Point Roberts, Washington is a pene-exclave of less than five square miles sitting at the tip of a Canadian peninsula just below the 49th parallel. This episode traces how the 1846 Oregon Treaty’s straight-line border sliced off the bottom of the Tsawwassen Peninsula, why the British asked for an adjustment, and how the expansionist politics of James K. Polk’s era made giving up even a square inch politically impossible.

The conversation then explores the town’s economy of cross-border arbitrage, from Sunday drinking laws and cheap gas to the P.O. box industry that gives Point Roberts 40 times more commercial mailboxes than residents. It covers the 1970s drought that led to a 1987 agreement to buy water from the Greater Vancouver Water District, the daily logistics of schoolchildren crossing the border four times a day, the absence of any medical facilities, the pandemic border closure that required a state grant and an emergency ferry, and the 2025 tariff boycott that local business owners said hit harder than COVID.

• Coast Salish history, George Vancouver naming the point, and the 1846 treaty error
• Why Polk’s ’54-40 or Fight’ politics blocked a simple border fix
• The mailbox economy, the 1858 Gold Rush tax dodgers and the Canadians Go Home signs
• School buses, dentists and vets: four border crossings for a nine-year-old’s commute
• The ‘best gated community in the U.S.’, the 2020 shutdown, the 2025 Delta fence and tariff fallout