piece of paper and then suddenly that was four sheets of pages. And then the octavo, you folded it one more time. And I think it was the octavo volume that suddenly was a size that, oh, you could pick it up and carry it with you. And suddenly the book worked. And I think it was 100 years between the Gutenberg and the octavo volume. And it takes a long time from the invention of a technology until you find out, oh, this is the way that it works for human beings who live on a planet with this level of gravity and this much rain. 

And you know, that has to work. A book had to be portable, but it had to be small enough that you could put it under your cloak if it started raining. Before that, we knew what books were. Books were these enormous things that were came to desks that monks wrote in. That's not that satisfying a technology. But when you carry the book with you, a whole different thing. 

Tripp: I think you're very fine. But it's not like you're often in your writing, at least you're not crafting jokes. But your style is such that you're sort of unfiltered or maybe authentic. And that results in very funny moments. Is this something you think about consciously when you're writing? 

Scott Huler: Another great question. I think I wouldn't say I'm consciously thinking about it, but I'm always aware that I'm conveying information, but if I'm not entertaining you, it's over. If I'm doing soft shoe, that's a problem. That means I don't have enough information. That means I don't have the story. But if good jokes come up and or clever ways to describe something to explain it to you in a way that will hopefully delight you, that's, you know, what is humor? Humor is surprise. 

Yeah. I'm hoping to surprise you with the information that I can surprise you in the in the rhythm and in the expression of it, even better. And I learned this doubly when I started giving reading. You know, you hate you books come up and you go to the bookstore and you stay in front of people and give them reading. And I learned that you have to have some monkey shines built into whatever you're going to say or whatever you're going to read, because I don't care how beautiful your prose is. People are going to fall asleep on you unless you keep them snappy, make them laugh a little bit. 

You have to say something they didn't expect. That's what I like to read, too. I want to be reading a book that's, okay, I know where we're going. You're telling me, oh, oh, oh, I didn't see that coming. You just told me something that was funny or that was sly or that was clever or that delighted me in a way I didn't expect. 

That's what I want out of my reading experience, out of my listening. I remember in college listening to a Mozart piece and suddenly realizing that like a tempo change was a joke. You know, Mozart had you going and then he surprised you and he was over you in the ribs. And I was like, that's, you know, it wasn't like classical music that you're just supposed to gaze at in awe. 

It was Mozart having a conversation with you and he wanted to keep you with him and he wanted to wake you up or surprise you. And I loved that. And I think that that's part of what's going on there. A big part of what's going on is that my writing and I work very hard to make it this way is conversation. Want it to feel like we're talking about this topic and I want you to feel like you can ask a question. And I hope that if you have a question sometime in the next pages or chapters, you will find the answer to that question because I want it to feel like a conversation. 

I think every writer is trying to convince you that what their topic is worth your attention and a great way to get people to believe you is to make them glad to be around you. Yes. If you're entertaining me, I'll stick with it. 

Tripp: Yes, especially when you're approaching complex topics, a lot of your books really dive into some complex stuff, but you somehow keep it conversational and keep it unselfconscious maybe or not take it self so seriously even though the topics themselves can be quite serious or quite complex. You still want to convey it in a way that's fun. 

Scott Huler: Right. Yes. No. What do they remember the movie, Arthur? Don't you love fun? Isn't fun the best thing to have? Yes. Objectively. I want readers to be having fun when reading my work. I want them to say, gosh, that was fun. I'm going to give this to someone else or I'm going to go buy 200,000 more of these and distribute them to everyone. So far that hasn't happened yet, but maybe one day. 

Tripp: I want to ask you about science a little bit. So Beaufort was the man of science, Lawson, what he did certainly qualified as science in his day, although that word scientist had used to be coined. Neither of the books are like strictly about science communication, but I've learned so much from both of them and obviously you're drawn to scientific topics. So what is it that's like attractive about science or scientific thinking? 

Scott Huler: It's organized and you get results. You know, that's the best thing about science. I read somewhere just the other day, someone saying, science isn't about answers, it's about better and better. It's that Newton understood it all. Well, he did until Einstein showed up. And then we're like, oh, Newton's wrong, except no, Newton's not wrong. Newton's exactly right to the degree that he understood things. Einstein came along and asked better questions. And now we're getting into science that are almost unimaginable. You talk to me about quantum. So I'm like, the cat is dead or it's alive? 

That's all. So there's a lot for me to learn there and I want to learn how to ask those questions because it's clear that quantum physics is a real thing. It's too much for my puny brain, but I would love to understand it better. So maybe I'll find a way to write about it. But the scientific method of understanding the world is why we have so many things that work. It's why we have modern dentistry. It's why we have antibiotics. It's why you and I are sitting and talking to each other, literally an entire world apart. And it's beautiful and it's magical and it's marvelous, but it's all understandable and communicable. And that's why I find so much of the struggles that we're currently going on in the United States is that so many of the things that are guiding us now are objectively wrong. 

It's easily the science shows. No, that's not right. You know, people, well, I don't believe in climate change. 

