Off to the Races

The July 4th holiday is a big time in Point Roberts. There’s a wonderful, old-timey kind of parade with a kind of corny theme (this year it’s ‘it’s a small world,’ of course). The Vancouver RCMP motorcycle precision drill team comes down and races around in figure eights for our amusement/amazement. The Shriners from Ladner, B.C., drive down in their calliope truck (and occasionally with their tiny cars), sporting their fezzes. The local businesses and groups all get together some kind of float: some of them pretty minimal but others very elaborate. Town dignitaries drum up an old car or a convertible and wave to us, while kids race around grabbing candy from whoever is throwing it; grabbing as if they were starving for candy, I might add, though that is not likely to be the case.

For my taste (an old-timey one, for sure), there is not enough music: no marching bands struggling to play on key while marching. No baton twirlers, though there has been a stilt walker the last couple of years. There are horses, some decorated; there are kids riding decorated bicycles. And, perhaps most impressive, there are a herd of white samoyeds that belong to different people but who march—or at least trot--in the parade as a group.

After the parade, there is food, music, and arts and crafts on the beach, and the evening then offers dinners and barbecues at the local eating spots, but no fire works in recent years. And we all hope for at least a day without rain which is usually a wish easily granted in July.

This year, however, the 4th will be followed by the 6th of July, an event at least as good as the parade and maybe even better though with a shorter history. This year, on July 6th at 11 a.m., we will have the return to Point Roberts of the International Belt Sander Drag Races. Lorne Nielson (of Nielson’s Hardware on the Point) apparently invented this activity in 1989, but eventually it became such a successful event that the international race had to move around to other towns, states, countries, so we haven’t seen it here for maybe five years.

In a belt sander race, electric (corded) belt sanders race one another. Some of them are souped up a lot, some of them are decorated a lot. They run, as I recall, two at a time in parallel wooden ramps, and it goes on for hours. Everybody standing about cheers and yells and generally carries on, but I think there is neither on-track nor off-track betting. Anyway, the sport may be Point Roberts’ second greatest claim to fame (the first, of course, being our location), but location and event are equally odd, surely. Come visit on July 6, see the sanders go! But if you can’t, check out the race nearest you. Pictures and instructions included.