Population Densities and the Wilderness's Edge

Introduction to Cabin Trip, 2018

I have too many things to post about before work resumes, but maybe it feels like that because of the emotional weight the main projects hold. One is our trip to the Farm for Corrie's family reunion; one is Tuxedo's eulogy; and one is our recently finished trip the Cabin. Anyway...

I had an idea that I wanted to examine using Google Maps and some crude tools of my own.

It started with an idea about the edge of the wilderness and our Cabin up north near Mt. Lassen. Then I went back to find places where I, and then later, Corrie and I lived, and tried to compare population densities.

Here's my crude tool:

I would drop a pin in the location and set the Google Map zoom at essentially the same magnification, take a screenshot of my map, then go an image editor and tape that paper to my screen centered on the pin and crop the image to the rough outlines of the square above the black line. 

The dimensions of the square were about 4400' x 4200', which, when calculated out gave squares that were about 2/3 of a square mile.

Seems like a strange number, right? The reason will become apparent with the first picture.

Where I grew up, on Basswood, in Citrus Heights, a suburban satellite city of Sacramento:

That pin in the center is essentially where I spent the bulk of my childhood. This is the first map I dealt with, and it is this size so I could capture Norm and Holly's house in it in the upper quadrant on the left-hand side. So is our elementary school, Lichen, and our Westwood Park stomping ground, and the freeway and the railroad tracks boxing in the neighborhood. Pretty neat.

Next I did the same thing for our Oceanaire place:

The lake on one side buttressing the mountain, and the farm on right hand corner. It's weird for me to think that Norm's place compared to Basswood is further than the old Albertson's.

Next up was our Palm St granny unit:

Old McCarthy's was closer to us than Norm's is to Basswood, but not New McCarthy's. Notice the density being tighter, but that makes sense considering the college-town nature of the city itself.

But speaking of density, check out the same square of Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy:

The A-train's Utica stop at the bottom, and the J-Z train's Gates stop in the upper right-hand side, frame what we could guess about our neighborhood back while we lived there.

Next I put our place on Dwyce, in Austin in the same setup. The rendering of the trees sucks, so it looks more blurry that the others, but you get the idea:

Still pretty dense, but that makes sense for an area that sprang up on what was then outskirts of downtown Austin as a suburbia of sorts.

How about now, in Long Beach:

As we guessed, the sand is closer to us than the A-train was in Bed-Stuy. There's the small park up by the MoLAA and even Beachwood Barbecue and Brewing, which is a phenomenal place.

Check the differences in density. Suburban Sac, the "other side" of San Luis, the outskirts of downtown San Luis, madly dense yet "provincial" Brooklyn, not-quite-suburban Austin, and urban beach-side southern California...they all have their own rhythms and feelings, and different amounts of people in those relatively similar squares. 

Now here's the same view of the Cabin:

The edge of the wilderness? This looks like the wilderness proper. The Cabin is either the first settlement on the edge of civilization or the last cabin in the community of Mill Creek, depending on which way you're driving. The national forest starts on the other side of our "yard," right on a former meadow that has turned marsh, a green smear coming down and right from the pin.

Of course it's awesome there.

For good measure I included the same experiment with Corrie's family's Farm, outside Clarendon, Texas:

The farmhouse and surrounding buildings are discernible, as are the property lines on the west, north, and eastern sides, while the southern edge is out of sight.

This experiment has opened my eyes to a few things, and I may have plans to make something like this as assignment, but as the summer winds down (for me), I'm trying to wrap all of these ideas into a series of posts. This has helped with the other two things I mentioned earlier, about Tux and about the Farm, as well as the Cabin.

Wilderness...