Drawing the LI Line

[David Casseres]

Richard Romeo sez
>Very interesting article in the Times yesterday about the many confusions 
>regarding the boundary lines  on Long Island and how even the folks who 
>live there have a hard time sometime figuring out which township or 
>village they live in.

A-and last week I was on vacation in the Eastern Sierra, adjacent high 
desert country, and Mono Lake area, about as empty and open a region as 
you can find in California, where you can look across 60 miles or so of 
the Great Basin and know there are boundary lines out there somewhere 
'cause White Mountain is in Nevada, but that fact is rendered laughable 
by the vastness; and there I learned about the Mount Diablo Baseline, 
which is defined by the eponymous peak in the Bay Area, 'way out on a 
West Coast that seems like another planet, and runs East to that "Nevada 
border" out there in the shimmer.  Seems the Spanish colonists did their 
demarcation with goofy language like "a hundred paces from the great oak 
tree by the creek," and one of the first things the Americans did upon 
taking over was to impose an abstract, statewide reference grid.  It 
turned out to be useful in the subsequent process of cozening the Spanish 
landowners out of their holdings.


Cheers,
David