What separates Greenland from Canada is a line that no one has been able to prove exists: it would be hard to do, the fault being beneath the Nares Strait (if there's any fault at all), where the water freezes over most of the year, and when it's not frozen then ice islands nearly half the size of Liechtenstein have been known to break off of icebergs and head south with the current for the summer. Still they manage—the Danes and Canadians—to periodically float and fly exactly halfway across the strait to Hans Island, so very in the middle of the water that both parties have been agreeing to disagree about how middling it is ever since 1973, notifying one another (the way civilized nations do) in advance of their alternating landings—sailors and ministers plant flagpoles, raise cairns, and leave a bottle of the national liquor on the uninhabited boulder, sticks and stones and alcohol being the common ingredient of all territorial disputes, even the most polite, ever since the plates first started shifting.