Writing Notes

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated by Edith Grossman, Vintage Books, 1988.

Florentino Ariza was the poor, shy, bespectacled dreamer. As a youth he courted the girl of his dreams with serenades and secret anonymous letters. He lost when a mysterious high society doctor entered the life of the girl he loved. He would not get a chance to try again for fifty-one years, nine months and four days.

Fermina Daza was the tempestuous, self-determined girl with the beauty of a royal princess and the eyes of a panther. She had short shrift for men who loved from afar yet could not say what they mean. Fermina Daza’s father was a man of new money - ill-gotten, some said - who gave his daughter everything to propel her into the highest social strata, the ruling class. “I am not a rich man”, he would say. “I am a poor man with money. There is a difference.”

Dr. Juvenal Urbino was the dashingly handsome, educated, sophisticated prodigy of one of the country’s great old family names. He studied medicine in Paris. He grew to learn the whole world better, perhaps, than the whole truth of his own country, yet he followed a lifelong campaign of civic and infrastructure improvement. At the very beginning, Dr. Juvenal Urbino let it be known that he would wed Fermina Daza. Thus it was all arranged, and all Fermina Daza had to do was give her consent. She did.

In the following decades the newlyweds traveled the world, raised a fine family, survived an unforgivable breach of trust in the marriage, and settled down into the comfortable rust of old age. He told her: “Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.” All might have still have ended happily, except for that wretched parrot.

For me there could have been no higher recommendation of this book that than of the lender, who lent it without reservations, as a critically prized treasure.

It is about life in a South American country, apparently Columbia, around the turn of the previous century. It is a tale of love among the rich and the poor, but mostly among the rich, in a social stratum which has disappeared as surely as the manatee, gone as surely as the life and forestation that used to teem on the banks of the Magdalena River. The slow-witted manatee was shot for sport, to near-extinction. The alligators were killed for sport and perhaps for their skins; the trees themselves were stripped from the denuded rain forest soil for the fuel to power the river-boats that plied upstream, searching for the next cordwood depot to fire their boilers on their journey.

Set against the backdrop of this period, “Love in the Time of Cholera” is not about specie conservation and forest management, though it is somewhat prescient (the original Spanish publication was in 1985) about ecological balance and the un-greening of the planet. While the dread cholera ravaged all the continents toward the middle and end of the nineteenth century, Marquez’ book is not really even about cholera.

Until you nearly reach the very end, it is hard to see whether the book is really about love, either.

And it is no more about “the time of cholera”, than this book review is really a review. Cholera is touched on - Dr. Juvenal Urbino is said to have campaigned tirelessly for a civic cleanup of the terrible sanitary conditions which promoted epidemic waves of the cholera bacterium. The enormous contrast between the ruling social classes and the squalid living conditions of the poor is noted as a fact of life, which, in that time, it was. The advent of hot air balloons, airplanes, railways, oil-fired steamboats, the telegraph and then even radio - all these are acknowledged, but in passing.

I detest the worn phrase “the human condition”, and nearly everything to which it alludes, but I would end up saying that this book is really about that condition, and that Marquez did a remarkable job of describing his perspective on it.

The book is about the souls of the principal players, told expertly by a master observer. There are surely many reviews of this stunning 1988 best-seller translation (also a 2007 movie); Wikipedia as usual does a creditable job with the synopsis and plot analysis.

What I want to touch on, instead, is what I know best: why I ended up liking the book, why I admired the author’s style, and why at the end I had to give Marquez his due for his incredibly introspective insights into human nature.

On a good day, I could give you scores of reasons why I disagree with the author’s metaphysical viewpoint on humanity, but on a very bad day I could only tell you that I was not so sure I could go as far as he in both understanding and damning human aspiration in the same breath. 

I was not even sure, then, that I would like the book.

The people in it do not generally do things; they politely wait for things to happen to them, and then they blame others. Behind the mask of post-Victorian manners and politeness, we see that almost everyone lies, cheats and possibly steals: sometimes, worldly goods; mostly, souls. The dearer the victim, the more they turn the screw. And, of those who do not lie, cheat and steal, well, even there, there are lapses of human resolve.

Writers are often given to comparing layers of human personality to the layers of a vegetable, though it might be impertinent to suggest that they should know best. Not all of us come across so favorably in the comparison. Of course the domesticated onion is the favored vegetable for this analogy, perhaps because it has caused so many tears. Poets become lost in the rapturous mysteries of the unfolding petals of the rose, the daisy, the forget-me-not.

Personally, I am surprised we always forget the siren call of the unflowered artichoke, with its prized, edible barbed leaves and spiny, prickly interior. Of course the sweet delicate heart of the artichoke is the ultimate objective, the purpose of the whole exercise, and all of those outer leaves are best understood as the necessary exercise of the expected prenuptial ritual of conquest. The very act of eating the unfolding layers of the artichoke is a fine balance between high cuisine and choking to death on baby thistle.

To lavish so much attention on a domesticated weed seems frivolous in a book review, at first glance, but in keeping with the style of the book it would be indelicate to address the layers of human personality directly. Let us use the device of the lowly but emotionally neutral cabbage, whose full flavor is only appreciated in the company of other condiments.

So then, the cabbage is enfolded in layers of symbolic and literal meaning: the tough, fleshy outermost leaves protect the inner plant against the ravages of pest and garden. Call these the social petals. These are the only parts of the cabbage we see in the garden, and the only ones we strip off and dispose. The inner leaves might be our layers of deception, jealously, greed, pretense and fear. These are the layers of the cabbage that provide the heart core with security, safety, warmth and privacy.

Most of all, privacy! No one eats a cabbage by unfolding it petal by petal. Love changes all the rules. With a keen sharp blade, for better or worse, one slices the hapless plant as a geologist slices through the strata of time with his core samples: here, stripped naked, from oldest to newest, is the map of the entire life of the cabbage.

And so, as Love in the Time of Cholera unfolds the layers of human truth and meaning, it would seem we all live our lives enshrouded in the leaves of secrecy, in fear of being caught in discovery, and exposed in all our honesty or dishonesty. In this view, the mark of the successful person is only the superior ability to project to others a finer, more facile person than the fearful, ever-cautious deer mouse residing within each one of us.

