Post by encompassingchaos on Apr 2, 2022 20:52:35 GMT -5
The Whistle Pig
I am new to this hunt but maybe new eyes are what is needed. I received my book last week and I found a gps coordinate that helps to “bare” a cross once the groundhogs shadows are found. I have now begun doing a literary analysis on the book, but that part isn’t much fun. Interesting and intriguing, but not particularly fun, like solving a cipher is, plus literature can be so vague and ambiguous. It can be interpreted in so many ways. Not sure if this new info will help narrow something down, but maybe I have begun to look at it for too long and need to take a break.
To get the gps coodinates you write down the page number of every page that has a key starting with xi which is roman numeral 11 (this missing page 11 for those looking) This was needed to be moved to make the numbers line up properly. I went down the page as so:
xi = 11
1
4
13
18
28
38
42
48
50
56
62
70
76
78
84
86
At first, I added all of these up and tried reducing that and looking for numbers, but it didn’t produce anything. Possible hwy numbers or something…wasn’t sure. I then chose to count the number between each succeeding number essentially reducing the numbers to another set of numbers. Like counting the number of spaces from one letter to the next when figuring out an Ottendorf cipher. The next row of numbers I got was -764506244022444. I got the negative because when counting from 11 to 1 you are counting backwards so to me was making that number negative. I looked at the numbers with and without using the roman numeral, but because it was an 11 and page 11 was missing, I felt it might be significant to get a particular set of numbers. When you divide the numbers into 2 sets starting with the key direction change on pg 48 you get transposed gps coordinates. Reversed it is 44.022444 -7645062 (I would have continued to reduce this, but not need if coordinates were found after the second reduction)
picThis will land you in Lake Ontario on the Canada side. Google maps will put you in the US, but you can find the exact location which will come in handy later for making that cross. Curious it is outside of the US, but close to some beaches and not far from a town of the name Sandbanks which made Townsand Banks look rather interesting. I then spent many days going down quite a few rabbit holes looking along the coast of Lake Ontario and the many shipwrecks as well. I learned quite a bit, but nothing that just jumped out.
Sidenote: Robert Wehle State Park got my attention for quite some time because his life and the life of his family was rather interesting. If Duck Miller was dead and his estate’s trustees were pretending to be him, then Robert Wehle would be a great possible writer. He died in 2002 and his property was opened to the public as a park in 2004. There is so much going on there. Horses, hunting, fishing, conservation, writers, and on and on. Great contender, but I just couldn’t pin down much more from there clue-wise.
Back to the book. I started going backwards in the book this time. I then became fixated on the silhouette of the groundhog. It bothered me. I am an artist and have been drawing all my life, so being very particular about details and realism is a thing for me. The shadow of our whistle pig was off…why? I went down another rabbit hole learning about all the different kinds of groundhogs all over the US. Interesting, but did not answer my question of why this particular pig had a more pointed nose and a deformed head with ears that prick up beyond the head. I started scouring maps for possible counties that looked like the shadow. Have you seen the shadow? It hit me. Lake Ontario on the inside cover looks eerily like the shadows arm. No way was the shadow on the cover going to perfectly align with the map on the inside. I traced the shadow on the cover and then cut it out. As an artist I have perfect tiny scissors for this type of job. I was very particular to make the shape as perfect as possible. It lined up very close. I then painstakingly followed the outline of this shadow on the map and compared it to the larger version that can be found on Library of Congress website at www.loc.gov/resource/g3700.rr000570/
The shadow lined up very particularly with cities and moved along the roads and the way one might when orienteering. The Punxsutawney circle is very close to the center line of the shadow. The cities were helpful to keep looking and gave my brain something to do. I was excited but this was rather tedious work. One city being crossed was Chateauguay, a racehorse who won two of the three U.S. Triple Crown races. Maybe on to something…more rabbit holes to follow.
I then noticed in the area of Chanteauguay on the map the road was the same damn shape as the part of the shadow that irked me. The same damn shape! No way was this going to line up as well. I needed another to scale shadow that was not the front cover. Well, I was sent a sticker with my new copy of the book. Maybe? I did the same as before, traced the shadow from the sticker, then ever so meticulously cut it out. Bam! The exact match to the map on the inside cover. There is no way that this coincidence would occur. There are multiple locations where the two shadows cross. One was at the city city of Chanteauguay. I now had crosses. How to narrow them down. I had the idea to make a line from the city Chateauguay to Punxsutawney as well as a line from my gps coordinate to another one of the crossing shadows cities, which was Elizabethtown, New York. I made these lines on Google Earth for much more preciseness and clarity. The cross made from these two lines is unmistakable. The center of the cross is near a Cranberry Lake. (fruit?) It is an angle and maybe something can be triangulated. There is so much from here that could be done. Maybe nearby cities and landmarks.
picSome nearby areas of interest:
Black Duck Hole
Flat Iron Point
Cathedral Fire Tower
6 mile Creek
High Falls Loop
Below is some things when getting into the literary analysis of the book:
The area of Cranberry lake is in St. Lawrence County which when researching the use of ‘coveyed’ I found a book written by Lawrence George Durrell brother to naturalist writer Gerald Durrell. Interesting rabbit hole.
Another book using ‘coveyed’ was Concerning Irascible Strong And Trixie Cunning And Their Sons by William H. Smyth. This book not only used coveyed, but also has ‘dim religious lights’ which to me correlates with the odd use of semantics in the sentence, ‘Its remembrance made me glad to be outside and not trapped on the dark side of the stained glass.’ Thinking of divinely colored shadow is contrasted here by ‘trapped on the dark side,’ but speaking of the same space. The shadows created by stained glass are on the inside of the building.
The analysis part reminded me of college and why I was glad I was no longer trapped there. I decided I would take a break and share some of my findings. Look into semantics such as tautologies and contradictions to get that brain going or put yourself to sleep if you so choose.
What do you think?
