One of fifty: Indiana

My grandfather's leather notebook was warm from riding against my chest the whole drive up, tucked inside my jacket like something that might get cold if I let it sit anywhere else. I stood at the edge of the gravel parking lot at Conner Prairie, watching a family of tourists unload folding chairs, and I felt my stomach doing the same nervous flip it did before a big spelling bee. This was it. The start of the whole thing my grandfather used to talk about, the kind of summer he said only came once if you were lucky.

"You must be Wyatt Miller."

The voice belonged to a tall man in a khaki vest, his hair the color of a gravel road, silver mixed in with dark. He held a leather journal of his own, and when he smiled, the lines around his eyes deepened like creek beds after a hard rain.

"Harrison Dunlap-Porter," he said, extending a hand. "You've got your grandfather's notebook, I take it. He wrote me letters once, you know. Fine historian, that man."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I just nodded and shook his hand, and something about the way he said it made the nervous flip in my stomach settle into something steadier.

He led me toward a cluster of three kids standing near a split-rail fence, and my nerves came right back.

"Wyatt, meet your fellow scholars," Mr. Dunlap-Porter said, spreading his arm out like he was presenting the Indiana State Fair.

A girl with beaded cornrows didn't even look up from her tablet at first. She was tapping something with quick fingers, muttering under her breath about blade density and root systems. "Big bluestem's got roots that go down eight feet," she said, mostly to herself, before finally glancing at me. "Sorry. Jada Williams-West. This prairie grass is honestly incredible. Do you know how much carbon this stuff pulls out of the ground?"

"Not exactly," I admitted, and she grinned like that was the most interesting thing anyone had said all day.

A stocky kid in a fishing vest stepped forward next, holding out a small jar like it was a peace offering. "Sam Gentry," he said. "Try this. My mamaw's apple butter. Made it last fall with apples off our own tree."

I dipped a finger in, mostly because it seemed rude not to, and it tasted like cinnamon and sunshine and something I couldn't quite name. Sam watched my face and laughed, a big open laugh that made the whole group relax a notch.

The fourth kid hung back near the fence, adjusting the lens on a camera that looked like it cost more than my family's truck. She had a sharp haircut and sharper eyes, and when she finally spoke, it came out flat. "Izzy Delgado," she said. "And can we please talk about the humidity here? I feel like I'm breathing through a wet towel."

"Welcome to Indiana in July," Sam said cheerfully, like that was a compliment.

Mr. Dunlap-Porter clapped his hands together once, and we all turned. "Prairietown awaits, scholars. The year is 1836. Follow me."

We walked into the outdoor exhibit, where a blacksmith hammered a glowing bar of iron against an anvil, sparks jumping like startled fireflies. Nearby, a woman in a long dress worked wool through a pair of wooden paddles, the fibers separating into soft white clouds. "That's called carding," Mr. Dunlap-Porter explained. "Before wool becomes yarn, it must be untangled, straightened. Rather like a good education, wouldn't you say?"

Izzy raised her camera, snapped a photo, then lowered it with a small sigh. "I don't get why anyone would do this by hand when there's a machine that does it in ten seconds."

"Because there wasn't a machine," I said, maybe a little too fast. "This is how people survived. My grandfather always said pioneer skills weren't old-fashioned, they were just honest work. You can't fake carding wool. You can't fake black smithing. It either works or it doesn't."

Izzy tilted her head at me, unimpressed. "Sure, but nobody's out here carding wool for a living anymore, Wyatt. The world moved on. That's not nostalgia, that's just fact."

"Doesn't mean it's not worth understanding," I said, and she rolled her eyes, but Mr. Dunlap-Porter's mouth twitched like he was hiding a smile.

We moved along the dirt path to a shaded table where a woman in a bonnet showed us how to twist dried corn husks into little dolls, tying them off with thin strips at the neck and waist. Jada leaned in close, studying the folds. "Wait, look at this," she said, holding one up. "The husk pattern is basically fractal. Same shape repeating smaller and smaller. That's math. That's actual geometry, right here in a toy from two hundred years ago."

"Never thought of it that way," I said, and I meant it. She had a way of finding the science tucked inside the history, and it made the corn husk doll in my hands feel like more than just a craft.

Sam twisted his own husk clumsily, the doll's head lopsided. "Mine looks like it's had a rough week," he said, and even Izzy laughed at that, quick and surprised, like she hadn't meant to.

It was while we were washing husk fibers off our hands at the old rain barrel that things went sideways. Izzy leaned over to check her reflection in the water, and her lens cap slipped from her fingers, plunking straight down into the barrel with a hollow splash.

"Oh, come on," she groaned, staring down into the dark water like it had personally betrayed her.

Sam was already pulling his pocketknife from his vest, flipping open a small hook attachment I didn't even know knives could have. "Don't get your feathers ruffled," he said, kneeling by the barrel. "Just gotta fish it out slow, same as pulling a hook free from a log."

It took him three tries, his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth in concentration, but the little black cap finally rose to the surface, hooked and dripping. Izzy took it back without quite meeting his eyes. "Thanks," she muttered, and Sam just shrugged like it was nothing at all.

As the afternoon sun slanted lower through the trees, Mr. Dunlap-Porter gathered the four of us on the porch of the meetinghouse, his journal open on his knee. "You have been chosen," he said, "to build something no one else has built. A full archive of Indiana, her land and her people, gathered piece by piece as we travel. I must tell you plainly: the funding for future youth expeditions like this one depends on what you produce at the end of this journey."

The words settled over us, heavier than the humidity. "No pressure," Izzy said dryly, though I noticed she wasn't rolling her eyes this time.

I looked down at my grandfather's notebook, then out at the split-rail fences and the low gold light falling over Prairietown, and for the first time all day, the nervous flip in my stomach turned into something that felt a lot more like hope.