Borders

Friday, I was very disturbed to encounter gas at a neighborhood station priced at $4.259/gallon.  It was only a couple of weeks ago that we were bracing for $4/gallon, after all.

However, today on a border-hunting mailing list, a link was posted to a photo gallery of one member’s recent trip to Baarle.  Included in the gallery is this picture:

Seeing gas priced at 1.513 is refreshing (other than that anomalous 3/10ths of a cent)…until you consider that price is stated as Euros per liter.

Doing the conversions…folks, that there is some $9/gallon gas.

Maybe my local $4.259 doesn’t seem quite as painful now.

I’ve written previously about Georgia’s desire to annex part of southeastern Tennessee to gain access to water in the Tennessee River, to alleviate pressure arising from poor planning prior to the drought.

The AJC has an article on what seems to be a more realistic solution—make nice with the feds, who actually own the plot of land Georgia really covets:

Georgia, though, could launch another legal attack. Federal land — not controlled by Tennessee — lies between Georgia and the river. The Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal agency that manages the river, owns the half-mile slice of largely untrammeled property separating Dade County, Ga., from the river.

TVA policy allows adjacent landowners to cross its property to reach the Tennessee River. Georgia, conceivably, could bypass a spat with the state by dealing directly with the federal government.

There are years of environmental bureaucracy that must be satisfied before such a plan could come to fruition, and of course Volunteer pride is still ruffled over the idea of Tennessee water going to alleviate Georgia’s lack of resource management. (Have Vols started patrolling Nickajack in their bass boats, I wonder?)

But at least this seems far more realistic than a TN-GA border war.

An odd anecdote I came across in the Seattle Times:

It turns out the feds have been monitoring Interstate 5 for nuclear “dirty bombs.” They do it with radiation detectors so sensitive it led to the following incident.

“Vehicle goes by at 70 miles per hour,” Giuliano told the crowd. “Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope [in the passing car].”

The agent raced after the car, pulling it over not far from the monitoring spot (near the Bow-Edison exit, 18 miles south of Bellingham). The agent questioned the driver, then did a cursory search of the car, Giuliano said.

Did he find a nuke?

“Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological treatment three days earlier,” Giuliano said.

This anecdote was shared at a community meeting that Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat attended. The meeting was held to address concerns by San Juan County, Washington residents over being harassed by border agents to prove immigration status. (San Juan County is made up of a group of islands between Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and the mainland of Washington State.)

I suppose that it’s a good thing that the feds are monitoring for the sorts of contraband that are legitimately concerning. However, I also have to admit that I share Mr. Westneat’s concerns about the pervasiveness of government monitoring.

However, I do take comfort from another comment in the story. Deputy Chief Giuliano, the number 2 guy for that stretch of the U.S.-Canadian frontier, has his own reservations about the authority he seemingly could wield:

Yet even he, a federal agent for 35 years, is queasy about the snooping’s reach. He said he opposes parts of the Patriot Act, namely the section that expands warrantless searches.

“I think we can do this without tossing out our checks and balances,” he said.

Seen in the Chattanoogan:

The mayor has officially proclaimed Feb. 27, 2008, as “Give our Georgia Friends a Drink Day.” The proclamation comes as a result of the Georgia Legislature passing a joint resolution that seeks to pursue reestablishing the boundary between Georgia and Tennessee.

The truck load of bottled water along with the proclamation will be delivered to the Georgia Legislature Wednesday morning.

“Please know that we are willing to help our neighbors to the south with this complimentary truck load of water,” said Mayor Littlefield. “And along with this water, we want to send Georgia legislators a message that focusing on conservation efforts would be much more productive than an ill-conceived land and water grab.”

Just when I had written off plans for Georgia to push their border a half-mile further north as the sort of weird bill one normally sees introduced at the start of a state legislative session, there’s this story from the AJC:

Last week, the House and Senate passed separate measures requiring the state of Georgia to revisit its longstanding border dispute with Tennessee. The legislation was immediately pronounced an international punchline. The state Senate encouraged the giggles by singing a round of “This Land Is My Land” prior to unanimous passage.

But don’t be fooled. The people involved in this are looking at a water shortage, exacerbated by drought, that could jeopardize thousands of billions of dollars in development over the next 50 years. A wet state grows, a dry one stagnates — and the competition with neighbors is fearsome.

Sponsors of the legislation are as serious as a heart attack.

