The Bobby Bones Show - Episode 1: The Cartographer

Episode Date: May 12, 2020

Meet Tom Harrison, a former park ranger turned cartographer, as he patiently navigates the world around him and turns his adventures into high-quality maps. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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On the job is brought to you by Express Employment Professionals, a leading staffing provider that employs nearly 600,000 people annually across more than 800 franchise locations in the U.S., Canada, and South Africa. Our long-term goal is to help as many people as possible find good jobs by helping as many clients as possible find good people. In these uncertain times, it's more important than ever to take care of ourselves and our loved ones, to do what we can to stay healthy and productive. Express Employment Professionals will be with you every step of the way. We understand what it takes to land a new position at a top employer or start a new career in today's job market. Plus, we never charge a fee to find you a job. And, just like finding a job,

finding the best people to fill open positions in your company requires more than sorting through applications. It takes real people, real interviews, discovering the skills you need. At Express, we find people for jobs and companies of all sizes and industries. From the production floor to the front office. Express knows jobs. Get 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, if we're 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 matmaker to take. talk to him about the job, how it's changed over the years, and the beauty of finding your own way in the world. On the first really warm, sunny spring day of this year, I got in my car.

155.15 miles. I took out my big road atlas. Take a right at Londonderry. And I set out to find Hapgood Pond. Hapgood Pond. Here we come. Before COVID-19, 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, the data we have on our phone is just data. It's just, oh, a couple of lines and maybe some nasty looking fonts. This is Tom Harrison.

He is a cartographer, a mapmaker. But something interesting about looking at a map and say, oh, this is the landscape around me. I'm going through New Town But right here About five miles away It's Old Town I wonder what Old Town looks like

Five more miles Did we take a right Tom is the reason I'm looking for Hapgood Pond He's got his own company Called Tom Harrison Maps I'm the entire company He lives and works in San Rafael

California just north of San Francisco And I've been producing Shed Relief topographic maps For hiking and backpacking For over 30 years I had been using my atlas around the country and places that I'd 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 20 miles away

It was right off a row that I've driven a million times Oh 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 I see this is where it gets tricky But I live in a very very rural area. So on the map,

Hapgood 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've got to figure it out. Yeah, exactly. So even though

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 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. Oh, there's tons of it. I mean, McDonald's has cartographers. Really? Well, you know, if you want to put a McDonald's someplace, you want to find where the nearest school is and figure out what's the cheapest real estate you can buy in newer schools

so the kids can walk there for their lunch break. All the kind of stuff that everybody needs to know where things are, and that's what cartographers do. Tom designs beautifully rendered and 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 it won't affect the spotted owl population and blah, blah, blah. A cartographer has to find that data, put it on a map for the planner to say, okay, here's what we're going to 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. It 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 your GPS would always look like without the toms of the world. Wow.

So, okay, so any company who is expanding and building new stores, any apps that use geolocation. Yeah, oh yeah. Everyone needs matmakers. You don't see them very much because you're kind of behind the scenes, but they're out there. Tom was born in 1947 in Bakersfield, California. He grew up there.

He was a Boy Scout. He was 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. I'm not lost.

That's good. That means you're a good matmaker. I don't know if I trust a metmaker who gets lost regularly. In the 60s, Tom went to college for a semester, but it wasn't his thing at the time. The Vietnam War was in full swing, and in 1966, he decided to join the army instead of getting drafted, so he could at least choose where he wanted to go.

There was something going on to some place called Vietnam. I thought, well, let's go see what's going on over there. So you kind of went on an adventure basis. I just a big long backpack trip. How'd that turn out? It was okay until the day I got shot. And 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 way in the rear decided to walk the artillery back to cover us, and they walked back too fast, too far.

And I got hit by Shradm. Friendly fire. Yeah, friendly 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 GI Bill 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 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 went and got his master's in geography,

and he was figuring out what to do next. While I 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 campground 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 the trails and the mileagees and, you know, that kind of stuff. You know, there'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's story after the break.

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Find your location at Expresspros.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 in. 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 80s, all of Tom's maps were done completely in Penn and Inc. I mean, when I was in grad school, the Macintosh had first come out. Who, black and white.

So cool. So everything was by hand. He would get all the maps and guidebooks that he could find on an area and it's 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 private map and these two guidebooks. But they don't agree here, here and here. He'd go and do more research, looking for where 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 figure it out himself.

Just put on the hiking boots and go out and hike the trail. So I'd get him a Jeep, go out and hike the trail for a couple of days with a mason wheel and make my notations. And he ended up with these 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 lot. map of the area I was doing. His first maps were well received. One map store said they'd 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 could buy his maps for their stores. And after about seven years of doing that, it got to be the point where I needed 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 their garage for a while.

And after 34 years, Tom's maps can now be found in huge outfitting stores like REI 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. Which he says has actually made the occupation of mat 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 GIS software. GIS, geographic information system, basically software where you can analyze, manipulate, and manage geographical data. You'd also 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. Yeah. But all of these hard skills aside, there's one thing that hasn't changed at all since time.

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 in digital data isn't always correct. You have to always question everything. What's the truth? It 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 kind of a way of meditation is very zen-like. I completely clear on 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 it. Lover's Lane.

Taking a lift on. And for some reason, that single-minded focus makes my life easier and clearer. There's something that's very interesting about having yourself spatially oriented to land. landscape around you. Oh, there it is. Have good pond recreation area. But something about looking at the map and saying, oh, I always wondered where that was. 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 sort of embeds itself in our spatial memory for some reason. That'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 for, I'm right here, but a map is like, oh, all that's out there. Yeah, 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.com. For On the Job, I'm Otis 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 Smallins. 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 IHeart Radio and Apple Podcasts. If you liked what you heard,

please consider rating or 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. All right, if you have ever dealt with a traditional home security company, you know the drill. Expensive monthly fees, contracts that lock you in for years,

and waiting around for a technician to set everything up. It's a lot. Well, now they're SimplySafe. They have completely changed the game. SimplySafe has no long-term contracts, no hidden fees, no being trapped. They earn your business by actually keeping you safe, not by locking you in. Setting up is so easy. You customize your system at simplysafe.com. It ships to your door in a few days, and with the app guided setup, you can have everything installed and armed in under an hour. No technician needed. And it's not just a case. It's not just a camera. It's a full ecosystem of sensors, cameras for inside and outside, and 24-7 professional monitoring. If there's ever a break-in, a fire, or a flood, SimpliSafe's agents are on it immediately.

They were also named America's best customer service by Newsweek, which honestly tracks. Right now, you can get 50% off your new system by visiting Simplysafe.com slash bones. That's half off at SimplySafe.com slash bones. There's no safe like Simplysafe. Service opens doors and at American Military University it can open doors for the whole family if you have a loved one who served in the military you may qualify for reduced tuition

AMU offers flexible online programs designed to fit your schedule so you can keep moving forward wherever life takes you. Learn more at AMU. APUS.edu slash military. Open doors to the future for you and your family

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