Outlet

The intervention Outlet is for 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 glacial forces of the Great Lake.

The Lake minded its glaciate body out of its bed, ground up a valley through a high escarpment, sheltering the south shore. The reach of the lake here holds tight to this stone, a shifting course pulling 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).

This confluence forms a damp exchange at the Head, 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 sands across its throat. These sands separate the head from the lake, forming 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. A common bowl for major steel, petrochemical and textile operations. Now a harbour, the great basin lays with almost a quarter of its remaining 250 hectares under an average of 15 meters of toxic contaminate.

The throat has since been collard and solidified and the sands now drone under 150,000 vehicles a day. Two (2) 2.5 km bridges hold eight lanes of freeway 200 feet in the air.

The intervention echoed the last location of the outlet, where the sands once allowed the basin to spill into the lake. The recordings used were made of water sources and fauna from head-of-the-lake's upper benches,

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

this 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.