The First Map I ever Carried
I was once asked in an interview:
What is your favorite building?
I answered, “The Bank of America Building in Charlotte, North Carolina.”
The interviewer sneered.
“It looks like a giant asparagus.”
He asked what else.
I said, “The Smithsonian Building in Washington, DC,” and he seemed somewhat appeased.
I didn’t get accepted into the architecture program.
But I did become a geographer.
And I’ve thought about that question ever since.
Because I never saw a vegetable.
I saw a symbol.
The skyline became more than a collection of structures. The Bank of America tower stood like a crown—intentionally so—honoring Queen Charlotte. It marked the city as a financial center, a place becoming something greater. It was height, ambition, identity.
Power, shaped in steel and glass.
Not a vegetable.
When I made my first map, something clicked.
Mapping isn’t just drawing lines. It’s understanding why they exist. You study the land, the relationships, the quiet logic behind rivers, roads, and boundaries. A map is a translation—the physical world distilled onto paper.
I’ve come to understand that I don’t just see things—I interpret them.
Where others see objects, I see stories.
Where others see places, I see layers.
History, intention, meaning… hidden in plain sight.
This blog isn’t about maps in the traditional sense.
It’s about perspective.
The first map I ever carried wasn’t a Rand McNally atlas in my car,
or a National Geographic print on my wall.
It was how I see the world.
A map that changes as I change.
Redrawn with every new place, every idea, every moment of clarity.
Cartography is called the art of making maps,
but a map is not the world.
It’s a decision about the world—what to include, what to leave behind, and what to reveal.
Poetry does the same thing with language.
It takes something vast… and distills it into something felt.
As a cartographer, I create maps to communicate something useful.
But this… this is something else.
Because this is where mapping meets poetry.
Not always answers—
but ways of seeing.
And maybe, if you look long enough,
you’ll begin to see your own map taking shape.
..and that is where the first map began.
