Finding meaning in a buried creek
Digging beneath our ever-expanding urban sprawl to explore city’s history
Poet and essayist John Terpstra’s latest book is the kind of tough-to-classify work that sends even the seasoned reviewer scrambling for clichés. Is Day
lighting Chedoke a “meditation” on the natural spaces paved over and buried beneath our ever-expanding urban sprawl? Or is it “part-personal memoir,” “part-lament for the natural world” and “part-urban geography treatise?”
Daylighting Chedoke is all of those things, but in the simplest terms it’s a short memoir about the author’s attempt to uncover the original source of a buried creek in his home city of Hamilton.
Terpstra’s lost Chedoke is just one of several creeks that run through Hamilton’s Chedoke watershed, most of them all but invisible until they cascade over the Niagara Escarpment (“the Mountain” in local parlance).
Terpstra finds himself drawn again and again to the creek’s origins, a pleasant obsession he attributes to a childhood fascination with running water and with his family’s move, from Edmonton, to a subdivision on the Mountain in the late 1960s.
There, the young Terpstra encountered the last vestiges of Chedoke before the creek was buried beneath expanding suburbs, beginning what proved to be a lifelong engagement with the landscapes of urban spaces.
The need to find meaning and a sense of tradition — if not permanence — in the perpetually changing geography of city and suburb animates Daylighting
Chedoke. Terpstra is aware of the possible futility in his search, for the creek’s source and for a broader sense of meaning in that search.
He pushes forward with wry humour, digging through archives for early city maps and interviewing older local residents who remember the creek before it was buried by developers and city planners.
He also risks life and limb to explore the massive storm drains that now divert Chedoke’s natural course down to the lake. “The landscape changes when you pursue the stories connected to it,” he writes early in his journey. “When you pursue the historical threads, the oral and written creeks that travel through time.”
Those historical threads lead Terpstra back to the late 18th century, when Pennsylvania farmer Michael Hess and his son Peter arrive at the western tip of Lake Ontario in search of a more hospitable home than post-Revolution America.
After climbing the Niagara Escarpment, the farmers followed Chedoke Creek to its source, possibly in what is now a Canadian Tire parking lot, and built a new homestead there.
At least this is the story handed down through generations of the Hess family. The truth is more complicated, as Terp- stra discovers. Stories, even those of historical record, are very much like running water, altering course to match the changing terrain.
So what is Terpstra after in his quest? More than just a new marker to add to the city’s map.
Chedoke Creek’s history functions, in Terpstra’s multi-layered, meditative prose, as a microcosm of Hamilton’s growth from a distinct urban space surrounded by farmland to a typical North American city, sprawling beyond its old borders into nebulous suburbs and exurbs that devour the countryside.
It’s a too-familiar tale, one we’d all do well to learn from, as Terpstra does in his unearthing of a buried and largely forgotten watercourse.