Almost everything in a place like Point Roberts is just a little more difficult. Want someone to lay carpet? Probably have to convince somebody to drive the 100-mile round trip from Bellingham (crossing the border twice on each trip, of course), or find somebody in nearby Canada who has a green card to work in the U.S. Need to get the snow off the road in the winter? Probably have to have somebody from Bellingham make that same trip, but probably only after they’ve ploughed all the rest of the roads that are much closer to them. From the perspective of the rest of the county, indeed perhaps from the rest of the world, the response usually is ‘Well, what did you think you were doing when you moved to such a strange and isolated place?’
And for lots of things, that is a pretty fair response. I think we do have a fair complaint about the border because all the people who were here before 9/11 (coming up on 7 years ago) definitely didn’t know that the border was going to become so very difficult when we moved here. For all those other things, though, it’s a response that at least has to be addressed.
One of our current problems is trash. When we moved here 12, 13 or so years ago, I don’t think there was any organized trash collection of any sort. Certainly, we composted what we could, recycled what we could by taking it either to the U.S. or the Canadian recycling depots depending upon which one we drove by first. But I don’t know what we did with that, for us, very small remainder of stuff that neither composts nor recycles. Perhaps delivered it in person to the transfer station. Then, Hosanna! (as I guess we must have felt), a young man and his family came to the Point to start up a regular private trash and recycling business.
The county and the state, of course, have a lot of regulations about how such a service is supposed to work. A private service is allowed, but it must meet certain standards, one of which is that the service must provide regular pick up of recyclable material. If it’s a private service, apparently the use of the service has to be voluntary. That is, a private service doesn’t mean the county is going to hire a private company to pick up everybody’s trash and pay for it via taxes. Nor is the county going to send its own garbage trucks up that route to haul any trash, assuming the county has any trash service, since that is usually more of a municipal function. But somehow, the service got started and you paid by the can for regular pickup service and a monthly fee for the recycling. The company has the use of a transfer station (which I think is public land) to get all this stuff moved from one place to another: we don’t have landfills in this tiny area waiting to be filled.
It’s now 5 or 6 years at least that this service has been working for us, but recently the recycling truck, which the company had purchased used, broke down and was beyond the point of repair. And the company hasn’t the money to buy a new one. So the company suggested that residents just bring their recycling to the transfer station. The state/county aren’t happy with that because it's against the rules: private garbage pick-up must provide regular recyclable pickup. What to do?
We can force the company to go out of business by insisting that it operate only if it buys a new recycling truck; or we can require everybody on the Point to be part of the garbage collection system (which would increase revenues sufficiently to support the recycling system); or the state/county could provide some financial assistance or some truck assistance or some rule-bending assistance. Or, finally, we could stop producing trash. So, what did we expect when we moved to a place like Point Roberts? I’m pretty sure I didn’t think about it at all.
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4 comments:
Hi, I found your blog while trying to find the address of the transfer station on point roberts (I still didn't find it after reading many search results...) It is wonderful to have all your experience to read about Point Roberts.
I wonder if you may know something I found on line at the same time of find your blog? In another link http://www.cqs.com/super_wa.htm
I read there is a super fund site on Point Roberts Dump. What was that all about? What kind of chemical waste were they trying to clean up?
I have not had the time to read the other writings in your blog, I will do that soon. Do you still enjoy living on Point roberts? Would you move to Point Roberts now if you know what you know now?
Thank you for having your blog, and thank you if you have time to answer my question. Have a beautiful autumn.
there's nothing now on the washington superfund site list about point roberts and the site you gave me said that the list was as of 1997, but i've been there since 1995 and i don't remember ever hearing about it.
do i still like living in point roberts? yes, i do and i do keep living. would i still make the same decision to move there? no, probably not because of the increased problems around the border. at any moment, the border people can make your life much harder and i wouldn't choose to give that power to somebody if i'd known about it beforehand, which i couldn't have known. 9/11 changed plenty (if not everything) and the border situation is one of those things.
Thank you so much for answering me. I will seriously rethink about Point Roberts. I just crossed the border back to Seattle, and it was fast and easy. Unless the hour long nightmare going into Vancouver. It was unlike anything I ever experienced and I have lived in Europe, Asia, and Middle-East.
I talked to a canadian lady who just turned 40 while on a train back to Seattle. She said the american officers were always friendly and respectful to her, but she had horrible experience going back to Vancouver.
She was asked questions for over an hour and all her luggages taken apart and jewlery took to another room to be checked and she wasn't allowed to follow along. An armed guard had to walk her to the bathroom outside of the border office because there was no bathroom in the office and she had to go.
She was crying and confused. Having lost her husband 2 months earlier, she went to spend 3 weeks with a sister in Seattle and had the most unwelcome homecoming. Her parents were waiting outside and started calling their lawyer. The officers did not believe the stuff she brought back were not bought in U.S. and went over each item.
Her parents end up calling the man in charge of that border point and supposely the officers who over used their power had something written into their records. She was very shaken up and still do not know why she was treated that way at all.
When I asked her about Point Roberts, she said she used to go there 20 years ago and she remembered it as very low class. I was very surprised for her choice of words. She said it was a place that canadian people go to get drunk and it smells like sewer in the summer time, the whole place.
I sincerely hope it isn't so. I do hope things have changed in the last 20 years for Point Roberts, both the drunk part and the smell part. I was very serious about getting a place in Point Roberts. I even had a good friend who would come construct the house or log cabin for me there. Now I feel less certain about the whole picture on Point Roberts. I really appreicate your guidiance. Thank you for taking the time to help me.
attitudes about the border issue are highly personal. some people find it not a problem; others are more irritated by it. your mileage may be different! as to people drinking here: canadians used to come down here to the bars in the days when b.c. bars (or maybe just Vancouver) were closed on sundays. no longer the case. also, no strange smells, summer or winter...
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