Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
175
COURTESY OF SCOTT HULER
for the widow and orphan” (213). Then he gives a clear-eyed, angry account of how English people are destroying them. Lawson “gives us a glimpse into what it would have looked like, what it would have felt like, to walk around in the last moments of the seventeenth century and the first decade of the eighteenth.” Huler has tried, in turn, “by walking through highway underpasses and eating at lunch counters and talking to everyone I met, to give a glimpse of the second decade of the twenty-first” (217). The twenty-first holds only a patchwork of delicious country remnants from Lawson’s time. Huler’s work gives a haunting sense that in the Carolinas today, as in Lawson’s time, entire civilizations of people in small villages are hanging on by a thread. This reader hopes that Huler’s adventure introduces more people to John Lawson and that the author’s contemporary trek
N C L R ONLINE
brings more awareness to his own work: six other nonfiction books on such diverse topics as NASCAR, The Beaufort Scale, and The Odyssey. Huler chooses subjects that snag at surfaces but reveal great depths; he puts his mind and body on a journey of encounter, then
brings science and history to life by including human stories. Lawson’s journey haunts Carolina’s nature and travel writers. I’ve heard more than one of them yearn to do just what Huler did. Reading A Delicious Country, preferably in a hammock tied between two trees, may be the next best thing. n
Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize $1000 for winner and finalists selected for publicaton (at least $250 for the prize-winning essay)
ANNOUNCING A NEW SUBMISSION PERIOD: JANUARY 15–MARCH 1 2020 FINAL JUDGE: PHILIP GERARD 2020 winner and select finalists will be published in our 30th issue. No submission fee; subscription required instead.