Cross-Border Dog Relations

We did not have a January Rose-coloured from Linguist-in-chief Anne-Michelle Tessier, author of such posts as Happy Halloween from Howard and other explorations of the canine/emotional insight vector. We are very excited to welcome her back in February with this excellent post, and the excellent accompanying photos. The Rose-coloured rumour mill informs us that young Bagel has been ill, and so we send out good wishes for a puke-free season to Bagel, and indeed, to you all. If you are following this reporter’s own illness journey I am still, in fact, very ill, but slightly less so than previously, and puke free. And now, over to AMT!

Some mornings I wake up with a low-grade throbbing in a vein along the back of my left hand. This usually only happens perhaps twice a year, and it began in 2010 after I had emergency retinal surgery and that vein was where my IV needle sat for eight hours. If I were the protagonist in a fairy tale, that throbbing would signal the beginning of the rising action; if I were a grizzled farmer or an army veteran, it would tell me that atmospheric pressure was dropping or the crops might could fail, etc etc. As it is, the throb makes me rub my hand and worry a little, and currently I am not running out of things to worry about.

Like most Canadians I live fairly close to the American border—half an hour’s drive from the Peace Arch crossing between British Columbia and Washington state—and as I type, our senseless crippling trade war is 48 hours away. But I also live close to an especially strange part of the US you might not know about, Point Roberts WA, and that local slash of the 49^th parallel is very much on my mind.  

A couple of weeks ago my left-hand vein was hurting, and I drove Howard and Bagel to the border with  Point Roberts’ outpost peninsula. I go about once every six weeks, and I wouldn’t have thought the border guards recognize me, but then again they do offer us dog treats (going in both directions!) and this last time the American guard didn’t even ask for my passport. I pulled up to the booth, and without reaching for my documents he said the first half of my first name like a question, “Anne?” … and when I blinked and nodded and said I was taking the dogs for a walk, he nodded back and waved me through. Anyway: there we were on familiar foreign soil, and I took us to my current favourite PR place to dog walk: Lily Point Marine Park.

Point Roberts feels to me like the setting for a lesser-known Stephen King novella. At Lily Point, I am especially easily unsettled: it’s beautiful, it’s creepy, it’s somewhat wild and remote, its entrance is just past an old graveyard with wrought-iron chained gates—but don’t imagine something too fanciful, it also has dog poo-specific trash cans. The paths wind close to the cliffs, with sudden views of metropolitan skylines in both countries, then they veer off into padded forests of ferns and pine. And they are almost the same as the forests near home, yet somehow not. The trees are a bit too quiet and when the birds do call they sound off, with hints of screaming. In these barren winter months the bushes have a preponderance of tiny white berries, like abandoned Christmas décor. On one trail you can climb down a long switchback to the rocky beach, where the wind will whip the long grass, the waves, your hair, and your dogs into a synergetic frenzy, and where we recently had an exchange with a happily barking offshore seal. [editor’s note: no photo of seal for me??] [author’s note: seals bob away fast!]

Sometimes Howard will freeze while walking here, and look out into the bushes or across the water as though he’s getting a message I can’t receive. Sometimes the messages give him the zoomies, or the urge to fling a stick into the sand. I really love this place, but I find myself consistently looking over my shoulder, watching our backs. One time we crossed paths at Lily Point with a friendly older man who had a high viz vest, a bike helmet, and a motorized unicycle—and the dogs were not surprised or thrown at all, which was almost the most baffling part of the encounter.

As I say, it’s only been two weeks since we went to Point Roberts; today it’s snowing and my barometer vein has begun to ache a little. I wonder what it will feel like the next time we go. I wonder what the snowy woods sound like there right now. I wonder if the dogs will feel that anything is different.