I’ve mentioned before that Cresco is located quite near the border of Iowa and Minnesota. In fact, if you travel on Highway 63, there’s only one town, Chester, that comes before the border. However, and here’s the weird thing that I noticed while driving back from Rochester last week—the state boundary markers don’t match up. When you drive out of Chester, maybe a hundred yards out of town there’s a sign on the side of the southbound lane that proudly welcomes you to Iowa. Further down the road, in the northbound lane, a smaller sign welcomes you to the State of Minnesota. It’s a bit hard to judge the distances, but it feels like there’s at least a quarter mile of space between the two signs. The space in between is like a kind of no-man’s land, where no one lives except perhaps some cows, who are notorious for ignoring state boundary lines.
This was kind of curious, so I sat down after I got home and fired up Google maps. After all, the border between the two states had to exist somewhere, didn’t it? The map informed me that, yes, yes the border did exist. What’s more, in the area surrounding Highway 63, there was a road perched right on the border between the states, appropriately called State Line Road. I scrolled along State Line Road, and then came to another surprise. About 15 or 20 miles to the north of Cresco was a town called Florenceville, that put the town of Chester to shame when it came to being a border town. Florenceville was so close to Minnesota that it had apparently grown into a Minnesota town by the name of Granger, and the two were, for all intents and purposes, one town. The thought of seeing Florenceville and Granger drove me to get in my car and, paying no heed to the current price of gasoline, driving off to locate the border towns.
The first step in this trip was locating State Line Road, which was harder than I thought it was going to be. This is because State Line Road isn’t what you would call marked well, or even at all. It’s just a narrowish dirt road that is barely wide enough to hold two standard cars whose drivers are on very good terms with one another, and the turnoff is almost hidden by a copse of trees that are part of a smallish park that seems to exist for no other reason than because it is on the border of Iowa and Minnesota. To be honest, it’s a lot like the Four Corners Monument, the area where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado meet, only much less impressive. For some reason, I could see my Mom and Dad stopping here on one of the vacations they would take my brothers and me on when we were growing up. We, meaning mostly my Dad until my brothers and I got old enough to drive, would go on vacations through the continental United States, and along the way we’d hit every attraction that a state could offer. There were lots of spectacular locations, but there were also a lot of small, little locations that my Mom would see, have my Dad stop the car, and we would get out and look at a plaque that commemorated a spot that seemed to meet the bare minimum standards for historical significance. I could see my family stopping by the State Line Wayside Park, with my Mom and Dad understanding the subtle wonder of seeing the border between two states, while my brothers and I wondered what was so great about standing among six trees and some shrubs that commemorated the state border.
Then there was the road itself. It was defined in a Zen-like way by its complete lack of significance. For all intents and purposes, it was just another dirt road in another rural area, with the occasional house cropping up on one side or the other. Sometimes I would see a farmhouse on one side, with a pasture where cows were grazing on the other, and I would realize that if that farmer owned the cows in that field, he’s traversing state boundaries every day of his life. Then I realized that, for said farmer, when he crossed from Minnesota to Iowa, it was probably morning, and when he crossed from Iowa back to Minnesota it was time for lunch or dinner.
Here’s the thing—I think I’ve been conditioned to think of crossing borders as a big thing. After all, borders can be pretty significant. Crossing borders from countries to countries means flashing your passport and having a customs inspector make sure you don’t break any of the byzantine rules that all countries seem to have on what can be taken where, and that’s just going from the United States to a friendly country. Then you have borders, say, between North and South Korea, or the border of the old Berlin Wall that are so foreboding they’re almost impassable. This isn’t even counting those invisible borders, like the one between childhood and adulthood, or the one between high school and college, or the border between an amateur and a professional. Crossing a border is supposed to mean something, and yet here I was, driving on the border itself and watching people treat it with all the meaning of crossing a road. I was so caught up in this that I didn’t notice when the road ended and I ended up in the middle of a large family farm. I smiled, tried to ignore the stares from the two or three adults who were wondering what this idiot was doing driving into their farm in a subcompact car, and turned around to try to discover what had become of State Line Road.
To Be Continued…
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