Of course, I myself deny all this, or I would say that I deny it, and surely you too have no doubt that this may perfectly well apply to other unfortunates we have known. If we remain true to our conventions, whatever these may be, and, in the test of time, whatever they shall ultimately prove to be, then it should be entirely possible to live most of a long lifetime without ever being compelled to look inside the cabbage. So I, myself, once thought.

This review, like the book, is not about the “me” but exactly about any of us you might wish it weren’t. This loss of fear happened to come to me late in life as a sudden dramatic certitude. It was not always so. I hid in the long shadows of fear for decades, but even that held no equal to the terror of self-discovery. That is why our finest friends are often those who have the perpetual grace of not asking too many questions.

It seems impossible to determine who first observed that time is the great leveler, for civilizations have always known this, but older age strips off the leaves of the cabbage. The process is as inexorable as the glacier peeling the meat off the backbone of the mountains, depositing millions of tons of rock as the finest silts of time, into the rivers that bend and flow all the way down into the great ocean.

“Death has no sense of the ridiculous, above all at our age.”

It is up to you to find out how the marriage of Fermina Daza and Dr. Juvenal Urbino settles down into the sediments of the winding decades. It is up to you to follow the fate of the unfortunate and miserable Florentino Ariza, lurking like Gollum in a land of adventurous Hobbits. It is up to you to judge whether, by keeping his 622 clandestine affairs highly secret, he had remained “faithful in spirit” to his lost love. It is up to you to find out what happens when one waits out a pointless shadow existence for fifty-one years, nine months and four days, only to see whether there can be love in the time of cholera.

In the twenty-first century we learn that it is better to seize the moment, capture the day, and proactively build our futures, while politely seeming to wait for the others, or even cheerfully hurrying them along. We do admire decisiveness. We do not wait for things to happen to us, and we exchange knowing nods regarding those who do. But even as we renovate the whole house, it is in the basement that the archaeologists will find the most interesting material if we do not find it first.

It just does not seem plausible that the story of Love in the Time of Cholera applies equally to all of us. It is in the basements, if you will, hiding the dusty parts of ourselves left behind with no hope of catching up, that we find the truth of Socrates’ admonition that the unexamined life is not worth living. There is no terror like that which has not yet been confronted.

“How noble this city must be, for we have spent four hundred years trying to finish it off and we still have not succeeded.” — Dr. Juvenal Urbino

“I have never been able to understand how that thing works.” — Fermina Daza, on the male conjugal member

He: “I think I am going to die.” She: “That would be best; then we could both have some peace.” — on marital discord

“It is better to arrive in time than to be invited.” — Florentino Ariza

And, finally:

“They can all go to hell”, she said. “If we widows have any advantage, it is that there is no one left to give us orders.”

And so it comes in our time, each of us, to celebrate the safe passage of the ancient rocks and whirlpools, to summon the serenity, grace and courage to make our peace with the world in our own way, and to sail once more on the river with a love of the passing world in our heart, forever and ever.

You can read the plot outline on the back cover of the book. I gave nothing away. By reading the book you can see what Gabriel Garcia Marquez saw. I heartily recommend it.

As a youngster I was quite taken by “Swallows and Amazons”, the children’s adventure series by Arthur Ransome. It instilled in me a love of sailing, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, of history, as the kids in the books were always concocting imaginary play battles with bad guys with names like Xerxes and Darius.

This is no longer just a childhood memory, it is now a memory from another century, of a yet much older time when “world wars” were fought in a known world not much larger than today’s modern Europe. Click the map below for a larger version at the Wikipedia entry for the world of Herodotus.

 I went on to take four years of Latin, and absorbed (and forgot) an amazing amount of history and lore of ancient Rome. But the exposure to the history of ancient Greece never came, and, until this week’s issue of the New Yorker, I never knew who this King Darius person was, or why military men study his defeat to this day, or how greatly the Persian wars shaped the future of the Western World.

The April 28 New Yorker review is Arms and The Man, by Daniel Mendelsohn. It is a masterpiece of expository writing in its own right, and reviews in detail The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories, (Pantheon) edited by Robert B. Strassler. In case you are never going to get around to ordering and reading this work (Amazon, $29), I highly recommend you follow the New Yorker link while it is still active, and read what you can of this world of Herodotus, circa 450BC. I read the review twice and ordered the book.

Mendelsohn promises Herodotus will tell us as much as we could ever want to know about King Darius, and his son Xerxes, and possibly more. I expect to learn why the Persians’ two military campaigns to subjugate the city states of Greece both failed catastrophically, despite overwhelming military superiority (”shock and awe”). I expect insights into why it is said that the totalitarian power of mindsets like Xerxes cause peaceful democracies to lose sleep to this day.

And I look forward to reading the full story of how a Greek leader said, when told the Persian armies blacken the skies with arrows, “This is good, then. We will be able to fight in the shade.”

My take, based on the New Yorker review: this isn’t just a first-rate history classic, written by Herodotus, whom it is said gave the first modern meaning to the concept of “History”. It’s an epic adventure, on a relative and heroic scale that would remain equally immortal in prehistory or in Star Wars.

Hardcover. 1024 pages. Lavish illustrations, maps, annotations and cross-references.

You asked how we like retirement. The Retired Life is, entirely unlike most other things, just what it’s cracked up to be. I worked all my life for this: to not have to work all my life. Retirement is wonderful. It’s worth it.

We moved up here for many reasons: we wanted seasons; we got seasons. We tired of the sky being the same color all the time; we got skies with drama. We got tired of the cycle of six years of draught and one year of deluge; we got frequent gentle rains. We wanted out of the rat race; we got life at our own pace (which is a hectic one for Ellie, less so for me, both by our own choice). While we longed for a sense of neighborhood, we found ourselves surrounded by a community of welcoming, caring and gracious friends. While we wanted space, in a very rural setting, we found our own little piece of heaven.

We wanted a return to the land - we spend most of our day outside, working the soil, planting, fencing, pruning, preparing pastures for the goats, planning the way we want our home to be when we’re old.

Here in the early light of morning, as the world wakens to a new day on my run along the creek up to the first bridge, we discover in the deer and wild turkeys the only other traffic on our road. In the cool twilight as the sun drops below the mountains to the west and the crystal quiet of evening settles in, with the murmur of the creek just at the edge of consciousness, we know we are where we belong: we are home.