“I don’t think it’s a gimmick,” Perdue told reporters a few hours after his computer demonstration. But the enthusiasm the governor showed in the basement had shifted to a diplomatic practicality.

“I think we have to be very careful in the way we proceed in this effort. As it gets more and more serious, the people of Tennessee get more and more concerned. There was probably a better way to do this — legislation’s a sort of in-your-face sort of thing,” the governor said.

I heard a rumor that Vols and Vandy fans have set aside intrastate rivalries, and are now patrolling the Nickajack Reservoir in a flotilla of bass boats.

The AJC also provides readers access to an 18-page memorandum entitled Tapping the Tennessee (1.8 meg pdf, converted from the AJC’s .doc format document) which goes into more detail about the history of the claim.

Even though Hong Kong has been returned to China for over a decade now, the autonomy granted to the Hong Kong S.A.R. means that the border between mainland China and the former British Colony still functions like an international border.   Consider, for example the Lok Ma Chau ( 落馬洲) border crossing:

To the right is the road crossing, used primarily by trucks, coming in the form of a high bridge across the Shenzhen River.  The north end of a bridge features an impressive ramp structure that not only helps achieve the necessary elevation, but also facilitates the switchover of traffic from left-hand-drive in Hong Kong to right-hand-drive in mainland China.

To the left is a double-decked pedestrian bridge, housing immigration checks for pedestrians crossing the river between train stations on both sides of the river.

I’ve been reading Eric Flynt’s 1812: The Rivers of War an alternate-history fictional retelling of events during the War of 1812 in which the antics of some land-grabbing Georgians play a role.

So I was oddly amused to hear about current real-world antics of land- (and water-) grabbing Georgians. From the Tennesseean:

A resolution in Georgia’s legislature proposes to move the Tennessee-Georgia boundary about a mile to the north of where it now lies[...] The proposal elicited instant ridicule from residents of the area on Thursday, as well as tongue-in-cheek saber rattling from Tennessee lawmakers.

One state senator offered to settle the issue with a football game. Another suggested floating an armada of University of Tennessee fans down the Tennessee River to defend the state’s territory.

But behind the amusement is a serious issue that has bedeviled the Southeast: access to water. If the border is redrawn, the new state line would fall across Nickajack Reservoir. That would allow parched Georgians to tap into the waters of the dammed Tennessee River.[...]

The resolution, which has passed early hurdles but has not received final passage, claims that the boundary was erroneously surveyed in 1818 and that Georgia has never accepted it. The resolution calls for the creation of a “Georgia-Tennessee Boundary Line Commission” that would perform joint surveys and change the line to the “definite and true” boundary line: exactly following the 35th parallel.

Of course, it should be remembered that while Tennessee’s border was supposed to be set at the 35th parallel, 19th century surveyors were notoriously inaccurate about identifying the precise location of that line of latitude. If memory serves, the Tennessee State Constitution which includes a definition of the borders of the state, avoids specifying a specific line of latitude.

Why, even the famous intersection of 35° North, 90° West (famous to me, at least, since my bedroom growing up was precisely on 90° West) is a couple of miles inside Tennessee.

In case you’re wondering (and because I want to test out a modification to how I do the “Highway Feature of the Week” on this site), here’s a Google Maps view of the Alabama-Georgia-Tennessee tripoint, which shows just how close the border is to the reservoir in question:

Seen in the Wall Street Journal:

Mowing the grass between the U.S. and Canada, though, doesn’t weigh heavily in the arena of border security. With the collapse of its immigration overhaul, the Bush administration is promising to keep on spending billions for guards, fences, radar towers and robot airplanes. The focus is on the dry expanses of the Mexican border, where weed whacking isn’t the main issue.

Meanwhile, the Boundary Commission — whose officials think it’s probably the smallest and poorest independent agency in the federal government — is still working with the maps it drew up in 1937. It often has trouble finding the Canadian border, much less mowing it.

“They talk about securing the border, well, nobody ever came to talk to us,” Mr. Hipsley said. He circled around Lake Memphremagog, just west of Beebe Plain, turned north up a dirt road and stopped at a border gate with a rusty padlock on it. “That’s what we don’t understand. What could be the most basic thing you’d think of? How can you protect it if you can’t see it?”

The Boundary Commission charged with keeping clear a 20 foot wide vista along the U.S.-Canada border, and the article reports that the 12-position organization is running a few hundred miles behind schedule on its upkeep.

Good thing the Canadians are our friends, eh?