The Border: Where Are You Really Going?

So you have your Nexus go-thru-fast card, and you pull up to the border in the special Nexus lane. You stick your card out the window and wave it at the machine and then you go up to the border guard station, a maybe 4-foot-square house with a chair, and the border guard looks at his computer, which shows him your picture, your name, your address, and he asks you, almost invariably, either “Where are you going?” or “Why are you coming here?” I would remind you that Point Roberts is a 4.5-square mile peninsula, surrounded by water, as is the nature of peninsulas, on three sides. And the border is the fourth side. Where am I going???? Or, given that they are looking at my address, Why am I coming here??

This is the kind of question and the kind of interaction with the border guards that can put me easily over the edge. Since they cannot really be asking me ‘Where am I going?’ (the answer to which question would, obviously be ‘Pt. Roberts’—it is, of course, the only place to go to from this border crossing), are they asking me something more philosophical: As, “Where, really, are you going?” That’s a hard question for an old person because where you are going is not so much up for dispute or desired for discussion; you are, after all, a person with a past and a present, but not much that you might want to think of as a future. Do they wish, really, to discuss Death with me? Similarly, is the answer to ‘Why are you coming here?’ ‘I live here’? Surely not. They already know I live here. Are they checking to see if I know I live here? Surely I have not invested in this Nexus card and the Homeland Security people have not been trained and paid to ask a question to which the answer is obvious. Are they really asking me, ‘Is there any reason on God’s green earth that anyone would be coming here to this border station and if there is what would that reason conceivably be?’ Good question.

Why does the U.S. ‘own’ a 4.5 square mile peninsula that is attached to Canada? Well, it’s on the 49th parallel, which parallel marks the U.S.-Canada border, except that it doesn’t always: the border goes way south just past Pt. Roberts in order to give Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands to Canada. Could it not have given Pt. Roberts to the Canadians for the same reason whatever that reason was? Well, they could have back in the 1850’s, but they didn’t. And since they didn’t, it can never be changed. You will understand that, despite the fact that this border station is a very expensive operation and that it makes all the residents of the Points’ lives very complicated, the U.S. would never, ever give away 4.5 square miles of its territory. And the Americans here would never encourage it, either, even if by doing so all of us here became members of Canada's health care system. A few locals sometimes float the possibility of withdrawing from the state of Washington, and becoming a District, as in the District of Columbia. When this was once proposed to a congressional hopeful as a solution to local problems, he responded, ‘It won’t work: what would you do for sewers? For street lighting? For sidewalks?’ We decided not to vote for him since we don’t have any of those things now.

Myself, I prefer to think of our becoming an International City or something like the Vatican, because then we could issue our own stamps. And that in itself could provide an adequate industrial base, along with the sales of gas and alcohol, to provide us with the necessary moneys for our own government. But, until that happens, I’d like to thank my U.S. friends for providing us with a 24-hour a day, 7-day a week border station (costs duplicated, of course, going the other way by the Canadians). Dollars well spent!