The joy of walking: For mapmaker Tom Boucher, every walk is a scavenger hunt

Since 2016, Tom Boucher has been exploring Olympia on foot and creating detailed maps that document his discoveries — statues, wind chimes, free libraries, gypsy-moth traps and much more.

Four years later, what seemed an esoteric hobby is looking a lot more relevant.

His latest map, of northeast Olympia, is a collaboration with the Olympia Northeast Neighborhoods Alliance, a group of five neighborhood associations that approached him last June about helping in their effort to encourage more walking and biking in the neighborhoods.

He finished the map in March, just before concern about the spread of the coronavirus led to the governor’s stay-at-home order that radically changed most people’s lives.

These days, there are a lot more people walking and biking in their neighborhoods — and it’s an ideal time for Boucher to share the joy he’s always taken in simply taking a walk.

“It’s a great time to walk,” he told The Olympian. “It’s safe. People are in their yards. They’re walking their neighborhoods. They’re putting chalk on the sidewalks.

“People have time to tend to their yards,” he added. “I think they’re getting a lot of pleasure out of having time to garden.”

All that means there’s more to discover. “That’s my entire walking thing,” he said. “I’m on a continuous scavenger hunt.”

He also points out that walking provides some social contact at a physical distance. “Walking helps you meet your neighbors and know them,” he said. “You meet people you wouldn’t meet in any other way.

Indeed, though he spends a lot of time walking alone and with his girlfriend, Amy Moon, who works with him on the maps, Boucher enjoyed learning about northeast Olympia through the eyes and memories of its residents.

“I got to attend a lot of picnics,” he said. “We sat with a big map and people pointed out where interesting stuff was. I still walked the ground, but I learned things that I never would have picked up on otherwise.”

That means the map documents not only things that catch the mapmaker’s eye but also bits of history and mystery.

There’s a site where a UFO supposedly once landed, for example, and a notation about a now-demolished historic home.

The map does have practical information — descriptions of what parks offer, for instance, and several walking trails, including a new one just off 26th Avenue that provides a safer way to walk from Bethel Avenue to Priest Point Park. (The trail was also the work of the neighborhood alliance.)

And just like Boucher’s other maps, his latest creation reveals a lot about who he is and what delights him. He notices sounds and smells as well as sights, and he appreciates both long-term features and ephemeral ones like free furniture sitting at a curb and well-carved pumpkins.

He also has a great fondness for trees planted on the streets named for them (a yew on Yew Street, for instance) and for animals he meets on his walks — chickens, dogs and especially cats.

But this new map, unlike his older ones, doesn’t include the locations of cats. That’s because the cat killings that happened in Olympia two years ago were never solved.

Citing the need to “anonymize the cats in this area for their safety,” Boucher instead mapped the locations of “lost cat” posters. And he dedicated the map to “lost cats everywhere.”

Get a map

Boucher’s new northeast Olympia map, a collaboration with the Olympia Northeast Neighborhoods Alliance, will be distributed at neighborhood meetings and gatherings when those resume.

Meanwhile, that map and his others — of downtown Olympia, South Capitol, Wildwood and Governor Stevens/Carlyon — are for sale at Gallery Boom, at Legion and Adams in downtown Olympia; on the Gallery Boom website and on Etsy (https://www.etsy.com/shop/ScienceArtifacts). They’ll also be available at Orca Books once it reopens at its new location near Fifth and Adams.

Turn a walk into an adventure

Looking for the items Boucher has mapped out — including statues, Black Lives Matter signs, chickens and a pirate garden — is one way to enhance a walk. Here are a few other suggestions for walk activities from his map of northeast Olympia:

• Have a scavenger hunt. Look for decorations up long past the holiday they mark, trees with eyes on them — or anything that interests you.
• Take a smell walk. Sniff out such scents as freshly mowed lawns, tide flat mud and seasonal shrubs.
• Go on a freebie hunt. Imagine an empty apartment and keep track of how well you could furnish it using only items left out on the street.