That's not an option. Climate change is not Santa Claus, not God. It's not something that you have the option of feeling one way or the other. It's reality. You can decide you don't want to do anything about it. 

That fills me with regret. But you can't if you tell me that you don't believe in climate change, what you're telling me is that there's no point in our continuing our discussion, because when you face objective reality, you decide that you have the option of whether to engage with it or not. And that's a very dangerous. So I love science solving problems and it's science is a way of thinking. Exactly. Yeah, it works. It works. 

And that's why I love it. I'm not a scientist. I mean, I would call myself a scientist in that I believe in science and I focus on it, but I don't do science. I describe it and I love being around science. I love being around scientists. I love the way scientists figure things out. 

Tripp: Yeah, I would say the basic mistake people make in thinking about science is that they think that science is the body of knowledge that we draw up, like some kind of mysterious truth that we draw from. But science is the process of understanding the world and it's nothing more than that. I mean, as a culture, I can say what I appreciate about it is that the people that we value are the people that are observers that are trying in good faith to understand the world. Exactly. 

Scott Huler: I agree 100 percent. Scientists are in good faith trying to understand the world. And that's why to a good scientist, and most of them are good in my experience, who a good scientist, a failed experiment is a success. How we know something that doesn't work. 

Our hypothesis was proven wrong. That's an enormous step forward. We're all thrilled when the hypothesis is right and now we think that we have a new drug or we have a new machine or we have a new way of understanding something, but the results are the results even when they're disappointing. 

Tripp: Yeah, that's absolutely right. When it's working well, scientists are happy to be wrong. One point I disagree with you on though, I think you absolutely are a scientist. To be an observer, to watch the world, that's what it is to be a scientist. So Scott, you're a scientist. 

I think that's bad and I think. I want to bring it back to Beaufort. Maybe we'll come back to him, but if we don't, this would be one way to kind of look in that topic. Beaufort, you know, he lived a life worth writing about for sure, but in the end, he wasn't really responsible for the particular version that set off those fireworks in your brain. So maybe you tell the story of tracking down your Beaufort poet. 

Scott Huler: Right. Well, what happened was at some point, one of the many professors or meteorologists, engineers that I spoke with said, well, you know, the original, you know, this Beaufort scale that you see in the dictionary, this came from the Sir George Simpson paper of 1906. And I was like, oh, of course, the surgery, you know, it's like, okay, well, and somebody gave me a copy of that paper. And it's what they were trying to do was as that steam took over from sale, the, you know, the original Beaufort scale, the thing that he really did was he gathered as, as you've noted, gathered ideas from people who came before him and took the both and took the wind and made a scale that he could apply to sailing ship, which every sailor in the world sailed on the same kind of ship and would understand if you said this particular kind of ship was carrying this kind of sail, you would know how fast the wind was going. And so this was of immense importance. 

We are still gathering information from ships from 200 years ago because of Beaufort scale. And that, that was wonderful. But as steam started to take over, well, suddenly you lost this. We were all using, you know, this sailing ship as a sort of gauge. Well, now we have a new gauge. 

What, how's that going to work? Somebody came up with a state of sea scale, like looking at the, at the waves. But the problem is you have swell and you have waves and then you have wind going in different directions. So it's not like a, you know, wind speed of, you know, Beaufort scale four is going to give you waves with these characteristics. 

It's always going to be different. And so they were trying to figure out, they were trying to add miles per hour to the Beaufort scale so that it could be more accurate and figure out how to do that. And so these engineers, you know, in the, in the Met Office, the meteorology office of the United Kingdom set a bunch of observers to observe the wind in coastal place. Each of them would say, we have an anemometer. They have, they had great equipment by the early 1900s. They had actual anemometers. The anemometer says it's going such and such. Here's what I observed. 

And so all these different observers would give you these different things that they had noticed. But there was this one guy, the North Shields who would write like little eddies of loose paper in, you know, in alleys. And I was like, that's the guy. That's my guy. 

Oh my God. First I went to North Shields so that I could find out where his, he worked at the post office and where his observation station was. And I walked between where the post office would have been and where his observation station was so that I could see what kind of landscape he walked through and what he would have noticed. 

And that was very exciting. I felt like this guy was a poet. He was somewhere there had to be a love letter, him right to his wife. And he's, oh my God, I've got to find this stuff. And I went through all kinds of public records finding his descendants. 

I never was able to reach anybody who said, yeah, I'm the descendant of the North Shield Observer. And yes, we have a big crate full of his love letters to my great grandmother. I was never able to find him, but in a way that was beautiful in itself, that I was able to go where he went and see what he saw and just bring some of his observations to life for myself. And I hope for the readers, but it was opening, going through that 1906 paper that Sir George Simpson is the lead author on and looking at the, you know, turning the page and seeing this stuff was incredible. And then I did go to the Met Office and find some of his original observations with beautiful to see his own handwriting and stuff like that. But I never did get that full throttle. Here's the mother load of Beaufort scale poets writing now. So that's a, you'll have to put up with mine instead. 

