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Point of No Return
the Vancouver Courier, October 17, 2001
Photo: Randall Cosco
Sixteen-year-old Neil Teutsch used to cross the border to meet his best friend Bryan for a Slurpee at the 7-Eleven in Tsawwassen. Neil lives a stone's throw from the border in Point Roberts, Wash., and Bryan lives an equal distance from the border in Tsawwassen. It's only a five-minute drive, but Bryan and Neil haven't been able to see much of each other since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Point Roberts, a town of 1,000 people, is on the tip of a peninsula, completely cut off from the rest of the United States. Due to a fluke of history, the peninsula was divided at the 49th parallel by the Treaty of Washington in 1846. To get to the mainland U.S., residents have to cross the border into Tsawwassen, drive for 40 minutes through Canada and cross again at the Peace Arch at Blaine, Wash.
That's meant Port Roberts residents have experienced a dramatic change in lifestyle since crossing the border turned into a lengthy ordeal.
"Point Roberts is quite an isolated community," says Neil's mother Joan Roberts. "We're so dependent on being able to cross that border. We really don't have many facilities in our community. We depend on the facilities down in Bellingham and if we can't get to them, it's very difficult for the people in our community."
Roberts, a dual citizen of the U.S. and Canada who has lived in Point Roberts for 22 years, is the owner of Brewsters, a friendly restaurant and bar. Brewsters is frequented by locals who stop for a drink on their way back from work in Vancouver or Bellingham, but the majority of its customers are Canadians who come down to Point Roberts to take in the scenery, scope for whales and have a meal. With the new border restrictions, Roberts says her business is down around 35 per cent from this time last year. In the past month, she's had to lay off nine of her 21 employees. Orders from suppliers have been cut back and each remaining staff member has given up one shift a week.
"Most of the people that have been laid off have been part time," says Roberts, sitting at a table in the restaurant. "I do try to employ a lot of kids in the community because there's so few jobs for them, but unfortunately, they're the first ones to go."
Roberts says the economic repercussions of Sept. 11 are affecting everyone in the United States, but Point Roberts residents face additional obstacles. "There are effects that people don't think about. There are no doctors in town. There is no pharmacy. The food bank supplies five per cent of our population and they're having a hard time getting additional food up from the county. These are small issues but as a whole, it becomes really complicated for our community."
Photo: Randall Cosco
Richmond resident Matthew Lang worked in Point Roberts for eight years, running a postal outlet catering mainly to Canadian customers. He no longer runs the business, but is still connected to Point Roberts as a property owner and member of the Chamber of Commerce. "Without a doubt, this is probably the hardest time that we've gone through as a community," says Lang, a U.S. citizen and permanent resident of Canada. "We're completely dependent on Canadian citizens coming down to support the economy of Point Roberts. We have five gas stations, a half dozen restaurants, a couple of mail box and parcel places and without those Canadians coming down, this town would have none of those."
Lang attended a meeting several weeks ago where 40 Point Roberts residents raised concerns about border delays with Congressman Rick Larsen in Blaine. Even getting to the meeting was difficult-eventually Lang decided to skip the four-hour lineup at the Peace Arch and walked into Blaine on foot.
"Certainly most people understand and agree with the need for increased security. Nobody I heard speak that day said you can't go searching cars. I think everybody understands that need exists. People were saying we need to solve this thing immediately, otherwise businesses and communities on the border are going to be just devastated. If they don't change things in the next few weeks to get people across the border, it'll turn towns into ghost towns in no time."
On Oct. 2, Congressman Larsen wrote a letter to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in Seattle recommending that the PACE lanes, which normally provide express crossings for commuters, be reopened. Cars would still be subject to physical inspections, but they wouldn't have to wait in the same lines as the other vehicles. The move is necessary, he said, to ensure that businesses in Blaine and Point Roberts survive past this month.
"For family businesses in Point Roberts, there is an unmistakable correlation between traffic and economic security," Larsen wrote. "[Point Roberts] residents rely on PACE to live a normal existence [...]. Many community leaders have seen their revenues drop fifty percent since September 11th, due to the closure of the PACE lane and lower levels of traffic."
Four days later, U.S. Customs opened a second lane at Point Roberts to regular traffic, but the PACE lanes remain closed. The wait times to get into town have improved, but the Peace Arch crossing continues to have regular line ups of two hours. Sometimes the wait is as long as five hours. U.S. Customs officers are working double shifts to deal with the heightened security measures.
Point Roberts resident Steve Fowler, vice-president of a technology company in Blaine, says he's now in the process of relocating his business to Point Roberts to avoid crossing the border. In the meantime, he's trying to conduct his business from Point Roberts via telephone and the Internet. "We had it very easy before with PACE," he said. "It allowed people to live here and commute. Now there's regular border lineups of two hours and it's a big problem.
"The uncertainty factor makes it difficult. If people knew it was going to be this way for three months or five months or six months, we would be able to put some time frame on it."
