Driving along a straight highway in the American countryside, you may find yourself forced to turn right or left, then turn again just to keep moving ahead, all to compensate for a rectilinear planning system imposed on a spherical planet.

Picture running two fingers along a globe from the equator to the North Pole, starting an inch apart but following parallel lines. Eventually, they will converge and ultimately they will touch. At smaller scales, the effect is all but invisible, but when tens of miles are involved, and as seen from the sky, it becomes quite pronounced.

Dutch artist and photographer Gerco de Ruijter dug into the history of this phenomena after noticing these periodic “grid corrections” strange during an artist residency at the Ulrich Museum in Wichita, Kansas, that appeared to happen for no immediately apparent reason. They take various shapes and forms, including zigzags, angles and curves, and some are less obvious than others (except from above).

The cause dates back centuries, to the egalitarian Jefferson Grid, designed to ensure equal and fair land distribution by carving up rectangular townships the undeveloped country west of the original 13 states. Each was six square miles, and framed by borders and roads running in straight lines, parceled for sale and development in part to pay off debts following the Revolutionary War.

Those implementing Thomas Jefferson’s plan stumbled upon a flaw in its perfectly geometrical approach, analogous to the classic dilemma of fitting a square peg in a round hole.

“It did not take long for legislators to understand that a township could not be exactly six miles on each side if the north-south lines were to follow the lines of longitude, which converged, or narrowed, to the north,” explains landscape architect James Corner in Taking Measures Across the American Landscape. “The grid was, therefore, corrected every four townships to maintain equal allocations of land.”

“This added up to a detour every 24 miles, from sea to shining sea,” writes Geoff Manaugh. “These particular doglegs are most clearly seen far from urban centers, in the agricultural countryside, where the regular, quilted appearance of rural land use makes them more visible.” There are perhaps larger lessons to be found in this geometric anomaly, about the best-laid plans and how they intersect with an imperfectly-aligned reality.

Located along a tectonic fault, the town of Hollister, California, acts like an earthquake in slow motion, its surfaces slipping past one another along a ragged line visible in everything from skewed traffic lines and split sidewalks to entirely torqued houses.

As Geoff Manaugh neatly summarizes on BldgBlog, “Hollister is an inhabitable catalog of misalignment and disorientation, bulging, bending, and blistering as it splits right down the middle.” Thanks to inexorable forces of geology at work far below, “The entire west half of Hollister is moving north along the Calaveras Fault, leaving its eastern streets behind.”

Instead of the sudden and devastating motion we normally associate with earthquakes, Hollister suffers the movements of rocks below at more geological than human speeds, its buildings and infrastructure ever-so-slowly twisted through the passage of time. At a rate of one inch per five years, the change is not noticeable on a daily basis, but dramatic over the decades.

There are elements of Alice’s Wonderland all over the urban landscape: “Curbs at nearly the exact same spot on opposite sides of the street are popped out of alignment. Houses too young to show this level of wear stand oddly warped, torqued out of synch with their own foundations, their once strong frames off-kilter. The double yellow lines guiding traffic down a busy street suddenly bulge northward—as if the printing crew came to work drunk that day—before snapping back to their proper place a few feet later.”

Manaugh also traveled to a nearby bridge in Parkfield where a road bridge spans the San Andreas Fault, its distortions the ultimate manifestation of fault creep as each anchored side moves in the opposite direction. Built straight across, curves are already visible as one sights along the structure.

His photos here and elsewhere capture many of the region’s “minor landmarks for the seismic tourist,” which, “for all their near-invisibility, visiting can still provide a mind-altering experience.” All images by Geoff Manaugh.