It was three hundred years after Christopher Columbus landed on an island he named San Salvador (Holy Savior
) and Pope Alexander Ⅵ had divided the globe into zones of influence, controlled by the Kingdom of Portugal to the east and the Crown of Castile to the west, before American and European explorers began a comprehensive survey of what today is known as the Pacific Northwest, which is where I live. By the early nineteenth century, the number of parties vying for national control of the territory had grown to include Spain, Great Britain, the Russian Empire, and the United States. Beginning in 1818, the area was jointly occupied by the United Kingdom and the United States,
and, although by 1825 the Spanish and Russians had withdrawn their claims, sovereignty over what became known in the United States as Oregon Country remained in dispute until 1846, when, the genocide and alienation of the Indigenous peoples having mooted their rights, the United Kingdom and the United States
alone signed the Oregon Treaty establishing a boundary between them at the 49 parallel of north latitude from the summit of the Rocky Mountains to the Strait of Georgia. As a consequence of the treaty, a 4.9‐square‐mile
area at the southern tip of the Tsawwassen Peninsula
of British North America became a functional exclave of the United States, which, while fewer than 100 miles from home as
the crow flies and a part of Whatcom County, I had never visited, despite a lifetime of travel throughout Washington state. This week, I mended that lacuna.
Four of us forged our way across the international border at Blaine, Washington, where the stately Peace Arch astride the frontier beckons children of a common mother to commemorate
the 1814 Treaty of Ghent, pleading, May these gates never be closed.
Sixty‐seven feet tall and dedicated in 1921, construction of the monument was organized by the fascinating Samuel Hill, whose civic‐mindedness I have long admired and on the grounds of whose art museum I had recently eaten lunch.
A bridge crossing the Columbia River from Washington into Oregon is named in honor of his advocacy for improved roads,¹ which, among other effects, drove the state of Oregon to launch a state‐funded highway‐building program in the early twentieth century, unique in the nation at the time, and his
Maryhill Stonehenge memorial to the members of the U.S. Armed Forces from Klickitat County who died during the Great War
is equally a fitting site upon which to be inspired by the life of a man whose devotion to the public weal had also guided the creation of the portal of concordance through which we now passed.
We had chosen White Rock, British Columbia, as our overnight destination and arrived in time for lunch at
Charlie Don’t Surf,
which is directly across the street from the beach of Semiahmoo Bay and proved a satisfying table at which to turn up with appetites. I confess it took me longer than it should have to finally place why the name of the restaurant seemed familiar to me, because the Francis Coppola film
from which it is taken is famously quotable and is one from which I often borrow.
The city of White Rock takes its name from a huge stone that rests on the shore of the bay. Weighing approximately 488 metric tons, it is a glacial erratic deposited on the beach during the last ice age. Imagine a very prominent rock at the edge of the water so covered with bird droppings that ships at sea are able to use it as a navigation aid: the Semiahmoo name for the rock is P’eqOl’es, which translates as White Top. A light gray color in its natural state, the city has been painting the rock white on a regular basis since 1950. Legends of the Semiahmoo people say that the rock is present because the son of a sea‐god, having fallen in love with a Cowichan princess and being told that a god and a mortal could not marry but determined to remain with his lover, became enraged and, raising a massive boulder in his hands, threw it sixty miles, then, together with his lover, followed it to where it had landed, where they made their home and created the Semiahmoo nation.
After lunch, we walked over the water to the end of the 1,540‐foot‐long White Rock Pier, 
which advertises itself as Canada’s longest. The 101‐year‐old pier was heavily damaged in 2018 by a storm, and one may purchase a wooden plank on the pier with a donation to help fund its repair and improvement. The nameplates on the planks identifying the contributors reminded me of the
Care for the Market
tiles at Pike Place Market in Seattle, which were sold in the 1980s to raise funds to repair the floor of the Market. The weather was cool and breezy as rain made a half‐hearted attempt to get us wet, and we paid little heed to the sprinkling skies as we strolled down the
beach southeast of the pier to lay hands on the namesake rock there among the tidal pools.
We got ourselves checked in to the Ocean Promenade Hotel for the night just as the rain sorted itself out and began to pour. We sat on the patio catching up on household news, listening to the rain and pausing in the din of each Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway freight and Amtrak passenger train as it passed on the old Great Northern Railway tracks across the street. Dinner in the evening at Washington Avenue Grill was just around the corner overlooking the bay. The room was packed when we were seated, and we were the last patrons there when we left, having enjoyed good food, good service, and good conversation.
Breakfast in the sunshine the following morning at The Café @ Ocean Promenade at the front of the hotel was served with a pretty good latté. The women running the counter and who prepared our meals were thorough, polite, quick, and made tasty eggs. Were they at work in our neighborhood at home, I would be gladly claiming a stool at the counter on a regular basis to enjoy their version of running a restaurant.
