Anniversaries and the Wounds Thereof

Today is the fifth anniversary of the Bush administration invasion of Iraq, so I thought I’d talk about public transportation here in Point Roberts. And that is because I am generally not aware that anyone in Point Roberts has a particular position on the war. Whatever things are happening in the world to express dismay, outrage, disappointment about this unspeakable violence done to ordinary people in our names does not happen here. No signs, no bumper stickers, no community meetings. Scott Horton (at harpers.org) is always saying, Where’s the outrage?’ My conclusion is that people are holding their outrage very close to the vest, and waiting to see, endlessly, what happens next. My Canadian friends are usually appalled by the U.S. actions, but their response is more like the one you would have to a show-it-off bully who has, for a change, bitten off more than he can chew. They look smugly at us Americans, while saving their moral outrage for their own government’s actions, including its role in Afghanistan. As they should.

What then do public transit in Point Roberts and the poor state of Iraq have in common? It is perhaps the case that public transit in Point Roberts and in Iraq are about the same, which is to say nonexistent. Baghdad probably used to have public transportation, but then so did Point Roberts. Another similarity to note on Number Five Year Anniversary Day of General Outrage. I’m outraged about this war and also about the fact that there is no public transport on the Point, although the scale of the outrage is smaller in the latter case. But I wish to keep my outrage fresh and green, like salad.

Four or five years ago, people here on the Point went to Whatcom County to ask for some kind of help about transit to the rest of the U.S., or at least to the County. If you can’t drive or if you no longer can drive, then you have no options but to depend upon others to get anywhere that isn’t already here. It’s even hard to get a taxi to come down here because it involves crossing borders: a Canadian Taxi Company doing business in the U.S.? Some taxis will come and take you to the airport ($60+ for the ride), say, because they have legally arranged it but you can imagine why such an arrangement might easily be more trouble for the taxi company than it’s worth for this tiny potential consumer base. However, driving 90 miles round-trips to Bellingham is not really the kind of thing you want to use a taxi for. And Bellingham is where all the doctors and hospitals are, to cite a particular need.

We pay a lot of taxes to the County and we get little back for our taxes, so how about some public transit? Somewhat surprisingly, the county agreed after much negotiation. If people up here would take county-provided training to drive a small van (about 8 or 9 seats), then the County would pay for the van, gas, and insurance. All the driving and the coordination of van trips would have to be done by volunteers on the Point. And it worked. Many people up here worked very hard to get everything to work. Cat-herding work, I’d call it, which requires great persistence and an easy temperament, none of which is in particularly high supply up here or anywhere else outside a Carthusian Monastery, maybe. But then the County didn’t like it—the van couldn’t take you to some places in Canada and it couldn’t take you any place beyond Whatcom County, so no trips to Seattle. And the trips couldn’t be just randomly scheduled and there needed to be enough people traveling every week to make the county feel it was getting its money worth, although the time that all the volunteers were putting in was more than equal to the money the county put in. The Point Roberts community rose to the challenge; the Whatcom County Council chose to collapse.

So, this past winter, the County finally decided that were tired of being helpful and the County Council refused to pay any further costs. They offered the Point the van (which is called ‘The Blue Heron’), and also offered the Point the opportunity to pay all the costs associated with it. But ‘The Point’, of course, is not a legal entity, and certainly not any kind of entity that can actually either accept the van or generate the funds to service it. A couple of weeks ago, I saw the van parked over near the Community Center, where I guess it is in at least temporary abandonment. No one has incorporated themselves into some kind of non-profit entity that would be able to be responsible for further van service. So all that had been created to make it work was uncreated. If it stays around, maybe we could rename it ‘The Wounded Blue Heron.’ And then we can rename the country “The Wounded States of America,’ while we’re at it.