There is some hope that waits will ease. A bill before the U.S. Congress could triple the amount of customs officers and provide $50 million US for new technology to monitor the border.
Ken Peck, Port Director for U.S. Customs, says the agency would like to have more staff to ease congestion at the border but he couldn't predict how long that would take. In the meantime, the PACE lane will remain closed indefinitely. "We will always be looking a different systems and perhaps we can use technology but for the near term, our focus is in providing security at the border and not in providing facilitation lanes."
Last Thursday, the Canadian government announced it will spend $12 million to hire additional customs officers. However, the new staff will be working at airports and ports where people enter Canada from overseas-not at the border.
Pat Grubb, publisher of All Point Bulletin and the Northern Light, the community newspapers of Point Roberts and Blaine, has resorted to using his boat to travel between the two communities, although he can only make the trip when the weather is good. His staff are leaving their cars at the border and walking across to get to work. Grubb thinks the new security measures are too much.
"We obviously support increased diligence but the fact is most of the [Sept. 11 terrorists] that got into the U.S. were given student visas for flight school. Canada is not a haven for terrorists. It seems silly that they're stopping all the people going across the border on a regular basis. We're law-abiding citizens and we're getting all these restrictions. Yet the terrorists are smart enough to get across the border where they're not going to get caught."
Grubb says it's ridiculous to beef up the borders when it's so easy to get around the checkpoints. "You'll see the signs saying you have to check into U.S. Customs and right beside it is a well-worn path going into Canada. No one's going to stop you. It's just a public relations exercise."
Point Roberts has a relaxed atmosphere, similar to that of the Gulf and San Juan islands. Visitors flock here in the summertime to enjoy the sunny skies and sandy beaches. The community has a subtle blend of U.S. and Canadian lifestyles-most shops use Canadian money, yet the shelves are stocked with American candy bars and the drinking age is 21. Half the residents celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving, half celebrate American Thanksgiving, and some do both. Jennylynn Fraser, who has dual citizenship, lives in a beautiful luxury home overlooking the water, but these days, it's beginning to feel more like a prison.
"Up until September 11, I was out of Point Roberts two to four times a day. Sometimes I would leave six times a day. Now, because of the increased security, there are many days I don't even leave Point Roberts because I'm saving up to try to make all my trips and appointments in one day. It's a very restricted lifestyle now for me."
Like most of the children in Point Roberts, Fraser's 12-year-old son Stephen attends school in Blaine. The school buses have a special arrangement at the border that allows them to go to the front of the line. However, parents have to wait in the lines in order to volunteer at the schools or take their children to a friend's birthday party.
On the first day after the terrorist attacks, Fraser arrived home to find several messages on her answering machine from her son's school saying he'd had a minor accident. "The last message I had was from Stephen saying, 'Mom, are you coming to get me?'"
Fraser phoned the border crossings and found out it would take over five hours to make the trip. Thankfully, Stephen phoned again and she told him to wait and take the school bus. He didn't make it home until after seven o'clock, but after some ice and rest, he felt better.
"I wasn't panicking, but I was getting quite uptight about it," says Fraser. "I was very concerned because I had no way of getting to the school to look after him."
The Frasers are now parking their car on the Canadian side of the border, walking through the checkpoint and getting into their second car, which they've left on the other side. "We're really hoping it's not going to be a permanent state of affairs, but we really don't know. We're just having to sit and wait to have the decision come down from the presidential level to determine how we live our lives day to day."
Not everyone is concerned, however-some residents consider Point Roberts' unique geography a blessing, not a curse. Paul Doyle, a U.S. citizen who has lived in the community for 11 years, works at the Blue Heron, a co-operative gallery that displays works made by local artists. "You can say it's an inconvenience, but I feel rather protected by it all. I feel safer certainly than living in a non-controlled area."
Doyle says business at the gallery is down, but it always takes a dive in the fall when the tourist season dwindles, and he doesn't want to dwell on the current problems in Point Roberts.
"When we moved here 12 years ago from Florida, we knew it was a gated community. We knew what the problems were. When we moved here there was no PACE lane and we all stood in lines. We geared our lives around it. People who had PACE stickers are used to sailing through the border crossings. Those that didn't have them still had to wait in long lines."
Back at Brewster's Restaurant, Joan Roberts is also trying to remain positive, even though she's serving the smallest crowd for Friday's happy hour that she's ever seen.
"I'm not worried about long term. I think sooner or later the border is going to come to some sort of middle ground. It's all so new. I think the initial response was to take it to the extreme. Over time, it will ease back and it will be somewhere in the middle from where it is now to where it was before."
Roberts is convinced the beauty of Point Roberts will bring people back naturally.
"Here in Point Roberts, our community is very linked with the Canadian communities across the border. We're not so much the U.S. and Canada here, although we are separate countries. The border has always been a peaceful, friendly crossing between the two countries and I think it'll get back to that."