Speaker 1: I never thought retirement would mean spending this much time
Speaker 1: among maps, let alone doubt in their very purpose. I
Speaker 1: came to it honestly. I suppose four decades in the
Speaker 1: world of nautical cartography have left me with a certain
Speaker 1: stubborn faith in the lines we draw. Even in Cornwall,
Speaker 1: surrounded by centuries of legends about vanishing ships and beacons
Speaker 1: lost to the fog, properly made map has always felt
Speaker 1: like a promise, you are here, the land and sea
Speaker 1: will behave. When I agreed to volunteer at the corm
Speaker 1: Or Maritime Museum, I pictured myself as a kind of
Speaker 1: living annotation. I would label the old charts for public
Speaker 1: display fran at wyward pushbins, set straight. Anything that looked
Speaker 1: like a fancy from its snuck in among the true stories.
Speaker 1: I like order, the sense that everything has, or at
Speaker 1: least to add, its precise location. On my first week, Vin,
Speaker 1: the curator, assigned me a back room full of rolled maps,
Speaker 1: each bristling with brittle tape, coppery, handwritting, and the faint
Speaker 1: musk of old salt and paper meldy I cataloged for
Speaker 1: comfort year scale shaped latitude. The work had the kind
Speaker 1: of quiet it allows the mind to free will, at
Speaker 1: least until I am all the eighteen thirty two Admiralty
Speaker 1: chart and frowned just off the southern arm of the
Speaker 1: Lizard peninsula, blank sweep of water. In any chart I known,
Speaker 1: there was a knee triangle of land, clearly labeled Iyre Island.
Speaker 1: An accompanying notation in the margin, written with the same
Speaker 1: calm confidence as any headland or bay, gave his coordinates
Speaker 1: and the legend warning cholzen of ire aunt but hurriedly unprecedented.
Speaker 1: I marked it down in my loger curiosity for a vienne,
Speaker 1: perhaps of the next museum news letter. Then two days
Speaker 1: later I opened a different chop from eighteen ninety nine,
Speaker 1: this one Spanish in origin, donated by an amateur collector.
Speaker 1: My eyes were tired from working on the finding Colonna phalaciuri.
Speaker 1: But there again was Iyre Island, different hand, slightly shifted topography,
Speaker 1: but in exactly or as nearly as makes no odds,
Speaker 1: the same position the cartographer had written in flowing Spanish
Speaker 1: arl are seabirds abundant a voidiste passage. I sat back,
Speaker 1: pressed my knuckles into the small of my back, and
Speaker 1: reached reflexively for my mug of coal tea r island
Speaker 1: twice separated by nearly seventy years, two different mapping traditions.
Speaker 1: Yet neither chart matched any reference I'd seen in the
Speaker 1: hydrographic record. For the sake of due diligence, I checked
Speaker 1: the modern charts that Vivienne had approved for our visitors
Speaker 1: display Not then a pale and broken wash of blue
Speaker 1: stretched up from the headland, all the weight of the
Speaker 1: aisles of Sully and beyond no Blipsit was open water.
Speaker 1: Had I missed a famous sir? I flipped open my
Speaker 1: tattered edition of England's Phantom Miles of Fun read light
Speaker 1: on footnotes. There among tales of high Brussel and the
Speaker 1: vanished Lioness. No reference to hire theory won a common
Speaker 1: mappy mistake theory too, a quickly changed place name issized
Speaker 1: by local authorities. More likely, I supposed it was just
Speaker 1: the same error, copied from one chart to the next.
Speaker 1: Yet I couldn't shake the odd precision. The names match,
Speaker 1: the location aligned, and even the descriptive notation shows to
Speaker 1: the North Sea birds. Fock felt as if the island were,
Speaker 1: if not quite real, then at least somehow present in
Speaker 1: the minds of these far up our chart makers. Should
Speaker 1: I have shrugg be moved on? Probably instead, without quite
Speaker 1: planning it, I slept both maps and to protect a folder,
Speaker 1: and rowed out a note for Vivienne Possible an omily
Speaker 1: Are island recurs on multiple historic maps, no known counterpart
Speaker 1: in modern charts worth a second look. It would have
Speaker 1: been easy to dismiss as an old sailor's slip of
Speaker 1: the hand. But there was something too crisp, too consistent
Speaker 1: about the confidence with which this non existent place streaded
Speaker 1: its way through otherwise careful records. I felt a slow
Speaker 1: electric nibble of curiosity, of feeling I hadn't it since
Speaker 1: my ear lest surveying days, A place that shouldn't be there,
Speaker 1: whose only obvious quality was that it persisted against all reason.
Speaker 1: Even as I walked out into the museum's main hall,
Speaker 1: I found myself glancing through the window at the faint
Speaker 1: shimmer of the mid morning sea, wondering whether somewhere behind
Speaker 1: the haze an invisible island nestled right where it shouldn't.
