Longings

The folks at lilypoint.org have included among their other site features a survey about what we’d like to see in Point Roberts that isn’t currently here (doesn’t include ‘Gated Beach Club Development’ as one of the choices, I’m afraid). It’s hard to know what to make of any survey, even those with highly respected methodological designs, but a loose internet survey such as this? Who knows who is responding? Awhile back, some folks from the Point Roberts Community Association were designing a survey which included some similar questions, including (my favorite), ‘Was the survey taker interested in fine dining at Point Roberts?’ I mean, I suppose I’m interested in fine dining anywhere, including in my own dining room, but do I think that Point Roberts in general or the Community Association ought to be responding to that interest (we can scarcely call it a need)? Well hardly. Or that my days would longer or happier if it did?

So I don’t know why those kinds of questions come to peoples’ minds. They seem to me like the questions philosophers pose to college students: ‘If it snows in summer, would it be winter?’ Or, ‘If your mother were a bicycle, could you ride her?” If everyone would like, say, a movie theater in Point Roberts, could we go to the movies? Will everyone being interested in a movie theater’s appearance lead a movie chain to appear here? Or to some otherwise secret entrepreneur among our 1600 residents rising to the occasion of meeting our desires or vague interests? Unlikely.

But more than that, I am somewhat puzzled by the very idea of people even asking the question, ‘What does Point Roberts need?’ I would think that Point Roberts already has what it needs and if it doesn’t, why do people move here? With the expectation that their arrival will occasion the creation of answers to their unmet needs?

I grew up in a small Idaho town and I certainly thought that what it needed was to have me not living there, but I can’t imagine what it could have incorporated that would have made me want to stay. I lived most of my adult life in Los Angeles, which pretty much has everything one could think of, but the one thing it doesn’t have—rain—was not possible, even in the land of a million entrepreneurs per square mile. So, I left for the love of rain and greenery.

Here’s what the lilypoint.org website guys (who are much younger than me and this may be the answer to all my questions) suggest as possible Point Roberts’ current needs:

Pharmacy
Doctor's Office
Restaurants that Deliver (eg; Pizza)
A Bridge to Bellingham
Car & Passenger Ferry to Bellingham
Passenger Only Ferry to Bellingham
Movie Theater
Fast Food Chain
Trader Joe's
Farmer's Market
Sewer System

Alas, they do not offer the survey taker that answer most needed for all surveys: ‘None of the Above.’ The possibility that Point Roberts is fine just as it is, with all its quirks, its strange weather, its staggering limitations, and it’s beautiful location does not seem to be one of the choices.

But maybe this is all, really, just in the nature of humans or of Americans or of Westerners, or of people under the age of 70. Most of the people I know here think Point Roberts is a wonderful place: that’s why they are here. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop them from thinking about how they could change it to make it a little more like where they came from. But if Point Roberts were an urban metropolis—with Trader Joe’s, fine dining, and movie theaters--would we live in an isolated, peninsular exclave of amazing beauty?