Cartographer-geographer Mark Adams discusses mapping national parks, sketchbooks, Eric Newby, MFK Fisher and his favorite keepsake from the Bhutan National School of Traditional Arts…

NOWHERE: What are you working on right now?

MA: A video/text/sketch journal of Vietnam-Cambodia trip, a sketch log of Gulf oil spill cleanup, and GPS survey sketches of Acadia NP seabird islands and mountains.

NOWHERE: Tell us about the greatest trip you didn’t want to come back from…

MA: Winter cartography in Tetons, hiking Northern India and Bhutan, and an Umbria sketching trip.

NOWHERE: How about a trip you would never go on again?

MA: Cities of Vietnam.

NOWHERE: What’s one thing you never travel without and why?

MA: A sketchbook. Whenever I open the sketchbook I know I belong exactly where I am at that moment. My intuition is a perfect guide and I am rooted to the ground. Not only does the movement of the pencil connect me to the place, the act of drawing brings local people to me through some wordless sense of shared interest and knowledge. I feel like the attention I pay through drawing is something I can give to the place. More than once, drawing in a marketplace, as I broadened my focus I became gradually aware of a crowd — glancing behind me, a gathering of people exhale and chatter, pointing at the page. We all laugh and vendors and cops lean over to see how I have treated them. Rickshaw drivers, shoeshine children, and monks sit down next to me. I usually try to get them to draw or to just sign their names on my page. Chanting monks in a temple craned their necks to see my book. At a traffic jam in north India, children crowded tight around me, almost pulling the book out of my hands. Schoolgirls at an Imperial palace in Kyoto wrote the characters of their names and drew a cartoon Snoopy. Elderly ladies cooking at the curbside cast sidelong looks out of modesty. What ends up on the page comes directly from the experience and is seen directly — unlike a photo. Precision and accuracy are beside the point — it’s a first-hand account.

NOWHERE: What was your favorite souvenir/keepsake you brought back from a journey? Where was it from and why is it so special?

MA: A young student in the Bhutan National School of Traditional Arts tore a page out of his copybook — exercises to practice copying the standard facial expressions of the Precious Guru, Goddess of Compassion and other iconographic faces that they must learn by rote. They were fascinated to see what was in my sketchbook since I didn’t have to follow any formal rules. I also have a stained woven robe I bought from a Bhutanese farmer — later I wore it in the capital and people told me it must have been very fine and important when it was new — old raw silk woven by hand.

NOWHERE: Who is your favorite travel writer and why?

MA: Eric Newby (Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, Love and War in the Appenines) for humility and humor; MFK Fisher (The Measure of my Powers, from the Art of Eating) for passion. Both never patronize or look down on the place — good travelers who see their luck and fortune in being wherever they are, regardless of any discomfort. Chatwin for his intense observation and intuition; Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana for erudition; Rory Stewart. I could go on.

Nowhere contributor Mark Adams is a cartographer-geographer with the National Park Service who paints and makes videos on Cape Cod. He travels for his health and well being and believes the sketch-journal is an antidote to seeing the world through a lens. “Non-artists should draw and non-writers should write because no one will ever see the world the way you do.” He filled his first complete sketchbook in 1980 on the Chilkoot Pass in southeast Alaska, his first successful watercolor standing in an alley in Arles, and recently brought back a pocketful of scribblings from a brief stint on the Gulf oil spill cleanup. He learned the value of speed-sketching on ferry boats leaving Istanbul, Martha’s Vineyard and Santorini. He lives in Truro, Massachusetts. View his contribution at nowheremag.com.