Hate your commute?
Join the club, but first spare a twinge of sympathy for the intrepid high school students in a postage-stamp U.S. outpost called Point Roberts, Wash.
Each weekday morning, the students begin a daily odyssey that takes them on a bus north along Tyee Dr. till they reach the control post at the U.S.-Canada border separating Washington from British Columbia.
After clearing customs, the bus ventures into Canada and traces 56th St. north through Delta, B.C., before bearing east on Highway 99, till the travellers arrive at the Peace Arch border crossing.
There, the bus lumbers back into the United States, through the town of Blaine, Wash., where it delivers its charges at the local high school.
Several hours later, the students make the same journey in reverse.
That makes four international border crossings — a day.
What’s going on?
Point Roberts constitutes a rare present-day example of a once common geographical entity known as an enclave.
Or an exclave.
Or, because it borders partly on water, a pene-enclave or a pene-exclave.
To be honest, the name is kind of complicated.
But the concept is not.
Point Roberts is a tract of U.S. territory that:
A. Is not an island;
B. Is unconnected by land to any other part of the United States; and
C. Looks really weird on a map.
To travel overland from Point Roberts to another part of the United States, you have to go through Canada.
In fact, it is difficult at first glance to understand why Point Roberts is not part of Canada.
“It’s much more a part of the lower B.C. mainland than it is a part of the United States,” says Viktor Konrad, an expert on borders at Carleton University in Ottawa.
Point Roberts is one of several similar territorial anomalies scattered across the longest undefended border in the world. It is also a prime example of a kind of geographical feature that was once quite common but has now almost vanished from the world’s maps.
They are known as enclaves or exclaves — the name depends on whether the feature in question is part of someone else’s country attached to yours (enclave) or a part of your country attached to someone else’s (exclave) — but you could simply call them orphans of the atlas.
Ever since the signing of the Oregon Treaty by Britain and the United States in 1846, the discontiguous speck of coastal land known as Point Roberts — measuring just 4.9 square kilometres and now with a full-time population of about 1,500 — has been forthrightly red, white and blue.
When British and U.S. negotiators agreed on the border — a westward projection of the 49th parallel into the Strait of Georgia — they did not realize the southernmost tip of the Tsawwassen peninsula nudges a couple of kilometres below that line.
British surveyors figured this out later and suggested the border be jiggled in order to put Point Roberts back where it seemed to belong. But the suggestion went nowhere.
“The British had just burned Washington down,” says Jim Julius, a Point Roberts resident. He’s referring to a British attack on the U.S. capital during the War of 1812. “We were still a little miffed at the British, and the letter didn’t get a reply.”
And that is why students in Point Roberts have to cross four international borders each day in order to get an education.
Point Roberts is not the only cartographical oddity on the North American continent — and it’s far from the biggest. (That would be Alaska, which is also an enclave/exclave of the United States.)
There are dozens more such quirks of geography distributed about the map of the world.
The Northwest Angle
Known simply as “The Angle” to those who live there — all 152 of them — the Northwest Angle is another example of faulty map-making leading to strange results. Cartographers did their best but still managed to put a substantial part of Minnesota in what is now Manitoba. That was in 1818.
Two nearby specks of what would seem to be Canadian soil also wound up in American hands. One is called Elm Point, the other is nameless, and both are uninhabited.
The land in question has an area of more than 1,500 square kilometres with extensive frontage on Lake of the Woods.
Its only overland connection to the rest of Minnesota is a gravel road running through Manitoba for about 100 kilometres.
For a fictional portrait of the area, read Lake of the Woods by American novelist Tim O’Brien.
Alburgh, Vt.
True, there’s a bridge — in fact, two bridges. One connects this otherwise disconnected offshoot of Vermont with Rouses Point, N.Y. The other links it to Swanton, Vt. If it weren’t for those two bridges, however, Alburgh would seem almost as bizarre a bit of cartography as Point Roberts.
This section of the border between the United States and British North America was negotiated in 1783, with the boundary set along the 45th parallel, leaving Alburgh and its 75 square kilometres of land jutting southward into Lake Champlain, with no terrestrial link to the rest of the United States.
Nowadays, the region’s 2,000 or so inhabitants still cross into Quebec sometimes, but only because they want to.
Campobello Island
Because it’s an island, Campobello isn’t technically an enclave/exclave. But this 40-square-kilometre orphan of Charlotte County, N.B., is a cartographic oddity just the same.
For many years, the island served as a summer retreat for former U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now a bridge bearing his name links Campobello to Lubec, Maine, but not to anywhere in Canada.
Gibraltar
The British territory of Gibraltar surveys the western entrance to the Mediterranean Sea from the tip of southern Spain. Less than seven square kilometres in area, the territory has resided in British hands since the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. The Royal Navy still maintains a base at Gibraltar, now home to about 30,000 people. Gibraltar’s status as an overseas territory under British sovereignty remains a sore point between London and Madrid.
Ceuta and Melilla
With a combined land area of about 32 square kilometres and a total population of roughly 145,000, the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla are located within Morocco. Their European lineage dates back around five centuries, to the Reconquista, when Christian warriors ousted Muslim forces from the Iberian Peninsula. Madrid regards the cities as integral parts of Spain, a position opposed by Morocco.
Llivia
Pronounced “Yeebia,” this minuscule territory of Spain is located in France, about 2 kilometres north of the French-Spanish border. It has a population of about 1,600. Llivia’s history as a discrete territory dates back to the Middle Ages. In 1659, Spain ceded a variety of similar pockets to France, but they did not include Llivia, which remained in Spanish hands because of a technicality in the treaty’s wording. Llivia boasts one of the oldest drugstores in Europe.
San Marino
The Most Serene Republic of San Marino is not merely an enclave. It’s also a country that dates back to the early years of the fourth century. Nowadays, San Marino is about 60 square kilometres in area, has a population of about 30,000 people, and is surrounded by Italy. Due in part to its isolated setting in the Apennine Mountains, the country has managed to maintain its independence over the centuries. The main spoken language is Italian.
Lesotho
After a series of debilitating battles against Boer forces advancing through southern Africa, King Moshoeshoe of the Basotho people called on Queen Victoria to declare his territory, Basutoland, a British protectorate. That was in 1867. The tiny mountain kingdom — as it is often called — has remained at least nominally independent since then and is now a constitutional monarchy under the rule of King Letsie III. Covering 30,000 square kilometres in area, surrounded by South Africa, Lesotho has a population of 2 million.
Cabinda
This enclave/exclave of Angola is sandwiched between the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It became a Portuguese protectorate in 1885 and was deemed a part of Angola at independence in 1975. Cabinda boasts major offshore oil reserves.
