Brezovica pri Metliki & Malo Lesce

The border between Croatia and Slovenia turns particularly unusual and twisted at several points west of Zagreb. At one point a little bulb of Croatia protrudes into Slovenia like a geographic hernia. It’s not a practical exclave or a pene-exclave, either. A road goes straight down its pencil-thin neck to connect a small town and a few farmhouses within the bulb to the rest of Croatia without requiring residents to negotiate any border controls. I’d love to live in a little geo-oddity like that someday.

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Yet, inexplicably, this isn’t even the weirdest thing about that convoluted border. I mentioned Brezovica pri Metliki in Odds and Ends 3 some months ago. At the time I said, "It’s not worth going into detail when it’s already known." However, slowly, I’ve come to realize that while it may be known in small circles, even those who are aware of it don’t seem to have a lot of details. Otherwise, I wouldn’t receive a steady stream of search engine visitors on that page. All I did was mention Brezovica pri Metliki in passing. Twelve Mile Circle shouldn’t come up on the first page of Google results for that topic as it did this evening. That doesn’t make sense.

I still don’t have a lot of information although I’ve learned more than I knew before. Let’s take a closer look at the neighboring towns of Brezovica pri Metliki and Malo Lešče, both in Slovenia.

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That is one seriously messed-up border. Slovenia bulges into Croatia, but instead of being neat-and-clean like the previous instance, this one twists upon itself in an origami mess. Good luck trying to decipher those boundaries. It’s even more complicated than it appears, however. Google apparently left off one important detail: a place that is either the most tortured chunk of tethered border area ever conceived, or a true exclave.

SOURCE: Wikimedia Commons via Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)

Observe the squiggle of Croatia running between Brezovica pri Metliki and Malo Lešče that opens into a little triangular splotch. The "Boundary Point" discussion group noticed this patch called Brezovica Zumberacka in 2007 and were still trying to decipher its meaning in 2011. Even maps produced locally in Croatia and Slovenia seem to differ in random ways (it’s not a Croatia versus Slovenia thing; neither seems to care much about this infinitesimal sliver). A slight preponderance of evidence seems to imply that it’s probably a Croatian exclave. A lot of evidence points the other way too. I’m not sure the discussion has arrived at the point of "agree to disagree" as much as it’s become a "we need someone in Brezovica pri Metliki, Brezovica Zumberacka or Malo Lešče to look for markers and confirm it one way or the other."

It does matter, at least for now. Slovenia became a part of the Schengen Area in December 2007. Croatia, conversely, is not within the Schengen Area although that’s expected to happen by 2015. Croatian citizens have been granted a special access arrangement which eases the crossing into Slovenia although it’s still not completely hassle-free:

Many people living near the border cross it several times a day (some work across the border, or own land on the other side of the border), especially on the border with Slovenia, which was unmarked for centuries as Croatia and Slovenia were both part of the Habsburg Empire (1527–1918) and Yugoslavia (1918–1991)… every Croatian citizen is allowed to cross the Schengen border into Hungary, Italy or Slovenia with an ID card and a special border card that is issued by Croatian police at border exit control.

It’s not unlike the border situation between the United States and Canada created in the wake of 9-11. Cohesive communities formed atop porous boundaries now find themselves split by border controls.

I found one Slovenian article that described some of the issues in Brezovica pri Metliki. Translation software wasn’t perfect but the point of the article seemed to be that convoluted borders at this location were rather inconvenient. Residents reported issues with policemen who were assigned to patrol the border but who were not from the area, and therefore couldn’t recognize who was a resident and who was not. Residents also felt like they were under siege with a contingent of police constantly in their midst, requesting identification repeatedly. This was also apparently a significant wine-producing area with individual vintners owning land on both sides of the border, now worried about harvest time when ordinarily they would invite friends and family from outside of the area to help bring in the crop. Additionally, hunters come to the area in search of game and were once a reliable source of tourist revenue. It’s a bit difficult to do that with those wacky boundaries. Border controls were expected to have a tangible economic impact.