Tripp: Something about that makes it even more beautiful or valuable in that like we just have these fragments. And it's sort of amazing that all these years later, they set off a firework in your brain and that you've, you produce something of value to everyone else based on that. I think there's something cool about that. 

Scott Huler: Oh, I love it. And then things will happen. Like a choreographer created a dance performance based on the Beaufort scale after she read my book. And so I read the scale for the performance and the sense that the Beaufort scale and the understanding of it and love for it is moving forward through time and to feel like I've been a link in that chain. It gives me goosebumps even this moment to feel that that's if you want to be a writer, if you want to do that, you're doing it because you're arrogant, right? Because I think I think people are going to walk into a bookstore and say, here's $30 quick, give me Huler's book. You know, what kind of insane person believes that will happen. And yet there's nothing else that will do for you. 

So that's been my life to realize that my book moves these ideas forward and then other people do dance about it. Or I get Beaufort scales in the mail now. Sometimes somebody sent me a Beaufort scale that he wrote in prison. He's a murderer. 

He's a convicted murderer. And I get this mail from this dude, you know, talking about pigeon droppings and stuff like that. Somebody wrote a laundry Beaufort scale of like, you know, what your shirts and socks are doing on the clothesline. This, this makes me happy in a way I can scarcely express. It's a little bit like having kids where you're like, OK, whatever this notion of mine was, it's moving forward through time and my hands are off of it. 

Tripp: And what's amazing about that is like it shows that people get it because it's about paying attention to what's around you. What is that telling you about the environment and nature and your surroundings? Yeah, it's amazing. 

Scott Huler: Well, it makes you feel less alone in this big, lonely world that there are other people who are like, oh, yeah, that's cool. 

Speaker 3: Wow. You're like, OK, I can live. 

Scott Huler: I can live another day. 

Tripp: Let's maybe transition to Lawson a little bit. So one of the themes in Lawson's is the ephemeral nature of life of things. And this applies to Lawson in particular, who you quote this historian saying he appears to flash like a meteor across our kin. 

I thought that was an amazing line. This also applies to the native cultures he encountered, which were so obviously in decline. Can we talk about the status of the native population in the southeast when Lawson arrived? 

Scott Huler: Yeah, absolutely. So Lawson was telling Lovebeth, you know, where we're talking about science. Lawson went to Gresham College, which is where the Royal Society worked. And I believe that the way Mark Twain as a young kid looked at steamboat pilots or the way people who grew up in my era looked at astronauts, I believe that Lawson saw these the world's first scientists saw them walking around and was like, Oh, that's for me. That's all that. How do I contribute to that? How do I get there? And he was clearly looking for a way to do it and stumbled into someone who said, Well, he was going to go over to Rome and and write about the Jubilee, which was basically a state fair that the Pope threw every 25 years, because it was, you know, the early modern era and what did people have to do at their time? So it was something to do. And he was going to go to that. It was clear that he just he was looking for something big to apply himself to. 

And he ran into someone who I like to think of them as like the Fox in Pinocchio put his arm around him and said, Well, you could go to Rome if you want, but isn't Rome kind of, you know, 17th century, 18th century, has happened over in North America. As it happens, I got a boat right out here at the docks. Come with it. Well, Lawson did and found himself in Charleston, South Carolina, population 2000. So a new person is going to meet everybody in a big stinkin' hurry. And he wanted to do science. He wanted to write about what he saw. 

He wanted to be, you know, books were coming into England about people saying, I just sailed to, you know, we've discovered half of Australia and people would read it. It was crazy. There was no TV. There was no radio. 

There weren't even really many books. They were thrilled to find out about this planet that had things in it that nobody knew about. Lawson wanted in on that. And he came to Charleston and was hanging around. And then he found out that some guys were heading north from Charleston to make their way by land up into Virginia. And that was a valuable thing because just like Beaufort was part of the project of people understanding all of the winds because the wind was oil, right? The wind is what carried your ship where it was going in. 

The East India Company wanted to make, wanted the ships to get there two days before the other ships. And so understanding the wind was very important. Beaufort was part of that. Lawson, before all of that, was like, oh, people are starting to understand the world and describe North America, this continent full of things that nobody's ever seen before. 

I want to be part of that. And he found that these guys were going to be taking this walk from Charleston to end up in South East Virginia. They were heading for the tide water, you know, for where Norfolk is now. 

As it turned out, they ran into Indian sufficiently hostile that Lawson just had to do East instead at one point. But he wanted in on that. And I like to think that he was sitting around in some public house, 1700, and heard some guys talking about this project. And he was like, can I come? 

You're like, OK, sure. And these were guys, these were Indian explorers. These were these were some of the greatest explorers of the day who were setting out on this journey. Lawson jumped in this canoe with them and off he went. 

It was just that's how you did it. What I love about it is that Lawson, the first thing I learned in retracing his was that he didn't do any of the hard work at all. They were all paddling and Lawson's writing. I'm convinced that Lawson said in this writing, because Lawson's book is full of complaining, full of complaining. It's snowing, it's wet, I'm hungry, the food's lousy. 

