I did the math during a walk yesterday — in one of those brief spaces between “atmospheric rivers” (my favorite new term from 2021) — and realized that I’ve been writing on behalf of Meyer Sign for seven years now. In September 2014, barely a year after arriving in Mount Vernon from Boise, Idaho, I penned what could have very well been a “Tales From the Magic Skagit” story about the Seattle World’s Fair origins of the Meyer Sign building on Old Hwy. 99 South. And here we are, a surprising and delightful one hundred and twenty-four stories later.

Our Meyer Sign stories began as hopefully entertaining sketches of life in the sign biz. But given this marketing ploy, we were far more interested in telling the stories of our customers, particularly our locally owned Skagit Valley businesses, than in bragging about ourselves. Humility aside, if it wasn’t fairly obvious that we are a damn good sign making company, you’d have to wonder how we’d managed to survive, let alone thrive, over the past 65 years. The realization that the best way to promote your success as a business is to promote the success of your customers is the inspirational underpinning of our website’s “Behind the Sign” section and its stories.

Our stories about local businesses, and the appreciative responses we received from sharing them, soon led us to widen the aperture of our story telling lens to include local people, places, and events, both current and historic — and this resulted in the launching of our “Tales From the Magic Skagit” series almost two years ago, starting in January 2020 with our story about the wonders of traveling Chuckanut Drive. The rest, as they say, is history. As we’ve shared our Meyer Sign stories, our audience has grown. Even better, our audience engagement has grown as our Meyer Sign followers have shared their personal connections with the stories we tell.

As our way of thanking you for making us a part of your lives, we’re pleased to invite you on a new journey — one that will take us thousands of miles from the Skagit Valley, even as it makes its inexorable way to our Pacific Northwest corner of the world. It’s the story of Captains Merriwether Lewis and William Clark, and the men, woman, child, and dog who constituted the most famous team of exploration in American history: “The Corps of Discovery.”

The Corps of Discovery’s story is certainly one of “undaunted courage,” and their journey illuminated lands and life never before imagined by the Americans of the original thirteen colonies. It also provided a first time glimpse into the lives of the people who inhabited North America west of the Missouri River for thousands of years before the Louisiana Purchase and Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a trade route between the Pacific Ocean and the Missouri River.

To call the accomplishment of The Corps of Discovery a game changer would be an understatement. Short of the American space program and our human journey beyond our planet, no story of exploration comes close to the significance of Lewis & Clark’s in terms of how we see see ourselves as Americans — and most especially, as people of the American West. Meyer Sign would like to take you with us on a discovery of the Lewis & Clark story through what will ultimately become a book entitled, “The Core of Discovery: A Lewis & Clark Traveling Companion.”

The use of the word “core” in the book title is more than a play on words. As the book’s author, the title I’ve chosen describes the experience I want to create for its audience — an immersive experience of the places associated with the Corps of Discovery’s more than 8,000 mile journey across early 19th century North America at time when the size of the United States was roughly one-third of what it is today. You can think if it as equal parts contemporary travelogue, history, and reflections on the significance of the places and events associated with Lewis & Clark between 1804 and 1806.

My aspiration for the book is that it becomes an essential “traveling companion” for anyone interested in peeling back the layers of history from known places along the Corps of Discovery’s 11-state journey from St. Louis, Missouri to Astoria, Oregon — and back again via a modified route — to provide a deeper understanding of their significance to the Lewis & Clark narrative. In doing so, I’ll be relying not just on my shared experience of those places, but also on the perspectives of local historians, museum curators, docents, and guides — including those of First Peoples whose stories are as much as part of this American narrative as the first American citizens and their immigrant progeny.

As you can imagine, bringing this book to fruition is no small undertaking — but like all the stories I write on behalf of Meyer Sign, it is a labor of love. My wife Carol and I anticipate spending at least two years on the road traveling the path of the Corps of Discovery — taking almost as much time on our journey as they did on theirs. Although I will be the chief writer, Carol will share authorship through her focus on an essential character in this tale of exploration — one that figures just as largely as the people engaged in it: the American landscape between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean. Her observations of the geographies that defined, and were defined by, those who traveled them, indigenous and newcomers alike, are more than just landscape backdrops to the Lewis & Clark story. Ultimately, they are the story.

Rather than leave you all waiting for a bound copy of this book, our plan at Meyer Sign is to bring you into its telling through a newly created section of our website: Core of Discovery. Along with a dedicated Facebook page (travellewisclark), I’ll share my field and research notes as weekly posts, with periodic stories that offer context and perspective. If you’ve enjoyed our Tales From the Magic Skagit series, which will continue unabated, I think you’re going to enjoy our journey to the “core of discovery,” no matter your current familiarity with the history of Lewis & Clark. I look forward to being your guide, and to finding ourselves at the end of our journey with a deeper appreciation of not just what it means to be an American or a Westerner, but to be a part of a much larger human story of migration, change, assimilation, and renewal.

Welcome to the Core of Discovery!