Counties of Western Washington, part I: Introduction

Dear Diary,

Part of the reason I indicated the nearest restrooms to so many places in the nearly-finished "Library Hours Six Months Later" series is that I wanted to figure out how far each place for which I did that was from those restrooms.  I remembered (badly) a quote I read early in the pandemic:  Alison Eisinger saying her organisation, the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, recommended "everybody in the city be within a half a mile or less of a working toilet and a way to wash their hands".  (From "Seattle will reopen 5 library bathrooms during coronavirus pandemic", by Sydney Brownstone and Daniel Beekman, April 21, 2020.)  I wanted to see not just how well that held up in Seattle, but in general.

But then I thought of another approach that might be easier and would certainly be more entertaining.  Why not just examine and map the public restroom situation in each of the nineteen counties the library hours series covered?  As with the libraries, this would be essentially a desk activity, rather than a hiking one.  (And I'm really not up to hiking right now, being sick.)

Of course, King County, the only one in Washington in which I've lived, and the one that includes Seattle, your titular concern, dear Diary, is the most urgent of the nineteen from my perspective, and since it's much the most populous, probably from the most perspectives too.  But King County is a huge and complex place.  It's physically the second largest county in western Washington (though Okanogan County in eastern Washington is about twice as big), it has by far the most munipalities, to say nothing of additional districts relevant to the topic...  Not a good starting point.

I also remembered the failed series on Tacoma, and how important population density is with regard to the density of things like public restrooms.  So I decided I would figure out the raw population density of each county, and then, since King County is about twice as densely populated as the next in line, I'd start with the least densely populated.

I'm finishing up that county now, and hope to tell you about it within a few days, dear Diary.  But it's shown me that I can always count on projects I think of as fun to get bigger as I proceed with them.  So I thought I should tell you what I intend to do with each part.

Where this starts is that much of western Washington (28.6%, page numbered 8 of 28-page PDF) is federal land, and this is by no means equally distributed county by county.  This makes even population density an unreliable number.  That least densely populated county is probably much nearer the middle of the pack if I only count acreage not owned by the state or the nation.  But, see, that county's government has an incentive to publicise this fact; I'm not sure I can get such convenient numbers for every county.  And quite a few other counties, actually including King County, have vast tracts of federal or state land.

So I've allowed my interest in geography and history to contribute.  Things I've now researched for County A, and see no reason not to research for the rest:

Parks, of course, and libraries.

Airports.  (Because I don't know whether publicly owned airports have public restrooms.  County A, however, doesn't have any publicly owned airports.)

Schools, post offices and election turnout.  (Because of what they show about geography.)

Election results.  (Because, hey, who isn't interested in politics?)

Rivers.  (Because mapping at the county level with my resources is annoyingly hard, and the rivers can help.)

Government maps.  (Because I used to be a geography major.)

Settlements.  (I'd never appreciated before just how nebulous the concept of an unincorporated settlement can be.  Much more on this below.)

Park restrooms.  (Not just locally owned parks, mind.)

Transportation.  (Because I still want to know whether I can walk to Bellingham, but want to know alternatives in case I'm not equal to it.)

Cell phone coverage.

Private amenities like churches and supermarkets.

So I was right to start with an easier county.  This is turning into an enjoyably obsessive, but fairly huge, job.

Three things need more attention.

1. Maps and grids

Once upon a time, dear Diary, maps often had grids, usually showing latitude and longitude.  (A grid based on latitude and longitude is called a "graticule".)  This enabled people using the maps to do a couple of basic things:  identify a location with a couple of numbers; and make maps of their own.  But a lot of map users don't care about either of those things.  As far back as the 1980s, companies had started producing "atlases" whose maps omitted the graticule - here's looking at you, Dorling-Kindersley! - and by the 2000s, the majority of "atlases" published omitted it.  Nevertheless, the graticule was still considered conventional enough that both Google Maps and OpenStreetMap, which both, Wikipedia says, started in 2004, have offered ways to show it.  But now they don't.

Graticules can, of course, be carried much further down than they usually are on atlas maps.  I've owned maps whose grids represent minutes of latitude and longitude.  But in the majority of the US, it's also possible to use a different grid, whose ultimate unit is the mile, but which is much less regular.  This is the surveyors' grid on which descriptions of land title are based.

This grid starts with the section, which usually is one mile north to south and one mile east to west.  Sections have numbers which usually show their place within a township of 36 square miles.  (My home state of Wisconsin assigns governmental powers to this kind of township, but Washington doesn't.)  The numbering system is consistent, so the corners of a township are sections 1 (northeast), 6 (northwest), 31 (southwest), and 36 (southeast); some maps show numbers in only those squares, which is enough to identify that this is the kind of grid being shown.