He's just talking and talking about what was terrible. I would have loved to travel with Lawson. We would have sat around and sit every night. 

It was the most fun. First thing I did, I spent the first week of retracing his journey. He spent his first week in a canoe. And so I did the same thing, paddling up and two hours into my journey. All I cared about, I cared about only two things in this entire vast world. I cared about which direction the wind was blowing and which direction the tide was running because I was fighting it to get this canoe, this move in northward. 

And I was tired and frustrated and exhausted. And Lawson never once complains about getting blisters on his hand, never complains about paddling against the wind. And so I'm like, dude, you never paddled. You sat there like useless Tilly on the cover of The New Yorker with the monocle looking at the butterfly. 

He sat there taking notes while everybody else was going to love that. But so he was one of six Europeans and there were four native people, three men and a woman, probably to see we tried because that's what you see down there. He moved day by day with these guides. He never didn't have a guide. And anybody who looks at this book or thinks about this journey understands this was not Lewis and Clark. This was not men manfully macheteing their way through jungle. No, he was on paths and he was being led by the nose by by native guides, by Indian guides. I'm comfortable seeing Indian because I will tell you I met so many people from so many tribes and I said, how do you prefer to be? 

And they were like, the United States is a Bureau of Indian Affairs. I don't care. He's fine. And, you know, I'm not sure I would do that now. I think even 10 years later, I think I would call them native Americans. But nobody ever said, don't call me a native. He was dealing with tribe after tribe and they would feed him. 

They would, these guys would just walk into town. Hey, we're here. We're hungry. 

Anybody help. And universally, they're sitting down. We'll give you some food, give you a place to stay. We'll talk to you. We'll tell you. 

We'll describe what we're doing. It was unbelievable. And Lawson was alone among the people who have written about this. Alone among them who understood that he was not seeing native Americans in their natural habitat. He wasn't seeing Indian culture in its blossom. He was seeing the ragged end of something. He says several times in his book, there is not one out of six Indians left from what there would have been 50 years. He's like, I'm seeing the end of something. He understood that he was walking through a culture on a knife that that 50 years before him, he would have seen, even though smallpox was making its way through North America, even though guns had arrived and horses and all kinds of things that were going to change the world forever, still an awful lot of native culture remained. 50 years later, you know, you're talking, you know, the Revolutionary War. 

Right. He understood somehow that he was at a moment of staggering change. And he felt that he would document what he saw and what they told him to the best of his ability. 

And it was this book. Lawson describes Indian culture. He describes what's growing. He describes what animals that they catch and what they eat and what they don't. And he describes funeral culture and traditions. 

And it's, it is so beautiful. And the most important thing that I would say about Lawson is that he treats these cultures with such enormous respect. He loves these people. He respects them. He sees them as fully human. He says several times. They aren't the book in front of me, but he says, you know, we consider ourselves educated and we consider ourselves advanced, but an Indian walks by our house and we let him go. If you walk by a house of an Indian person, they're going to make sure that you have food. Do you need something to eat? 

What do you need? Not, you're not noble savages. They're not perfect. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that he looked at the cultures as fully human equal to the culture that he had left, just different and everybody else. He called them savages like everybody did at that time. He wasn't asking them for their pronouns. Don't, you know, don't was respectful and loving towards these people. 

And they were very kind towards him universally. And he saw the remnants of tribes, right? How there's a process where several different tribes who had been through warfare, through slavery, through disease, through alcohol had been demolished. 

The tattered remnants of several tribes would get together and then create a new town and function. He saw these places and he just understood that he was really seeing the end of something. And I'm so impressed by that because I fear that I would not have been able to notice that, that I just would have said, this is the Indians and this is how they're like. And he was like, this is how they're like now. They tell me what they used to do. And wow, what that is a great scientist and a great reporter. 

Tripp: Yeah, I think a special for his time like that perspective was really rare. You say in the book in Lawson's time, two narratives seem to compete for primacy regarding the new world. First was that North America was in essence, empty, a virgin country awaiting European settlers. And the other was that the Indians were savages to be swept aside. 

And Lawson was definitely preaching the first of these tenets. But on the second, he was much more sympathetic to Native Americans. And we've been talking about today, I think, you know, his writing is treasured for his documentation of a Native American life and ceremony. And that's a big part of his legacy now. 

Scott Huler: Right. Absolutely. And it's a, it's a legacy of which he should be proud and which everyone should be proud of. I tell people that Lawson should be to North Carolinians, what William Penn is to Pennsylvanians. Everybody should know about him. He was in every way the first European citizen of not first like numerically, but the first truly great North Carolinian. 

Just like Penn was the first great Pennsylvanian. And I would love to see more attention paid. And I, I hope that my book would really wake people up to Lawson. 

Tripp: There is some evidence that the respect was reciprocal. So you, you quote Lawson is saying, this is him talking to one of his guides. And he's saying, if I would take his son, Jack, who was about 14 years of age and teach him to talk in that book and to make paper speak, which is their way of, the way they call our writing, he would wholly resign him to my tuition, telling me he was of the opinion I was very well affected to the Indians. And this passage was affecting me because yeah, maybe this person probably felt highly of John Lawson. 