We lost some things we loved, as well: the closeness of old friends and family, the daily support and affirmation of co-workers, the comfort of structure, the endless variety of automotive enthusiast activities of Southern California. These things we miss. We are making new friends, and encouraging the old ones and family to drop in for a visit, to share for a time an interval of quiet in their lives as well.

We wish for you, in your own time and in your own setting, the peace and the quiet contentment we find here. Life is good.

text and photos copyright Dave Norton, April 2008

What’s in a name? Recently I was staring at the names in a mailing list, and the name “Butcher” reminded me that it’s spelled exactly like the professional tradespeople behind the meat counter for a reason. Names tell us something about our heritage.

How many “occupational” names can you think of? I tried to list as many such names as I could think of, below. My list is mostly English surnames. I didn’t try to branch out into other languages: “Schmidt” is German for Smith. “Muller” or “Mueller” is the German variant of Miller. My own surname “Forbes” is from the ancient Gaelic “forba” meaning field - possibly indicating agricultural origin.

If you get stuck, I found a useful genealogy link at About.com which offers etymologies on hundreds of names.

Baker

Brewer

Butcher

Butler

Carpenter

Carter

Cartwright

Chandler

Collier

Cutler

Fisher

Gardener

Hooper

Hunter

Mason

Miller

Packer

Plumber

Porter

Sawyer

Skinner

Smith

Swain

Tanner

Warden

Wright

Some unrecorded number of years ago, struggling to come up with ideas on how to present Summitlake.com to our readers, I wrote in “About This Webite” that “I am finally content and happy in the backwaters of unread America, examining root causes …”

I compared the virtual summitlake to a very real place in the high country they call Summit Lake, a place where the occasional stranger treks through our lives and leaves something of value behind.

I wrote:

It’s quiet up here at this lake. I like it. This place seems to have a thousand moods and seasons, and even as that cloud passes overhead, the mood of my meadow changes by the minute. Now, as the evening breeze picks up in earnest and the orange sun begins to sink below the western range, is a good time to remember that, as my perceptions change from this meadow, it’s still the same lake.

In another essay, “Black Elk Speaks” , I wrote:

Black Elk said that he did not ever tell any one person all of his vision, until the very end, but only little pieces of it to any one person, because if you did, it would lose its power and would not work for you. Missing from this are the ideas of growth and change, but even these come to us unevenly, and we can mark these periods like rings on a tree.

As I said, people do not come by here often, but sometimes, when they do, they pick up a thread I may have dropped years ago. Like those who have the training and patience to read the rings on a tree, we learn a little more about this place we are visiting, and you know, we’re all guests here … including me.

So here we have this idea of a lake, not just a concept of the body of water itself but the idea of a lake, which is why we capitalize it and call it the Lake. Summit Lake? Tahoe? Winnipesaukee? It may make a huge difference to me, but no difference to you. A fisherman, a small child with water wings, a backpacker, a family that has been coming back here summer after summer for generations: they all bring different paraphrenalia, expectations, and traditions, but it is the same lake.

Take the family that summers here, and knows the best picnic spots, the lightly traveled fishing trails that encircle the lake (unnoticed by that casual day user, toward whom we privately affect airs of smugly proud superiority).  They know where the white triangular cotton sails of the dingy best billow with the breezes that flow across the water, and where the moss-filtered hillside trickle is that fills the water cooler bottles with clear, cold, pure spring water. This is also the lake of their grandparents. It holds out few secrets. To this family, every rock and boulder relates to some event in the family history, but the rich collection of memories, as wonderful and instructive as they are, is not the lake. Grandpa, smoking his pipe on the porch at dusk,  understood this:

“Sit here, and just close your eyes for a minute. You have seen the lake. Now, just listen to it.”

The sounds have a life of their own: the crickets, the birds settling down for the night, the waves lapping against the sand. Somehow, the youngster understands: we are not just part of the lake. It is a part of us. At this moment, either statement is just a different way of saying the same thing.

This short essay is just to remind us: have fun, but revere the lake. We are part of the local history of the lake, but it is also a part of us, more than most of us take the time to realize.

The Lake is everything that you see, hear and experience, but you have to know how to look. Eastern mysticism? Think again. Western philosophers have struggled with the question “but what, really, is the Lake?” Wrong question. I can describe to you how one would build a mighty dam, or how the beaver builds the humble but effective wier of twigs and branches … but who can describe how to see a lake?

In my personal view there is no secret process that would gradually be revealed to you, at some price you might be unwilling to pay. Everything is already there, on the surface, waiting to be seen. Or, perhaps in your past you have seen parts of it in the rings of the trees, welcoming another who sees that becoming a part of the big picture just means letting go of the alders and cottonwoods and the fall leaves floating in the still of the pond: they ARE part of the picture, but the lake is everything.

But I would not be surprised to see things I never noticed before. To be honest, I can always tell you not to read too much into all of this, and to look for what you see without the artifice of vanity and personalized interpretive embellishment. Robert Pirsig wrote that if you wanted to learn how to fix a motorcycle, learn how to think like the motorcycle. I was the wise guy who at first thought he was just being funny.

Secretly, I have always known that whenever we should get a chance to share with a genuine Master our own vision of the Lake, the very nature of his construction will require him to throw T.S. Eliot back at us:

To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
  Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
  That is not it, at all.”

– The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

As long as we are throwing Masters around, there is value in going back to the ones who also saw it clearly on the more fundamental level, and said so better that I: let me share with you a couple of passages that still electrify me. And then you, all the visitors to this lake, this place here, tell me: is there really something here that does not meet the eye? Has it not been here all along?

From Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig, 1974:

[Phaedrus] felt that the solution started with a new philosophy or he saw it as even broader than that — a new spiritual rationality — in which the ugliness and the loneliness and the spiritual blankness of dualistic technological reason would become illogical. Reason was no longer to be “value free.” Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality, and he was sure he would find the cause of its not being so back among the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of our technology, the tendency to do what is “reasonable” even when it isn’t any good.