Speaker 1: I arrived at the museum early most days, the sharp
Speaker 1: tang of salt from the nearby wharf mixed with the
Speaker 1: comforting scents inside walkst hardwood boards, linseed all meldeed bookof
Speaker 1: and Brian's stained canvas. I always made a slow turf
Speaker 1: through the exhibits before settling in idly tracing my fingers
Speaker 1: across battered binnacles and polished ship bells. There's something about
Speaker 1: the combination of new light and old brass that makes
Speaker 1: the world feel exactly balanced. Vivigne presided over the museum
Speaker 1: like a hawk, thin, wiry, sharp eyed, her hands always
Speaker 1: smudged with graphite or sticky from some chemicals should been
Speaker 1: using to restore paint. The other volunteers called her the map,
Speaker 1: which but only when she was out of vyshap to
Speaker 1: me she was a welcome reminded that certainty is always
Speaker 1: in limited supply. Morning, Arthur, she said, without looking up
Speaker 1: from her stack of forms. You turned up before the
Speaker 1: heating habit is hard, I replied, smithing a ripple in
Speaker 1: my shirt and fighting the urge to correct the angle
Speaker 1: of a slantin model schooner. Near bah Peter, the local
Speaker 1: history teacher swept in one a gust of kelp scented
Speaker 1: here soon after, always greeting us too loudly his job
Speaker 1: as he used to joke was to put legends in
Speaker 1: context for the children, and to sneak newly drawn maps
Speaker 1: out to his classrooms. I've got the pupil's making salt,
Speaker 1: though corse signs. Peter announced us that morning, as Vivin
Speaker 1: pretended not to listen. They are inventing islands wholesale. One
Speaker 1: has a unicorn beach. Put her on your list of
Speaker 1: charting errors. Arthur, he winked. His beard was always full
Speaker 1: of baked crumbs from the bakery across the street. Most mournings,
Speaker 1: the three of us jostled the tangled middle ground between
Speaker 1: seriousness and story. The museum itself performed this dance two
Speaker 1: brass portholes mounted next to old pub photos plaques commemorating
Speaker 1: both real storms and entirely questionable sea monsters. Old locals
Speaker 1: like to say Cornwall is a place where the pass
Speaker 1: never goes away, It just turns around like a gull
Speaker 1: hoping for chips. The town beyond the windows had the
Speaker 1: same balance. Whitewashed terraces oval with the docks and the
Speaker 1: high cliffs pressed every lane closer to the water. Everyone
Speaker 1: knew everyone. Children grew up learning how to read nautical
Speaker 1: shots before they could recite their home address. You could
Speaker 1: see mapped painted on fish market walls, tattooed on forearms
Speaker 1: and hung as curtains, and harbor fer and pubs. Even
Speaker 1: the local supermarket gave away printed tide tables twice a year,
Speaker 1: along with recipe cards. I'd lived here two decades, long
Speaker 1: enough from my brisk outside of politeness to soften into
Speaker 1: real affection. Each morning after the museum, I'd take a
Speaker 1: walk along the wharf, watching cargo get unloaded, girls ride
Speaker 1: in the wind like they drawn their own set of
Speaker 1: lines for the air. My world was orderly but porous,
Speaker 1: full of small surprises, jokes, and the quiet tolerance of
Speaker 1: stories that sometimes only half fit the facts. My own
Speaker 1: relationship with legend and truth had always been this way.
Speaker 1: Maps could be flawed, stories could fill the gaps. I'd
Speaker 1: Repeater for letting his students draw make believe islands, but
Speaker 1: secretly I admired how quickly a group of children's stories
Speaker 1: could trace their way into town shared memory. Even so,
Speaker 1: if you'd asked me whether I believed in anything a
Speaker 1: mat or lost, I'd have laughed and said not if
Speaker 1: I can help it. Yet, there are certain questions that
Speaker 1: land in your mind and won't lift off again, no
Speaker 1: matter how often you try to show them away, Which
Speaker 1: is why three days after my initial discovery, I found
Speaker 1: myself telling vi Vienne and Peter about Ire Island, half
Speaker 1: expecting them to roll their eyes. We keep seeing the
Speaker 1: Sire Island here and here. I placed the two charts
Speaker 1: side beside, stabbed a finger out the familiar, unlikely patch
Speaker 1: of ocean. But there is nothing in the hydrographic record,
Speaker 1: not even as a mariner's error. I just wondered to
Speaker 1: f either of you had come across it in local stories.
Speaker 1: Vivienn only raised her eyebrows, the coroner of her mouth
Speaker 1: twitching Ire Island. Oh everyone knows about it, she replied,
Speaker 1: like I just asked whether the sun rose in the east.
Speaker 1: I blinked, genuinely, not blessed. Are you seriously? Peter glanced over,
Speaker 1: a reading upside down. Yeah, sure, I wear the gillemot's nest.
Speaker 1: He pointed through the wind to Vegas southward, as if
Speaker 1: the island might drift into view at any moment. Kids
Speaker 1: ask about it all the time, well more when I
Speaker 1: was young. Maybe it's always foggy round there. Vivin nodded
Speaker 1: with more embassies than usual. Funny you've not heard folk
Speaker 1: mention it. Arthur see gets thick with fog by the
Speaker 1: island's edge. Some say it's best left alone. I grew
Speaker 1: up here, said a volunteer named Roof, from across the room,
Speaker 1: polishing a bell. My grandmother used to say, it's with
Speaker 1: the seal's hold. Council course, no one lands, bad luck Supposedly,
Speaker 1: or she gri into Mayvy. The council won't let you
Speaker 1: back for a full minute. I felt as if I'd
Speaker 1: stepped side, was into a pantomime. These went half remember
Speaker 1: tales or wings a tourists. The matter of fact tone
Speaker 1: in their voices caught me completely off guard. What do
Speaker 1: you mean, no one lands? I tried, my voice, losing
Speaker 1: some of its intended skepticism. If it's real, why isn't
Speaker 1: it on every chart? Vivin shrugged, busy with a pencil
Speaker 1: and laminated exhibits scape. Perhaps it moves, or perhaps the
Speaker 1: official charts are too fixed in their ways. Some things exist,
Speaker 1: whether are not the record keepers know? Peter laughed, legend
Speaker 1: Trump's bureaucracy. Arthur always has ies. I hesitated, unsure where
Speaker 1: my question would even land. But there are no physical records,
Speaker 1: ship logs, tied tables, nothing. Have never even seen a
Speaker 1: reference until these old charts, Ruth jined back in cheerfully, Oh,
Speaker 1: we talk about it when the FOG's stick or when
Speaker 1: the kiddiwake's roost outside. No one actually claimed to have
Speaker 1: stepped on the island. Peter claimed he'd seen it plain
Speaker 1: in his day, from a school trip in the seventies.
Speaker 1: A great little drop of land right out in the haze,
Speaker 1: Vivienne only said, used to watch the light off at evening,
Speaker 1: just to the left of the bay, when the sun's low.
Speaker 1: Each account was delivered without so much as a wink.
Speaker 1: It wasn't an Anxiet joke. It felt more like a
Speaker 1: local fact, so widely it seemed it wouldn't occur to
Speaker 1: anyone to doubt it. The feeling that I was misunderstanding
Speaker 1: something essential, some layer of local language, or an elaborate
Speaker 1: tradition left unexplained, left me faintly disoriented. Were they all
Speaker 1: pulling my leg? Or was I the only one out
Speaker 1: of step? That deepenable of curiosity toned to a gentle
Speaker 1: but persistent ditch. The question was no longer about one
Speaker 1: odd island on a couple of old maps. It was
Speaker 1: about why everyone seemed so settled in knowledge had never
Speaker 1: even encountered. By the time I left the museum that afternoon,
Speaker 1: I couldn't help looking back over my shoulder, half expecting
Speaker 1: to see our islands trangle hovering somewhere on the edge
Speaker 1: of the horizon, just waiting to be acknowledged. The restlessness
Speaker 1: carried over well into the next day. After an unusually
Speaker 1: brisk night breeze, the morning air was clear enough to cot,
Speaker 1: the sun dazzling off the harbor's boats glittered in the
Speaker 1: tidal pools. I let myself in before opening, and settled
Speaker 1: at the small reading table in the museum's back room.