So that speaks to his character, but also this guy probably saw the writing on the wall and was trying to do the best he could for his son given, given the enormous amount of change that was going on. 

Scott Huler: I think that's exactly right. That's Eno Will. And he, that's what Lawson called him, Eno Will. I think he understood that. Yeah, these, these, these Europeans were here for the long haul and dealing with them was the best long-term strategy you could develop for the future. And so he wanted his son to do that. It doesn't sound like it happened, but it was a beautiful. Notion and the friendship between Lawson and will sounds like it was a very, very beautiful thing. And I was very grateful that every tribe I met, I felt like I met someone who would sit and tell me the stories that, that they had. One of them was the Santee tribe. I met the vice chief of the Santee tribe, which I love the term because it's such a combination of the cultures, right? 

The, the vice, you know, that sounds like the constitution, but the chief, that's still, that's still Native American. But she sat down with me. She said, so what do you want exactly? You know, when we were talking on the phone and I said, well, you know, I'm retracing Lawson's steps. And so I thought that we could walk a little together and she had recently had a operation, so we weren't going to do that. And I was like, but sorry, are you familiar with Lawson? She said, I never don't know where my copy of Lawson is. 

Let me let me explain. She said, I grew up Indian in the binarily segregated American sex. She said, in my elementary school, if a white kid wanted to drink water, go to the drinking fountain. If a black kid wanted to drink water, there was a crappy drinking fountain next to the nice drinking fountain for you. If an Indian kid wanted a drink of water, the principal would have to come in with a little cup of how much more a race for the population being left school, eventually got herself a GED. And then she went to community college and I think ultimately got her got a four year degree, but she was in college and had a class where they read Lawson. 

And she said, book after book, you're reading, you know, the all of these European people talking about these savages and here's Lawson speaking with obvious respect and obvious affection of these people who were kind to him and who he tried to be kind to in response in many ways he failed. But, you know, he tried and she was like, he gave me my history. He gave me my history. 

Oh my God. You know, what a powerful thing to run across is we were talking about being a writer, being a reporter. This is why you leave the house is to find someone whose life was so profoundly enriched by this guy who's like, I found his book amazing too. And now suddenly we're a community. Well, she directed me to their, they have a sort of a long house, a big once it hot that they had built on a piece of land that they owned. She said, that piece of land means my tribe has land again for the first time in like a century. You know, it's just amazing to run into these people. 

And then I would, you know, meet people who would talk about you want an arrow ahead here, come here and they would just, let's take a walk in this field. We'll find, you know, amazing that this history and tradition is still in the earth beneath our feet. And yet, yet the people have been so devastated with nothing. 

Tripp: Sales of the book aside, I mean, meeting with someone like that must just be so reaffirming in your commitment to do projects like these. 

Scott Huler: Oh, absolutely. Oh, the fact that my book sell like dogs has not had the tiniest effect on whether I want to keep writing more books than doing this work. I'm either very stupid or very committed or perhaps both. But no, this is, this is what I do. I go out, I talk to people in and one of the things that, that I found very powerful for myself was to remember, I didn't want to slavishly retrace Lawson and step everywhere. 

He stepped. I want to do what Lawson did. What Lawson did was say, here I am. Let me go out into this place and document and take basically, you know, take a data set, you know, do a transect, right? Like Grinnell's transect of Yosemite famously. And he said, I'm doing this, a transect as your listeners may or may not know is when you bunch of scientists, a bunch of observers go through a place and write down what do you see? What's growing? What, what lives here? 

What's the weather like and just describe it and document it so that a century later people can look back and say, well, okay, how does it compare? And so I realized that Lawson did that and I was adding the next transect, the next data set to Lawson's. And that was an amazing feeling that we're doing this. And so then, you know, a hundred years from now, people can look back and say, like, okay, here's how the native people are doing. 

Here's how the European people are doing in this. I had some amazing conversations with populations, you know, white people, black people, Hispanic people who live here now and are just, their stories are just as fascinating as the stories of the native populations that Lawson does. 

Tripp: Talk a little bit about the, the trek itself here in Australia, a lot of the highways follow along traditional indigenous routes called songlines, obviously because they're, they're routes between two places that people want to be. And I think few people realize how many modern roads and highways follow these old trails. 

Scott Huler: I didn't know it until I did this project, but a road has to have, I guess, what Plato would have called roadness, you know, that a road is where it is for a reason. Somebody didn't just look at a, look at a map and say, okay, I need to get from Raleigh to Charlotte. Here's where we're going to go. I remember once having an inkling of this, when I was doing early, when I moved to the south, I took a big car trip all around Hither and Yon, and I was in, in Louisiana, or I was in Arkansas, and I wanted to come back to Mississippi. And I suddenly realized, oh, I can't just start heading east. I have to look for a city with a bridge. I'm kind of, there's the Mississippi River. 

