Watch the video on ice monitoring and the ice boom
Clip your vest before you touch the line.
Then look where your boots are.
A cable under strain moves faster than you.
If it jumps, I can’t pull you clear.
The report calls this Phase Three.
We call it taking the strings off the breakwall,
towing them out from Buffalo,
making the mouth of Erie ready for winter.
Most pontoons: thirty feet of sealed steel,
thirty inches through, black and blunt.
Nothing graceful about it.
In a west wind, don’t waste motion.
Raise the junction plate. Fasten the buoy barrel.
Water comes over the barge while you line up the three-inch pin.
Watch the tug, not the gulls.
When I say easy, ease.
Never stand inside the bight.
At the intake crib, thirty feet under, they read the lake.
We start at thirty-nine degrees,
or on December sixteenth if the lake stays warmer.
High wind and waves can still stop us.
You asked where Canada starts.
At the chart table I’ll show you after shift.
Here, the anchor cables are numbered,
the spans lettered A through V.
The power companies divide the invoice exactly.
The weather does not.
Don’t call it a dam.
Water goes under from the first day to the last.
The steel gives loose ice a place to gather,
to freeze into its own arch
instead of running down the Niagara
toward shoreline docks and the power intakes.
In a hard winter, a west wind can stack ice twelve feet.
The boom may sink. It is made for that.
Ice rides over. Pressure passes. The pontoons rise.
Write overtopped.
Engineering will ask whether it failed.
You think I repeat myself. I do.
My first year I stepped inside the bight.
Frank swore once, pulled me back by the collar,
then went on fastening shackles.
I don’t remember what he called me.
I remember both my hands.
At night a camera watches what we built.
Most winters nobody phones. That is a good winter.
Turbines keep turning. Shoreline docks stay put.
Twenty-two miles downstream, near the Falls,
less ice reaches the power intakes.
By spring we count what remains on eastern Erie,
wait for safe water, loosen the buoy barrels,
tow every scarred string up the Buffalo River
and pull it into dry storage.
At the last span I tell you, “Pull the pin.”
You look at your boots first.
Good.
Span A swings free, blunt nose toward the Niagara.
The current takes the slack.
You give it room.
Source: Jatin Garg, 2026.
This poem won an Honourable Mention in the Niagara Falls Poetry Project 25th Anniversary Poetry Competition. It will be published with all the other entrants in a print anthology to be published by Phylum Press. To reserve a copy of the anthology please email aporteus@niagarapoetry.ca. A companion volume exploring the poetry over 6 centuries will also soon be available, and may be reserved ahead of time.
Jatin Garg is a fiction writer and poet from India whose work explores relationships, identity, memory, and the quiet pressures of everyday life. Drawn to people, places, and the ways history lingers, he combines close observation with imagination to find something unfamiliar inside ordinary experience.
