Daylighting Chedoke: Exploring Hamilton's Hidden Creek

by John Terpstra

Chedoke is one of six creeks that weave their way through Hamilton, but it is the most hidden, lost to culverts and concrete. It sees daylight only in a couple of waterfalls where the creek flows over the edge of the Niagara Escarpment and in a short canal where it runs alongside Highway 403.

In elegant, seamless prose award-winning author John Terpstra attempts to trace Chedoke's afflicted waters back to their source, searching through historical archives and city documents, and even walking up the great storm drains that collect the water that spills from the escarpment. Daylighting Chedoke is a moving meditation on how urbanization and industrialization have literally buried our natural environment and what it would be like to free our creeks and reconsider our relationship with nature.