Townships are located by four references:  A local meridian (north-south line) and base (east-west line), a range (how many townships from the meridian), and, um, this is stupid but it's never going to change because it's built into too many aspects of American life, a township (how many of the other kind of township from the base).  Usually people don't talk much about the 36-square-mile kind of township in Washington, and usually the other kind shows up like this:  T8N, R6E, S26 W.M.  (Where W.M., Willamette Meridian, implies also the Willamette Base Line.)

Because County A turns out to have so many federal and state lands in it, which Open Street Map quite simply doesn't handle all that well, I've turned instead to government maps that do a better job (and as an added advantage have sectional grids).  However, I expect to go back to OSM later on, in more settled counties.

Anyway, as a by-product of using US Geological Survey topographical maps, I re-learned this system, and adopted it.  It turns out Open Street Map allows downloads at a scale of one inch per mile up to about 220 sections.  So I've divided my maps, and County A, into nine regions of three townships by two ranges, which I originally meant to cover from Open Street Map.  Obviously, to the extent that I go back to OSM, I'll stick with this way of dividing counties up, though the exact shape of the divisions will probably vary.

2. Toilets and drinking water

It turns out that national and state parks and similar things often have something called a vault toilet.  (No, dear Diary, I did not know what that was either, until I started looking.  It's basically an outhouse except that it's designed to be emptied periodically like a "sanican", keeping human excretions separated from the surrounding area, which explains the purpose of building them in huge areas of land that's supposed to be somewhat conserved.)  Wikipedia has a long list of other things that can be considered forms of toilets; in County A's national lands, the composting toilet, which we've already encountered, dear Diary, in North Seattle's Picardo Farm, also appears in a few places.

Furthermore, looking closely at national and state parks has reminded me of childhood camping trips in Wisconsin parks (to be exact, one National Forest and one Wisconsin State Park), in which potable water usually came from pumps.  The agencies I'm looking at don't talk about their sources of drinking water the way they do about their toilets, but I bet when I call they'll say that most of them are pumps.  Now, nothing requires that we use potable water to wash our hands, but since the difference between potable and non-potable water can be understood as one of cleanness, and much of the point of washing hands is to get them clean enough to, for example, eat or touch our faces with, I'm not at all sure alternatives make much sense.  It's, um, relatively hard for a person alone to wash hands using a pump; how hard depends on how long that person wants to wash and how long the pump runs (if at all) after the person stops pumping it.

English Wikipedia doesn't seem to have even a footer, let alone an actual page, listing other forms sources of potable water can take.  (Though its articles "Pump" and "Drinking fountain" list lots of specific kinds of each.)  But one thing I've heard often enough to have some confidence in it is that running water is much safer than still water; given a choice, when drinking water in the wild (or for that matter getting cooking water), go for the river or creek rather than the lake.  Sadly, in North Seattle we don't have any rivers, and the surviving creeks are rather more still than running much of the year.  County A's creeks may be different, but even there, the most important agency strongly recommends boiling any water one drinks from the wild.

In County A, sources of potable water are much less common than vault toilets.  This strikes me as unnatural, since the first place where I really looked at this sort of thing was North Seattle, where the opposite is true.  On the other hand, Tacoma is the same way as County A, so I should probably just get over my prejudices.

Concretely, then, my maps of County A, and eventually, should I live so long (and retain map-making tools so long), of King County, need to account for multiple forms of what I've hitherto treated as more or less unitary categories.

3. Settlement types

Remember townships, dear Diary?  In the other states in which I've lived, Wisconsin and Illinois, these have governmental purposes.  As a result, those states' geography is relatively clearcut.  The townships aren't necessarily incorporated, so that's like Washington, but it's easy to specify where an unincorporated place is - "Oh, that's in the Town of Oconomowoc" - and the Census Bureau's choice of reporting areas becomes more predictable.  In County A I've more or less had to figure out my own methods.

I'd fumbled around for a while when I noticed something in the main map I used for County A:  At its highest magnification, the one that numbers all the sections in each 36-section township, it also shows a lot of small dots, and they seem to cluster around settlements.  I eventually concluded that those dots actually represent buildings, not people or residences.  At any rate, I then went over all of County A carefully noting which 36-section townships had dots, and how many and where.

(Unfortunately, the same map doesn't do this for other counties.  I guess the makers thought they could handle County A precisely because it really is pretty sparsely populated.)

