I am pretty confident that a language with syntax that allows you to feel that freedom that C gives you AND is safe to write software with (without garbage collection) is possible, we just need to come up with a reasonable syntax that has both of those features. It won't look like C or Go or any of that, I don't think.

I am not a computer scientist (I have no degree in CS) but it sure seems like it would be possible to determine statically if a reference could be misused in code as written without requiring that you be the Rust Borrow Checker, if the language was designed with those kinds of things from the beginning.

Everything you wrote sounds like Rust, except that you didn't want it to be Rust :).