The Cartographer

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to Know Express. This season, we're speaking with folks who are finding their professional stride in a tumultuous job market and learning how to double down on their skills and their experience to overcome challenges. We'll bring you inspiring stories of people making themselves essential, an important skill set in any economy. Today. For on the Job, we look at a profession that you might not have thought was still

around cartography. I went and sought out a modern mapmaker to talk to him about the job, how it's changed over the years, and the beauty of finding your own way in the world. Vermont, on the first really warm sunny spring day of this year, I got in my car as I took out my Big Road Atlas Londonderry, and I set out to find half good Pond, Half

good Pond. Here we come. Before COVID nineteen, I was on a cross country trip and right towards the end I started using this big Road Atlas I had in the car instead of the GPS on my phone, and it made a world of difference. I felt so much more present and was so happy to not constantly be looking at a phone. In a lot of ways that the data we have on our phone is just data. It's just a couple of lines and maybe some nasty looking font. This is Tom Harrison. He is a cartographer,

a map maker. Was something interesting about looking at a map and say, oh, this is the landscape around me. I'm going through, um, you know, new town, but right here, about five miles away his old town. I wonder what old town looks like five more miles do we take it? Right? Tom is the reason I'm looking for Half Good Pond. He got his own company called Tom Harrison Maps Company. He lives and works in San Rafell, California, just north

of San Francisco. And I've been producing shady releaf topographic maps for hiking and backpacking for over thirty years. I had been using my atlas around the country in places that I've never been before. But after talking with Tom, I looked on the map to see if there's anything I didn't know about right where I grew up, southern Vermont, and I saw Half Good Pond, not even twenty miles away. It was right off a road that I've driven a

million times. I think I just went past it. I'd grown up hearing about it, and I heard it was beautiful. I just never went I never realized it was right there. Guy. See this is where it gets tricky. But I live in a very rural area. So on the map, half Good Pond is just in a big green patch off the main road. It's all country roads, so it might be a little lost. Tom says, that's the beauty of maps.

Sometimes you gotta figure it out exactly. So, even though you're you're making these things so people can orient themselves in space, you hope people still wander and get lost a little bit. Yeah, very much. You don't have to know everything, and some things are better off just have being part of the discovery of your day. Where is it? I'll be honest, I was really surprised doing research for this show and finding out that not only is matt making still an occupation, but there is a lot of

work out there for cartographers. All there's tons of the tons of it. I mean, McDonald's has cartographers really well. You know, if you want to put a McDonald someplace, you want to find where the nearest school is and and figure out what the what's the cheapest real estate you can buy nearer schools so kids can walk there for the lunch break and all the kind of stuff that everybody needs to know where things are. And that's

what cartographers do. Tom designed beautifully endered, in shaded maps, mostly for hikers. And while I might have assumed that advancements in technology would put people like Tom out of work, it's actually opened up tons of cartography jobs all over the world. Any planning department in any city uses cartographers.

Like when you put a new subdivision in and you're trying not to upset the people that live there, you need to show why that is not going through the local cemetery and why I won't affect the spot of owl population and blah blah blah. A cartographer has to find that data put on the map for the planner to say, Okay, here's what we're gonna do. And that's designing both printed and digital maps for the public to see. And if you're thinking, okay, but I've never needed a cartographer,

I've got GPS. Well, a lot of the base maps that your GPS uses are made by cartographers. If you think about it, GPS just gives you a latitude and a longitude doesn't show you where you are. You ever look at a GPS on your phone when you don't have any service and you're just a blue dot in the middle of a gray grid. That's what or GPS would always look like without the Tom's of the world. Wow.

So okay. So any company who is expanding and building new stores, any apps that use geo location, everyone needs mat makers. You don't. You don't see them very much because you're kind of behind the scenes. But they're out there. Tom was born in ninety seven in Bakersfield, California. He grew up there. He was a boy scout. He's a pretty adventurous kid. He loved hiking and exploring and backpacking. Did you ever get super lost as a kid? Is that why you do what you do? I've never been lost.

I've been confused a few times, not lost. That's good. That means you're a good map maker. I don't know if I trust a mat maker who gets lost regularly. In the sixties, Tom went to college for a semester, but it wasn't his thing at the time. The Vietnam War was in full swing in nineteen sixty six, he decided to join the army instead of getting drafted, so he could at least choose where he wanted to go, and there was something going on to someplace called Vietnam.

I thought, well, let's mess go see what's going on over there. So you kind of went on a adventure basis. I picture sas there's a big, long backpack trip. How that's turned out. I was okay ntil the day I got shot, and that after that not so much. The first six months Tom was in Vietnam, he didn't see much action. But then another company got ambushed in a nearby village, and so they brought in the rest of

our battalion surrounded the village. There was a firefight that lasted through the night, and the next day they got word that there was a battalion of North Vietnamese nearby, so they started to pull back. As we're pulling back, somebody wagh in the weird decided to walk through artillery back to cover us. And they walking back too fast, too far, and I got hit by friendly fire. Yeah, fendy fire. Tom got sent home with a purple heart

and spent about a year in the hospital. He soon met his future wife back in the States, and even though he wasn't a fan of college, he decided to use the benefits from the g I built to go back and get his degree. The courses I hated the least were geography. He was outdoors and I had this curiosity about the world and how things were made, how geology and weather, and the geography tended to cover a lot of those areas. Kind of the same reason you

went to Vietnam. You were looking for adventure. Yeah. Right after graduating, he became a park ranger in the Redwoods area around San Francisco. He loved the outdoors, but he got tired of the bureaucracy. So after six years he ain't got his masters in geography and he was figuring out what to do next. Why it was a park ranger, people kept asking where can we get a really good map of the park? And parks aren't in that business,

he says, the Park Service. They make very basic maps, rough sketch of the camp ground where the bathrooms are, maybe a little bit of history, and it's sufficient for most people, but a lot of people really want to know more about it. They want to know the elevation and trails and the mileages and you know that kind of stuff. You know, here's a business here, someplace, somebody should do this. I didn't know any better, So after I got my master's degree, I just started making maps.

