Subtitles section Play video
-
Canada and the United States share the longest, straightest, possibly boringest border in
-
the world. But, look closer, and there's plenty of bizarreness to be found.
-
While these sister nations get along fairly well, they both want to make it really clear
-
whose side of the continent is whose. And they've done this by carving a 20-foot wide
-
space along the border. All five and a half thousand miles of it.
-
With the exception of the rare New England town that predates national borders or the
-
odd airport that needed extending, this space is the no-touching-zone between the countries
-
and they're super serious about keeping it clear. It matters not if the no-touching-zone
-
runs through hundreds of miles of virtually uninhabited Alaskan / Yukon wilderness. Those
-
border trees, will not stand.
-
Which might make you think this must be the longest, straightest deforested place in the
-
world, but it isn't. Deforested: yes, but straight? Not at all.
-
Sure it looks straight and on a map, and the treaties establishing the line *say* it's
-
straight... but in the real world the official border is 900 lines that zig-zags from the
-
horizontal by as much as several hundred feet.
-
How did this happen? Well, imagine you're back in North America in the 1800s -- The
-
49th parallel (one of those horizontal lines you see on a globe) has just been set as the
-
national boundary and it's your job to make it real. You're handed a compass and a ball
-
of string and told to carefully mark off the next 2/3rds of a continent. Don't mind that
-
uncharted wilderness in the way: just keep the line straight.
-
Yeah.
-
Good luck.
-
With that.
-
The men who surveyed the land did the best they could and built over 900 monuments. They're
-
in about as straight as you could expect a pre-GPS civilization to make, but it's not
-
the kind of spherical / planar intersection that would bring a mathematician joy.
-
Nonetheless these monuments define the border and the no-touching-zone plays connect-the-dots
-
with them.
-
Oh, and while there are about 900 markers along this section of the border, there are
-
about 8,000 in total that define the shape of the nations.
-
Despite this massive project Canada and the United States still have disputed territory.
-
There is a series of islands in the Atlantic that the United States claims are part of
-
Maine and Canada claims are part of New Brunswick. Canada, assuming the islands are hers built
-
a lighthouse on one of them, and the United States, assuming the islands are hers pretends
-
the lighthouse doesn't exist.
-
It's not a huge problem as the argument is mostly over tourists who want to see puffins
-
and fishermen who want to catch lobsters, but let's hope the disagreement gets resolved
-
before someone finds oil under that lighthouse.
-
Even the non-disputed territory has a few notably weird spots: such as this tick of
-
the border upward into Canada. Zoom in and it gets stranger as the border isn't over
-
solid land but runs through a lake to cut off a bit of Canada before diving back down
-
to the US.
-
This spot is home to about 100 Americans and is a perfect example of how border irregularities
-
are born:
-
Back in 1783 when the victorious Americans were negotiating with the British who controlled
-
what would one day be Canada, they needed a map, and this map was the best available
-
at the time. While the East Coast looks pretty good, the wester it goes the sparser it gets.
-
Under negotiation was the edge of what would one day be Minnesota and Manitoba. But unfortunately,
-
that area was hidden underneath an inset on the map, so the Americans and British were
-
bordering blind. Seriously.
-
They guessed that the border should start from the northwestern part of this lake and
-
go in a horizontal line until it crossed the Mississippi... somewhere.
-
But somewhere, turned out to be nowhere as the mighty Mississippi stops short of that
-
line, which left the border vague until 35 years later when a second round of negotiations
-
established the aforementioned 49th parallel.
-
But there was still a problem as the lake mentioned earlier was both higher, and less
-
circular than first though, putting its northwesterly point here so the existing border had to jump
-
up to meet it and then drop straight down to the 49th, awkwardly cutting off a bit of
-
Canada, before heading west across the remainder of the continent.
-
Turns out you just can't draw a straight(-ish) line for hundreds of miles without causing
-
a few more problems.
-
One of which was luckily spotted in advance: Vancouver Island, which the 49th would have
-
sliced through, but both sides agreed that would be dumb so the border swoops around
-
the island.
-
However, next door to Vancouver Island is Point Roberts which went unnoticed as so today
-
the border blithey cuts across. It's a nice little town, home to over 1,000 Americans,
-
but has only a primary school so its older kids have to cross international borders four
-
times a day to go to school in their own state.
-
In a pleasing symmetry, the East cost has the exact opposite situation with a Canadian Island
-
whose only land route is a bridge to the United States.
-
And these two aren't the only places where each country contains a bit of the other:
-
there are several more, easily spotted in satellite photos by the no-touching zone.
-
Regardless of if the land in question is just an uninhabited strip, in the middle of a lake,
-
in the middle of nowhere, the border between these sister nations must remain clearly marked.