The feature of the Washington state landscape known as Point Roberts was given its name on June 12, 1792, by Captain George Vancouver, after his friend Henry Roberts, the original captain of HMS Discovery before Vancouver took over as the commander of the expedition that brought him to the Pacific Northwest.²
Situated at the southern tip of the Tsawwassen Peninsula, the point composes the functional exclave of the United States created by the Oregon Treaty. In 1858, it became the realm of prospectors looking for gold in the Fraser River. In 1859, the United States established a military reserve at the point. Homesteaders trickled onto the
point for the next three decades, as did smugglers and others who were evading the law. The poor quality of the soil made farming impossible, and the fishery was exhausted by the 1930s. In 1953, Washington state statutes were changed to allow Canadians to purchase land in the state, leading Point Roberts to become a haven
for Canadians who were looking for a home away from the city of Vancouver. Today, the Point Roberts Chamber of Commerce notes that the town has been [a] Canadian summer cottage community for generations!
The United States and Canada share an undefended border of 5,525 miles. Since 2001, it has been closely guarded, but the international border on the peninsula was once a much more casual affair. There was Metcalfe’s Cafe in the mid‐twentieth century, built in Canada with a threshold on the border, where the front and back doors formed a border crossing through the middle of the building and Americans bought fish and chips through a window let into the wall.³ There was Ernest Astells, who, in 1970, drove his road grader across the border into Point Roberts to tear up a road he had graded after he had not been paid the $680 he was owed for the work, then was chased back across the border by Point Roberts sheriff’s deputies, who were firing pistols and shotguns at him after he had smashed a police car in the donnybrook.⁴ We quietly showed our passports to the U.S. Customs officer and crossed the border into Point Roberts without incident.
By 1908, the federal government had vacated Point Roberts, but it retained 21 acres at the end of the peninsula for a light station. A true lighthouse was never built, and the land was transferred to Whatcom County, which, in 1971, established
Lighthouse Marine Park on that acreage.
The point is among the sites on the Whale Trail, and we took a walk on the beach at the park, hoping to see whales from ashore, while fancying the shy movements of sandpipers milling about the lapping surf.
We found on the shore the 1985 David Barr (1939–2015) sculpture Sunsweep
and read aloud the text of its explanatory plaque: […] an international art project for three sites adjoining the US/Canada border, Roosevelt‐Campobello Park, New Brunswick; American Point Island, Lake‐of‐the‐Woods; Boundary Bluff, Point Roberts, Washington. This sculpture is aligned to the North Star,
solstices and equinoxes, and portrays the path of the sun from east to west.
The three sculptures were carved from a single slab of polished Canadian black granite, and all are laser etched with an image of a woman’s hand, symbolizing Mother Earth, traced by concentric rings that fan out resembling a topographical chart, each ring becoming more circular to form a perfect circle with the last ring. From east to west the
elements of the project are named Dawn, Noon, and Dusk, respectively. On the day of its installation, Point Roberts cottager Vi Stevenson, a Vancouver resident, said of Dusk, This is a farce.
We’re real people down here, not oddballs. These people are sincere, but they’re not hewers of logs.
⁵
A drive around the point to make certain we saw the sights was enough to satisfy us that our visit had been a success, and we decided to head for the border and home beyond.
Back in the United States that afternoon and eating lunch at CJ’s Beach House
in Blaine,
I wanted to reflect on the hardships we know the merchants of Point Roberts are enduring as a consequence of pandemics, tariffs, unilateral abrogation of treaties, and the statements of the current president of the United States to the effect that he intends to annex Canada as a new state, which have driven Canadians away from the
businesses on the point they have long patronized. For example, on March 13, 2025, the felonious imbecile said, Canada only works as a state. We don’t need anything they have. As a state, it would be one of the great states anywhere. This would be the most incredible country, visually. If you look at a map, they drew an artificial
line right through it, between Canada and the U.S. Just a straight, artificial line. Somebody did it a long time ago, many many decades ago. Makes no sense. It’s so perfect as a great and cherished state.
In response, the Canadian Prime Minister declared a new national policy: The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation, is over.
On average, each Canadian spent $8,500 on U.S. goods in 2024, so they have no small amount of leverage, and every dollar withheld from Point Roberts, where those dollars are often in the majority, is sorely missed. Who can blame the Canadians for their outrage and their boycott? America has installed a man to preside over its government who is threatening their self‐determination and has set about undermining their economic well‐being. The folks in Point Roberts, many of whom depend upon their Canadian neighbors for their livelihood, also depend upon their Canadian neighbors for water and electricity: this hooliganism by the American president has placed their entire community in jeopardy. Because about 75% of the Point Roberts precinct voted for a presidential candidate in 2024 other than the eventual election winner, I am much more sympathetic over the plight of their community than I would be otherwise, but I similarly endorse choices being made by Canadians to do business elsewhere than the United States. I was grateful to have been welcomed to Canada and embarrassed as a United States citizen to accept the hospitality.
From Lake of the Woods to the Strait of Georgia, the United States and Canada have treated the boundary between their two nations at the 49 parallel as would two neighbors sharing a fence. Keep your dog off my lawn, but the kids are welcome to come over any time so long as they behave themselves. This has been so since 1818, when the Anglo–American Convention began fixing the line that so flummoxes the American president today. We found crossing the border to be as uncomplicated as ever, but fear for the sake of our neighbors on the Tsawwassen Peninsula that the animus inhibiting trade across that line will not soon be redressed.