This is Point Roberts, a small city located on the Tsawwassen Peninsula.
While it’s only accessible by driving south from Canada, its location just below the 49th
parallel actually makes it part of the United States.
And for centuries, it was relatively accessible for Canadian and American tourists alike,
as visitors and residents could pass through Canada to access the city uninhibited.
The locals became dependent on its easy accessibility and lack of border restrictions to entice
tourists to come indulge in its not-quite-Canadian charm.
Now, that was all well and good, until it got bad and… bad.
After 9/11—and again during the pandemic—the US closed its border with Canada, completely
stranding the residents of Point Roberts.
Today, it’s struggling to survive, with one news outlet referring to it as a “ghost
town in the making.”
Point Roberts’ story, though, isn’t unique.
A myriad of towns along the US-Canada border have relied upon the absence of a secured
border for centuries.
“Stateless” cities from Maine to Washington pride themselves on their diverse communities,
but increasingly, their nebulous borders have presented new challenges for residents who
are now separated from each other by the presence of a very real boundary.
As early as the US’ founding, its shared border with Canada has been subject to good-ole
fashioned fighting.
As George Washington’s signature dried on the Treaty of Paris, land surveyors got to
work mapping the US-Canada—then called British North America—border, established at the
45th parallel.
In the following century, both countries realized that just drawing a line across a piece of
paper wasn’t the most reliable way of splitting a continent in two.
So disputes over land claims in Maine and New York slowed the process of figuring out
the surveyors’ chicken scratch for decades.
The US even started building a military fort in Canadian territory during the 1840s, which
was subsequently named “Fort Blunder” and abandoned, because the US would never
build a military base in a foreign country.
That would be crazy.
But finally, the Oregon Treaty of 1846 brought the two countries together in agreement.
They moved the US-Canada border to the 49th Parallel, which allowed the United States
to retain full ownership of Oregon, Washington, and all of the hipsters contained within.
Ever since, Americans and Canadians have lived along this line in border communities.
Point Roberts was originally settled by Canadian trappers in 1858 and has long been a vacation
community for nerds who only vacation in places created by weird surveying oddities.
Though at one point residents wanted to secede from the United States and join Canada because
they were sick of all of their awesome freedom, it remains part of the US—even though the
town leases water from Vancouver and receives assistance from the Delta, British Columbia,
fire department.
There’s a number of border towns that share culture and community along the world’s
longest “undefended border” for a variety of reasons, including Sault Ste Marie, Michigan,
and Sault Ste Marie, Ontario; Sweet Grass, Montana and Coutts, Alberta; Sumas, Washington
and Abbotsford, British Columbia; Derby Line, Vermont and Stanstead, Quebec; and Blaine,
Washington and Surrey, British Columbia.
Some, like Niagara Falls, started as vacation towns for curious tourists and barrel enthusiasts
in the 1800s, while others in British Columbia and Alberta attracted miners and entrepreneurs
during the Gold Rush.
These communities hold a certain pride in their stateless identities not defined by
nationality or citizenship without a true border.
Derby Line and Stanstead even share the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, originally built
by an American-Canadian couple in 1904, who met while living in the two towns and somehow
overcame the massive cultural divide keeping Americans and Canadians apart.
And though the US and Canada later charged the International Boundary Commission with
clearing the border of any vegetation in a six-meter, twenty-foot radius in order to
prevent any more Americans and Canadians from ever falling in love—residents of border
towns could still move freely between sister cities without passports or security checks.
The passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 further promoted the idea
of a “border-free North America”.
But 9/11—and later, COVID-19—changed everything.
At 10:05 AM on 9/11, the White House sealed the northern border with a Level 1 customs
alert, something that had never been done before.
All traffic came to a grinding halt, with lines of trucks and cars spanning 30 miles
or 50 kilometers deep in some places.
This shutdown reconfigured the US’ and Canada’s border security measures and cut off Point
Roberts from Canada entirely.
While Canada tried to maintain an open and secure border with the US after the terrorist
attacks—given that $1.9 billion in ketchup-flavored potato chips cross it each day—the northern
boundary became a “hard” line that no one could cross without identification, which
made it challenging for border communities to be the singular, cohesive entities they’d
always been.
With the US’ new border security, border town residents became required to show identification
to pass over the US-Canadian border—even when they were simply walking to the other
side of town.
While residents of Point Roberts had previously been allowed to pass through Canada without
a passport or birth certificate, they were now stopped at each security checkpoint along
the border—first while leaving the mainland, and then again while re-entering the southern
half of the Tsawwassen Peninsula.
So whenever they want to leave Point Roberts to buy those messed-up Oreo flavors that are
probably illegal in Canada, they’re subject to car searches and border agents.
And for towns all along the US-Canadian border, it’s a hard pill to swallow.
They’re not the singular communities they used to be, and with the COVID-19 pandemic
shutting down the border for much of 2020, these towns were divided once again.
Point Roberts lost 80% of its business and could no longer welcome the hundreds of part-time
residents that had previously padded its economy.
While officials did allow a ferry from Bellingham, Washington to periodically visit with tourists,
it wasn’t enough to stave off the isolation or separation residents experienced.
And though the border has now reopened, the additional burden of COVID tests, entry forms,
and vaccination requirements before entering Canada has made it even harder for border
town residents to reassemble the shattered pieces of the boundless communities they once
had.
Arbitrary borders are a big inconvenience in North America, but elsewhere in the world,
they’re the fuel that fires some of history’s most persistent conflicts.
Joseph from Real Life Lore covers many of these cases in his Nebula-exclusive series,
Modern Conflicts.
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This exclusive stuff is really what makes Nebula great, but what makes Nebula even better
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