Speaker 1: My hands wrapped round and mugged that I'd refulled three
Speaker 1: times without remembering. I followed my curiosity where it led
Speaker 1: straight into the archive room. The museum's archive was more
Speaker 1: a patchwork of local generosity than any coherent system. Faded shiplocks,
Speaker 1: scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, a motley heap of lighthouse keeper notes,
Speaker 1: and half the cipher diaries. On a whim, I pulled
Speaker 1: the ship register for nineteen o two, which had been
Speaker 1: donated by the terminally cheerful widow of an actual sea captain.
Speaker 1: I read for an hour rivals, departures, whether minor incidents
Speaker 1: with lines and sail. Then in the June entries the
Speaker 1: words rounded iro dense, bird life, adjusted twenty degrees for shoals,
Speaker 1: I froze. The log was knee methodical and referenced to
Speaker 1: other familiar landmarks near by without fuss. The mention felt casual,
Speaker 1: almost beside the point rounded are no other explanation, just
Speaker 1: something you do of sailing a coast. The logs before
Speaker 1: and after that year made no mention of such an island,
Speaker 1: nor did several other ship logs I checked, except for
Speaker 1: one from nineteen fifteen, in which the writer described navigating
Speaker 1: by fog bot beyond Are, but just a few inches
Speaker 1: later the same captain refers to a cross him with
Speaker 1: no land between here and sully no Ir or island there.
Speaker 1: The deeper I dug, the more the wreckord flickered. A
Speaker 1: lighthouse keeper's report from nineteen twenty eight refers Matto fact
Speaker 1: Lay two for gathering at ire, Yet reports for the
Speaker 1: years before and after made no reference to it whatsoever,
Speaker 1: even stranger A voyage diary from an amateur dots mandated
Speaker 1: nineteen forty five Marle of the position of Ire Island,
Speaker 1: but then, after scrubbing a note in the margin of
Speaker 1: Foggy impassable, he crossed out the name entirely. I started
Speaker 1: comparing these records to the official hydrographic survey charts. Even
Speaker 1: in the annotated local coppice strewn with coffee stains, crowd
Speaker 1: writing and playful caricature, as there were references to your
Speaker 1: shoals off ire in some and total silence in others.
Speaker 1: No consistency, just a recurring ghosts in the records. Peter
Speaker 1: agreed to help me dig further. After school, we walked
Speaker 1: down to Saint Patrock's Primary. He showed me a whole
Speaker 1: line of children's illustrated maps. I made dragons, an exaggerated
Speaker 1: of lighthouses. Several drawings included Ayre Island, invariably just south
Speaker 1: of the headland, crayon notes, reefs segels live here or
Speaker 1: were the seals rest or fog stay away? The idea
Speaker 1: of the island seemed embedded and had the youngest learned
Speaker 1: picture of their own. Wild At the town library, Missus Stallaway,
Speaker 1: the gray haired librarian with the uncanny ability to recall
Speaker 1: every title shelved in the last ten years. Let us
Speaker 1: sort through stacks of local almanacs and pocket guide books.
Speaker 1: Some editions had a short paragraph the curious ire Island
Speaker 1: often try uded in mist is said to break the
Speaker 1: view south. Other editions skipped the place entirely, as if
Speaker 1: the island had been ghostedded it out of local knowledge
Speaker 1: for several years at a time. When I asked the
Speaker 1: old attounts for the ones who spent afternoons in the
Speaker 1: garden or on wooden benches painted every spring, whether they
Speaker 1: needed it or not, they mostly offered warm fogg soft stoys.
Speaker 1: Missess Aynel, who'd been born two houses from mine, said
Speaker 1: she remembered seeing the island shadow from the windows growing up.
Speaker 1: She described it as a blow, like a patch of
Speaker 1: land that wasn't always in the same spot, but was
Speaker 1: always just there, whether you could step on it or not.
Speaker 1: Others were more philosophical. Maybe it's just what we called
Speaker 1: the miss bank, said mister Jameson, whose sons run one
Speaker 1: of the fishing boats out of the harbor. Falk can
Speaker 1: look like anything can. Sometimes the mind fills him more
Speaker 1: than the icy. But even he seemed reluctant to let
Speaker 1: the idea go entirely. Not one person claimed to have
Speaker 1: actually landed on Ire. Some agreed it was myth, an
Speaker 1: old habit and nursery jape, but none seemed to doubt
Speaker 1: that the island, however it was defined, was as real
Speaker 1: as any conversation about the weather. The line between story
Speaker 1: and memory twisted into a single road rope. Two days later,
Speaker 1: brood Infrun and so old tuboks of donated seaside postcards.
Speaker 1: I found a card with creases so deep I nearly
Speaker 1: overlooked it in cheerful blockie type Greetings from Ira Island.
Speaker 1: In a faded photograph, a rocky outcrop, possibly even the
Speaker 1: real coastline, taken from some unfamiliar angle, had been printed
Speaker 1: with a child's skull rowned to a spot in the mists.
Speaker 1: Seals here deeded nineteen seventy six. The stamp was familiar,
Speaker 1: but the postal address was real, matching a local house
Speaker 1: on the outskirts of town. I felt as though the
Speaker 1: more I looked, the more the lines between record and
Speaker 1: myth blurred. Ira Island's existence flickered through history and across
Speaker 1: generations in precisely the manner of those rare places that
Speaker 1: managed to be both everywhere and nowhere, both fact in
Speaker 1: the local daydream. Instead of lining up the evidence into
Speaker 1: a crisp empirical line, I found myself gathering handfuls of contradictions,
Speaker 1: official and an official, both documented and erased. There seemed
Speaker 1: to be no solid boundary. The island was real in
Speaker 1: the public mind, yet absent from every authority. It was
Speaker 1: present in Skolchovn's career on absent from navigational radar. It
Speaker 1: sat in lobooks and postcards as a placeholder for something
Speaker 1: between memory an invention. Somewhere along the way, my curiosity
Speaker 1: had outgrown the technical. The puzzle was no longer what
Speaker 1: is our island? But how can everyone believe in it
Speaker 1: so convincingly? Despite every effort documentation makes to insist otherwise?
