Grandma Susie out in Arizona heard the story of Alton’s name, and she looked online and found a pretty rug for his nursery floor—a rug that was also a map of the United States. It showed the name of each state and its capital city, plus a big blue star for Washington, D.C. And when Alton first got up onto his hands and knees, his mother called Grandma Susie and said, “Guess what, Mom! Alton just crawled all the way from Texas to Michigan!”

Alton’s other grandparents lived in Connecticut, and they played a part in the map nuttiness too, but it wasn’t something they did on purpose. They had given a present to Alton’s mom and dad the first Christmas after they got married—a subscription to National Geographic magazine. And his grandparents kept on renewing the subscription, year after year.

Alton was born five years after that subscription began, so there was already a full shelf of the bright yellow magazines in a bookcase in the family room. By the time Alton turned seven, there were more than a hundred different issues of National Geographic at his house.

And one rainy Sunday afternoon, as seven-year-old Alton sat looking at some pictures of a temple in Tibet, he turned a page, and a heavy sheet of folded paper fell to the floor. He opened it and flattened it out, and stared down at a map called “China and the Forbidden City.”

The map was big—even bigger than the old road map hanging on the wall in his room. He had never seen a map so colorful and so packed with facts.

He picked it up and ran to show his mom and dad. “Look! This was inside that old National Geographic—isn’t it great?!”

They helped him spread it out on the kitchen table, then leaned over it with him.

After a minute his mom said, “It’s pretty amazing—I love the drawings of the palace, don’t you?”

And his dad said, “Yeah, great map—and guess what? If you go look through the other National Geographics, I bet you’ll find a bunch more.”

The hunt was on, and Alton whipped through those magazines like a tornado—first the ones in the family room, then the older copies on the shelves in the basement.

Two hours later he called out, “Hey, come quick! I need help!”

His dad got to Alton’s bedroom first.

“What’s the—” He stopped. And stared.

Alton’s mom finished the question: “Problem?” She was staring too.

Every bit of wall space in Alton’s room had been covered with maps. And they weren’t just taped up all higgledy-piggledy. Maps about Asia filled half a wall, then to the left of them came maps about Europe. The other continents followed, from east to west and north to south. There was also a sprinkling of maps about the oceans and animals and natural resources, plus a handful that featured major historical events or ancient civilizations. Using about thirty maps, Alton had created a grand tour of the whole Earth.

And now he stood on top of some books stacked on his desk chair. “I have to get these other ones up onto the ceiling.”

Ten minutes later Alton and his parents were lying on their backs across his bed, looking up at maps about the moon, Mars, the solar system, and the whole universe, plus a really great map called “The History of Flight.” There was also one called “Planet of the Dinosaurs,” which didn’t really fit in with the other stuff on the ceiling, but it was about dinosaurs, so it had to go somewhere.

This was a big event for Alton, a major map-quake, and it shook up his view of the world. It also taught him how maps could be used to show all kinds of different information—and it happened in October of his second-grade year.

By October of his fourth-grade year, Alton’s collection of maps had grown to more than a hundred and fifty. Fourth grade was also the year he began to get serious about drawing maps of his own.

He discovered that making a good map was complicated, much more complicated than he had ever imagined. And even though he didn’t like math very much, he made himself learn about fractions and measurement so that his maps could be as accurate as possible. He didn’t really notice it, but during fourth grade, maps began to turn him into a very precise thinker and a very careful observer.

And by October of his sixth-grade year, Alton Robert Zeigler had become well known at Harper School as a complete geo-geek—the kind of kid who could get so wrapped up in drawing a new map that he wouldn’t even notice when his whole class lined up and hurried out of the room for a fire drill.

Because when Miss Wheeling and Mr. Sims found him Tuesday morning, lying on the floor by the windows in room forty-three, that’s certainly the way things looked.

But any good mapmaker knows that the way things look and the way things are can sometimes be different.

Very different.