What's a Correction Line?

Besides being the name of my novel (soon arriving at a kindle near you), what is a Correction Line anyway?

I heard the term a lot, while growing up on the prairies, usually when someone was giving directions. 

"Oh yeah, head south about ten miles, just past the correction line, you'll see the turn..."

 I knew they were talking about a road, but it was a long time before I figured it out. If you have driven through the Canadian prairies, or the U.S. midwest, chances are you have been on a correction line - especially if like me, you get off the freeway and get a bit more experimental in your road choices. Now, maybe you found yourself on a long "s" curve, and you look around and wonder, "Why is this curve here? We aren't going around anything?"

No, there are not invisible structures to be navigated around, giant hay bales, or colonies of Sasquatch (though, there may be)... you're driving on a correction line.

Here's the official definition from Webster: One of a set of parallels of latitude 24 miles apart that is used for laying out nominally square sections and townships in the public land survey

Huh?

Well, here's how I understand it in basic, non-government language, we live on a ball. I'll explain...

Roads in the province of Saskatchewan are set up in a grid system - one mile apart. Nice and neat, good when your province is a trapezoid. (Saskatchewan, hard to spell, easy to draw.) But if you think about it, what happens when that nice grid is put on something round, ball-like, our planet to be exact? If you keep the mile x mile grid going, eventually those roads are going to converge. Not only will there be accidents, but problems galore for surveyors, cartographers, and cows. (Always bumping into each other).

So, every 24 miles apart, they put in a road that curves one way and then the other - to "correct" the grid. Happy surveyors, happy cows.

In the country these are hard 90 degree turns. But I also recall going around ones that are more "s" like. I had a Pontiac Laurentian, my first car, and one of the greatest feelings was taking that big boat (the Saskatchewan land shark), and easing it around a long curve. Being that there wasn't much to go around, those curves were usually Correction Lines.

So what does this have to do with a novel? 

Next time...

Check out an excerpt from the Correction Line.