Speaker 1: I retreated one evening too, the rising Anchor, the pub
Speaker 1: favored by both the museum staff and a certain type
Speaker 1: of local wag. Curiosity had clearly become a living rumor
Speaker 1: as soon as I ventured the subject its bread like
Speaker 1: cinders in a dry field. You remember, Joe, that time
Speaker 1: you thought you saw the herd of deer on ire,
Speaker 1: said an old fisherman. As I sipped my dark ale Joe,
Speaker 1: perhaps six decades past the age he had last raised
Speaker 1: against any deer, took his pipe out of his mouth
Speaker 1: and admitted, I might have been, or might have been
Speaker 1: a low cloud, but it was something all right. At
Speaker 1: the table behind me, two women debated with ire was
Speaker 1: the size of a football pitch or two fields with
Speaker 1: a stream? Both, however, agreed that some one's always seen it,
Speaker 1: If not you, then the person next to you. I sat,
Speaker 1: not sure whether to laff or challenge them, but to
Speaker 1: swept up in the mood to jew either. The stories
Speaker 1: rolled on of lost couts, full of island wind, of
Speaker 1: nights when the falcrn carried the echo of seabirds that
Speaker 1: couldn't be found elsewhere. Every claim was rooted in certainty.
Speaker 1: Every contradiction met with the gentle, tolerant logic of old
Speaker 1: friends who have long since given up carrying which parts
Speaker 1: of their shared history were fact in which fiction. When
Speaker 1: the pub quieted oppressed the issue, has any one here
Speaker 1: ever set foot on ire? The general foughful silence. One
Speaker 1: person smile best fully and said, that's not really the point,
Speaker 1: is it. I walked home through quiet streets, the light
Speaker 1: from upstairs windows blotting the night wetly on to the
Speaker 1: uneven stones. I found myself rehearsing arguments folk are woven
Speaker 1: into place. Old sailor's habits may be a joke that
Speaker 1: became a tradition too cherished to correct. But as my
Speaker 1: keys rattled in my pocket and another idea surface, less comfortable,
Speaker 1: much harder to let go. What if the boundary between
Speaker 1: remembered anne reel was thinner than I believed. Ire Island
Speaker 1: wasn't simply a cartographic accident, nor merely an in joke.
Speaker 1: It was something kept alive in speech, memory and rich seal,
Speaker 1: something that flickered between presents and absence according to the
Speaker 1: act of being recalled. I began to wonder, was the
Speaker 1: act of remembering ire Island as a ton enough to
Speaker 1: make it locally real, a self perpetuating conscer entences marked
Speaker 1: out in story imap and island whose main quality is
Speaker 1: that its remembered in unison across the generations. That thought
Speaker 1: was equal parts unsettling and thrilling. What else in this
Speaker 1: town or in the wider world might ere such a
Speaker 1: precarious existence hovering somewhere between agreement and actuality. Nevertheless, I
Speaker 1: slept poorly all night. I dreamt of violins appearing and
Speaker 1: disappearing with the tides, each one exchanging its name only
Speaker 1: when spoken aloud. It was the kind of misty, cornish
Speaker 1: morning that seemed to pull the world closer together, softening
Speaker 1: the edges until even the sharpest stones on the shingle
Speaker 1: beach seen to blow beneath your boots. The air was thick,
Speaker 1: humming with invisible moisture in the distant clinking of mordships.
Speaker 1: I hadn't managed more than two hours sleep, but I
Speaker 1: felt wide alert. My body moved before my mind caught up.
Speaker 1: I found myself walking the long arc of the shore
Speaker 1: east of the Lizard, Carrying the oldest of the two
Speaker 1: charts stuffed under my jacket. I retraced the lines of
Speaker 1: the map as I walked, beats crunching slate and seaweed.
Speaker 1: I stirred as close as I could to the very
Speaker 1: point where, by both old maps estimation, Ire Island should
Speaker 1: have risen from the sea. I looked out over the water,
Speaker 1: shrouded in thick banks of fog, daylight barely able to
Speaker 1: press through. I was ready, I think, to reject the
Speaker 1: whole thing. But as I was quinted into the haze,
Speaker 1: I saw it forethought I did. Just where the coordinates landed,
Speaker 1: A shadow detached itself from the mist, not a vague smudge,
Speaker 1: but an honest, almost a fine profile, a low triangle
Speaker 1: of land, battered rock on one side, pale underbelly, rising
Speaker 1: out of the breaking waves. I stared, mouth dry, my
Speaker 1: mind flickering between a marouche and reel, wanting to blink
Speaker 1: it away, and only half daring to The sight held
Speaker 1: for how long a minute less, just enough for me
Speaker 1: to catalog features and outcrop of stones near the north side,
Speaker 1: something like sund of pale grass, fleck along the shoulder,
Speaker 1: a burst of sea birds against muted sky. Then the
Speaker 1: fog shifted and the island vanish completely. I without apology,
Speaker 1: I stood there, shivering, angry at myself for believing, then
Speaker 1: doubting them, believing again, for the next hour. I ran
Speaker 1: back through town, heart hammering, flagging down Vivienne and Peter
Speaker 1: on their way into the museum. I insisted, half wild
Speaker 1: that they come see for themselves, though I must have
Speaker 1: looked half craze, clutching a chart and gesturing at empty air.
Speaker 1: We returned together. The fog had burned away, the water
Speaker 1: calmly indifferent to us scrutiny. Viviens quinted at the horizon,
Speaker 1: shaking her head, but not mocking Peter always the joker
Speaker 1: lifted his phone for a photo anyway, but the sea
Speaker 1: was as blank as ever, just the steady drumming of
Speaker 1: tide against stone. Back at the museum that afternoon, things
Speaker 1: got stranger still. The council was holding an event. I
Speaker 1: waited outside, distracted until the mayor, her sash trailing like
Speaker 1: an orambeld a new plaque on the overlook near the harbor,
Speaker 1: in raised letters, I or Island Lookout, dedicated to the
Speaker 1: generations who have shared our maritime horizon. Children clambered over
Speaker 1: the stones, laughing, asking their parents about Alan picnics and stores.
Speaker 1: A few snap photos of the plaque with their phones.
Speaker 1: When I returned to the museum's gift shop later, still bewiltered,
Speaker 1: I found a new rack of glossy postcods. There. Between
Speaker 1: brightly colored life butts and familiar sunsets were three different
Speaker 1: photographs labeled Ire Island. One breaftickingly indistinct, seemed to show
Speaker 1: a pale shape on folk bound water. It features just
Speaker 1: familiar enough to pinch at recent memory. The label in
Speaker 1: plain type Ire Island seen from the coastal path twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one. I rushed to the museum office hot thudding
Speaker 1: and pulled up the mapping software we used for interactive displays.