And that counts. You know, it's not just a blue line on the map. It means that if I'm over here and I want to get over there and there's no bridge, I can't get there. And it's like, oh, geography is consequential. 

It has meaning. And so it's the same thing here where many of these roads, just like Lawson, I was led by the nose through bike guides who knew more than I did on every one of these topics. People would tell me, you know, okay, you're walking the sand road through a national forest. People are walking that road for at least a thousand, probably four times. 

That was a great feeling. And then there's the great trading path that goes through sort of the northern part. It makes a big arc through the northern part of the North Carolina Piedmont. Well, that's the trading path. And then you get wagon paths. And then the railroad goes there. And that's what I-85 follows that exact same path. Because if you're going through the mountains, you look for the path. 

The path. If you're crossing the river, you look for the ford. You know, look for the place where the, where the river is going through a flat area. And so the river spreads out. 

And so you, your horse can walk through it or you can walk through it or you could even step over it on rocks. If it's, you're following a path that has meaning behind. It's not just, you know, we drive these interstates and you're just driving. You'll, you get out when you're done and then you're in a different place. 

Or worse yet, you get in an airplane and you get in it in Raleigh where it smells like pines and you get out of it in Chicago where it smells like whatever Chicago smells like today. You don't have that experience of getting from place to place. And it's not for nothing that people say the journey is the best part. Lawson wrote this incredibly beautiful book, but there's no question that the 40 pages where he's describing his walk are the spectacular passages of the book where you're just like, we're going to go tomorrow. 

What's going to happen next? It has that narrative to it. And, you know, that's, that's one of the most natural human narratives, right? Here, I need to get somewhere. How do I get there? Totally. 

Tripp: And we were talking earlier about sort of how a book is the natural unit, maybe of information or storytelling. Walking is like the natural unit of traveling through space for a human. Lawson, he was like, he was definitely at the intersection of art and science. He was among the first like observational nonfiction writers, but he had prose, like the following lines here, like fragrant vines and evergreens who aspiring branches shadow and interweaves themselves with a loftiest timbers yielding a pleasant prospect, shade and smell, proper habitations for sweet singing birds that melodious entertain such as traveler through the woods of Carolina. I mean, I just, I don't know, knock your socks off of that. But there's something so powerful about combining careful observation and incredible prose. And I think there's like a thread through history of people who did this really well. Lawson, Von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, Rachel Carson, and they like something about that captures the public imagination. What do you think is going on there? 

Scott Huler: Well, I think it's home. You know, we want the story. And so the beautiful language helps us, but we want to learn something about it too. So there's the human lessons in there, the observational, the analysis. Here's what the terrain is like. Here's what the country's like. 

But also here's what it was like when I was trying to get there. It's all of those things. And what's a journey? It's a person trying to get somewhere, trying to do something. We're all every second of our lives in that striving place of I am here and I need to be there. 

And what adventures will I encounter on the way? And that's an incredibly satisfying, fundamentally human story. I did this book, retracing Lawson's journey. I also did a book retracing the journey of Odysseus through the Mediterranean because it's the same thing. 

Now, that's a fabulous journey. That's, you know, if I tell you that I went where the Cyclops lived, you're going to lock me up and throw away the key. But if I tell you that I went to a cave that sounds a lot like the cave Homer describes Odysseus visiting, and then I try to make sense of the story of Homer and Odysseus and the Cyclops, and what human lesson are we trying to learn there through that? 

That becomes a very satisfying experience. And I think it's the same thing with Lawson is that Lawson took a walk, saw some stuff that's not very interesting. Lawson took a walk, saw the universe at a knife edge moment of complexity, told this story in a way that made sense to him and in a way that brought more settlers here and in a way that finally pushed the native populations to the point where they started a war and the first person to die in the war was Lawson. That's a story. Now you've got a story, right? 

Now you're, that's a very human tale that brings hubris, the heartbreaking incapacity of one culture to understand another and the heartbreaking shattering of bonds where Lawson, you know, all of the tribes in Eastern North Carolina knew Lawson. They knew he was important. They trusted him. They dealt with him, but they also knew he was part of the problem. He was helping the new people who were coming boat by boat. 

He was helping them take land away from, from these tribes. And so it was this incredibly complicated moment and it's just unbelievable to think I'm where he was. And also I think we too are at an equally complicated moment, right? 20 years ago, certainly 50 years ago, we thought we understood how things worked, right? United States worked in a certain way and we thought that made sense. And the earth worked in a certain way and we were trying to clean it up. We knew we were being, you know, we were polluting and that was no good, but we had no reason to think that we were shattering an ecosystem that was going to change so radically in our own lifetimes that we wouldn't be able to know what came next. But right now, who would even predict what was going to happen five days from much less five or 50 years from between the political unrest and the climate catastrophe that we're living through? 

Nobody, when a scientist says the sixth grade extinction, nobody says, oh, no, anymore. We know, we see it. It's happening. We're living through it. So what comes next? I don't know, but it seems fairly likely it's not going to be more primates, you know, that we've had our run. 