This will become an academic exercise once Croatia joins the Schengen Area. It will be an interesting artifact that won’t have much of a meaningful impact anymore. In other words, it will be like the preceding five centuries.

Obviously I would be interested if the knowledgeable 12MC audience can find more information about this situation and can help enlighten the rest of us.

License to Map

I guess I didn’t know until this morning that license plates, those little identification signs we attach to our automobiles, are more generically known as vehicle registration plates. Right now I’m sure my North American audience is wondering why I even bothered to define "license plate" when the meaning is so intuitively obvious. That’s because the name varies between nations and 12MC has an international audience. In some places it might be called a tag, a number plate, or something entirely different. More to the point, "License to Map" refers to the very simple fact that maps are a common design element on license plates, or tags or number plates, or whatever one may decide to call them. However, I noticed this feature appeared in the wild within a fairly narrow geographic band.

License plates first appeared in Western Europe in the earliest days of the automobile at the tail-end of the Nineteenth Century, when they were more properly considered horseless carriages. This is also known as the Brass Era of automobiles due to an abundance of brass used both functionally and decoratively on the vehicles themselves. I’ve always loved the term "horseless carriage." One of my favorite Y2K stories (kids, go ask your grandpa if you’re unfamiliar with the term) involved the horseless carriage. I’ll quote from a period news article published in 1999: "PORTLAND, Maine –– State government got its first Y2K surprise months early when owners of 2000 model cars and trucks received titles identifying their new vehicles as ‘horseless carriages.‘" I still smile every time I hear that although I have an even better Y2K story. Fortunately that was about the worst of the Y2K damage, we all got on with our lives, and I’ve rambled along a serious tangent. Let’s see if I can pull this back to the predetermined topic.

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The first license plates in the United States were probably issued in Massachusetts in 1903:

At the time, no laws were governing the rules of the road which led to a great deal of confusion on the thoroughfares as well as a lack of public safety… The first plate, featuring the number “1″ printed on it, was issued to Frederick Tudor in 1903 and is still held as an active registration by a member of his family… Although Massachusetts was not the first to register motor vehicles, we did lead the way in issuing registration plates. These plates were made of iron and covered by an enamel porcelain. They had a dark blue background with white numbers and “MASS. AUTOMOBILE REGISTER.” printed across the top. The plates were not uniform in size as the number of characters needed for a particular registration governed the length.

The seems typical. I flipped through uncountable license plate collector pages and sites. The early plates seemed to lack any kind of standardization. They were myriad sizes and were simply alpha-numeric characters stamped on a plain background. The earliest U.S. plate I could find that featured a map traced to Illinois in 1927. The design appeared rather crude compared to many modern plates.

A quick note on license tag images. It was surprisingly hard to find any that I could lift with attribution, so you’ll get what you get instead of a lot of nice illustrations. I’ll feature a few that came with Creative Commons licensing options (hover over the image for the source citation) and I’ll provide additional links to places where you can see others.

I counted about a dozen U.S. states featuring maps on their current license plates. There are others that featured maps in the past that have not carried into current designs. Feel free to follow that link and count for yourself. I can’t guarantee that I found them all because I was beginning to get a little cross-eyed. They started blending into each other after awhile.

Most of them, like the New Jersey example provided above, used a solid-fill state map outline as a separator between an initial set of alpha-numeric characters and the remainder. In addition to New Jersey, the states of Kentucky, Minnesota, New York, and Tennessee followed similar patterns. Texas employed a variation on the theme because Texas always needs to be a little different, and they filled their state outline with a stylized "Lone Star" flag design. Missouri had similar placement although their map was much larger. Florida used a very large teal map with oranges superimposed upon it.

Then there were the outliers. Ohio creatively placed its state outline beneath the initial O in the state name. Louisiana pushed their map to the left and superimposed a pelican atop it. Connecticut placed the state towards the upper-left. They get an honorable mention because it was sufficiently detailed to show the Southwick Jog (take back the notch!).

