Outlet

The intervention Outlet directs us to the geography of Head-of-the-Lake, a region situated at the western end of Lake Ontario oriented around a series of watersheds that take their shape from the glacial re-entrance that pushed out of the Great Lake.

The Lake, minding its glaciate body out of its bed, ground up a valley through the high escarpment sheltering its south shore. The reach of the lake here holds tight to this stone before shifting its course to run down its chest and tail. Years ago this stone gave way to the neck, allowing it to stretch out onto the thickly growing upper benches hanging heavy, wet and rich atop the stone.

A damp exchange at the Head forms confluence, a series of successive wetlands and streams; the accumulations of the kettle-pocked neck running into a large basin. Here the head produces a great spawning for the Lake, a spawning folded with memory, a collection of what it is and was, providing the nourishment for the greater body.

Brock University Map Library

The Great Lake protects this place through its turning. Depositing a long sandy throat. These sands that separate the head from the lake do so with a membrane, providing protection for the Head; and a back-pressure to nourish its great dreams.

Canal works between 1823 and 1836 gapped the back-pressure at the original outlet. The canal works turned Head-of-the-Lake into one of the largest industrial centres of North America. The common bowl for major steel, petrochemical and textile operations. Now a harbour, it lays with almost a quarter of its remaining 250 hectares under an average of 15 meters of toxic contaminate.

The throat has been collard and solidified and the sand spits of the neck now drone under 150,000 vehicles a day. Two (2) 2.5 km bridges hold eight lanes of freeway 200 feet in the air - it is a view entangled with the modernists’ dream and overlooking the outcomes of those fortunes.

A sounding made of recordings from the wildlife in the upper benches took place at the location of the last outlet in May of 2014.

Hamilton Public Library

A deep muck,
an affair gone too far.

a thickening viscous,
coughing on our backs.

littoral death

stint.
force.
a drain.
like a bilge pump, lacking prime

-

Coal Oil Creek
and sickness from elsewhere
and what we brought with us

the greedy exchange with the sloughs of those crashing empires

Hamilton Public Library

non-place ; trans-location, just space ; the forgetting of place.
Head-of-the-Lake.