This answer, again, returns us to the river. In 1937 the Deshkan Zibii crested its banks and swamped much of the city of London, Ontario. In response, the city instituted flood control measures that arrested the seasonal submerging of the lowlands held within the oxbow. Thus, on the eve of the Second World War, the Canadian government offered up this land, which they had used for nearly sixty years as a rifle range and training ground for agriculture. Simultaneously, the advancing tide of German expansion drove the Wolf family from what was then Czechoslovakia. In 1939 Thomas Wolf purchased nearly all the land we have mapped in this piece. He planted a fruit orchard, built a house, and quietly continued his family trade in the basement, mixing paint. Within a decade, Thomas Wolf and his family established the Almatex Paint company. It expanded quickly, and before anyone could raise alarms about the environmental impact, it became a significant employer in the city. The factory closed in 2001. Its warehouses, laboratory, and factory are gone. However, the chain link fences topped with barbed wire, cement pads, and blocks of concrete threaded with rebar remain, marking where the toxic chemicals were once mixed. This summer, I led walks through a hole in the fence to this site. We poured water gathered from the ponds onto a living artwork: a ring of goldenrod planted by the Coves Collective into a trench we cut into the cement with a circular saw. This goldenrod removes lead in the soil, one of the many invisible presences Almatex left behind. In the center of the ring, we marked our presence by stacking rocks and chunks of concrete to form a cairn. In August, the former factory site is similarly ringed with four-foot-high goldenrod, nourishing swarms of bees, vibrantly declaring that these plant beings are already working to heal this place. The Coves Collective's work humbly draws attention to what these plant beings have already begun. I told those who accompanied me on my walks about Mrs. Ayshi Hassan, who wrote to the city in 1971 and informed them that all the birds had left the area, driven away by the stench of noxious fumes. I told them about the "paint pit" that children set on fire in 1966, creating a column of smoke that rose hundreds of feet above the land we stood on. I told them about the two towering evergreens that were felled in 1981 when a labour strike turned violent; the Almatex management replaced the trees with a giant pole topped with a CCTV camera. One day as I was telling these stories, two deer raced around the interior perimeter of the fence, circling us before escaping through a gap known only to them. One of the youths with me that day asked, “what is the opposite of traumatized?” Valspar, a subsidiary of Sherwin Williams, who bought out Almatex, still owns this land. Their contractors only visit the site to test the groundwater through blue test wells that dot the land.
But does the land belong to them?
michelle wilson
18
on site review 42: atlas :: being in place
:: complex systems
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