Montana is the winner. The outline map of Montana is the dominant feature of their plate.

I turned my attention to international locations. I couldn’t find any in Canada or Mexico. This surprised me. Both nations issued plates for their secondary units of government — provinces and states respectively — and both featured a wide variety of detailed graphics and artwork. Mexican plates in particular showed great creativity. Canadian plates were pretty interesting too, especially Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, but nary a map between them.

I began to think that maps on plates might be a uniquely U.S. design element and considered whether this represented some sort of broader cultural characteristic. Then I discovered instances on plates from Bermuda, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. The rest of the world seemed bereft of license plate maps, though. I’m not saying they don’t exist. I just could not find any as I began to lose interest after a couple of hours of searching.

Maps used as a design element on license plate appears to be primarily a North/Central American theme. Canada and Mexico need to catch-up with the rest of the continent and print some maps on their plates.

Natural Forces: Nuclear

My series on Natural Forces seems to be a dud based on the (lack of) comments which are usually rather robust in terms of both quantity and quality on the Twelve Mile Circle. It goes to show that I have no idea which articles will resonate with an audience, which probably also explains why 12MC readership is rather modest compared to lots of other sites.

The bad news is that I kind-of like the topic so I’m going to complete it. The good news is that the final two natural forces need to be combined into one due to lack of content so this will be the final article in the series. We’ll get back to a new bunch of geo-oddities in a couple of days.

Those final forces of nature are strong nuclear forces and weak nuclear forces. It’s pronounced nuclear not nucular. It’s like someone grating on a blackboard whenever I hear it pronounced "nucular," with apologies to actually, more than one former President of the United States. Sorry about that pet peeve mini-rant.

I can’t possibly begin to describe the difference between the two forces (except that one is "strong" and the other "weak") much less find any distinct towns named accordingly. I blame it on my liberal arts education. Actually, I couldn’t find a single populated place named Nuclear or some variation thereof in any of the official place names databases of the largest English-speaking nations. There’s always radioactivity of course but we’ve already covered that one rather extensively. I did find the names of a whole series of nuclear power plants of course, but I felt that was probably cheating and defeated the entire premise of the exercise.

No, I did not find a town but I did find a curious lake outside of Poughkeepsie, New York.

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Nuclear Lake? That’s seemed like an odd name and I figured there had to be an interesting backstory. I also noticed a dotted-line on the map running along the western shore of Nuclear Lake. I switched it from terrain mode to map mode, zoomed in and discovered that this was the famous Appalachian Trail. Thus, anyone collecting counties along the trail or otherwise hiking the AT from one end to another (like Steve from CTMQ has done) would have to strolled directly along the shores of Nuclear Lake.

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Here’s the scary part, and I think the title of a 1986 article in the Los Angeles Times says it all: New York Trail Includes Site of Plutonium Spill…

Hikers who stray from a new stretch of the Appalachian Trail may emerge from the oaks and laurel to find a shining lake echoing with the honks of Canada geese. To get there, however, they would have to surmount a rocky spine of land that hides the lake from the trail and pass signs posted every 50 feet bearing an ominous warning: “Property of U.S. Government. No Entry Beyond This Point. Potential Radioactive Danger.” United Nuclear operated the complex, a private research facility licensed by the government to experiment with bomb-grade uranium and plutonium, from 1958 to 1973. In 1972, the surrounding woods were contaminated when a chemical explosion scattered radioactive plutonium dust, considered by scientists to be the most toxic form of plutonium because of the threat of lung cancer if inhaled. The plant was closed, the plutonium was cleaned up, truckloads of contaminated soil were carried away.

Nuclear Lake does indeed have a nuclear connection. It may or may not have been contaminated at one time and it may or may not have been completely cleaned-up. It’s still somewhat controversial and a cause for concern for many people.

It looks like I won’t be hiking the Appalachian Trail anytime soon. Yes, that’s the reason… plutonium spill. It may have contaminated all 2,181 miles. Right. I’ll just keep telling myself that.