Speaker 1: Nothing unusual at first, but then as I crossed reference
Speaker 1: to coordinates, a fleck appeared, a tiny annotated triangle Ire Island.
Speaker 1: The record updated before my eyes, switching between presents and
Speaker 1: absence as I toggled the map layers. I called vivienover.
Speaker 1: By the time she looked, the icon was gone. Was
Speaker 1: this a computer glitch? Had someone at the council pre
Speaker 1: m of the added the island? But the data toggles
Speaker 1: didn't behave like any update I'd seen. They pulsed, faded,
Speaker 1: then reappeared, depending on which layer was active, and faintly
Speaker 1: which account was used to log in. I checked a
Speaker 1: local fishermen's navigation app on my phone. For a few seconds,
Speaker 1: a path around Ire Island appeared in their recommended route,
Speaker 1: then vanished again, as if doubting itself. I should have
Speaker 1: been afraid. Instead, I felt the steady, dizzing rush of all,
Speaker 1: as if I had stumbled into a live experiment with
Speaker 1: collective memory. In the record keeping machinery of our age
Speaker 1: were writing one another as I watch. It wasn't just
Speaker 1: that the story of ire Island resisted bits of the town.
Speaker 1: The objects, the tourist guides, the navigation software were quietly
Speaker 1: methodically altering themselves to reflect a reality that was somehow
Speaker 1: being mutually created. It was more than a story. It
Speaker 1: was reality flickering into existence wherever the consensus was strongest.
Speaker 1: The contradiction was no longer historical. It was happening in
Speaker 1: the present, material and digital evidence shifting with the tide
Speaker 1: of belief. For the first time in decades, I found
Speaker 1: myself absolutely lost, wondering and a little delighted if the
Speaker 1: act of remembering, speaking, and sharing could make a place real,
Speaker 1: at least within the delicate edges of a town's imagination.
Speaker 1: The question had changed. This was no longer a matter
Speaker 1: of correcting the record. It was about understanding how belief
Speaker 1: may communal could assemble itself into the stubborn machinery of maps, technology,
Speaker 1: and memory. Vivin lingered by my shoulder notebook, forgotten and
Speaker 1: certain whether to laugh or for an We watched the
Speaker 1: shifting computer screen blinkey or island in and out of view,
Speaker 1: the town's WiFi flickering with sudden purposes if someone somewhere
Speaker 1: was collaborating on a new draft of the local coastline
Speaker 1: in real time. Peter kept trying to photograph the screen,
Speaker 1: hoping to trap the island mid appearance. He got only
Speaker 1: a blur enough for me to second guess if my
Speaker 1: own eyes or hands were playing along? Is there are
Speaker 1: settings menu for folklore? Then he muttered, half serious, tapping
Speaker 1: the mouse something to toggle collective memory mode. The vienn
Speaker 1: chin in hand said quietly, it's not possible, and yet
Speaker 1: there it is. I could feel the pressure building behind
Speaker 1: my temples are deep growing thill that threatened to tip
Speaker 1: into something close to her to go, but never quite did.
Speaker 1: I was seeing firsthand a phenomenon breakout of rumor into physical,
Speaker 1: or at least digital form. This was more than the
Speaker 1: queen persistence of a local legend. Something in the mechanism
Speaker 1: of belief. Collective stubborn reel had reached the point where
Speaker 1: it bled into evidence, changing real systems, even as its
Speaker 1: roots lay only half way. In fact, by noon, word
Speaker 1: was trickling through town, tourist us to after Ire Island
Speaker 1: look out with grinns, eager for a myth to take home.
Speaker 1: I overheard of Vienne explaining to a retired couple from
Speaker 1: Bristol that views famous round here sometimes people say, if
Speaker 1: the light's wrong, you see nothing, but see then a
Speaker 1: just a shimmerdres An island, or at least something you
Speaker 1: might remember as one. Years later, she winked, not with irony,
Speaker 1: but as if she too had joined the game. Peter
Speaker 1: was restless. He insisted on calling three friends who ran
Speaker 1: small boats out of the harbor, asking whether the GPS
Speaker 1: units had noticed anything odd near the old shoal co ordinates.
Speaker 1: It took a while for him to return Tom's fishing boat.
Speaker 1: He sways his plotter has been avoiding a phantom bit
Speaker 1: of water since last month. No explanation from the manufacturer.
Speaker 1: The system Eruptshi and tells him he's passing too near
Speaker 1: An updates own an upt its own the vienna, asked arch,
Speaker 1: I know he thought it was soft to a fail
Speaker 1: reset everything nothing changed, he said, It's just bad luck
Speaker 1: to try to go straight, So I sail around anyway.
Speaker 1: I think he half believes the machine knows more than
Speaker 1: he does. I was left with more questions than answers.
Speaker 1: I couldn't shake a particular phrase from a book i'd
Speaker 1: shelved the week before, something about place being born again
Speaker 1: every time it is believed to exist. It felt as
Speaker 1: if I was living inside a riddle. The town shared imagination,
Speaker 1: turning an idea into a fact, at least locally, with
Speaker 1: the record quietly updating as needed. That afternoon, I found
Speaker 1: myself impulsively reaching out to former colleagues in London and
Speaker 1: Portsmouth charter enthusiasts software engineers. Survey is now locked in
Speaker 1: urban desk work. Some replied quickly interested, but amused. You're
Speaker 1: not telling me you've got a resurrection of Sandy Island
Speaker 1: down there. One emailed a trace of envy between the jokes.
Speaker 1: We get hoaxes all the time from user submitted data,
Speaker 1: but usually not with commemorative plaques by the council. Another,
Speaker 1: less humorous, wrote, I see nothing unusual sand coordinates. I did,
Speaker 1: but their data returned blank, a smooth stretch of blue,
Speaker 1: without annotations. As precise as ever. It was only when
Speaker 1: I messaged Raj, a friend from the Hydrographic Society, who
Speaker 1: measured coastal erosion in Falmouth that anything ought happened. He
Speaker 1: emailed a screen clip from the government vital Air. There
Speaker 1: just visible was a transparent polygon tagged tentatively user submitted
Speaker 1: feature IR not confirmed. In my reply, I tried to
Speaker 1: be as plain as possible. Whose user whose feature? His
Speaker 1: answer local assets only last ping from your postcode? Actually,
Speaker 1: is this some newrotreat project? The anomaly wasn't global, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't private either. It seemed to flicker into existence
Speaker 1: with their ride. In Pusmap's story, geolocations were overlaid, producing
Speaker 1: a record that was stable only for the collective, never
Speaker 1: the loane observer. Between texts and e mails, I started
Speaker 1: reviewing history where I could found to islands. The thought
Speaker 1: made mishev but for no reason I could easily name.
