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Your way does not exist!
Aug. 7th, 2006 11:01 am
Thomas Jefferson is to blame for my problems with utility companies.
No, really. He is.
You see, back when he was President, he saw America as a nation of small independent farms, free from foreign entanglements. Does sound good, you have to admit.
In order to create this, though, he needed a quick and easy way to divvy up and sell all that Western land we'd stolen fair and square. So he came up with the township and range system. The land was divided up into mile-square "sections." Each six-by-six mile block was a township. Now, instead of using metes and bounds ("From the big tree north 20 degrees east sixty paces to the white rock, thence north 45 degrees west two chains three paces and a span to a pit full of broken crockery, thence...") you could designate a piece of land as "Northeast quarter of the northeast quarter of Section 22, Township 16 North, Range 12 West." You could do it from a thousand miles away, without ever seeing the place. It was efficient.
So most of the interior of the country, including my county, got broken up into these one-square-mile blocks called sections.
Now, to give TJ credit, nobody thought at the time that all the roads would end up going along section lines. But he reckoned without two things. The first is the power of precedent. The second is that farmers in Britain and New England were used to having public rights-of-way across their fields, and were sick of it. When they moved west, they weren't going to have any of that if they could help it.
So we ended up having roads on all the section lines. A rectangular grid of straight roads everywhere.
I have often pondered how much of an effect this had on Midwestern political thinking. If you have a section line running through a swamp and then over a hill, and if by curving the road you could avoid both, generally we build the road straight through. We go straight through, even in the face of all common sense and logic, and we don't trust people who don't. We even scoff at the surveyors who laid out that square grid because it jogs and bends in places, as if we weren't aware that the earth is a SPHERE, and you can't wrap a square flat grid around a sphere.
Since everything in my county is on the grid, the next logical step was to tie all street addresses to the grid. In less righteous, heathen lands, it might be all right to just start at one end of the road and have numbers increase until you get to the other end, but not here, oh no. All our street addresses are based on a grid system too. If you're on an east-west street, your address is based on how far east or west you are from the point of origin; if you're on a north-south street, it's based on how far north or south you are.
My street makes a right angle bend.
Everyone else on my street is on the east-west part. Their addresses are numbers like 1092, 1113, 1175. Go around the curve and mine is 3000-something.
Since my street is in the databases as an east-west, that either puts me about three miles away from my neighbors, or the database says I don't exist at all. Any time I try to check on any kind of utility service, their database search tells them that I'm out of range. Even for the gas, electric, and cable companies that already serve me. As for other things, like DSL or wireless, they say I'm out of range, but I don't know whether that's because I really AM or because of that same old problem with my oddball address.
Curse you, Thomas Jefferson!
No, really. He is.
You see, back when he was President, he saw America as a nation of small independent farms, free from foreign entanglements. Does sound good, you have to admit.
In order to create this, though, he needed a quick and easy way to divvy up and sell all that Western land we'd stolen fair and square. So he came up with the township and range system. The land was divided up into mile-square "sections." Each six-by-six mile block was a township. Now, instead of using metes and bounds ("From the big tree north 20 degrees east sixty paces to the white rock, thence north 45 degrees west two chains three paces and a span to a pit full of broken crockery, thence...") you could designate a piece of land as "Northeast quarter of the northeast quarter of Section 22, Township 16 North, Range 12 West." You could do it from a thousand miles away, without ever seeing the place. It was efficient.
So most of the interior of the country, including my county, got broken up into these one-square-mile blocks called sections.
Now, to give TJ credit, nobody thought at the time that all the roads would end up going along section lines. But he reckoned without two things. The first is the power of precedent. The second is that farmers in Britain and New England were used to having public rights-of-way across their fields, and were sick of it. When they moved west, they weren't going to have any of that if they could help it.
So we ended up having roads on all the section lines. A rectangular grid of straight roads everywhere.
I have often pondered how much of an effect this had on Midwestern political thinking. If you have a section line running through a swamp and then over a hill, and if by curving the road you could avoid both, generally we build the road straight through. We go straight through, even in the face of all common sense and logic, and we don't trust people who don't. We even scoff at the surveyors who laid out that square grid because it jogs and bends in places, as if we weren't aware that the earth is a SPHERE, and you can't wrap a square flat grid around a sphere.
Since everything in my county is on the grid, the next logical step was to tie all street addresses to the grid. In less righteous, heathen lands, it might be all right to just start at one end of the road and have numbers increase until you get to the other end, but not here, oh no. All our street addresses are based on a grid system too. If you're on an east-west street, your address is based on how far east or west you are from the point of origin; if you're on a north-south street, it's based on how far north or south you are.
My street makes a right angle bend.
Everyone else on my street is on the east-west part. Their addresses are numbers like 1092, 1113, 1175. Go around the curve and mine is 3000-something.
Since my street is in the databases as an east-west, that either puts me about three miles away from my neighbors, or the database says I don't exist at all. Any time I try to check on any kind of utility service, their database search tells them that I'm out of range. Even for the gas, electric, and cable companies that already serve me. As for other things, like DSL or wireless, they say I'm out of range, but I don't know whether that's because I really AM or because of that same old problem with my oddball address.
Curse you, Thomas Jefferson!