Tripp: I'm from Carolina and part of why this book hits so hard for me, because it's so interesting to read, but Walsons take on Carolina 300 years ago and see Carolina through your eyes as well. Honestly, parts of it are painful to read. A lot of it is about the erasure of native culture, about the injustice and of slavery and racism following that and the clear cutting of old growth forests, the development of marshlands, extinction of wildlife. And it feels a lot like we're not learning from our mistakes. At the same time, there's still wild and beautiful places in the Carolinas and we should fight to protect them. 

And they're good and kind people everywhere you look. This was my own take. What do you hope people take away from reading this book? And is this something you think about during the writing process? 

Scott Huler: I don't think about it during the writing process because it would stop me. I'm just trying to do the job while I'm doing the writing. What I would want people to take away is that there's so much, as you say, so much has been lost and yet there's so much still left to say. And we should be about the business of trying to say and not just because we're you know, good and kind people, but because we'll have much better lives. The better the more we save, the more we teach our children how to live healthy lives and lives in synchrony with their environments and with the world. The better things will be for them and for their children should all of that happen and it's better for everyone. 

It's clear. It's again, we've lived through it and we've done enough observation to see we have resources enough for all of us. We have the capacity to improve things, to fix things, to make things better. We're not the Habesian war of everyone against everyone. 

It doesn't have to be that way. We can see this. The 5,000 years of human history, of human, the hockey stick curve of how fast we learn and how fast things change is now all but totally vertical. And so everything is changing so fast that it's just hard to, it seems impossible to know what to do. We can look to someone like Lawson and say, and to Boford it in the same way, understand what you can, be willing to see differently than those around you. Lawson saw the native tribes as lovely, beautiful and fully human people when he was surrounded by people who saw them as subhuman. 

Share what you understand in the hopes that others will build on that understanding. What I was shocked when I stumbled across Lawson's book and while I was working on another book and when looking for the book for my book base, where's the book where someone, I wanted to know what my county in Central North Carolina had looked like when Lawson was through. And when I found out that Lawson had walked through, I was like, okay, well, where's the book where someone wrote, said, here's what Lawson's on, here's what's there now. But where is that book? And to discover that book didn't exist. I was like, y'all, they had 300 years. What are you even doing? Right. Obviously I was thrilled. I was like, oh boy, now I know what I'm about. 

Tripp: With other people. And I think that was a big part of it. Would you connecting with other people as you made your way through the trek? Sometimes literally connecting with other people. I guess oftentimes literally. Can you talk about some of the, what you call heroes of Lawson's trek? 

Scott Huler: Oh, wow. Well, the first person was a woman named Kathy Livingston, who at that time, ran an outfitter in Charleston. And I was planning my trip and I reached out to her and I was like, I want to rent a canoe. It was like, well, for what? And I told her what I was going to do. 

And there was this long moment of silence. And she said, I got you. And she would not allow me to rent the canoe. She donated the canoe for the project and would have let me keep it. 

In fact, if I had wanted to. But she found me a guide for every step of the way while I was on the water, partially because she wanted to help and partially because she was like, this dumbass is going to drown. You know, this is paddling a canoe. Even in the intercoastal waterway, you're still in the ocean. I don't care how much river paddling or lake paddling or even white water paddling you've done. 

The ocean is a whole different story. So I was very glad that you did that. And she hooked me up with places to stay. And then Lawson could leave Charleston one day and then pop up two months later in northeastern North Carolina. 

The nearest person who knew anything about him was 5,000 miles away. I had Sunday school carpool to manage and mighty Mike soccer games. So I had to go away for a few days at a time. 

A week when I was in the canoe, but otherwise three or four days at a time, you know, I would park my car where I planned to end, then I would need someone to drive me back to where I wanted to start again and pick up the trail. And so I was meeting all these people. I met a descendant of a guy named Van Grafenried, who when Lawson was killed, he was captured with Van Grafenried, who was a Swiss guy who led much of the settlement of eastern North Carolina. Van Grafenried lived to tell the tale. 

Lawson did not. I met and was ferried around Carolina by one of his descendants. You know, people working for, you know, the NASCAR Speedway, you know, would help me find a place to camp. It was always somebody putting me in touch with someone or, oh, you know, who you need to meet while you're in town, do this. Or, you know, they were amazing people. 

And then sometimes you would find their hiccups in their own life. You know, I spent three days in Salisbury, where I was meeting the entire Salisbury Historical Society and somebody put me up in a 200-year-old cabin. And this, that, and the other was wonderful. And as I was walking out of town, I was walking through poorer neighborhood and black neighborhood, and I stopped to talk to these two guys, sitting on the porch, and they were like, well, on your way out, don't miss the hanging tree. 

And I was like, go what now? And they said, oh, look on Google, you'll see that, you know, these lynchings. Well, of course, it's the South. So there's this history of lynching and things that nobody had talked to me about when I hung around with all the white people. So you're reminded every day, talk to everyone. Don't think you know the story. Ask everybody. 

