How Do You Get to Point Roberts?

Quick answer: cross the border at Blaine, turn left on #17 and turn left again at 56th St. and you’re back at the border. This includes a short drive through Tsawwassen, an attempt to reproduce in English spelling the sound of an indigenous word, although it is hard to imagine exactly what sound ‘ww’ would be representing. Usually, I just spell it TSSAAWWAASSEN, and offer the reader the choice of any two of the double letters. After Tsawwassen, you get to cross the border and you are in Point Roberts! That’s sort of how we got there.

Point Roberts has a Historical Society which may have many passive members and which definitely has a few active members, largely people who actually grew up on Point Roberts and stayed there. The Society’s current task is to compile a storybook of how we all got there. Here’s our story:

In 1989, Ed and I were pondering our eventual retirement and were trying out places. I was particularly interested in the Olympic Peninsula (ocean, remote, trees, rain, etc.). We went there in November and found it flat and treeless, though definitely with ocean and rain. What to do with the rest of the week? We ended up driving up into B.C. because Ed had once landed a plane in a nice town there and wanted to go see the town again. It was not part of the retirement journey. But when we got to the nice town, it took about ten minutes to determine that this was exactly what I had in mind when we mistakenly went to the Olympic Peninsula looking for it. We spent the rest of that week on the Sunshine Coast of B.C., just north of Vancouver, and returned to L.A. to explore the possibilities of living in another country.

We found that there was an immigration category for U.S. citizens who owned property in Canada, could demonstrate adequate access to financial resources, and were not interested in employment. With this category in hand, we returned in March of 1990 and bought a house in Roberts Creek, the middle of the Sunshine Coast. (Note that we had only been there in November and March, neither one the part of the year that is celebrated in the phrase ‘Sunshine Coast.’) We rented the house out for two years and in 1992, we moved there just in time to discover that, as of January 1 of that year, the immigration category under which we expected to claim residence had been eliminated. Canada, it turned out, didn’t want a lot of old, retired/unemployed Americans coming there to use up their health care. In 1992, we were in B.C. only part of the time in any case, so we weren’t immigrating: we were just tourists with a house. A few years later, as we were preparing to sell the house in L.A., Ed discovered Point Roberts on a map.

After picking me up at the airport from one of my trips to the U.S., Ed drove us down to Point Roberts to look it over since we were going to need a permanent U.S. address. Astonishingly, it looked exactly like Roberts Creek. So we bought a house there too. (These were the days when real estate in the Northwest was still very, very inexpensive.) The distance between these two Roberts-es is about 45 miles, but it includes a ferry ride as there is no continuous road up the west coast of B.C., and it is a slow drive either around or through Vancouver to the ferry terminal. From the front door of one house to the front door of the other, it’s about a 3-hour trip.

So we set up a life in which we go back and forth between the two houses, spending more than half of the time in the U.S., so that (1) the U.S. house would clearly be a permanent residence; (2) I could have a real garden in both places; and (3) we could have some kind of social life in both places. It’s a strange kind of life, going back and forth between two countries every month, 24 trips a year, but it works for us for now. We are still tourists with a house in B.C., but we are also library-card holding, taxpayer-paying, voting, and permanent-residing residents of Point Roberts, and of the U.S.