DATASET 03
East
They say you’ll know the way if you’ve walked it before in a different life. Some say they heard a call, something insistent and unquenchable, pointing them back east to a place with many names and shifting edges. Objects retain a shade of their original home, their original makers, ancestors who whisper through stains and chips and creases, making maps that can only be deciphered in altered states.
Mystical or not, our research indicates that those who already have a connection to Backwater—whether biological, historical or metaphysical—are far more likely to find their way there, sometimes over very long distances with little solid information. Those not in that category can expect to find themselves waylaid or beset by catastrophe on the way there or back.
Antique leather “spirit map”, created by an unknown artist circa 1810. Courtesy of the Red Shell family.
RETURNED DISCIPLES OF TAL BARAT
Our first local landmark was actually mostly in the ocean. Structural remains of the original Acadian settlement of Port Meduse stick out of the water on a coast that has eroded considerably over the last 250 years, near a swampy delta in the southern part of Pokelogan territory. The name probably derives from the same source as L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland: L’anse aux meduses, French for Jellyfish Bay.
Five hundred years before the French, the first Norse settlers named the bay Tunglskinforaðhǫfn (literally “harbour of moon creatures”) and built sod houses into the bluff to the north. The Tal Barat folk, who settled in Backwater around the mid 20th century, have long emulated this tradition. They built modern, sophisticated versions of the traditional sod house, which can be seen jutting at strange angles out of the earth.
Curiously, this silty delta features a number of unusual standing stones or cairns, perhaps carved from a quarry to the northwest. In autumn, the swamp turns red with cairnberries, a variant of wild cranberry usually cooked into jam or dried into tea by locals.
Remains of a sod house near Darger’s Head, circa 1890.
Cantilevered Tal Barat house built into the rock, circa 1979.
PIRATE RADIO
Of the people we interviewed who had a personal connection to Backwater, 80% confirmed that the Autonomous District of Pokelogan has an official radio broadcasting station and had listened to a broadcast. 30% claimed to have seen a local television program at some point when they lived in Pokelogan.
Our interviewees, ham radio enthusiasts Lee M. and his son Randy M., have recorded eight instances of rogue transmissions* on frequencies they don’t belong. They believe these transmissions originated in Backwater, and that their purpose is to communicate with those who seek the mysteries of this place.
*We hope to be able to digitize these recordings in future.
We think the coywolf, one of Pokelogan’s apex predators and a notorious pest, is a fitting mascot for a Backwater radio station: a hybrid that survives by improvising.
PSYCHIC AUTOCARTOGRAPHY
At some point in the 1990s, Pokelogan University (a small and unaccredited institution established by renegade theosophists in 1919) offered a course called Introduction to Psychic Autocartography, taught by visiting scholar Dr. Niflyn Eugast. The underlying assumption seems to be that physical locations intersect with a person’s internal psycho-spiritual configuration, itself imagined as a geographical landscape, and that one may reach deep insight about the self by a sort of automatic map-making.
The brochure below contains an excerpt from what is apparently the definitive text on the subject, A Legend Is Born by Dr. Atef Diab. Could this possibly be the same Atef Diab that Anna Miller corresponded with? So far, we have not been able to find a physical or digital copy of this book and so cannot confirm that it really exists.
[CLICK TO ENLARGE BROCHURE BELOW]
SIDE 1: Crystals, charts and ghost hunting tools are for sale at the Arts Store. Pokelogan University’s Academy of Metaphysical Sciences offers courses in such subjects as “Astrology for Fishermen” and “Energy Balancing with Crystals” for prices listed in Ranz (PRz).
SIDE 2: A description of the purported “ancient mapmaking tradition” of the Tal Barat that developed into psychic autocartography, taught by Swiss master Dr. Niflyn Eugast. An excerpt from the seminal text “A Legend is Born” by Atef Diab presents the spiritual seeker as an alchemist exploring modalities.
