The First Query
The farmhouse sat on a flat stretch of riverbank in Vermont — twenty acres of flood-washed bottomland, old pasture going soft at the edges, a river running fast in spring and slow in August. Across the water, the mountain started almost immediately. Steep, forested, the kind of hillside that holds snow long after the valley floor clears.
My stepfather’s timberland was up there. A hundred and some acres. He’d owned it for years.
He was a forester. Had been for longer than I’d been alive. When I worked with him in the woods — which I did, from the time I was old enough to be useful and probably before that — he narrated what he saw. Not in a teaching way, exactly. More the way someone thinks out loud when they’ve been reading the same text for thirty years and it still has new things to say. That stand needs thinning. This one’s been mis-managed — look at the crowding at the understory. The rosebush is pushing up through here, we’ll need to get into this section this season.
I drove the skidder when I was older. He complained I drove too fast, which was probably fair. Once, reversing deep in the woods near where he was cutting — before I’d even hitched up a load — I came back over a buried stump wrong and the rear tire caught it and the machine tilted, back end lifting, the front dropping, the kind of angle that takes a second to register. I put the blade down before I thought about it. It caught. I winched myself out of the resulting situation and tried to look like I hadn’t just scared myself badly. He didn’t say much. He’d seen it before, or something like it.
Some of the most formative time I spent with him wasn’t logging — it was boundary line work. Walking property lines through the woods with a survey map, a compass, paint cans, flagging tape, and a machete — always the machete, constant companion, the thing that made any of the rest of it possible in dense brush. You’d run a flagged line from a corner and follow the compass bearing through the undergrowth, and sometimes you’d get a hundred yards in and realize something was off — the bearing didn’t match the terrain, or the next monument wasn’t where it should be — and you’d backtrack and start again. How did I juggle all that? Carefully, and not always gracefully. But that’s boots-on-the-ground land intelligence: a lot of things at once, all of them necessary.
The stone walls were the best part. Two hundred years old, built by hand while someone was clearing fields for pasture, and still marking the line more reliably than anything we’d run with tape and compass. The land had its own records. You just had to know how to read them.
That work put me in the habit of thinking about land as something with defined edges, legal history, and a data layer underneath the trees — a problem as much as a place.
Part of that came from watching my stepfather before jobs. He’d go down to the town or county tax office and come back with tax maps — paper records of every parcel, who owned it, what it was assessed at. Public record. Always had been. He used them to understand a property before he ever set foot on it. I was fascinated by that even then — how much was just sitting there, available to anyone who knew to ask for it. The potential it held. I’ve thought about that for a long time.
Years later, my mother bought a house in Waynesville, North Carolina. After a few years she realized she had more house than she needed. She was thinking about retirement, about downsizing, about tiny homes, about what the next chapter could look like. She had specific criteria: cost constraints, lot size, location. And more than anything, she wanted to see what actually existed — not just what someone had decided to put on Zillow.
Over Christmas break in 2024, I built her the tool to do it.
That last part was the problem. Listing sites show you what sellers have chosen to put in front of you. They don’t show you the full picture of what’s actually out there — the parcels that have never been marketed, the owners who might consider an offer if someone thought to ask.
County parcel data is public. All of it. Every lot, its acreage, its assessed value, its owner of record and mailing address. The information she needed was sitting in a public database, unlocked. It just wasn’t in any form that let her browse it the way she was trying to.
So I pulled the data, filtered it against her criteria, and loaded the matching parcels as a layer in Google Earth. She could fly around the county and look at actual land — every parcel that fit, not just the ones with listing photos and asking prices.
She spent a long time on it. She identified the ones worth investigating. And then she did something I hadn’t anticipated: she wrote letters. Dozens of them. Handwritten notes to property owners whose names she’d gotten from the parcel data, explaining who she was and what she was looking for.
One of them wrote back. By May 2025, she had found the right parcel. She bought it.
I knew, the afternoon I put that Google Earth file together, that I had built something. Not what it would become — I don’t know that yet. Just that the gap I had closed was real. The information had existed. The tool to make it useful hadn’t. A few hours of work had made it possible for someone to find a piece of land they never would have found otherwise.
That was the first query this project ever ran. One person. One county. One set of criteria that no listing site would let her set.
I don’t know yet how far this goes. But I know the question it’s built to answer is the right one: what’s actually out there, on the land, that you can’t see from a listing?
That seems worth building toward.