From Learning To Fly, P.H. Liotta, 1989:

The wilderness was born in my refusal to listen to the silence. Now I believe that every human, if only once in a life, should turn back to whatever she or he can take up of the remembered earth … To forget whatever small and precious things one has learned, to believe they are foolish things really, only the beginnings of understanding or the remnants of some acquired education, to discard one’s particular way of sight as surely as Picasso did in his first flight in an aircraft, when he looked down to the earth and muttered absently to himself, Cubism. Everyone should see the earth from such fractured angles, to be so uncertain of the certainty of one’s existence. Everyone should image existence without the presence of the self, to remove every thought of one’s own life from the equation; and only by doing that can one begin to believe the sureness and the truth of one’s own life.

In the English Lit classes I believe they still teach us to take paragraphs like that apart.  Pay attention, class. Why did the author say it that way? Indeed, what do you suppose he meant, “fractured angles?” Why would he say we should forget the small and precious things, only to re-inject them anew into the sureness and truth of life?

While the students are set to learning how to diagram sentences, some of them are learning how to understand themselves. Is it possible the instructor understands that? I’m pretty sure the real point’s not what we think an author meant, but what we get out of it. Aren’t you?

“What we get out of it”: the classroom instructor is right here, vindicated in his knowledge that the student who digs gets the higher marks, and probably, the better lifetime. On the surface, Pirsig and Liotta seem to be saying epistemological opposites:

Pirsig rued the tendency to strip value from reason, the dualism that allows us to say “this is what the thing is, and that is what it means to us, and we need not be concerned with how you reconcile the two”.

Liotta is saying, immerse yourself in the experience of the this, and leave all your accumulative that out of it.  Once we grasp that existence thrives in absence of the personalized trappings of the humans who trample the forest floor, we are finally free to reinvest or reinvent our values to enrich our personal existences.

Liotta’s remarkable book is filled from cover to cover with the richness of personal evaluative content, so my vote is that he is not saying evaluative asceticism is a required destination, but a terrifically useful stepping stone. To learn how to evaluate reality, you must learn first to identify it, and that is a tremendously riskier task when you have to tote a week’s supply of intellectual baggage. Just listen to the lake.

I think Pirsig and Liotta took profoundly different routes to saying very similar things. Pirzig drilled down through thousands of years of academic strata to find out what was left when you separated out the sediment of prejudice and predisposed opinion and political alliance. Liotta took the more direct method of looking out the metaphoric aircraft window and seeing nature’s designs without us in the picture.

By either route, how do we get to Pirsig’s “Quality?” That would be a much longer essay … but once you have the methodology for thinking about it, you see that “Quality” can’t just be an after-market add-on. It has to be engineered in from the very first draftsman’s sketches. Like the Lake, the finished product of Man has to be true to its nature. Before you can design a motorcycle that’s a pleasure for us to ride, you have to design a system that takes good care of the needs of the motorcycle.

Concerning quotes such as I cite from Pirsig and Liotta, how can we know when we’re just grabbing snippets from the masters and reapplying them to our own contexts and purposes?

The words are theirs. The concepts we carried away from them are ours now (or should be, if we have thought about them) – not in the sense that one is ever free to misappropriate originality, but in the greater sense that, to the best of our ability, we have lived them.

But that’s still too convoluted. As in life, simplicity comes at the end, not the beginning.

At the end of this stem-winder, you drop by the lake, and you take in the view. You see one thing. I have been here for a while, and I may have seen something else. To take home with us forever the actual beauty of the lake, we don’t need a communally synthesized composite view of what everybody has seen.

It’s still the same lake. It’s just not about binding arbitration and spin doctoring. You walk away with what you put into the process. And you own it.

That’s what I’m talking about.

Names on the Land

Kauai, the name of my favorite island in the Hawaiian group, comes from an ancient time and people, and possibly from an older language language, from an ancient and prehistoric strata of place names stretching back way before King Kamehameha and Captain James Cook.

Wailau Valley (Hawaii) translates into “Many Waters”, according to one tour guide website, or more exactly “four hundred streams” according to George R. Stewart, author of Names on the Land (Lexicos, 4th Ed., San Francisco ©1945, 1958, 1967) - available at Amazon.

Wai, “water”, comes across in so many Hawaiian place names, such such as the Wailua River in Kauai County. The river mouth flows into the Pacific through the town of the same name.

The North Fork of the North Fork of the Yuba River underwent the scrutiny of the California Board of Geographic Names in the mid-twentieth century.

Part of the problem was, there were two North Forks, and two North Forks of those northern forks of the Yuba River. The problem was resolved, in part, by renaming one of those forks the Downie River, after Downieville, through which it flows — the town having been named after Major William Downie when it was settled in 1849.

California’s 1849 Gold Rush brought a huge influx of settlers and transient prospectors, all seeking their fortune in the gold fields, or selling goods or services to those who were. Many of these men brought little they could not carry, and cared not about the genteel sensitivities of postal regulations and tradition in bestowing their place names across the rivers, foothills and mountains of the Sierras. They brought us celebrated names like Rough and Ready and Poker Flat, exploited and popularized by early western writer Bret Hart, among others.

Name Clusters (my term) - Stewart describes how you can sometimes tell just by looking at the density and distribution of place names on a map where major events and population shifts occurred. Sometimes a name cluster gives insight into the fancies of the explorer bestowing the names. California’s gold country was certainly one of those local regions about which one could write a book on place names.

Stewart mentions an E.G. Gudde who was working on that project for California (and he cites numerous other researchers mining place names in other parts of the country). Sure enough, a Google search on ‘Gudde’ finds an EBay posting: California Gold Camps, by Erwin G. Gudde, printed 1975, 1 available, $175, 467 pages; “place names, glossary and bibliography, list of places by counties. Maps, black-and-white drawings and photographs. Rare!”

Mention “Groundhog Day“, and we automatically think of Punxsutawney Phil, and of course we might associate the groundhog and his Pennsylvania town with some local name for the groundhog. Not so; Stewart explains it comes from Indian words meaning roughly “punkie” or midge, the annoying little flying insect, joined to another native word for “town”.

Mooselookmeguntic is the name of a lake in Maine.

It is found in the Androscoggin watershed, feeding the Rangeley Lakes where I fished as a boy. The word is Indian for “moose feeding place”. We visited “Pond In The River“, pictured at left, south of Middledam. Place names could be very practical, too.