Speaker 1: There was Sandy Island, charted for a century in a
Speaker 1: coral sea before being raised in twenty twelve, and Berrmager
Speaker 1: hunted for in the Gulf of Mexico. Intel scientists declared
Speaker 1: it a myth, but none of those had left an
Speaker 1: active living mark in their communities. The myths had been
Speaker 1: chased to extinction, not strengthened by every telling. I spent
Speaker 1: that evening on the phone with the colleague at the
Speaker 1: University of Exeter who specialized in what he called navigation
Speaker 1: for corps of the half believed charts, vanished promontories, and
Speaker 1: locally insistent places not found anywhere else. It's unknown thing, Arthur,
Speaker 1: he said, warmly, at least in the letter turefixt of
Speaker 1: islands mistake made memory, then tradition, but usually these fade out,
Speaker 1: replaced by corrected charts or newer stories. If yours as
Speaker 1: persisting af fricator actually self perpetuating, especially in modern day
Speaker 1: to well, that's something pretty rare. Could it be deliberate
Speaker 1: a prank sustain over generations? He sounded thoughtful, possible, but unlikely.
Speaker 1: Pranks collapse when the originators move away or lose interest.
Speaker 1: Ere describing something more integrated, almost like a ritual, a
Speaker 1: kind of unspoken social agreement. I jotted a note Penn
Speaker 1: stuttering social agreement as cartography. The next morning brought a
Speaker 1: drizzle that made colors bleed from the gull's perch on
Speaker 1: slate roofs, dripping down to my own mood. The museum
Speaker 1: felt muffled. Vivienne worked in the office, Peter was out
Speaker 1: with the school group. I lobbed into the mapping software
Speaker 1: again quietly, and watched the island's marker flicker into being,
Speaker 1: then back out, depending it seemed, on which credentials or
Speaker 1: use of profiles were active. It was then that I
Speaker 1: decided this was no longer the kind of mystery solved
Speaker 1: by counting ship locks. It was something happening in apparatus
Speaker 1: of the town, in the feedback loop between its collective
Speaker 1: memory and the records it trusted. I set out, notebook
Speaker 1: in hand to interview a few more locals, Not the
Speaker 1: usual retirees or enthusiasts, but those who kept the social
Speaker 1: assistance running. The woman who processed council paperwork, the engineer
Speaker 1: who maintained radio beacons, the twenty something borist at the
Speaker 1: coffee cot. Not all believed Denyre Island with equal conviction.
Speaker 1: A story for children, said, beyond from the council folding
Speaker 1: a series of event flyers briskly. That's all the plaque
Speaker 1: was for Fawn, and I suppose for tourists. She didn't
Speaker 1: meet my eyes, as if she was already wary of
Speaker 1: having a conversation float too far from policy. Mick the
Speaker 1: engineer was more reflective radio comm's look it. Sometimes that's
Speaker 1: a trick of the repeaters, though I get out a
Speaker 1: cousette there. Sometimes a local call picks up acord and
Speaker 1: it meant to be empty, could just be atmospheric, But
Speaker 1: I always make a note for the next shift. Never hurts,
Speaker 1: so you act as if as if there's something there.
Speaker 1: Suppose I do? He grinned. I trust a local warning
Speaker 1: as much as a distract one, no sense being the
Speaker 1: reason anyone else loses a day's catch. At the coffee cart.
Speaker 1: Ruth's niece Lauren shroked, we learned about iron school, drew it,
Speaker 1: told stories, but I never saw it with my own eyes,
Speaker 1: only from photos. Maybe those postcards? Did you notice them
Speaker 1: before yesterday? I pressed? She hesitated. You know, I thought
Speaker 1: there'd be new ones for the summer. But no, that's
Speaker 1: not quite right. I feel as if I've seen them
Speaker 1: for years. Maybe I just never really looked before. The
Speaker 1: strangeness wasn't that people acted in concert, but that their
Speaker 1: memories seemed to arrange themselves along the lines drawn by
Speaker 1: communal reference. I felt a new unease bubbling up, a
Speaker 1: sense of participating in something deeply co operative with the
Speaker 1: act of believing, referencing, and preparing for ire Island kept
Speaker 1: it alive in ways that stretched crosspaper, screen and memory.
Speaker 1: I've visited Ruth, now cold in her parlor, tea and
Speaker 1: crossword to hand. I explained the date of the living loop.
Speaker 1: The council's response. She looked at me levely, then smiled.
Speaker 1: When I was a girl, we didn't worry about what
Speaker 1: was really there. We worried about what a village would
Speaker 1: remember our next spring. My brother used to say, it's
Speaker 1: only real if it keeps the story going. She sipped
Speaker 1: her tea. If people decide not to talk about ire Island,
Speaker 1: if it's seen as a passing joke or a nuisance,
Speaker 1: how long do you think it will last without belief.
Speaker 1: I don't think it stands a chance. Memory is bellas
Speaker 1: belief as anchor. The next day, at Peter's urging, the
Speaker 1: town agreed to a meeting, cold with a quiet urgency
Speaker 1: of something both ordinary and quietly unpresdent. Words spread quickly.
Speaker 1: By the time I arrived, shivering in my best windbreaker,
Speaker 1: the room above the pub was nearly full. People argued,
Speaker 1: but not with anger. A new family from London wanted
Speaker 1: to know why the Ire Island Fression was Modelingnessen's geography homework.
Speaker 1: It isn't on my phone, it isn't in official hydro records.
Speaker 1: Why keep it? Peter cheerful but sharp countered. If everyone
Speaker 1: says it's there and you have evidence, shouldn't you work
Speaker 1: out what kind of reality you're dealing with? A fisherman
Speaker 1: named Carl spoke up, what if it's more dangerous to
Speaker 1: doubt what we all agree on that there at least
Speaker 1: boat stair clear records get checked, safer for everyone, even
Speaker 1: if it is only half real. An older woman in
Speaker 1: the back set my grun used to light land and
Speaker 1: for Iro on foggy days, said it kept the rom
Speaker 1: sort of luck from coming in. She glanced around, adding
Speaker 1: I don't think she cared much if it was real.
Speaker 1: She didn't want to give up the Habit makes me
Speaker 1: feel safer too. There was polite laughter, but it was
Speaker 1: the kind you give when you're ensure her if anyone
Speaker 1: is still joking, A student from the sixth form college,
Speaker 1: tall and nervous, confess, I never heard of it until
Speaker 1: last year, but then it kept coming up, friends, teachers, souvenirs.
