I lay my head not far from an old GE plant. I like to think I live just outside of its plume. A childhood east of oil refineries—I comprehend in prevailing winds, and here I’d be on the good side, but does such a measure translate.
What’s talked of here is groundwater.
The plant left a lot of itself on that site, and beyond it: the structures, the poisonous offal, the seeped-in PCBs, TCE, the scrap asbestos sold to employees as house insulation. A hundred twenty-some years’ worth of this, about the length of my own history on this continent. It made streetcars, refrigerators, train engines, electric motors, insulated wire. It manufactured a modern age. It gave Nogojiwanong the nickname Electric City. The place once teemed with engineers.
Hard now, as a latecomer, to imagine the site so occupied, so active and functioning, the train tracks snaking off the property more than just speedbumps across crumbling city streets. The dereliction reads as nearly total—a crater larger than itself, extending into the neighbourhoods surrounding, into the groundwater, into the River That Beats Like a Heart—though there remains some industry, mostly nuclear in nature, and GE still keeps some engineers, and the west parking lots still fill modestly in the mornings, but the south lot is closed to cars, capped for the volatile compounds in the waste oils they used to spray as dust suppressant. The doing it took to dig up the report that states this: what’s on and in the land, what they put there, how much remains, how safe or unsafe. Walking past all this is like walking past a prison: chainlink, barbed wire, distant, imposing walls.
West and north of their parking areas is a treed lot, growing untended in its age and from time to time treated as illicit human garbage dump: old mattress, propane canister, plastic bottles through the ages. The exertions of cattails, buckthorn, crab apple, Manitoba maple, sugar maple, willow, chokecherry. Hints online that the site may have once held a research facility turned veterans’ hospital turned burned-out building. Old stone steps in this unlikely bit of forest. I used to love to walk around in there, and so did a lot of others: paths worn every which way through the scrub. There have always been No Trespassing signs, Private Property signs, but few obeyed and no one enforced. Then housing became too hard to find and drug poisoning too rampant, and story goes it became a place where humans lived and died and were violated and found shelter. It became like anywhere else. Up went the chainlink, the barbed wire, around the trees, around the walking paths, around the poisonous south parking lot. I miss it dearly.
But water disregards the barricade: the rain moves from road to gutter, under fence, onto footpath, making runnels, around the bollards, down into where we all used to walk. Toying with the fenceline, the very concept, inside and outside again. A good lesson.
I braid stakes through rabbit fencing, keep out the undesirables, protect my lettuce and peas and beans. They go about keeping the yard’s fence porous, digging into ground, bending back the chainlink. They flout like water flouts. The dog mystified in the mornings when we can’t go up that driveway, over to that private green patch, into that backyard. Sometimes it’s clear that every other being has it right and we have it wrong.
I’ve started walking the perimeter of GE’s fence, a bit of an exercise, both protest and expression of private sadness. I don’t flout, don’t have the guts in the face of a demarcation so complete. And their theory of chainlink holds that they must obliterate everything within six feet of the fenceline. I walk, in spots, on a thick bed of woodchips. The fence hooks a sudden right angle and I climb farther up the hill, away from all this, toward the water tower, a field of little blue scilla soon attracting me back, to face it. I know, if I were to start asking questions of GE’s personnel, that my care for this scrubby tract of land would be incomprehensible, prohibited, voided. On the parking-lot side of their enclosure, I’m stared at by security, just for looking in. High-vis vest, clenched jaw. I can see where people have dumped their trash. A robin dips under the fence, then a grackle. Chokecherries stand among copious chipped remains.
I need to learn the word for this phenomenon, for this form of loss. The profound gap this fence has created in the neighbourhood, in me—a quiet at its core, trying to transform into acquiescence, trying to flow like water, failing at it. This language I operate in has so little to give to this process that we repeat and repeat, barricades multiplying. But vital things are taking place before the words do come, in a whisper, to the trees standing on the other side.
I like the collection of things the fence can't stop; water, birds, vision, memory.
Well explored.