on boundaries

The Euro’s dad was talking about boundaries the other day. How Cumbria isn’t really Cumbria, but something all together new and not right-sounding. How some of Cheshire used to be some of Lancashire and how politicians like to redraw the map as it suits them. “You don’t really do that in America, do you?”

I said “I don’t know” and got to thinking about McDowell County, West Virginia. I remember hearing, or reading, or somehow being aware of, a movement to eliminate the county by absorbing it into the neighbouring two.

Iaeger will still be Iaeger, I suppose, but it will be somewhere else. Even though it hasn’t moved an inch. And all the money that should have been spent, but wasn’t, on repairing the county after the floods (the building materials still sit, covered in dust, in the flood condemned post office) would disappear into the redrawn boundary. All the mistakes that were made, all the city-centre roads that haven’t been paved since 1976 and all the scandals that made their way onto the Today Show would be erased by many of the same people who made them in the first place.

I don’t know that there’s any legitimacy to the rumour. It may be one of those urban myths. Either way, I’ve been thinking about it a lot since I heard about the Iaeger Dairy Bar shutting down.

When the last horse in a one horse town drops dead, where do you go from there?