Lucien Thomas revisited a few days ago bm196 and found that the “the poor thing” has been covered again. Bm196 has been buried for about 40 years, the last years being completely covered. In 2013 he was found again.
Lucien asks: what to do now? Well, I don’t know. Without any official involvement and reinstallment, this was bound to happen. I know that letters have been written to the municipalities on both sides of the border but nothing has happened so far.
Something bittersweet about it. Presumably the local property tax collectors want to know this at least as much as any private boundary line…Our “EU” mentality ought to cheer the thought that the marker of an international frontier has become of such little importance to the locals; yet anyone interested enough in this website understands the magic of the concrete marker of an abstraction… What a strange religion we have, this fascination with borders!
There are worse things to do to a marker than burial..someone could have actually TAKEN it. In the US, the agency responsible for surveying and marking important political points is (or was) the US Coast and Geodetic Survey, established by President Thomas Jefferson in 1807. They had placed (around 1900), just above the high-tide mark on the Pacific coast at exactly 42N latitude, a fancy brass marker set into cement to show the northwest dryland corner of California and southwest dryland corner of Oregon. For years, when I was taking the coastal route (US Rt. 101) between those states I would stop, hike into the woods and admire it. A few years ago, alas, someone apparently thought it would make a fine souvenir and hacked it out of the tree root that had grown around it.