Neal Nichols Jr.’s Eastham studio is illuminated by a wan greenish glow similar to the light in an airport: a photo of a wolf from when he lived in Alaska 20 years ago, a shelf full of history books, two iridescent globes, a black case of decades-old maps and travel guides, stacks of laminated newspaper articles, souvenirs from faraway places, every passport he’s ever had (four) — all evidence of a life spent adventuring.

“Everyone calls me ‘modern-day Marco Polo,’ ” Nichols says. “Where’s my life?” he sometimes finds himself wondering. It’s a comfort, he says, to know it’s all here.

Not that Nichols needs much help remembering. He takes out a map he drew in 1981, when he was 14. Nichols, who says he has a photographic memory, copied a map of the United States onto a sheet of paper: every harbor and every island, every curve and corner of every state’s border, every river and major highway, with cities and towns labeled in green and blue pen in tidy handwriting, and points and beaches labelled, too.

These days, he can draw a detailed map of the United States from memory in three minutes. He demonstrates, using a black Sharpie to outline the elegant rectangles of the West and the oscillating, intricate borders of the coastal states. He can draw a map of the world in five minutes, he says, and he does: the continents emerge from the tip of his Sharpie like magic.

He draws the smallest islands as dots in the middle of a blank sea. Usually, he knows the island’s name. “Even if I don’t,” he says, “I know it’s there.”

Nichols was born in Bridgewater and later moved with his mother and his six siblings to Wellfleet. He went to Nauset High School and showed a precocious talent for drawing. He became a student at Mass. College of Art, a detective in Seattle, a fisherman on the Bering Sea, a carpenter in the Caribbean, a truck driver, and a teacher of geography, history, and art in schools all over the world. He’s also spent a lot of time above the clouds.

Nichols has flown on a plane 2,244 times. Every time he goes somewhere new, he marks a line on a creased paper map of the world: the path of the plane, here to there. Then he records his origin and destination airports in a notebook. And he makes sure to keep his paper boarding pass. He’s got thousands of them in a plastic bin in his studio. “What if someday I’m sitting here telling you I flew 2,244 times,” he says, “and you’re like, ‘Yeah, right.’ ”

In college, pen-and-ink drawings were his favorite. Along with mapmaking, his drawings are ways to record his travels: there’s a church in Cavtat, Croatia on the Adriatic coast; imposing buildings in Tokyo; the cab of a truck in Wheat Ridge, Colo.

If his drawings are a moment of focus in the kaleidoscope of his inner world, Nichols’s maps — which he also considers art — are a way of organizing the bigger picture. “I’m probably the most unorganized yet organized person you’ll ever meet,” he says.

As a teenager in Boston, he says, “I used to love to walk the streets and get lost on purpose and then find my way out.” On his way home, he’d discover things like the Old North Church or the State House.

In the fall of 1984, when he was a freshman at Mass. College of Art, Nichols was drawing on an upper floor of the studio art building when he noticed planes coming in for landing, sinking through the sunset. He suddenly felt the need to be a passenger. On Oct. 14 that year, he boarded a small plane from Boston to Hyannis — his first flight. He looked down from the window and saw the roads he’d driven to get to Boston, small and far away.

Later, during his 10 years as a truck driver for Magnum Moving & Storage out of Eastham, he’d track his journeys. “I’d sit in a restaurant in, say, Nebraska and illustrate it.” Between assignments, he traveled the world, drawing as he went.

The farthest Nichols has ever been from Cape Cod is Augusta, Australia — the farthest place in the world from Cape Cod. The fact of travel still amazes him. “I’m flying over everything,” he says, as if he’s not in his little studio at all but in the air, in a weightless reverie. Underneath him, “All of life is taking place,” he says.

Nichols learns the history of every place he goes. “My mother always told me I’m a walking encyclopedia,” he says. In 1992, he started “Geography Gameshow,” a one-man performance he’s brought to schools in which he draws a map and teaches history to go along with it.

One thing Nichols is sure of: when something turns into work, it stops being fun. And he’s here to have fun.

After a summer spent teaching children’s art classes through the Wellfleet Recreation Dept., as he’s done since 2005, Nichols is leaving Eastham on Sept. 10 to take his 2,245th flight, this time to Indonesia. He’s been there 21 times already. From there, he’ll go to Bali.

“That’s 2,246,” he says.