I then went to Google Maps and got the satellite view, and looked at each of those dot locations.  (This is when I gave up the idea that the dots meant people.)  And largely on that basis, I classified the settlements of County A.

This classification has three criteria:

1. Official recognition.  Washington has two categories of incorporation, cities and towns.  (There aren't many towns.)  But there are other forms of official recognition.  In County A, there are two official cities, but the Census Bureau has also "designated" one "place".  Post offices are another form of official recognition; County A has four, one each in the Census Bureau's three plus one more.  This more or less merges into the next ground.
   
2. Centrality.  As you know, dear Diary, I used to be a geography major, and one thing that has stuck with me from that is the idea of Central Place Theory.  It hasn't stuck with me entirely favourably - I also remember some anthropological archæologists who took it as entirely too reliable a guide in their own work. [1]  But I agree with the basic idea that cities are central places because they offer things people are willing to travel for.  (For this purpose, the advertising built into Google Maps is actually extremely helpful, but for County A I also looked at a lot of other official and unofficial lists.)
   
3. Population density.  The parts of County A that aren't parks include a lot of roads, but in many cases what adjoins those roads is farms or surviving forest.  My eventual conclusion was that what I consider "dense housing" for this project's purposes is very much less than urbanists want:  here, dense housing means that houses are separated by streets (if that much) rather than by fields.

I ended up with, in County A, five settlement types.  Given that I have three criteria and don't quantify any of them, the dividing lines aren't entirely clear, but I think these capture what I'm interested in.

[1] The guy whose page I linked to invented a test that was widely adopted but that I think is blatantly too mechanical to work.  See, Central Place Theory is fundamentally hierarchical.  So what this guy did was say that the classifications of societies used by anthropologists could be detected archæologically by their settlement hierarchies.  Societies without a hierarchy were bands.  Societies with a two-level hierarchy were tribes.  Societies with a three-level hierarchy were chiefdoms, and societies with a four-level hierarchy were states.  I assume this means that Singapore has a four-level settlement hierarchy, but I sure don't know where it found room for that.

Cities

A city, in this scheme, scores high on all three criteria:  it gets a significant amount of official recognition, it offers a number of central services, and a significant chunk of its housing is dense housing.  County A has three of these, but one (despite being an official Washington city) is pretty close to the next category.

Suburbs

A suburb, in this scheme, gets some official recognition, may have a few central services, but has some dense housing.  It also has to be possible to get from a suburb to a city without going through clearly rural areas like farms or forests along the way.  (This is why that official Washington city isn't a suburb.)  County A has two suburbs.  I don't expect, in later counties, to change my opinion concerning settlements that, like that official city, meet the base criteria but not the continuity criterion, so haven't figured out yet what I'll do if some place convinces me to do so.  I do expect, in later counties, to classify some official Washington cities that do meet the continuity criterion as suburbs.

Hamlets

An isolated place that has a little dense housing but not much of anything else, I consider a hamlet.  County A has three of these.

Villages

A village is the opposite of a suburb:  it has a reasonable level of centrality, but not so much dense housing.  (It also usually has a little governmental recognition.)  County A has five of these.

Rural centres

I think there must be a better name for this kind of thing, but haven't found it; this is my work-around.  A rural centre is the opposite of a hamlet:  it has zero dense housing, but a little centrality.  County A has one of these, plus a set of three so close together they might as well count as one.

Conclusion

I don't know how soon I can tell you about County A, dear Diary.  First, it's Christmas time, so I don't know how soon the e-mails I haven't yet sent and phone calls I haven't yet made might be answered.  Second, I have a lot on my plate.  My landlord seems to think he can make me homeless again at the end of this month - I'd thought, given the winter eviction ban, I had until March, but if I squint really hard I can see why he might think that, which might affect his decisions even if he's wrong.  My storage unit is due for auction tomorrow.  I'm sick.  I'm actively job-hunting.  And whether I become homeless or get a job, either way, that'll seriously bite into my time.  But County A is, at this point, the county I'm most certain I can do.  We'll just have to see about the others.

Once I get better, whether or not I'm homeless by then, I do expect to start checking the North Seattle park restrooms, too.  And although I am, in fact, right now treating the private academic libraries as a lower priority, come January that'll change.  Finally, although it's much more fun to study County A than to write about what I've already studied in downtown Seattle, that remains to do, and if I do become homeless again in January (especially if I also lose my storage unit by then), that's sure to put me in the right frame of mind for the writing.

So I don't know at this point whether you'll hear from me before January, but probably not long after New Year's.  Until then, dear Diary, happy days and nights, happy Christmas, and happy New Year's.