Surveyors

The flotilla entered the basin during a great marsh fire, their rafts festooned with flags, a live band, a small driftwood theater assembled haphazardly on the bow of one vessel where they delivered strange sermons to the locals of the largest island. They remained there through the fall and winter months to address some much needed repairs.

They grew vegetables in the prairies further north and traded tools and weapons with the trappers and fishermen of the area. Some mixed naturally with the community. Others were chased into the swamp after drunken fights and other transgressions. One boatman was killed by a hair-trigger veteran who found him stealing from his land.

In the winter, when the air was dry and the bayous bald and clear, they began to map all the little waterways of the swamps that hid to the lee of the island. They discovered the old haunts of pirates, shell mounds, and barracoons carved with scripture. They illustrated with detail the elaborate pumping system of some hermetic engineer pulled into the mud by oak roots.

They conducted this survey in small groups, assembling their rag paper notes and illustrations into a volume that they offered the locals in contrition for the actions of their deviant members. The council of the island accepted the gift on the day of the Christmas bonfire. The flotilla struck up the band and raised banners above the silver water while the locals danced in the sand under a brilliant evening sky. As the temperatures fell, they lit the driftwood sculpture of a bison and gathered around it to toast blackberry wine.

By spring, the flotilla had left and their atlas of the swamps was encased in the council house alongside the tintype of war veterans and the diaries of French sailors. Passing residents would stop to admire the delicate landscape of their home traced onto its cover, the meticulous hand-stitched binding, the teal velvet bookmark draped over its spine.

In the season following their departure, a hurricane entered the Gulf that was never named. Its towering surge arrived without warning, tearing away at the island's banks and knocking each standing structure to the lashing waves.

A few residents took shelter in a freight container turned sideways in the marsh where they held hands and prayed. They emerged while the wind was still screaming to a scene of absolute destruction, the dead floating among detritus and hanging from trees. The survivors searched the swamp all they could through the black night, pulling the dying from the twisted and scattered debris and laying them to rest on the beach.

The following morning, the Gulf was like porcelain. They loaded the injured into dugouts and used the atlas they salvaged from the council house to find their way to the prairie, none from that expedition having left the island in their lives.

They portaged along the land for miles, startled by its infinity. In time, they came to a town, also badly damaged by the storm. After learning of their island's destruction, the mayor assembled a search party. The expedition again used the flotilla’s atlas to find their way back to the carnage. They returned with a few more survivors, most unconscious and bloody. Residents of the town fed and bathed the islanders, removed and cauterized limbs where needed, and gave them shelter in the school gymnasium.

Some among the survivors called the flotilla a curse, the harbinger of their fate, while others praised them as their only salvation. In any case, none wished to keep possession of the atlas. They gifted it to the mayor who stored it away in an office cabinet.

Many years later, this town was also lost to a storm. A twenty foot surge blew away the foundations of its small downtown, and the atlas was destroyed.

Decades passed, and the atlas, were it to have survived, would have served no purpose for navigation. The swamplands sheltered by the island had transformed unrecognizably during that time. It began with the cypress logging that could scarcely keep apace with demand as the region rapidly urbanized. Private developers and public agencies dredged channels for floating barges of lumber to market, imposing a euclidean order onto the winding maze of the bayou country.

A few of the surviving islanders disappeared into that industry, sharing recollections of the unnamed storm. Such stories of devastation were not uncommon among the men of those barges and pullboats, distinguished only by the fabled atlas, which in turn became integrated into new myths and legends. None of these were recorded until much later, second and third hand, all of the details as scrambled and fragmented as the land itself.

Logging soon gave way to oil and gas. More channels dredged, more disaggregation of the old land and the old memories. New communities emerged to inherit the legends that held some semblance of their history, but very few of the waterways survived.

The basin became a carefully surveilled thing. Contractors wrapped the swamp’s substrate in a web of pipelines. They tied together production platforms harnessed with satellites and sensors that streamed data to headquarters east and west. Private multinationals and regulatory agencies commissioned their own fleets of high-frequency imaging satellites. Environmental organizations gathered ground data, took photographs. Airboat and kayaking tours populated social channels with curated images of alligators and migratory birds, insisting on the basin’s continued primeval allure.

One such business hoped to provide a guided tour of the legendary unnamed hurricane and the fate of the lost island. Discovering that there was no historical record of the old bayous, the proprietor commissioned a surveyor familiar with the area. The surveyor took to the task of producing a historical map with zeal, attracted by the challenge, as well as the legends of the strange boatmen who studied the basin many years before.

He became a fixture of the parish courthouse, gathering all the easement agreements he could find. He traced over a topographic map, marking each feature of the landscape that was described in the property records. He used a red drafting pencil for wetland boundaries that were contradicted between sources, of which there were so many that the illustration was overwhelmingly red in the end. There was no option but to accept this compromise, and at some arbitrary moment he declared his historical map complete.

He then reviewed the most current satellite imagery of the basin until its details were fixed in his mind – the channels that ran through meandering streams like Haussmann’s boulevards through Paris; the distinct remnants of hub and spoke cypress logging networks; the small traces of barrier islands scattered like debris in the ocean.

He took his boat into the basin to follow the likely exodus from the lost island community, never realizing that the one described in the popular histories of the region identified it incorrectly, and that the one he scrutinized for so long was never inhabited at all. This misidentified island was once a large hammock visited often by trappers, though now it was nothing more than a half acre of spartina and sand at the edge of the Gulf. He explored the waters for several days, always returning there before venturing out again.

