What's Above Us?

One of the great advantages of life in Point Roberts is the proximity of the Vancouver Airport, a scant 30-minute drive from the border. Most simply, it means the ROTUS, as well as the rest of the world, is easily available to us. It's a beautiful airport, but since they collect $10 from every passenger that takes a flight out of the airport, I think of the airport and all its beauty as in some small way belonging to me, and of course to all of us who fly out of YVR and pay our $10 fees. I like to think that my many $10 bills were used to pay for some part of the waterfall near the entry to customs as you arrive in Vancouver. You, on the other hand, may have paid for part of the Jade Boat in the main departure hall. Another good choice.

Although neither Point Roberts nor Roberts Creek is directly under the flight path of the Vancouver airport, one is aware of the great number of planes taking off each day (less aware of landings, unless you're nearer yet to the airport). There is one flight in particular, thought, that puzzles me. I hear it from both places, lying in my bed, somehow awakened around 1:30-2:00 a.m. The sound of a plane flying at first puzzles me because it's late and the planes have stopped flying by that time, I think. But it is a plane, a heavy plane as the controllers say. It's going somewhere I can't quite figure out. But here, today, and also here in a somewhat different version, comes the answer...if only I study it long enough, I'm bound to be able to spot that very late-night plane and to see at last where it's going.

Free as Birds

Point Roberts doesn’t have its own airline company to make little flights here and there, which is something of a shame, I suppose, but if it did, then people would doubtless be needing to rush off here and there to get away from Point Roberts, and what would be the point of that? Even worse, if we had our own airline, we would be required to have the Transportation Security Administration showing us how to behave in and around airplanes, which clearly we do not need to have.

However, Point Roberts does have its own airport. This is what it looks like. It’s near, but not on, the ocean. It’s entirely made of grass (the grey in the foreground is a little patch of gravel). It’s in someone’s back yard. Well, that’s one way of saying it, but another way: it is someone’s back yard. The gentleman who owns the back yard and thus the airport, I am told on reasonably good authority, is a current or former Air Canada pilot. If you need to go to this airport in a car, you drive down his street and up his driveway and into his back yard where you can await the plane you are expecting or just admire the airport. If you are going to land at his airport, you fly over and see if anyone else is landing and, if no one is, then you can land there. It’s absolutely simple. Planes take off from there all the time; not constantly, all day long, but now and then, every week. You’ll be walking or driving and you hear a plane flying low and it’s either going up at a pretty steep angle, or descending very clearly, and you know that plane is going to or from the Point Roberts airport. I think of it as the ‘Pt. Roberts Airport,’ but maybe it’s really the ‘Mr. [former/current] Air Canada Pilot Airport.’

Ed, who is a recreational pilot and occasionally lands a helicopter on this airport, says there are lots of small, private airports like this in the U.S. I believe him, but I had never seen anything like it, never even imagined that there would be such an airstrip in the U.S., brought up as I have been on commercial airports.

The day I took this picture, there were four planes parked on the strip. I don’t know to whom they belong. Maybe nobody knows other than their actual owners. Ed left the helicopter he was flying there once overnight. I don’t suppose anybody knew he was the one who had left it there. People just come fly in there and leave their airplane and then they come back and fly away in their airplane. They talk to some air traffic control people somewhere around, I imagine, and I know they can’t go into Canada without doing some kind of customs clearing, but here on the Point these planes, these pilots, come and go as free as birds.