THIS IS WHERE the Lower 48 ends.

A 4.9 square-mile forested thumb sticks into the Salish Sea like a spud barge, untethered to the contiguous United States physically and spiritually, and feeling adrift as the world zooms past without the slightest care.

Little dramatizes the detachment of Point Roberts like a ditch along the 49th parallel. It begins at Boundary Marker 1, a faded granite obelisk sculpted in Scotland in 1861 and obscured by a McMansion just feet away in British Columbia.

Point Roberts highlights the cartographical flaws of the Treaty of Oregon, which in the 1840s established the 49th parallel as the boundary between the western United States and what is now Canada. (Never mind exceptions like southern Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands — Canadian territories that dip into the 48th latitude.) British officials impetuously ceded the tip of the Tsawwassen Peninsula to create a pene-enclave, a plot accessible by land only through another country. Point Roberts is terrestrially connected to Canada but can be reached by car from the U.S. through two international border crossings.

In return, their patronage almost exclusively supported the few local eateries, gas stations, parcel posts and the grocery market in Point Roberts that now struggle to stay solvent.

“They are the end of the line; no one’s coming through there to go anywhere else,” says Laurie Trautman, director of the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University.

At a cozy cafe near the Bellingham campus, Trautman adds, “They have this unique borderland economy, unique borderland social structure, where they depend on that border, whether it’s to see people on the other side or the economics coming in.”

The hardy souls of the Point have survived previous border squabbles but their liminal existence has been tested, starting in 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the gates to the unincorporated oddity, causing the local economy to collapse. Some of Point Roberts’ small businesses ceased operations. Others crept along for two or more years.

Just when tourists started trickling back in, Trump returned to the White House, starting his second presidency by promoting the idea of annexing Canada as the 51st state. Then he declared a national emergency with outsized claims of Canadian-made fentanyl entering the United States. Trump followed that by imposing tariffs, which triggered a rare display of patriotic fervor and an unofficial Canadian boycott of America and its products.

According to U.S. federal data, Canadian visitation dropped significantly last year. It made a slight recovery in spring, but the number of crossings in Point Roberts is still half of prepandemic levels.

Canadians have not simply made a statement by spending their loonies locally. Many are scared to enter America because of aggressive treatment by U.S. border guards. Dave Duncan, who commutes from Whatcom County’s Birch Bay to manage the Point’s only grocery store, the International Marketplace, recounted how Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents examined foreigners’ cars before they reached the border checkpoint. “Nothing says welcome to America like that,” he says over a beer in Birch Bay.

The policies and actions of the Trump Administration have made a community bordered on three sides by water even more isolated while underlining the ground-level impact politics have on everyday folks.

Larry Musselwhite, who has owned a popular Point liquor store since 1993, worries few Canadians will bother visiting anymore. “People that used to come are out of the habit of coming,” he says. “Once you’re out of the habit of coming, that just snowballs.”

D. MALCOLM JOHNSTON, a retired Vancouver antique merchant who lives 2½ miles from the border in the Delta, B.C., village of Tsawwassen, used to bicycle past guards with a wave to visit the Point’s local saloon. Now he won’t cross the border. Canadians like Johnston, 70, say visiting the United States is tantamount to endorsing Trump’s actions.

“The divide is going to grow,” predicts the burly man who played rugby in his youth. “We’re not a vassal state of America.”

Retaliation takes many forms. In March, the B.C. government implemented permanent daylight saving time, which will cause Point Roberts to be out of sync with its neighbors when Washingtonians turn back the clock on Nov. 1.

Time sometimes seems to be against the inhabitants of “Point Bob,” as some locals affectionately call a community where 70% of property owners are Canadians, or “dualies,” as holders of two passports are known. Residents rely on water, electricity and the processing of septic waste across the border.

Canada essentially owns Point Roberts, says the exclave’s longtime provocateur, Brian Calder, as we drive along one of the tree-lined roads without streetlights or sidewalks. “They were just never given the keys,” he adds as a punchline.

Some residents have suggested it’s time to abandon their own ZIP code (98281) and repatriate to Canada. Not only have border hassles increased, the community struggles to attract an American service-oriented workforce because of housing shortages. Parents have to bus kids in the third grade and up to border town Blaine for public schools. American medical care is an hour’s drive away in Bellingham. 