To the west of the island I visited was Lake Umbagog. New Englanders are also very familiar with New Hampshire’s famed resort Lake Winnipesaukee, another Native American name - reported by Wikipedia to  mean either “smile of the Great Spirit” or “beautiful water in a high place”. The exact meaning of place names often gets lost in history, to be carried on anecdotally.

Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg is a lake my parents told me about in Webster, Mass. whose name was a hoax. The hoax was contained in the story passed on to me:

“So they named this beautiful lake after terms of that treaty. Chargoggagogg, ‘you fish on your side,’ Manchaugagogg, ‘I fish on my side,’ and Chaubunagungamaugg, ‘Nobody fish in the middle.’”

In truth, the lake name meant “The Fishing Place at the Boundaries—The Neutral Meeting Ground”. But somebody came up with the hoax translation, and it stuck. It has not yet been officially adopted as an explanation, but it will be. Trust the American instinct for local color.

You won’t find all of these place name etymologies in George R. Stewart’s wonderful and carefully researched book “Names On The Land”, but you will find others, more than you could possibly believe, in over 400 pages of gracefully literate narrative. Stewart started this work in 1941 before I was born, to become a definitive classic tracing the history of place naming in the United States.

If your American History is a bit weak, possibly because you suspect works of history of being a bit dry, this is just the ticket to shake you out of your rut. It is the story of geology, geography and the history of our peoples all rolled up into place names. It is nothing if not a fascinating, hard to put down read.

By researching every available resource of the time in libraries, periodicals, historical surveys and act of Congress, Stewart began with the names of the states as they worked their way westward, and shows how the local place names were a distinctly American blend of ethnic roots (New York, Germantown, Paris, Essex and so forth), tradition and established local usage, the nomenclature of discovery (Vancouver Bay, Bering Sea) and American Indian heritage.

In particular, we mostly avoided the European process of naming and renaming places to honor political correctness and toady up to political patronage. Of course, there were many blatant exceptions, and some very understandable ones as well. Cape Canaveral was renamed to honor our President Kennedy, and there were few who could take exception to that, except perhaps for the precedent that wasn’t really a precedent at all. I note that the media have taken to calling it by its old name again, though I’m not sure of the division of labor: there’s the city of Cape Canaveral, and Kennedy Space Center, and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

When Jackie Kennedy learned that the original name was 400 years old, she blessed the restoration of the geographic place name “Canveral”, with the Space Center justly retaining the Kennedy honorific.

Of Native American names, Stewart shows that there was a semi-codified procedure for name-giving, and rule #1 was: if it had a local name before, use that name on the maps and charts.

You can see this in all the regions of the US, from the Okefenokee to Mooselookmeguntic, across the states of the Plains Indians, to (especially to) Alaska and Hawaii.

The picture inset is of Denali National Park, Denali meaning “the great one” in the native Athabascan language. The name Alaska itself is reputed to come from several unidentified roots, including Alaeksu, Alaschka, and Alaxa. Wikipedia credits it to the native Aleut word alaxsxag, loosely meaning “the mainland”.

You can also see that when an “Indian name” did not come to hand readily, we could manufacture one to honor the heritage, such as Sioux City, or, for better or worse, to combat it: Fort Apache. And did we forget the states’ names - Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and possibly Wyoming?

In the Northeast, many towns were named or renamed after French heroes who aided us during the Revolutionary War. They had to put a stop to Lafayette in some areas (there’s even a Lafayette in California), and the Postal Service had to enforce it: you cannot have two post offices of the same name in the same state.

The coming of the railroads added a sudden need for many more station names than there were towns, and many towns grew up around stations and took their names, which often as not were given to honor railroad officials.

Of the lakes and rivers, the major rivers were all named before the states, and it is hard to think of all the states that took their names from the rivers: Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri, Colorado (though the Colorado does not officially flow through it; that is the Green River, as originally named). Once the largest lakes were named (Tahoe, an Indian name), tens of thousands of smaller unnamed lakes took fanciful names from someone’s sweetheart or daughters. There are whole chains of lakes named after daughters.

Similarly, with the mountains, once we were done with Pike’s Peak, Mt. Whitney, Mt. Ranier, the Appalachians and the most prominent or historical high-rise landmarks, there were thousands upon thousands of smaller mountains. My favorite, not noted by Stewart, is Painted Lady (King’s Canyon): its rich red bands really looks like a reclining lady in somewhat risque repose.

You can see the Painted Lady herself faintly on the peak in the photo to the left, imagining a figure reclined left to right on the peak above the pine trees. It shows better in late afternoon. It was no doubt named by a prospector who had not seen a female in 15 months and who may, possibly, still have been working on the precious whiskey supply.

Geological names are a favorite adventure of mine on rainy winter nights. On the USGS Mt. Pinchot map (15 minute series) we find Mt. Clarence King, honoring the pioneering surveyor, a contemporary of Major Powell (after whom the lake was named). Also in Kings Canyon National Park, in Evolution Valley (Mt. Goddard quadrangle, 15 minute series), we find a field holiday for scientists and students of science: Mt. Spencer, Mt. Mendel, Darwin Canyon and Mt. Darwin, and, gosh, wouldn’t you know it, Wanda Lake.

For you ancient history buffs, just south of there and way high above the John Muir Trail, USGS gives us the peak Scylla, the Ionian Basin, Charybdis, and the Three Sirens.

So, you see, once you get into the spirit of the research, you can find your own place names and surmise the history or research it from there. The names tell a story. Stewart begins the story as cited below, and you can continue the story every time you look at a map or tour this rich continent of ours:

Once, from eastern ocean to western ocean, the land stretched away without names. Nameless headlands split the surf; nameless lakes reflected nameless mountains; and nameless rivers flowed through nameless valleys into nameless bays …

Men came at last, tribe following tribe, speaking different languages and thinking different thoughts … after many centuries a people calling themselves Americans held the land. They followed the ways of the English more than of any others … yet they gathered together in their blood and in their manner of life something of all those who had lived in the land before them.

Thus the names lay thickly over the land, and the Americans spoke them, great and little, easily and carelessly - Virginia, Susquehanna, Rio Grande, Deadman Creek, Sugarloaf Hill, Detroit, Wall Street - not thinking how they had come to be.