The lee side of the island had eroded into a system of undifferentiated ponds. He discovered no interesting landmarks besides the occasional disused platform jackets sinking sideways into the expanse. No suggestions of gravestones, no shell mounds, no pilings remaining from the many homes that were shredded and pulverized by the unrelenting storm.

Through vague guesswork alone, the surveyor drew a path of exodus onto his map, favoring routes that provided the most vivid vistas. He modified his map many times to suit this course.

Returning to his office, he digitized all the many details of the landscape that he collected. He researched the messy and scattershot historical record of the unnamed storm, annotating the map with peculiar anecdotes from here and there, embellishing when necessary, weaving a narrative that he hoped would satisfy his client. At last he submitted the map, with its path through the open sea, terminating in a tangle of meandering turns through eroded bayous and dredged canals. The client studied this finished product without comment and paid the surveyor for his time.

The proprietor never offered the tour. He came to the same realization as the surveyor – a paddle through the open sea to witness a few acres of eroding marsh grass would entice very few.

He operated his business for another ten years or so. During this period, state tourism declined tremendously due to rising inflation and civil unrest. The proprietor sold the operation to a conglomerate that took advantage of this economic downturn to expand its holdings in the industry.

The assets acquired through this transaction sat unused for several more years, the surveyor’s speculative and meandering map gathering dust in a locker all the while.

As the economy began to revive, a market took shape along the disintegrating fringes of the south. Travelers developed an appetite for the romantic decay and colossal instruments of extraction that distinguished the region. They hoped to experience the deprivations of the great hurricanes and to savor the loss implied by the negative space of ocean, the missing bayous, the hollow system of ponds onto which the surveyor penciled his map.

The conglomerate acquired offices just blocks from the state capitol building, financing a small augmented reality startup, housed in a fifth-floor suite overlooking the river. It purchased the most precarious waterfront properties available, leading to a speculative frenzy along the disappearing waterways of the basin.

The regional executive toured this expanding empire, visiting each location, visualizing a grand offering of boutique disaster. Though the oceans were cooler than average during this period and the wildfires tame, he was undeterred. What mattered most wasn’t the scale nor the frequency of such events, but the public’s perception. He knew that the region had an increasing financial stake in upholding and managing its reputation for cyclical tragedy and loss; that a sophisticated media ecosystem evolved over time to ensure such an image; and that the reputation was certain to be nourished by more spectacular catastrophe in the end.

Over the course of this visit, he chanced to open a locker in the back office of one of the syndicate’s many holdings. In it was a map, liberally annotated with speculative assertions that told the story of a doomed barrier island in the Gulf. The map illustrated what were purported to be the old bayous of the nearby basin, tracing the route of those who survived a devastating storm.

In this telling, the island was a pirate den. One of the survivors discovered a mysterious treasure map hidden among the detritus of the storm. They formed a marauding band in the swamp that looted the corpses of the hurricane’s victims and continued their raid into the prairie lands further north, seeking the hidden treasures promised by the map. The executive eagerly returned to the regional offices with this document in hand.

He imagined not just a tour of this sordid tale, but a fully immersive AR experience, in which customers paddle their way through a simulated bayou of danger and intrigue, culminating in an approaching storm. He pitched the idea to corporate, fighting for months for funding, and was successful at last.

With the syndicate’s investment, the small augmented reality startup grew much larger, expanding its offices across the state, hiring animators and screenplay writers and machine learning engineers. The old bayous were mapped yet again, using the surveyor’s extrapolation and guesswork as a foundation. They constructed georeferenced 3D models of the bygone wetlands in a proprietary game engine. They studied the dynamic positioning systems of oil rigs to create a unique type of propulsion that could be easily affixed to small watercraft.

After years of development and testing, their first offering was ready to be revealed. A coterie of VIPs and influencers gathered for refreshments in a dilapidated shipyard on an eroding peninsula facing a wide and unvegetated pond. The executive presided over the event, enticing guests with apocryphal tales of the basin as they were each handed a pair of earbuds and a handsome and discrete set of goggles with polished reflective lenses and suede adjustable straps.

After the speech ended, waitstaff guided them to a small pier and instructed them to form a line. From around the bend of the bayou, the first sea kayak appeared, self-propelled, an emergency paddle ready at its side.

Comfortably seated and with life vests fastened, the passengers were instructed to don their earbuds and goggles, revealing to them an augmented jungle of monstrous cypress trees that blanketed the banks of the pond. In the groves, one could see the flickering of lanterns, ships far off towards the Gulf, the piercing reflective eyes of alligators scattered across the surface of the water.

The flotilla formed into unique geometries as it propelled itself through the open sea, the audience scanning the simulation in awe. They reached the island just as the sun was setting and the winds were calm, though they lashed violently within the high-resolution display projected onto their retinas. Rain smeared their vision as pirates scrambled from their elevated shanties, shouting frantically in the midst of an approaching storm.

As the hurricane whipped the whole of the island into a maelstrom of debris and devastation, the audience gasped and screamed and laughed nervously, often crouching and dodging the pixels of shrapnel, though never rocking the steadfast boats. When the last of the 3D-rendered shanties exploded and the violent lashings of the storm began to settle, the simulated survivors emerged from the surrounding devastation in a stupor, searching for the dead and injured among the destruction.

One surviving pirate, crouched and digging through the waste, rose with sudden urgency, a scroll of parchment gripped tightly in his hand. He approached the assembled kayakers as he studied the artifact, an expression of consternation giving way to glee.

“At last,” the avatar announced with bravado. “Our long lost treasure map has been found!” The audience, in a surge of release, began to laugh wildly, pointing at nothing, clapping, screaming in delight and howling towards the open Gulf.