How Making Maps Helped Me Find My Way Home
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Growing up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, I spent a lot of time trying to understand the world around me. Like many families in small mountain towns, ours had its share of complexity, contradictions, and quiet things we didn’t talk about. As a child, I learned early to navigate emotions the way some people learn back roads — carefully, instinctively, and always watching for the twists ahead.
But something beautiful came out of that.
Something I didn’t fully understand until much later.
I learned to read landscapes before I ever learned to read people.
I could walk into the woods and feel a kind of peace I didn’t always find indoors. The land was reliable. The ridgelines didn’t change their stories. The creeks didn’t pretend to be anything they weren’t. The mountains didn’t hide their scars. They wore them with a kind of rugged honesty I admired long before I realized why.
Years later, when I began creating topographic and bathymetric maps, something in me clicked into place.
Working with contour lines felt… familiar.
Not because I grew up studying maps — I didn’t.
But because topo lines look a lot like life:
- They rise.
- They fall.
- They twist.
- They narrow.
- They overlap.
- They disappear and return.
- They mark steep climbs and gentle valleys.
And as strange as it sounds, they tell the truth.
In a map, nothing is hidden.
Nothing is shameful.
Nothing is too complicated to be drawn.
Everything belongs somewhere.
When I cut those lines into wood, shape by shape and layer by layer, I’m doing more than assembling geography. I’m creating order out of places that once felt uncertain. I’m shaping meaning from terrain that refused to make sense when I was younger. I’m turning land — the one thing that never lied to me — into something beautiful, tangible, and steady.
People often tell me my maps feel alive.
I think it’s because they come from a place deep inside me.
Every piece I make is part cartography, part memory, part healing, and part prayer. It’s a way of reconnecting with the mountains that raised me, the rivers that shaped me, and the people who taught me — in their own imperfect ways — how to be strong, resourceful, and creative.
My mother was the one who first put tools in my hands when I was thirteen and showed me the joy of making something with care. She didn’t come from wealth or ease, but she had a gift for turning simple things into beauty. I like to think I inherited that from her — the ability to craft, to imagine, to make something that feels like home.
And the truth is, that’s what I hope each map becomes:
A way home.
For me.
For the person who hangs it on their wall.
For anyone who loves a place deeply enough to want to see it carved into wood.
My art isn’t about perfection.
It’s about belonging.
It’s about honoring the land that shaped us — in all its rugged, messy, breathtaking honesty.
And maybe, in some small way, it’s about honoring the winding paths we all take…
to finally find our way back to ourselves.