Alex Forbes © November 1, 2007

Day 13, Captain’s Log, Lieutenant Diem logging: We laid poor Captain Anderson to rest today in this hellish place. He died of multiple heat strokes despite the extra water rations and such precious shade as we could find. The ground here, if you can call it ground, is baked like bricks in an oven. The heat shimmers on the surface of this plateau at 122 degrees. There is scarcely any relief at night. Despite the TerraSat surveys they sent us before communications went out, there is no water to be seen anywhere. The men cannot go on like this much longer.

We buried the Captain in a small bowl-like depression in a clearing created by wind, weather and collapsing canyon walls, entered into the log in the graphic below. May the Lord have mercy on all our souls.

Marching orders were for our party to proceed on foot to a blue ocean, said to lie to the south. Data based on the survey of just six months ago indicated drenching precipitation and cold temperatures. We dressed warmly and provisioned to collect water for a short journey of five days on the way. What are they smoking up there?

Having only been able to struggle in the overwhelming heat for a few short miles in two whole days, we entered the slot canyon to escape the heat on Day 3, via a bowl-shaped depression near the bottom of the strip map. By that time Captain Anderson had already suffered his first case of heat stroke.

One cannot even describe the hell of the next twenty days’ journey south (north is bottom). There is shade against the slot canyon walls at almost all times, but the air is stifling, lifeless and blistering hot. The canyon floors are filled with broken and fallen rock debris of all possible sizes. One must be SO careful in negotiating the rubble.

Captain Anderson had his next two strokes, the last one taking him mercifully in the pitiful shade of a narrow slot wall. We named it “Anderson’s Gulch”. It took all our energy to scratch out a shallow depression for a grave. A deeper one would have served little but tradition - there would be no creatures scavenging this horrible land, and nothing to scavenge if there were.

Food rations were exhausted two days ago, save for some emergency personal energy food packets. Water is down to a liter per man per day, and will be half a liter tomorrow, and few things are more horrible to contemplate than slow death by dehydration.

I have called a halt to the procession to make a camp of any kind just for the night. I have also sent two volunteers forward after dark to see if they can find any options for us around the next corner of the canyon, or the next, or the next after that.

Day 14, Captain’s Log, Lieutenant Diem logging: The volunteers returned, shortly after solar noon. They bore good news. There is an ocean there after all! We are saved! We will head south from camp (red spot) at once. At least now we know we can make it. Poor Captain Anderson, betrayed twice by bad information and inadequate provisions by our employer. Once home, you can bet none of THIS crew will ever voyage with this company again!

I have provided a link to a TerraSat image we were later able to download to see what our destination looks like from the air. You may view it here.

For the first time in history, Google Earth and the internet brings instant research access to the average reader. Many reliable research resources were previously only available, at considerable expense of time and effort, to those who could access the great libraries of the universities and civic compendiums of knowledge.

In?my occasionally unavoidable?reading of histories and narratives that mainly concern geographical locations and terrain, I’ll admit I used to find them difficult to follow, tedious or even boring. “When the Smothers Party crossed the great Mongolian Cleft in 1893″ may mean a lot to a historian - in this case, I made that up - but it means nothing to me.

An author like Wallace Stegner who is also outstanding in the field of writing novels and essays can make this a lot easier. Stegner can be so good with his descriptions of physical geography and the land and water. Since he isn’t stingy with place names, it is easier to visualize his trip down the San Juan River even though there isn’t an illustration in the whole book.

But I need to see a map. Stegner’s biography of Major Wesley Powell supplied those maps, but most of his other historical essays don’t. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could see where Stegner traveled?

Fortunately, with Google Earth, we can. I would guess Stegner’s essay San Juan and Glen Canyon, from the book The Sound of Mountain Water, was written in the 1960’s. Stegner died in 1993, so he lived to read about satellite mapping. He?no doubt pored over some individual plates when he could get them. The ability to have detailed topo and satellite maps of almost the entire globe effortless served up on our home computers is about a decade newer, and (I think) would have delighted him.

This essay appears to have been written after the start of construction of Glen Canyon Dam (1956), but before the canyons started flooding. Stegner’s rafting trip began on June 5, but we don’t have a year.

I would like to take the liberty of citing an extended passage from this chapter, and invite you to click the Google Earth map “thumbnail”, and follow along with the full-screen image. Stegner’s party is departing Mexican Hat:

Four of us miss the launching because we are going overland to the Goosenecks to get pictures as the boats swing into the deep hairpins of the meander. We will join the others about noon at the foot of Honaker Trail…

We are at the Goosenecks a good while before the boats, which have to travel sixteen miles in the canyons to reach here. Below us the gray-brown river has sunk itself 1300 feet into the rock in a perfect double hairpin — what the geologists call an “entrenched meander.” The San Juan used to be a sluggish river running on a level plain, and meandering like any old-age stream. The a great plateau was slowly lifted across its path, so slowly that the river clould cling to its old course and simply dig in. So it still has the crooked course of a slow river, though it is actually the fastest major stream in the United States, with a gradient of about eight feet to the mile. Just for comparison, the Mississippi’s gradient is eight _inches_ to the mile …

Clicking the image at the top of this essay to get to the full-size Google satellite image (160K), near “The Goosenecks” area of the San Juan, we can easily see a “double hairpin” - I see a possible triple. Seeing how the river has cut its way into 1300 feet of slowly uplifting rock, preserving the original meander of a “flat” river, who now can ever forget this concept of the “entrenched meander”?

You can download your own copy of Google Earth for free. We recommend Broadband.

It is said that sometimes people make mountains out of molehills, and we all know what that means. There is a regrettable trait in?us humans that inexplicably lets us seize upon a simple (and perhaps wrong) notion and expand and soap-box upon its importance beyond all reason.

Sometimes it means a bad case of grandstanding. Sometimes it is symptomatic of nagging or bullying. Sometimes it exemplifies the old trap of “monkey’s fist in the coconut”: having grasped that sweet meat inside the coconut, the monkey is unable to withdraw his fist, but refuses to let go, because to let go would be to give up the coconut meat.

And sometimes people “go off” on trivial issues simply because they’ve had it; they’re fed to the teeth.

