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 5,500 miles of it. With the exception of the rare New

England town that predates national borders or the odd airport that needed expanding,

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 on a map and the treaties establishing the lines say it's straight, but in the real

world, the official border is 900 lines that zigzagged 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 the globe, has just been set as the national boundary.

And it's your job to make it real. You are handed a compass

and a ball of string and told to carefully mark off the next two-thirds of a continent. Don't mind

that uncharted wilderness in your 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 a line as you could expect a pre-GPS civilization to make,

but it's not the kind of spherical planer 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.

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