new album TURNAROUND

The Speed River Spearpoint

The spearpoint came out of the Curse of the Speed River series—the ultimate find after months of working in the river. I was cleaning a 130-year-old nail dump at the base of a small waterfall in Guelph when I shifted a boulder and pulled the point from the sand beneath it. At least 5,500 years old, and possibly as old as 12,000. Still sharp. Almost no river wear. Older than the pyramids and Stonehenge.

This may be the first spear point ever recovered from the Speed itself. The broader archaeological record shows the Guelph interior was rarely visited for roughly 13,000 years; people used the major river corridors and lived around the Great Lakes, while travelling up the Speed or Eramosa from the Grand would have led mostly into waterlogged marshland.

The film looks at how the point was likely sealed under boulders and preserved for thousands of years, and why it still looks almost new—something nearly impossible for an ancient point found in a river. The matching three-minute Short of the moment I found it is on the channel, along with the full Curse of the Speed River and Speed River Restoration playlists.

Speed River Restoration: The Board Hook

This is the first episode of Speed River Restoration. Pepper and I pulled a forged iron board hook from the Speed River—encrusted, rusty, and still strong enough to work. In the film I walk through the electrolytic reduction process: a low-voltage current in a soda-ash bath that lifts the rust without grinding away the original surface.

Six weeks later the hook emerges as 1800s blacksmith work—functional and elegantly made. I seal it with microcrystalline wax and set it in the Speed River Museum. The series continues with more iron artifacts from the same river digs that produced the spearpoint and the other finds in the Curse of the Speed River playlist.