Tripp: Yeah, that was a really powerful part of the book. And in fact, I remember distinctly after you talked to them, and maybe even after you visit the hanging tree, you walk by a store and it has a huge Confederate flag hanging in the window and you think about it. Should I do this? Should I not do this? And you're like, what am I doing out here if I'm not going to talk to everyone? And I just thought that was so incredibly brave. And you go and you go have a conversation with these people. Right. 

Scott Huler: That conversation was a wonderful conversation because that guy was telling me, well, when I hang the Confederate flag, I don't mean racism, it's heritage and history and my great-grandad. And I was like, well, you understand that to literally hundreds of millions of people, that flag doesn't mean heritage and history. It means racism. 

But that's not what I mean. And so I made the what people call the one-finger salute. And I said, so if I showed you that gesture, what would you think? And he said, I wouldn't like it. And I said, what if I told you that I didn't mean anything offensive? I meant that I was worried about your prostate health and I wanted you to get a digital exam and put there for a minute and then he laughed. And he was like, no, I see your point. He didn't take down the flag, but I like to think I may have advanced his thinking. And we've just had the same moment here with Elon Musk and his Hitler salute that, no, I was just sharing my heart with people. I was like, no, you weren't. We all saw what you did and we know what you did. 

And you can pretend it means something different to you, but we know what it means. These are one of the knife edges that we're on, one of the many knife edges we're on right now where you have to observe. And when you see what you see, I'm a reporter. My job is to be as honest as I am capable of being about what I observe. And then I have to put it down and then I have to live with what people may be offended or upset by what I see or what I say. And, you know, there are many southern people, many people who share, I think his name was Kerry, if I'm not mistaken, the guy with the Confederate flag. When I say that you can hang that flag, but you can't pretend it's not offending people that may offend people. OK, I'll live with that. I have to be the best reporter I can and describe what I see. 

Tripp: I thought I was brave to even want to have that conversation because I'm not making eye contact on the tram when I'm getting around. I'm trying to avoid people, but you were trying to have these conversations and that's doing God's work. What topics are you most excited about exploring in the future? Is there any follow-ons, a project coming up that you want to talk about? 

Scott Huler: Well, I am trying very hard to develop a project on the book of Ecclesiastes. This is a project I've had in mind for Ecclesiastes, the book that starts out. Vanity of Vanities, Hall of Vanity. And really, it's a book of the Bible that spends 12 crystal clear, brilliant chapters telling you that life is short and then you're dead. 

And that's it. You better make what you can out of your life, but don't expect much out of your projects because life is hard. Life has always been hard and it's going to be hard. And I feel like we may be at a moment where people might profit from hearing that wisdom, that your job is to get up every morning and do what you can. And then go to bed every night having done your best. 

And if you happen to go to bed next to somebody who's nice and warm and pleasant to be built, so much the better, but that your job is to face every day and live through it. I think that might be helpful. So I'm hoping I can get some interest in that. Timely message for sure. Yeah. Well, I wish I would that it were not so, but we have to live the days that we are given. 

Tripp: Where would you direct people? How do they best find you and support your work? 

Scott Huler: ScottHuler.com is my website. That website, you will find links to every one of my books, to books that are anthologies that have some of my work in them. They'll link to my journalism. 

I still do some journalism and newspaper, magazine, audio work. It will have links to all of that. It will have links to my TEDx talk. You know, if you want to see my TEDx is the 21st century equivalent of asking someone to read you a screenplay. If you want to see my TEDx, it's on my website. And if you don't want to, nobody will ever know. That's why I would send people to find out more about my work. 

Tripp: Scott, there's so much more to talk about, but I think we probably ought to leave it at that for now. I want to end by saying thank you. You're one of the first authors I reached out to when I began my writing journey. And you were immediately encouraging and enthusiastic, but also realistic. 

So thank you for that. When I think of your work, I think of obsession and immersion. I think of observation, the art of paying attention, connection, connection with connecting with other people, a genuine interest in their stories. And most of all, I think of curiosity. 

And at some point in Lawson, you say the call someone curious is the highest imaginable compliment and Scott, you're someone who walks through the world, just brimming with curiosity. So thank you for coming on today. 

Scott Huler: What a very, very lovely, flattering description of the work. And I thank you very much for that. It's been a joy to be here. I remain committed to being an asset to you as you move forward in your own writing. I'm here to help. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Look forward to the next one. Look forward to hearing this series. 

Speaker 3: Hey, Tripp here. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, there are a few ways you can help us keep the conversation going. First, be sure to subscribe, rate and review the podcast. It really helps us connect with more listeners. 

If you can also share the episodes with friends and family on social media. We also have a Patreon. So if you have the means, please consider supporting us directly. Patreon supporters get access to the book science community and bonus content only available for supporters. 

The Patreon is also a great place to get in touch and we'd love to hear from you. So what books would you like to hear us cover next? Remember, you can find share notes and all things book science, as well as everything else I'm working on at TrippCollins.com. Thanks for listening. I am Tripp Collins and this has been book science. Your invitation to think deeply, stay curious, get off the scroll and get out into the world. Take care.