I don’t know about you Easterners and your moles, but out west we call them “gophers”. It isn’t the odd gopher mound here and there that aggravates western homeowners, but acres and acres of them, compacted into a single family tract, so that once-green lawns look like a county landfill project. When our neighbor sees a single gopher hole, it’s a certainty he’s going to see more, so he’s forgiven for making the metaphorical mountain out of it, so long as he gets it out of his system and doesn’t rabbit on about it forever.

My mole-hill is the alarming misuse of the apostrophe in what used to be, in grammar school, fairly easy-to-diagram sentences. And I’d bet they don’t teach diagramming of sentences nowadays either, but I’d be digressing.

As much as you, I also deplore hand-wringing about the wretched and humbling apostrophe, particularly when we have global warming, several Mideast wars and a rheumatic economy. It just seems to me it’s getting worse.

In daily corporate email from people who should know better (and normally do), I see constructs like “Oop’s, re-sending to include Joe Blow”, and “Lets clean up the email’s in those mailboxes”.

No matter how “understandable” grammar errors are in-house, releasing same to the client always tends to be received in the most unfavorable light possible: it makes us look like idiots.

We also see punctuation errors involving the apostrophe in every newspaper (print or web). We see them in nationally circulated magazines. We see them in TV ads. I’ve seen them on BBC - it isn’t just us.

It goes without saying that in personal emails, internet blogs, private and corporate websites, public forums and bulletin boards, we see so many typos and bad constructs it’s fair to say they’re lousy with errors, fairly crawling with them. I no longer battle those. I shrug and get on with real life.

I almost never see apostrophe errors in the New Yorker magazine, and almost never in books. The expected level of training in grammatical issues is so high, and the number of people reviewing the material so great, that the odds of an error slipping through are close to zero.

So it brought me a great shock to find such an error in a prized book, The Sound of Mountain Water, a collection of essays by Wallace Stegner, one of my favorite authors. Stegner taught writing at Harvard and Stanford, among other places; he won the Pulitzer for his novel Angle of Repose, and several other awards in a distinguished career.

At first I just studied the error, parsed it, re-parsed it, and studied it again. By everything I know that is holy and true, it was an error. And then I shrugged and got on with real life. But it nagged at me. Was this a typo? How did it get past all those editors? My fist had become stuck in the coconut.

A diligent researcher would be able to go right back to that quote, and effortlessly trot it out for you on page such and such, and we could discuss it, and the researcher would look smart for having made the finding of a needle in the haystack look so easy.

A plodding, inattentive researcher would fail to mark the page, then spend hours and hours going back over the book, until finally he would locate and mark the offending passage. And he would conceal this effort from you, making our researcher look smart for having made the finding of a needle in the haystack look so easy.

And then there are the cowards and failed researchers, who merely pretend at their trade, who will simply assert that they did find such an error and never divulge how many hours they wasted in vain search for the offending passage. They will lamely trot out an analogy, not a real error, but a fabricated one that is “like” the real one, they say — or at least, as closely as their memory serves, which obviously is not well enough.

And I am not going to tell you which one I am, but I do promise that if I ever find that error again, I will trot it out, even if it is 3:00 AM and the normal world is fast asleep, and I will shout out, “See, I TOLD you so!”

The Problem With English

The biggest single problem with the English apostrophe seems to be our confusion over the differences between contractions, plurals and possessives, all of which usually end in the letter ’s’. And the second biggest problem seems to be the inconsistent application of the rules between proper and improper nouns, such as “Charlie’s limits” vs. “its limits”.

An American of average education should be able to sit down and verbally reconstruct the Rights of Man, from first principles if need be. If called upon to do so, he might be asked to explain, in ordinary English, the proper motion of the planets and other heavenly bodies. He or she should also be reasonably current on the technology of the day, so that if a small child asked us how GPS works, or, heaven help us, cell phones, we are expected to come up with some sort of reasonable answer in language anyone can understand.

But, God help us all, there is no requirement that anyone should be expected to explain the rules of ordinary English punctuation. Rankin cycles in heat engines - perhaps. Amateur string theory and particle physics, unified - certainly. Punctuation, never.

Punctuation is the reason so many people still cling to a belief in seances and astrology. “For those who know, no explanation is necessary. For those who don’t, none is possible.”

Strunk’s Elements of Style

For punctuation, I know right where to find the answers when I need them, and you probably do too: The venerated old 1918 Strunk’s Elements of Style. And I need those answers, and the book’s not on the shelf where I think it should be: this is but one of the many confusing benefits of having one’s library split between residences in two states.

There are some rules that I find troublesome. For example, the possessives of words that already end in “s”: Fortunately, Strunk is also on the web. We often can make an end run around the rules:

But as we know, some end-runs don’t sound right. I was born with a surname ending in ’s’: Forbes. “Forbes’ house” looks stilted. “The house of Forbes” implies a second meaning, perhaps a place of high fashion, and it sounds way too pretentious. Mostly, I settled on “Forbes’s house” even though I never saw a rule that justifies it.

But here you go:

And finally,

Even writing this stuff down is confusing. From generation to generation of native-born Americans, we are still learning English as a second language.

Lost on the Trail

So, did I ever find the Stegner error? First, I fell back on re-reading the chapters where memory told me, faultily, I was most likely to find the error. Then, I fell back on reading the chapters backwards until I might find what I was looking for. Lastly, I threw out any pretense of methodology and started re-reading the book from the first page of Stegner’s Introduction.

We said this is like looking for the needle in the haystack. Actually, here there are several haystacks, and there are many needles hidden within each haystack. They are all colored bright orange. The needle we are looking for looks like any other needle, except that it is colored bright red-orange.

In every backpacker’s career there comes a time when necessity finally forces one to re-trace one’s steps, or try to. Perhaps you realize have left a primus stove at a lake where you stopped for lunch. You could go on, cooking meals over collected firewood (when the rules permit). But you elect to hike back to the lake, where, fifteen minutes later, there it is, bright, shiny and embarrassingly hard to miss: some idiot has left his camp stove just off the trailside.

