The other day I visited Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park outside of Atlanta, and met an interesting character on the trail. 

"That's a 12-pounder Smoothbore Napoleon," he said as he approached me. I was standing next to one, so I looked like I wanted to know. "Not as accurate as the Grape Shot, but could hit much farther away."

"Oh Lord," I thought as I smiled and nodded. "I've been trapped in conversation with a smooth bore."

A Smoothbore Napoleon is a type of cannon used in battle at that very site during the Civil War. My smooth bore acquaintance told me all about its strategic use, trajectories and range.

I was not much interested in what he said, but studied how he said it in order to gauge the right time to escape. He was reciting what sounded like an encyclopedia entry from memory — I feared a guy who knows the Britanica volumes by heart may never run out of tid-bits to teach.

He took a two-beat pause, and I made my move. Excused myself politely and wished him a nice day.

"Hey, you ever seen one of these?" he called to me after I'd gotten ten paces toward the car. "It's a marker surveyors use to determine points on a map."  

That's when my impression of him changed. My inner map-loving geek raised an eyebrow of interest. Suddenly, this smooth bore was riveting! 

Turns out he was mapmaker by trade. I never thought a thing before about how political and property lines are drawn, but I guess it makes sense that he'd be interested in the kind of history that makes boundaries change. I had many questions, and each factoid he shared inspired a new one.

Don't yawn yet...

I learned that these days, surveyors use satellites and mirrors to determine a location within seconds of a degree. But most borders — at least not the ones that follow rivers and so forth — were drawn using technology guided by stars. The boundaries of the original colony of Georgia, for example, were determined by King George II over in England. He said the border should be at the 35th parallel north, but it was up to a team of guys walking in the wilderness reading the moon and stars to actually find it.

Can you imagine this?

My new acquaintance can. Like Indiana Jones, he and his buddies go hiking off the trails to find the rocks marked by the original surveyors.

Here's the thing: this method isn't very accurate. If you re-drew the map today, the US states would likely look very different. This made me think of all the countries on the globe that have borders way older than The States. Fought over and defended by cannon fire and the like — throughout history, people have died for these lines. Whether it's international or the boundaries of a city, border lines create the boxes we check to identify ourselves. Stark cultural contrasts exist on either side of them.

They're so official in the atlas, that it's hard to imagine them as more-or-less.

I could have explored this topic more with my new acquaintance. But when I paused two beats to contemplate my next brilliant observation, he used my earlier planned escape route - Excused himself politely and wished me a nice day. 

So I stood there next to the smoothbore and chuckled as he walked away. Border lines may be off-the-mark, but identifying boring is always spot-on.