The inherent headaches of living an island-like lifestyle have been exacerbated by politics. Moving forward, the citizenry faces complex questions about how to stimulate a plummeting economy while preserving the sleepy sensibility that attracted B.C. urbanites from the Lower Mainland in the first place.

While the summer population in Point Roberts swelled to as many as three times the population in the pre-COVID years, the place felt like a backwoods hideaway in the offseason, with deserted beaches and uninterrupted seascapes of the archipelagos of the Strait of Georgia. 

The end of the peninsula had been a remote outpost for millennia. Coast Salish peoples once employed reef net fishing off Lily Point, where today scores of bald eagles congregate in the rocky waters. The Indigenous bands built seasonal fishing camps, calling Lily Point Chelhtenem, or loosely translated, “hang salmon for drying.”

European sailors had little interest in the Point during their late 1700s explorations of the area, but had a proclivity to name every parcel of land after themselves. It was English naval officer George Vancouver who christened the Point after his friend, Capt. Henry Roberts.

A colonial settlement began a century after the first European expeditions, when Icelandic farmers and anglers looking for opportunity migrated to the peninsula from Victoria, B.C. The Icelanders worked in the salmon canneries and sawmills to establish a community. Their descendants now share the spit with retirees, British Columbians with holiday cottages and an infusion of new outsiders like Shauna Sylvester, a Vancouver climate activist with a home overlooking Boundary Bay on the east side of the Point.

Sylvester hatched a nonprofit, Resilient Point Roberts, to counter established voices that have dominated the narrative since the pandemic. Sitting in her home with fellow group leaders, Sylvester says, “We need to be thoughtful about the story that we’re telling ourselves and telling the world.” To say “this place is abandoned, that’s not a tourism campaign.”

But it is a reality to the dwindling business community.

ON A QUIET APRIL morning at the Reef Tavern, a salty breeze from the Strait of Georgia cools the barroom, where the establishment’s colorful owner is preparing his once-popular hangout for the summer.

Nick Kiniski, an alternate on the 1984 Canadian Olympic wrestling team, likes to regale visitors with tales of rollicking times in the 1970s and ’80s when Canada prohibited Sunday sales of alcohol. The Reef and The Breakers, a now-razed music venue located across the street, attracted rock bands and huge crowds until liquor laws loosened for the 1986 Expo World’s Fair in Vancouver.

Kiniski, 65, has nursed his bar along since the pandemic by closing during the winter and on weekdays. But since customers have not returned, the Reef now feels like a mausoleum, its vitrines showcasing Nick’s late father, Gene Kiniski, one of Canada’s most revered professional wrestlers.

With his blond locks, sandals and patched bluejeans, Kiniski has the look of an aging surfer. He’s among those skeptical that relations between Canada and the U.S. will improve after Trump leaves office.

“It’s like in a marriage, you get caught [messing] around, it will never be the same,” he says. “I’ve had a great life here, but it’s time to go. It’s for sale. I’m done.”

Although Kiniski owns a valuable piece of seafront real estate where three orca pods pass in the summer, selling isn’t easy. A septic-only wastewater system limits commercial and residential development at Point Bob.

The building also houses Larry’s Liquor Locker, where owner Musselwhite wants out. “But who will buy it right now?” he says. “Nobody. If you looked at my numbers, you wouldn’t buy it, either.”

In 2019, the store had $1.2 million in sales, Musselwhite says. He hasn’t cleared $700,000 since the pandemic ended, with receipts trending downward.

Musselwhite greets customers with good humor and a collection of anti-Trump baseball caps. White House rhetoric has brought one positive outcome for him, though. With Canada refusing to import Kentucky bourbon and American-made wines, “They come here to get a bourbon because everybody likes a good bourbon, even Canadians,” says Musselwhite, a 76-year-old high school referee who lives in Ferndale, Whatcom County.

A half century ago, the issue was water, not whisky. Kris Lomedico, branch manager of Point Roberts Library, tells me about the water controversy of 1973 while sitting at a round table in the children’s section. Lomedico’s father, Agnar Magnusson, served as a Point Roberts water commissioner when Canadians turned off the spigot during a drought in a symbolic protest against American entitlement to their resources.

“All the wells we were using to provide the water dried up,” says Lomedico, one of the Point’s Icelandic descendants. The controversy eventually simmered down, but not before Americans in Point Roberts threatened to limit Canadian residents’ water.

