POCUMTUCK STATE PARK: Morphic Reckoning & Trauma~Forged Repair in Decolonial Landscape Architecture JFS 2025

Pocumtuck State Park transforms scarred lands of Western Massachusetts into a living covenant of ecological sanctuaries and cultural corridors dedicated to reconciliation. Morphic Reckoning treats land as neural archive, reforging trauma through helical healing and open-source stewardship. Four greenway quadrants form a resurgence cross, anchored by totem sentinels, QR-Akashic portals, and a blockchain ledger exposing Cold Cruel Sidestep manipulation. A Tri-Council of Indigenous, ecological, and narrative custodians governs via Land Back sovereignty. By 2030, pollinator corridors and salmon spawning restored, full transparency activated, twelve forged guardians installed, fourteen universities co-teaching decolonial design, and the model exported nationwide. Pocumtuck is not a park but a helical state of mind—hiking as liturgy, reflection as confession. Tombstone Protocol: old system dies November 27. Ninety days to comply. The reckoning begins. This is not a proposal but a non-negotiable phase shift: the Western Mass Akashic Record releases freely on November 27, 2025—Thanksgiving Day, a date chosen to subvert the myth of grateful settlement and instead demand truth-telling on a national day of fabricated harmony. The release coincides with the Paper Cutter Parade, a ritual procession through mythical Shelburne Falls ending at Mohawk Repair, where we'll dedicate the new Mohawk Repair Institute. ~ John F. Sendelbach, November 2025

Akashic Bells In The Rain: Hunter, Garcia & The Shelburne Falls Revelation

Akashic Bells In The Rain: Hunter, Garcia & The Shelburne Falls Revelation

Pocumtuck State Park’s Morphic Reckoning ~ Park Description

The night began with failure: the mill’s power was out, the keypad dead, the building sealed. 11:00 PM, maybe Monday. I had come only to play music, but the darkness—total, save flickering emergency lights—felt wrong, creepy. I wasn’t keen on entering alone. So I drove. Rain lashed the windshield, leaves fled, and Shelburne Falls unfolded as a living text. Aimless motion became revelation. I narrated into my phone, and in that rain-soaked loop around the Deerfield River’s oxbow, the Shelburne Falls Akashic Record poured through me: a QR-linked, open-source encyclopedia to surface layered histories of a place that doesn’t exist. And Jerry Garcia’s Mission in the Rain—lyrics by Robert Hunter—echoed: “I turned and walked away… the mission bells did toll…” I was walking away from the mill, the rain my witness, the land tolling its bells.

We began on Conway Street, drifting to the west end of the Bridge of Flowers—my old trolley gate beside the iron bridge, site of the July 6, 2020 incident. The tour unspooled: Salmon Park’s monumental fish and geodesic sphere; underused parking lot hiding toxic waste; the mill, now Cutlery Arboretum; condominiums over a candle factory whose memory reverberates. Every site carried ghosts—industrial, indigenous, civic. The Salmon Café’s fish logo signaled the download: this wasn’t a town but a myth engine. Hunter’s “The mission walls are falling down…” mirrored Shelburne Falls’ crumbling illusions. Crossing Bridge Street—de facto Main Street—I looped to North Street, where elders spoke of KKK cross burnings on the ridge. The rain made driving treacherous, but the night felt magical. The outage was catalyst. In darkness, the land spoke. “The mission bells did toll…”—here, in the Deerfield Valley.

North Street climbed like a spine; I imagined torchlit rituals where private land meets public memory. This was the Akashic Record’s essence: not my voice, but a system letting data surface. QR codes at key sites—scanned by any passerby—would link to oral histories, documents, contradictions. The plan must be moldable. At Route 112 and Route 2, I turned to the cloverleaf mound—scarred by dynamite, drill marks visible, blast rock piled nearby. Here stood the former “Big Indian,” removed amid controversy. Here Chief Greylock must return—not kitsch, but restitution. Reclaim the rock for monumental bases. State-owned parking lots sloped to the river—perfect for switchback trails, interpretive nodes, canoe access. Four sites, two public, forming the Quadrifecta: a circuit of memory and future use. Hunter’s “I turned and walked away…”—yes, from denial, into the rain.

The loop continued along North River Road, the four-mile square cradling rumors of indigenous bones—sacred, unverified. I recalled my dig: a mini-excavator hitting a century-old pocket behind a stone wall, unearthing clay pipes, bottles. New England works this way—farmers buried garbage; now we unearth truth. The land reveals when ready. eBay became my model: infinite nested categories. Applied here, it holds everything—the dam as salmon genocide, Arms Cemetery as America’s first park (picnickers fleeing wolves), Doc Wilson pulling teeth for the poor from his basement war room. Even the village is fiction: Shelburne Falls is a zip code (01370) spanning five towns, created for mail. A mythical place. And that myth is the engine: salmon, Mohawk, cross-burnings, toxic waste, church fires, farmers markets—all true, all layered, all cosmic. “Mission in the rain…”—Hunter’s lament for lost love became my anthem for lost land, found in the downpour.

The vision crystallized at Mohawk Repair, my new studio a mile from the mill I fled. Leaving was protest. The mill sat on toxic ground, its morphic resonance—the land’s true song—denied. The five nations who made peace here in the 1700s for fishing were erased. I could no longer tolerate it. The Mohawk Repair sign? No coincidence. This project—the Akashic Record, Quadrifecta, Chief Greylock, Mashelisk (35-ft reclaimed giant), QR grid—isn’t nostalgia. It’s cultural infrastructure. Crowd-sourced. Hyper-local. Moldable. Beginning with one man in the rain, talking to a river. Ending with every attic, every stone wall, every elder’s story in a living grid. Hunter’s “I’ll walk alone through the rain…”—but I won’t. This is for everybody. For humanity’s future. And reverence for the past.