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By Root 886 0

the human equivalent of a dog peeing on a tree—probably go back millennia earlier. In medieval Europe, the surveyor was a hated figure, something like the “revenuer” in mountain moonshiner lore: a corrupt lackey always looking to stick it to poor farmers. His new map might take away part of your field, or it might raise your rent or your taxes. In Poland, surveyors were so dreaded that even death couldn’t end their menace. The flickering lights of swamp gas—what we call will-o’-the-wisps—were said to be the ghosts of dead mapmakers wandering the marsh by night. Better finish your cabbage, kids, or the surveyor will come and get you!

A nice thick border and a carefully chosen color scheme can serve to unify a nation, as on those Victorian maps in which every far-flung corner of the British Empire was always the same uniform pink, to impress on generations of schoolchildren the constancy and reach of the Crown—the “pink bits,” students called the empire.* Map boundaries also define, with a simple stroke of the pen, who isn’t on our side: an enemy to guard against or even territory we might take back someday. These aren’t just lofty scholarly concerns. Google fields so many complaints about the national borders on its maps that it’s started delivering localized versions to different users: an Indian user might see a border in one place while a Pakistani user sees it somewhere else, and everyone stays contented in their own little cocoons of geographic superiority. In 2006, when the Israeli education minister, Yuli Tamir, announced that textbook maps of Israel would put a border around the West Bank, rather than depicting it as undemarcated Israeli territory, hard-line rabbis announced that God would strike her down for her blasphemy. You can’t explain this all away as mere political posturing; it’s genuine offense. The clarity and simplicity of the lines on a map make them powerful symbols.

Borders have fascinated me since childhood: I remember staying very alert on family vacations so I could register the exact moment our 1979 Mercury Zephyr crossed the line between, say, Washington and Oregon. To this day, I like to see borders when I travel; many give up secrets in person that you can’t see on the map. You know that seemingly straight line of Manitoba’s western border, the one that makes Saskatchewan such an eye-catching trapezoid on a globe? It’s actually a pixelated zigzag, running maybe twenty miles north at a time before taking an abrupt one-mile “stair step” to the west. The Belgian town of Baarle-Hertog is even more intriguing: it’s made up of no fewer than twenty-six separate pieces of Belgium sitting, thanks to a complicated series of medieval treaties between two warring dukes, in the middle of the Netherlands. Some of these little bits of Belgium have little bits of the Netherlands inside them, leading to an impossibly intricate border that divides some village homes in half between the two nations. Your nationality depends on where your front door is, and residents have been known to “emigrate” by moving their door every time the tax laws change. When bars and restaurants in the Netherlands close, landlords just move their tables onto the Belgian side of their establishment and keep on serving.

In search of the most exotic border crossing of all, I insisted to my wife that our trip to Thailand last year should include a side trip to the Angkor temples of Cambodia—by bus. Why? Because I’d always wanted to find out what happens when you cross between a drives-on-the-left country (like Thailand) into a drives-on-the-right one (Cambodia). Would there be an overpass? A roundabout? An endless stream of hilarious traffic accidents? We were disappointed to learn that the border between Aranyaprathet, Thailand, and Poi Pet, Cambodia, is a traffic-free no-man’s-land with only the occasional semi pulling through after it clears customs. Maybe most people wouldn’t go to the length of a four-hour bus trip through the Thai jungle, but I know I’m not the only one who gets this liminal thrill from standing on borders. Four