Four corners

The Other Person Who Lives HERE (TOPWLH) has joined me a couple of times for my evening walks. I have had to explain to her that the route we are walking on is what I refer to in discussions with myself (I know, kinda early in retirement to be talking to myself) as the four corners route. My life's work has made me perhaps a bit more aware than many of the original government public land survey and I am aware that I live within a quarter section of land (PLS 40 anyone?) which, by the way, I CAN identify, I have the legal description noted on a post it on a map on the wall at work. I still work, technically, as noted recently by GFR, so when I next appear there (YIKES, day after tomorrow) I will liberate the post it note from its service to the man and bring it home and pass along the quarter-quarter, and the section, township and range. I digress. A quarter section is a half mile on a side so by walking the perimeter of a quarter section I can get in what I can comfortably assume is a two mile walk without the need for any further calculation or measurement. Civilization as we know it has cooperated in making this possible by, for the most part, laying out cities with the streets mostly on the section, half-section, and quarter-section lines. My personal quarter-section is bounded by Fairview, Roselawn, Cleveland and County Road B. A side bit of information that I really enjoy is that Roselawn is laid out along the 45th parallel of north latitude. Anyone living, as I do, north of Roselawn lives in the northern half of the northern hemisphere, or as I sometimes say, the True North. I digress again.

The reality based problem with my "four corners" route is that I don't actually live on the perimeter of the quarter section. I start from a point in the middle. A reasonable sounding solution, the shorthand for which is my description of the route, would be to walk to each of the four corners and then home. This would, however, be over two miles by the distance from my house to the nearest point on the perimeter times 2. I live one block, an eighth of a mile, from the perimeter, so that two miles walk would be two and a quarter miles. Messy. Unsatisfactory.

The solution that works is to walk to each of the four sides of the quadrilateral while maintaining a route that is always parallel to one of the sides. That sounds pretty mucky mucky but actually the blocks are all laid out in a grid, I don't cut across. I walk to all four sides, and then back home, voila, two miles. I admit that I am being inexact when I call it the four corners when it is actually the four sides, but until now this was only a discussion I was having with myself and I could call it whatever I wanted.

Anyway I thought about doing something similar on my bicycle, riding to the four corners of Roseville. A review of the map disclosed that at least one of the corners (the northeast one) appears to be not on the grid but in a park or something. I thought that I could just do with the bicycle ride what I do with the walk, just ride to the four perimeters and still call it "four corners".

Well, another look at the map revealed that I already pretty much do that every time I get on my bike. I can't get across Snelling without dipping into Falcon Heights to the south, any ride to the north crosses over into Shoreview, anything around Owasso probably gets out to Rice Street and Maplewood, the only side I don't do all of the time is the western boundary, Lauderdale. Today I did Lauderdale. The appropriate commemoration of this endeavor is pictured here:LOOK at the Roseville City Hall.

Today was my 100th ride of the year. My first ride was March 15 with pretty much regular riding not being possible until the weather improved, about April 7. But even using March 15, that's 100 rides in 134 days. When the weather permits, I ride just about every day.

I am a little hesitant to pursue the idea of face on a stick for perspective in the corn field. Every time I think about face on a stick what comes to my mind is this. Demonstrators pushing wheelchairs and wearing masks of Arthur Bremer appeared at a rally for presidential candidate George Wallace in Madison, Wisconsin. They chanted, "Free Arthur Bremer, give him another chance. He should have shot him in the head, he shot him in the pants."

Free speech is a wonderful thing. No one promised that it would always be in good taste.