Speaker 1: Now I think about it all the time. I think
Speaker 1: I could draw it by hand. I hush settled a
Speaker 1: sort of group realization that the mystery of Iyr Island
Speaker 1: had in some way become theirs to tend or to
Speaker 1: set aside. I felt a powerful but gentle tension between
Speaker 1: those who wanted the town to continue its peculiar tradition
Speaker 1: and those who wished to clear away uncertainty in favor
Speaker 1: of the clean, well lit world of modern certainty. I
Speaker 1: found myself thinking again of the way the Rereco's flicker
Speaker 1: presents absence reappearance. Could it be that the collective act
Speaker 1: of believing, remembering, speaking, mapping worked as a kind of engine,
Speaker 1: not mechanical but social and psychological, iterated the idea of
Speaker 1: ire Island into existence for those that ture into its story.
Speaker 1: After the meeting, I spent an evening walking. The key
Speaker 1: sought in my thoughts with the tide was my own
Speaker 1: brain being rewritten shit by immersion in the social consensus.
Speaker 1: I recalled a half memory from my own youth, visiting
Speaker 1: Cornwall with my parents. Had I once stood at the
Speaker 1: water's edge and pointed at an island that wasn't there?
Speaker 1: Or was that memory growing now from the soil of
Speaker 1: recent months grafted onto old roots. A sense of humility
Speaker 1: came over me. The distinction and and familiar feeling of
Speaker 1: standing at the edge of certainty with a line between
Speaker 1: what was and what was agreed upon led into the
Speaker 1: same fog that surrounded Ire itself. The logical next step
Speaker 1: was to Rea which for explanations from beyond the village.
Speaker 1: I drove to the university in Falmouth, meeting doctor Townsen Welch,
Speaker 1: a psychologist with a fondness for the borderlins between myth
Speaker 1: and cognition. She listened to my full account of kinetic curiosity,
Speaker 1: her pen flying across a thick notebook. So you're saying
Speaker 1: your community's belief, she said, not only drives fortelling, but
Speaker 1: is updating records in real time ere described in a
Speaker 1: hyperlocal Medel effective phenomenon where a collective's version becomes reality
Speaker 1: among themselves even if the outside world holds differently. It doesn't, ever,
Speaker 1: Town do that in some sense, legends, misremembered events, street
Speaker 1: names invented to settle a disagreement to of course, but
Speaker 1: the presence in digital records a self updating maps that
Speaker 1: is rare, a feedback mechanism strong enough to co opt
Speaker 1: the tools men to dispel tradition, not perpetuate it. I
Speaker 1: suppose it helps that navigation these days often cross us,
Speaker 1: as from use of profiles local data, I smiled, you
Speaker 1: can almost see the system filling in the gaps, eager
Speaker 1: to please consensus reality, she mused, tapping her pen. Insolte
Speaker 1: but flexible folklore, technology and memory collapsing into one. The
Speaker 1: document creates the place, The place feeds back to the document.
Speaker 1: Over and over. We spoke about the architecture of memory,
Speaker 1: the social muscle that keep shared history alive. Doctor Welch explained,
Speaker 1: what you see is a boundary effect, as story, repeated,
Speaker 1: reference in schooling, mapped and checked, and chair grows more
Speaker 1: real for those within the loop. For some tipping point,
Speaker 1: enough agreements, sporting wrechos and outside quers can produce evidence,
Speaker 1: not as shrick, but as raification. The world is never
Speaker 1: quite a fixed fact. Its animated moment by moment, by
Speaker 1: acts of collective attention. I mentioned the island's appearance from
Speaker 1: me that missive morning on the shore. His certainty in
Speaker 1: that moment might have been prone by hours of exposure,
Speaker 1: the anticipation of the coast, collective references, the question is,
Speaker 1: did you see a mirage or did your own? My
Speaker 1: mick reel for a moment a possibility shape by all
Speaker 1: you've been told, I didn't have an answer that Evening
Speaker 1: back a home, A scrolled through all files until the
Speaker 1: blue lights stung my eyes. A phrase from a childhood
Speaker 1: teacher came to me. Maps are not the territory, but
Speaker 1: in time enough, maps can become a kind of territory themselves.
Speaker 1: Rest Thus I set out to visit the museum after hours,
Speaker 1: taking the long way through streets that seem made of
Speaker 1: half forgotten alas and lampletstone. The plaque for Ire Island
Speaker 1: Lookout gleamed under the sodium glow inside. I opened the
Speaker 1: museum Guesswick to see what visitors had said. Recent pages
Speaker 1: showed a flurry of comments. Saw the island at dawn magical.
Speaker 1: Couldn't find it on Google, but here it is on
Speaker 1: the town map. My son says, the seals are real.
Speaker 1: I believe him. A Fatton took shape. The more it
Speaker 1: was reference to marked, the more real it became. For
Speaker 1: everyone except perhaps the purest skeptic. A sudden urge sent
Speaker 1: me hunting in the store cupboard, rummaging among spare exhibits
Speaker 1: and display board dolfcuts. There in a batter box marked
Speaker 1: old tech to review, I found the oldest marine radio
Speaker 1: I'd seen in years, dials only, no digital interface. I
Speaker 1: turned it on just in case, called only static. Then
Speaker 1: the routine glugging of passentroller engines, no reference to Ayre.
Speaker 1: I spent the rest of the night arranging rough notes
Speaker 1: timeline's local stories navigation shots. Each time I tried to
Speaker 1: create a simple chronology, a Leney chain from myth to reality,
Speaker 1: it broke down. The phenomenon was not additive, but recursive.
Speaker 1: The following week, the effect only deepened. Several local ships
Speaker 1: filed new navigation routes via their auto platos. The map
Speaker 1: in the town hall Foy gained a new hand drawn
Speaker 1: ire island feature, inked in as casually as if it
Speaker 1: had always been there. Even the municipal website added an efficiue,
Speaker 1: can I visit their island? Answer? Only in your memory? Perhaps?
Speaker 1: I consulted further afield, a focal expert in Brittany who
Speaker 1: recounted stories of islands that appeared to those who need them.
Speaker 1: A hydrographer in Dublin who confessed with some embarrassment, to
Speaker 1: remembering phantom headlands that hid fishing spots from rivals. Every
Speaker 1: tale spoke to an ancient impuls need to keep the
Speaker 1: world unfinished, to spaces for stories and markers for the unknown.