The current enmity feels different to Trautman, the Bellingham border expert. Canadians, she says, think the United States is now a bigger security threat than China. “It’s not just about economics or politics, it’s about trust,” Trautman says.

The distrust has become personal for Canadian-born Tamra Hansen, owner of the Saltwater Cafe and the Pier restaurant at the small boats marina. Hansen, 60, has lived at the Point for a quarter-century; she and an ex-husband once ran a Michelin-star restaurant in the French Riviera.

A graphic designer by training, Hansen originally opened the Pier in 2011. She ran it for about five years until new marina owners wanted to change directions. When their idea failed, they asked Hansen to reopen the restaurant in 2024.

“Had I known what I know now, I would not have opened it,” she says of the boycott that has led to six-figure losses at the cafe and a 50% decline in business at the restaurant. “I always look at Point Roberts as kind of a neutral zone, where a lot of us are dual citizens. I understand, their sovereignty was threatened. But they’re taking it out on the wrong people.”

On a few sun-swept weekends in March and April, it didn’t seem like the Point had issues attracting Canadians. One afternoon, Hansen’s cafe had no available tables inside. A few miles down Marine Drive, the parking lot at Point Roberts Golf & Country Club was filled with B.C. license plates.

The brief bustle offered a hint of the recent past, locals told me, when summer weekends meant cars lined up two lights from the border station. Back then, Tsawwassen residents drove across regularly for inexpensive gas and to collect parcels to avoid Canadian taxes on big-ticket items. Hansen says they also stopped at her cafe for lunch or coffee and pastries.

The incidental business that once padded the margins is gone. Hansen and a partner recently created 2 Salty Blondes, an artisanal salt company they hope can become a local success to offset the losses and bring attention to the Point.

Down the street from Hansen’s establishments, Annelle Norman, 75, has tried to foster fellowship by staging daily noon protests against the Trump Administration. She stands and waves her signs in front of the community billboard and signage for Point Fuel, where gas prices are listed in liters.

Democratic candidate Kamala Harris outpolled President Trump in Point Roberts by 790-277 votes in the 2024 election, according to Whatcom County records. But neither those results nor the Point’s dedicated protesters have swayed enough Canadians to return, particularly after the British Columbia government eliminated the consumer carbon tax last year that resulted in an immediate drop in the price at the pumps. Heading into the tourist season, the waterfront rental Norman manages had four reservations — three of them for only two days each. It used to get booked for the entire summer.

“Someone is going to have to tell the merchants it’s over,” says Johnston, the Tsawwassen resident. “They are going to have to grow up and realize the world has changed.”

JOHNSTON HAD COME as close to America as he had been in a long while, standing at the boundary — a foot-tall yellow curb in a quiet Tsawwassen cul-de-sac. Two U.S. Border Patrol cars idled a few yards away in America.

Residents on both sides of the curb have accepted enhanced surveillance since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on U.S. targets. But old-timers say the ambience changed after 9/11 when residents could no longer hop the curve for neighborly visits.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials in Blaine declined to be interviewed through an agency spokesperson. In an email statement responding to a list of questions, officials said, in part, Point Roberts “sees fewer travelers than larger ports, but CBP officers maintain the same high standards of vigilance, security and professionalism as at any other port of entry.”

As Johnston pointed to cameras monitoring our movements, a 60-horsepower Kubota tractor with an eight-foot flail mower chugged down the Point’s Marine Drive in the distance. Inside the cab was Calder, a white-haired Vancouver native, whose grandfather arrived at the Point in 1895 by rowboat. Calder, 85, says he clears overgrown brush that obstructs the Point’s roads because Whatcom County staff is slow to respond. Canadians won’t come, Americans won’t help, he grumbles.

Calder cuts the high-pitch whine of his tractor, walks to the yellow curb and shakes Johnston’s hand. The strangers share a feeling of uncertainty about Point Roberts.

Suddenly, Tsawwassen artist Lauren Klimek enters the cul-de-sac with a more hopeful outlook. She planted wildflower seeds along the 49th parallel during the pandemic. Klimek, 35, walks to the boundary periodically to check on the golden, crimson and purple blooms.

She felt empathy for the Americans trapped behind the border gates during COVID, so Klimek erected a sign at her plot. “Here’s our little peace garden, symbolizing our friendship between America and Canada.”

The handmade sign is no longer there, like a once-impenetrable fellowship that has been lost through careless politics.

Gone in an instant.