If There Was a book About This Hallway
It would start, There is a road within the home some pine slats in the corner and lamps along the walls that give the path an endlessness at night. I remember the day I left the meterman standing in the hall. In my room I drew his hard apple face as he waited in the cold shade. No matter how slight, it is a scene from history. A scene from the book. Are dreams set in hallways because the perspective is screwed? Or because they are the long, open, unused stages in our homes? The hallway was a dry riverbed I dreamed one night, an Indian turnpike on another. (And it may have been those things before the house was here.) I never heard the meterman leave but saw he was gone when I went out to hang his sketch on the wall. Sour furniture-polish winds rolled down the dark corridor. Once a fir where each door now stands. If Christ had died in a hallway we might pray in hallways or wear little golden hallways around our necks. How can it still be unwarmed after so many passings? An outdoors that is somehow indoors. 2
built on piles
built on fill
parallel to the shore extending out from the shore
quay
wharf
pier
jetty
above: the taxonomy of docking structures below: this pole marked the high tide mark where the outermost bouys were to be positioned. It also allowed the calibration of the guy-ropes down to the anchor boxes (lobster traps filled with stones) lower left: the original nineteenth-century pier
—David Berman
2 infrastructure as corridor/portal The Third Obstruction, Spencer’s Island, Nova Scotia In 1860s Nova Scotia there was a pier and lighthouse that connected the small village of Spencer’s Island to the rest of the world via the Bay of Fundy and Atlantic Ocean. The pier, then surrounded by shipyard and now a ruin, sits in a public space amongst the remaining lighthouse, a restaurant and a campground. In 2019 the outline of the original 350-foot long structure was re-enacted by a cast of ten, the shape and dimension of the pier emerging and re- emerging with the tide over a series of days. Over a 12-hour tidal cycle,
the water flow in and out of the bay (110 billion short tons) is twice as much as the total flow of all the rivers of the world over the same period. 3 Whilst camping on an adjacent re-purposed road, our workday collaborated with the moon, nesting into the cycle of the tides. Our primary structure was a channel of water, present and then absent every 6 hours. Over a decade ago, I started to work in the beautiful, and decentralised village of Spencer’s Island, completing community-based projects focused on an infamous ghost ship, the Mary Celeste, built on this same beach in 1861. Long since fascinated with the monumental scale and character of the
2 David Berman. Actual Air . New York: Open City Books, 1999
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Fundy
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on site review 41 :: infrastructure
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