Sometimes you are actually lost, as I wrote about in another story some time back, so that your task is not merely re-tracing your steps along the trail, but to re-find the trail at all. Moving in the generalized right direction, or perhaps even moving in every-increasing semicircles, if you are lucky, you find the trail. If you are unlucky, you will spend the night shivering in shorts and T-shirt, and perhaps read about yourself in the newspapers if you are lucky enough to get through this and get home.

Having found the trail, which way, up or down? Does this overhanging branch look familiar? Of course it does; you curse yourself - they all look exactly like that. In the end, you hope for a bit of luck when the deja vu kicks in and you know that camp is just off to the left of this bend in the trail.

That is the situation I am in with this apostrophe mess.The Stegner book does not yet look anything like a “well-worn favorite”, but already it is festooned with extra bookmarks and little Post-It page markers to tell me where I have already been.

There could be worse fates than re-reading a book I enjoy very much, and this is not a case where I absolutely have to be back at camp by sundown. Starting back at page 1, I realize by page 77 I have already re-read this chapter. I haven’t just been here before; I’ve been here before twice. I’m going in circles.

While I am floundering around on the side of the mountain, I would like to share with you a passage from Stegner that particularly resonated with me. It speaks to what I call the “River Theme”, a powerful symbol that for me replaces the steeples and bells and trappings of organized man-made worship. It is from “Overture: The Sound of Mountain Water”, Chapter 1. He is writing of a visit to the highest headwaters of the Snake, which “was starting through its thousand miles of canyons to the Columbia and the Pacific”:

And, your honor, and if I may indulge your kind attention, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, now that we have all shared the raw power of a writer of Stegner’s caliber, why are we wasting time in this courtroom haggling over an apostrophe? Even if the deceased defendant Stegner ever actually made that alleged error, as this undocumented charlatan charges, what of it? What should we think, when the person stepping forward to make this charge of grammatical lapse is unable to produce any shred of evidence that Professor Stegner, a Pulitzer prize winner, really made this so-called error at all? In this world of hopelessly inconsistent English grammar rules, unknowable even in the highest places - the White House, for example - if he erred, where is the crime here, ladies and gentlemen, and who has the right to step forward and blame Stegner?

Far be it from me to point the finger. My point was that apostrophe errors reach into even the highest literary plateaus of the land, not that Stegner (it seemed to me at the time) made the error. My case has crumbled. I wish I could shrink out of the courtroom unseen. In a country that celebrates whistle-blowers, I blew the whistle, and when people came, I said, in so many words, “I’m not really sure why I blew the damned thing after all.” As I disclosed earlier, I’ve been here before.

I’m really lost on the trail this time. I’m going to abandon this essay, high in the unread backwaters of American web pages, and just concentrate on finding my way back to civilization — hoping against hope that I am not going to read about myself in the newspapers if I make it back at all.

And what if I do eventually stumble upon the alleged Lost Apostrophe? We are not talking “Lost Dutchman Mine” here.? Would?I make the big announcement? I changed my mind. That will probably never happen. People are not going to go pouring over the mountain, gold pans, picks and sluice boxes stacked high on mule-back, looking to stake a personal claim in the greatest strike since the Comstock Lode.

Sometimes it just pays to keep one’s mouth shut. If I’d done that in the first place, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, you wouldn’t be looking at me and at this page in that tone of voice, and we could all get back to the really important things in life, like why Google offers over 17,900,000 English pages for the search topic “Paris Hilton.”

I’ll tell you what, though. Should you ever actually find that errant apostrophe yourself, please do let me know. I’ll make the announcement that it has been found, but neither of us will ever reveal its true location. The world will be goaded into reading more Wallace Stegner, and less about Paris Hilton, and something good might come of this essay after all.

Alex Forbes, ?copyright June 21, 2007

I’ve been reading Wallace Stegner’s delightful collection of articles and stories about “the changing American West”, The Sound of Mountain Water (Penguin; first published in 1969 by Doubleday). I feel quite certain I’ll eventually attempt a more serious article on this fine collection.

In Chapter 3, however, I find myself reading about the road signs on old Route 66. You remember them. “Gas”. “Ice Cold Drinks”. “Mag’s Good Eats”. Rattlesnakes. Katchina dolls. Stegner did not mention the Burma-Shave signs, but you remember them too. And finally, “Mystery Spot.”

Ah, yes, the venerable old quack Santa Cruz tourist trap that even the Loma Prieta quake couldn’t kill. Who did they ever enlist to post signs on the fabled road to New Mexico?

A bunch of us visited Mystery Spot in college. Larry, Bob and Bob’s girlfriend Chris all made me promise?to go there with an open mind and not make a scene.? I’m sure I failed my solemn commitment.

Basically, the proprietors swear this is one of a few spots on Earth where gravity is seriously perturbed. But what they have there is a cattywompus house, with floors built on a slope and nonparallel walls at all angles.?Room ceilings slope from one side to the other, giving the feeling that one is taller on one side of the room than the other. The feeling of disorientation is powerful, or “discombobulating” as one writer put it.

I’m not going to give away all the fun by spilling the beans again. You can research it at WikiPedia, or even at Mystery Spot’s own site. At the Mystery Spot site you can even see documentary photos, such as the photo of two gentlemen standing facing each other one a sloping floor. One of them appears to be taller than the other because they have not yet changed positions to the other photo, where the other appears taller. Amazing!

While in one room at Mystery Spot I noticed that, sure enough, gravity seemed to be all out of whack where I was standing. You could tell, because I knew I was standing upright, but the walls were pointing up and off in a different direction than I was.

The problem was, the Santa Cruz Mountains are prime redwood country. Somebody forgot to tell the redwoods. Why, right outside our window, the redwoods were standing to the same perpendicular I was! And, across the valley on the far slope, the redwoods there were also all obeying the same perverse law of gravity I was!

I got a number of glaring tourists frowning on me when I irreverently suggested the house had been build without benefit of local plumb-bobs, levels or carpenter squares.

Outside near the parking area - we were all standing straight up once again - they had a glassed-in bulletin board area with precious written testimonials. One was from some Austrian Professor from some obscure institution of higher learning nobody had ever heard of or was ever likely to hear of again. It said, basically, “I have examined the phenomena at Mystery Spot and they appear to be the phenomena I have examined.”

I called out to my friends, “Hey look! Proof right here, an authentic document!”

More glares and stares. We left before the believers rode us out of town on a rail.