For our Maps issue, we asked our writers to explore the idea of “place”: maps, travel, even their favorite location. Our first piece examines what defines a place and makes it yours.

In my life I’ve come across very few people who can sit still long enough to really, really pay attention to where they are, right now. Fewer can tell me why they are here and how their “here” got here, itself. It takes a patient, acute eye to watch and gather; a thoughtful, deliberate, delicate writing to ask the reader to please take a chair next to the author.

In The Wind, Gary Presley sits next to you and occasionally passes over the binoculars. You discuss the history, flora and fauna. You discuss the elements that make this place what it is–what it is to him–including the ephemeral, defined perhaps by its effect on this, his place.