For 200 miles the border between New York and Pennsylvania is a straight line, but at Pennsylvania’s northwestern corner, where I was now, it abruptly juts north, as if the draftsman’s arm had been jogged. The reason for this small cartographical irregularity was to let Pennsylvania have its own outlet onto Lake Erie so that its residents wouldn’t have to cross New York State, and it remains today a 200-year-old reminder of how the early states weren’t at all confident that the Union was going to work.