Speaker 1: One utterly local, missus Perry, called me over as a
Speaker 1: pastor gate, waving a faded photograph. This one's not ire,
Speaker 1: but it feels close, she said, with the wink, showing
Speaker 1: a blurry promontory where only miss was likely peasant. We
Speaker 1: tell newcomers that if they can see the island, they
Speaker 1: are meant to stay. A sudden chill prickled my arms,
Speaker 1: not from fear, but from the sense of something monumental
Speaker 1: resting just out of ordinary sight, the idea that the
Speaker 1: island was not a fact to be proven or disproven,
Speaker 1: but an ongoing act of collaboration, a place made by memory.
Speaker 1: All day I replayed doctor Wiltch's words in my head,
Speaker 1: walled donimated by acts of collective attention. I wanted a
Speaker 1: demonstration not merely of memory, but of the process by
Speaker 1: which belief created diffidence. I set up a simple test.
Speaker 1: That Saturday, Peter's school hosted a map in the Unknown event,
Speaker 1: gathering children, parents and residents around long table stat with creons,
Speaker 1: maps and print outs of the coast line. Let's short
Speaker 1: our favorite spots, Peter Knels, passing out sheets, even the
Speaker 1: ones that move. Children went first drawing ire Island, even
Speaker 1: those who said they'd never seen it before. Parents nudged
Speaker 1: by their children's enthusiasm, drew to its profile, growing more
Speaker 1: consistent across each map as laughter and suggestions filled the room.
Speaker 1: Midway through, I locked into the mapping software from my
Speaker 1: iPad connected to the school's public WiFi. As the children
Speaker 1: pasted bright stickers on to their group map, a small
Speaker 1: annotation appeared labeled ire Island, right where the fictional features
Speaker 1: clustered together. I watched as one parent, idly checking their
Speaker 1: navigation app, exclaimed, look, it's on my phone. Must be
Speaker 1: sinking with the class room feed. By the end of
Speaker 1: the afternoon, several devices in the room and only in
Speaker 1: the room shoued ire Island is a feature, complete with
Speaker 1: crowd submitted readings. Great for picnics, one child's mother added, grinning.
Speaker 1: I messaged Froj again, does it show for you? He
Speaker 1: replied blank. As always, The feature persisted in the school's
Speaker 1: digital archaf for days, then flickered way, as if the
Speaker 1: temporary buoyancy of group agreement had waned with dispersal. But
Speaker 1: still new maps, new memories, new postcouts circulated around the museum,
Speaker 1: the pub, the school bulletin board. I realized then, standing
Speaker 1: by the door as the children went home, that Ire
Speaker 1: Island was continually reconstructed, not just by store telling, but
Speaker 1: by acts of reference, drawing, mapping, teaching, coding, wrotes. The
Speaker 1: central realization had spoiled itself, quietly profound, not for its mystery,
Speaker 1: but for its ordinariness. Ira Island was not a fraud
Speaker 1: er hoox, nor nearer stubbornly trying to die. It was,
Speaker 1: in every material sense for plisworld into being, by the
Speaker 1: mechanisms of communal identity, a higher local example of the
Speaker 1: world's larger and acknowledged machinery of belief and shared reference.
Speaker 1: His purpose wasn't merely to confuse or to amuse, but
Speaker 1: anchored the town in a story that could not be
Speaker 1: mistaken for any other. They had made a place, They
Speaker 1: kept making it every day through process, and had it
Speaker 1: through arguments and agreements, even through disagreement. The phenomenon was
Speaker 1: not just memory or just documentation. But the ritualized overlap
Speaker 1: between the two. That evening, I felt both lighter and
Speaker 1: deeply moved, a sense of walking at the lively, shifting
Speaker 1: edge of possibility. My own compulsion for certainty had softened
Speaker 1: into admiration for the world's unfinished places, the human need
Speaker 1: to build islands not of stone or soil, but of agreement.
Speaker 1: On the following day, the town un built its final
Speaker 1: summer edition, a wooden platform at the top of a
Speaker 1: coastal path Ire Island scenic viewpoint. The museum staff attended,
Speaker 1: along with a bubbling crowd of Twansfolk, visitors, and children
Speaker 1: with cardboard telescopes. The sea stretched southward, calm and empty
Speaker 1: in the golden light. People lined the railings, exchanging stories,
Speaker 1: some inventing new legends on the spot, others pointing out
Speaker 1: imagined seabirds or flashes of light. No one pressed too
Speaker 1: hard for proof. Instead, they stood there together, looking, remembering,
Speaker 1: lting the boundary between fact and agreement to solve. For
Speaker 1: a while in the soft sea wind, I stood a
Speaker 1: step apart, no proctucked away. The museum's oldest local massist,
Speaker 1: Anniel beckoned Arthur, you see it yet, she asked, maybe
Speaker 1: I do, I said, behind us, laughter broke. A young
Speaker 1: girl clutched a home made map and pointed into the
Speaker 1: shining emptiness. There it is, I told you, She cried,
Speaker 1: and for an instant every head turned ice, narrowing in
Speaker 1: hope or skepticism or simple playfulness. I realized then that
Speaker 1: it didn't matter whether any one saw Ire Island in
Speaker 1: the strictest sense, to participate, to believe, to doubt, to
Speaker 1: argue us, to share in its creation. As the crowd lingered,
Speaker 1: some staring expectantly, others chatting or growing board, I watched
Speaker 1: the sunlight strike the water, painting new lines when in
Speaker 1: were before some daylights. The world is a map that
Speaker 1: waits to be named. I still couldn't say with certainty
Speaker 1: whether Ire Island existed, not in a way any hydrographer
Speaker 1: would recognize. Perhaps it did, at least for this willing
Speaker 1: to remember it together. And perhaps that act, the gentle
Speaker 1: dog good will to recall a place into being was
Speaker 1: enough to make it real. Here where the horizon always
Speaker 1: leaves a little room for another edge, what I wondered
Speaker 1: elsewhere in the world springs into being not by proof,
Speaker 1: but by fellowship, by the uncountered determined act of looking
Speaker 1: with others at an empty place and quietly agreeing that
Speaker 1: something meaningful waits just beyond the edge of Sie the sea.
Speaker 1: Captain's secrets flowing through an immensity of possible eyel nds,
Speaker 1: each one shape if only for a moment, by the
Speaker 1: attention of those who cared to search. And that is
Speaker 1: the end. Thank you for listening, and I will see
Speaker 1: you in the next one.