Traveling: A Sampling Problem

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Skidaway Island State Park, Savannah, Georgia

Yesterday was a down-day so there isn't a whole lot to tell. It was about the same as all other down-days - we slept in, cooked a bacon and egg breakfast, did a load of laundry, took a nap, walked the dogs, played cards, went to the store for more wine, read some, grilled hamburgers for dinner, played cards a second time, and went to bed. That's pretty much the entire day and there isn't enough in there to make an essay, at least, not a new one.

But we did have a conversation about our trip so far, asking the question about whether we have done justice to some parks. The question started along the lines of how long do you need to visit a park before you can say you 'know it'?

We both agreed that we had done the Everglades very well. We spent six days in that park, which is the longest we've spent in almost any park so far. We didn't see every single thing the park has to offer - but we certainly got a good overview. We visited all four visitors centers, we spent at least a day in each of the four different ecological zones, saw countless alligators (even witnessed the mating call and response), and more birds than I can possibly remember. We canoed in a canal with crocodiles, and hiked through a swamp. I mean, what else could we have done to add to our understanding of the area? We think we did Everglades right?

Well, did we? We were there in the early Spring which, it so happens, is the driest season of the Everglades. Although the great water purification system has been decimated by agricultural and urban development, it still functions. But not in the Spring time. What if we had visited the Everglades in September when sheets of water would be flowing down the grassy glades? When everything would have been much greener (and the bugs much worse than even what we experienced)? We would have seen the water system in action with the wildlife around it in full bloom. Wouldn't that be a richer experience? Probably. So we missed the Everglades at its peak season. Can we say we've 'seen the Everglades'?

When you get into seasonal variations you open up a huge problem. Is Glacier National Park the same in the winter as it is in the summer? Decidedly not - the roads aren't even passable in the winter and you are limited to snowshoes for traveling park roads, if you can get there at all. So which is the better experience - Glacier in the winter, or in the early fall when we went there? Everglades in September (with more bugs and hurricane risks), or in Spring when it is dry?

Perhaps because I'm getting closer to Chapel Hill, NC (where I went to grad school), I see the problem as one of sampling. I learned in graduate school that in order to draw reliable conclusions about a particular subject, you needed a minimum of thirty data points. (There is a lot more to that, of course, but hold that thought for a moment). So, if one can extend that thought to traveling, then to understand a park would require a minimum of thirty 'data points'.

Ok, then what is a 'data point' when it comes to traveling? I might argue that any event you might label as an 'experience' would count. The set of sensations and the physical, emotional, and mental reactions one has to those sensations constitute an 'experience'. The thrilling observation of the alligator mating behavior was definitely an experience because we were able to witness first hand what we had read, so there was a very solid integration of sensations and concepts in our minds that will be very hard to forget.

Did we get thirty of those 'experiences' in the Everglades? I think so. Some of course are 'bigger' and more important than others, but clearly there were at least thirty of them. Other parks, well maybe not.

At Cumberland Island, for example, we chose to ride bicycles, through the sand, out to a mansion and back. That did not end well and we never got to experience the mansion. We did get an unforgettable lesson in how difficult bicycling through soft sand is, but I'm not sure that would count as a 'Cumberland Island data point'. Biscayne National Park is another one that I'm not sure we collected thirty unique experiences. Sailing over the bay was certainly a set of experiences, but it was a very small set. Joan and I both believe we might have done better taking the ranger-led boat tour out to Elliott Key. There would have been more opportunity to explore different aspects of the park.

There is, of course, one important point in sampling theory that I have overlooked so far. Yes, a minimum of 30 data points is required to draw any conclusions. But what I didn't say earlier is that these data points need to be randomly selected. And that kind of gets at the core of the traveling problem - random selection is not practical. We are limited to a biased sample because of our own place in space and time. A key set of experiences at Biscayne, for example, would involve exploring the coral reef. If ocean conditions are right, we might have been able to do that with snorkeling equipment, but to really experience it would require scuba diving. That is a skill and an expense that isn't really available to us.

And whenever you travel, you are doing so at a particular time. We chose the spring time to see the Everglades. But it would be a radically different place in the Fall. If we were to really achieve thirty random-sample experiences of a park, we would have to visit it at all times of the year. Practical limitations make that impossible.

So, does one ever achieve an 'understanding of a park'? Probably not in a true scientific sense - we are always bound by practical limitations and by the decisions we make about how to allocate resources (like choosing to bicycle in the sand). But even if we don't achieve the randomness requirement, we can at least try to understand the park from within our own set of experiences. I think my goal is to get those 30 data points. They may not be random, but they are mine. So the understanding I achieve is MY understanding. The great thing about our parks is that each of us can have our own version. (17.1.48)

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Comments

[MIckey]

30 Data Points
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