Marking the Border

We went down to check out the new trail from the bluff to the beach on the northwestern corner of Point Roberts at Boundary Marker Park yesterday. I think it’s been there for awhile, but this was the first time I’d tried it. It’s certainly a great improvement going down with its broad, switchback trail, but it looked like more of a challenge than I thought my knee might like on the way back up. Thus, Ed and the (younger) visitors made their way back up to the car, while I walked alone down the beach to Gulf Road where they picked me up.

It’s a lovely beach walk (one of the Point’s more special hidden treasures) as long as the tide isn’t too high. It wasn’t; in fact it was very low, as the tides have been recently. There were little pools closer in here and there, but mostly the swimming ducks were a long way out. Nevertheless, on a spectacularly beautiful summer day, not too hot, not too cold, not too breezy, not too anything, and with the Point apparently still full of tourists, I was the only person on that long stretch of beach. That’s the kind of thing that amazes me about this place—how isolated one can be here, even when the place appears to be hosting crowds.

About twenty to thirty minutes of walking had me probably half-way to Gulf. Only then did I see anyone; a woman of indeterminate age, sitting up at the top of the beach, on a log, just looking at the water. I walked fairly close by, offered a greeting, and she responded by asking where I was heading. I told her what I was doing and she asked about the new path, which she hadn’t known was there. She said that she had come down the steps to the beach. I didn’t know what steps she was talking about, but I often don’t know things like that.

“Who built the path?, she asked.
“The County, I imagine.”
“‘Oh, am I in the U.S.?”
“Well, yes; you crossed the border back there where the marker says B.”
“Really? Does it matter?”

Our conversation extended a bit longer while we discussed border issues and whether the CBP agents were likely to be down on the beach and preparing to deport her or something. I remembered one of the first times I ever got into an extended discussion with a border agent, maybe 13 or 14 years ago, when he said to me with either irritation or despair, “Don’t you realize that these are different countries?” And I felt more empathy at this moment for his long ago irritation/despair. The beach lady, who had grown up in Ladner, declared that she felt the border people were intimidating. “Don’t they understand that we’re friends? That we wouldn’t do anything to hurt one another?” Hard for me to know quite how to respond to this. I can only imagine the despair in the air if she said it to the CBP people.

It’s a good walk: you start at the boundary marker on the beach (at least that would be my recommendation) via the new trail, and you end at the Tiki marker on Gulf. You're in the U.S. all the way. Good to know that if you are out walking.