Altered States

Let’s just keep driving north, you think, until we reach the northernmost point of the continental United States.

You head north, all the way up to Minnesota. You pass through Minneapolis, and you start getting excited, because you know it’s only a three and a half hour drive to the Canadian border. You arrive at the border checkpoints.

But you keep going.

The Northwest Angle (just called “The Angle” by locals) is further up there, so you drive through Canada for about two hours. Or, you have a boat handy, and you take that across the Lake of the Woods. Or maybe the water’s frozen, and you take a shortcut across an ice road.

This is an example of a state whose geography has been altered over time, so that the state’s map now looks almost fanciful, like there are multiple people tugging at the borders of the state all at once.

The Northwest Angle's really seems like it should be a part of Canada, right?

We can thank poor mapmaking for this, at least in part. Immediately following the Am…