More on Tom story after the break. A strong work ethic takes pride in a job well done, sweats over the details. This is you. But to get an honest day's work, you need a response, You need a call back, You need a job. Express Employment professionals can help because we understand what it takes to get a job. It takes more than just online searches to land a job. It takes someone who will identify your talents, a person

invested in your success. At Express, we can even complete your application with you over the phone, will prepare you for interviews, and will connect you to the right company. Plus, we'll never charge a fee to find you a job. At Express. We could put you to work with companies of all sizes and endo race from the production floor to the front office. Express Nose Jobs you get to no Express. Find your location at Express pros dot com or on the Express jobs app. Tom Harrison started by

doing what he knew. He started making detailed hiking maps of the San Francisco area that he'd grown up and they weren't very good, but nobody else had anything like it, so I kept selling maps and getting customers, and you know, after a while I had a business. When he started in the eighties, all of Tom's maps were done completely in pen and ink. I mean when I was in grad school. The McIntosh should first come out black and white,

so cool. So everything was by hand. He would get all the maps and guide books that he could find on an area and to hiking trails. And I look at him and go back and forth and say, well, okay, this is a government map, and that's a probably a map, and these two guide books, but they don't agree here, here and here. He'd go and do more research looking for wear maps do agree. He'd make a ton of calls, but sometimes when there was just no way to get an accurate read on a map, he'd go and figured

out himself. Just put on the hiking boots and go out and hike the trail. So I get him a jeep, go out like the trail for a couple of days with a major wheel, and make my notations. And he ended up with the super accurate, beautifully rendered topographical maps. He copied a bunch and started selling them around the immediate area map stores, backpacking stores, boat shops, any place that would sell a map of the area I was doing.

His first maps were well received. One map store said they take a dozen, but said he should really think about talking to a distributor if he was going to make any profit. I didn't even know what a distributor was. They put him in contact with one and he sold more maps to her. That distributor put him in contact with another in l A. He said he didn't really need any maps of the San Francisco area, but I need a map of this and this and this. So I went back and I made a map of this

and this and this. He said, great, keep doing it. Here's what else I need. Other companies started seeing his work and asked him if they buy his maps for their stores, And after about seven years of doing that, it got to be the point where I need help in the business. So I asked my wife to quit her job and she came to work with me. His

wife started on the business side of the operation. She handled the fulfillment service that they ran out of the garage for a while, and after thirty four years, Tom's maps can now be found in huge outfitting stores like ri I with maps of death Valley, Yosemite, Lake Tahoe,

the Palisades, and tons of others Over the years. The biggest thing that's changed in Tom's business is the technology, what she says, has actually made the occupation of matt making far more accessible to anyone interested in doing it. For one thing, it's made our life much easier, much smoother. I don't need to bend over this light table all day. I can sit down in front of a laptop and do it there. There are plenty of hard skills that

are a must when going into cartography. You definitely have to know Adobe Illustrator, and you have to know how to use g i S software g i S Geographic Information System basically software where you can analyze, manipulate, and manage geographical data. You almost have to have a reasonably decent understanding of printing and how colors are put on paper. Essentially, you can create a beautiful map on the computer that

might not translate to the printing press. But all of these hard skills aside, there's one thing that hasn't changed at all since Tom first started out. In order to be a good map maker and love what you do, what you really need is curiosity. You need to know understand that what you see and digital data isn't always correct. You have to always question everything. What's the truth? Doesn't say what the name of the road is on the map. What is your favorite thing about making maps? You know?

For me, maps are a kind of a way of meditation, very zen like I can I completely clear in my mind of anything else. I don't think about any of the problems or issues. I'm just focusing on a map. I think this is a lover's lane taking a left on And for some reason, that single minded focus makes my life easier and clearer. There's something that that's very interesting about having yourself spatially oriented to to landscape around you.

Oh there it is have good pond recreation area. But something about looking at the map and say, oh, I always wondered where that us And and then you're out there and you're it's like you put it in your mind, both the map and the landscape, and they come to come together and it's it. It's sort of embeds itself and our special memory. For some reason, it's actually pretty warm. Yeah. It's like phones make you the center of whatever you're doing, wherever you're going, and maps allow you to exist as

a smaller part of something bigger. Yeah. Yeah, the phone is throw I'm right here, but a map is like, oh oh that's out there. Yeah, I'm I'm in the middle of all this. There's no one out here. There's a really slight breeze, really little ripples on the pond. I can't believe I've never been here before. To see Tom's maps and learn more about him, you can go to Tom Harrison maps dot com for On the Job on Motus Gray, thanks for listening to On the Job,

brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. This season of On the Job is produced by Audiation and Red Seat Ventures. The episodes are written and produced by me Otis Gray. Our executive producer is Sandy Smallens. The show is mixed by Matt Noble for Audiation Studios at the Loft in Bronxville, New York. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Find us on I Heart Radio and Apple Podcasts. If you liked what you heard, please consider rating and reviewing the show on

Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We'll see you next time. For more inspiring stories about making yourself essential as you discover your life's work, audiation