Helpful Hints for Cartographers

Otter Creek was frozen over in most places and fringed with ice everywhere else.  I stepped over the ice that lined the bank and onto the shoals.  The water rushed against my calf-high boots.  I eyed the rocky streambed uneasily.  I was wearing my heavy wool jacket and a bulky synthetic skull cap – it was way too cold outside to be falling into creeks.  I imagined the scream that would likely escape my lips if I toppled into the water.  Shrill enough to shatter the glass on the cabin and loud enough to be heard for two miles, it would besmirch my family name for years to come.  Determined to avoid such infamy, I set my feet carefully on the mossy rocks, arms extended on either direction like a tightrope walker in Inuit garb, and picked my way across Otter Creek.  I clamored onto the opposite bank with relief, then turned to look for Duke.

A coot in Otter Creek.  (Picture taken a couple days ago, before the creek froze.)

He was sitting on the opposite bank looking at me with his ears perked.  Probably being well-mannered, I thought – when we forded streams while hiking, I’d make him wait on the bank while I crossed so that he wouldn’t bump into me mid-stream and knock me over.  I guess he remembered the procedure.  What a well-behaved dog.

“Okay,” I called.  “Come on.”

Duke started toward the water, put a foot on the icy edge of the stream, withdrew it and looked at me again.  He perked his ears.  I stared back at him.

“Duke, you lazy ass!  Get into the water!”

He sprinted up the bank in one direction, looking for a way across.  Then he ran down the bank in the opposite direction.  He found a spot and picked his way down the bank, stepped on the ice, then retreated again and ran the other way.

“Duke,” I said, “it’s a stream.  You can’t run around it.  We crossed this two days ago – it’s Otter Creek!”

I ought to call it Lazy Lab Creek, I thought.  It would be a better name than Otter Creek.  When it comes to naming topographic features in the American west, two themes dominate to the exclusion of just about everything else: using a local animal, and using someone’s last name.  Otter Creek, Bear Lake, Sheep Creek.  Bridger Mountains, Owens Valley, Humboldt River.  Frankly, I think these themes are overused, and I’d like to see some variation.

A muskrat in Otter Creek.  I have never seen an otter in it.

In fact, more inventive names have been actively suppressed.  For instance, a trapper named John Colter encountered a stream in what is now Wyoming that ran through tar pits.  The river stunk, so Colter called it the Stinking River.  It was a good name, and it stuck.  It was easy to remember, especially if you were downwind.  In his memoirs, the trapper Osborne Russell referred to the watercourse as “Stinking River.”  But years later, the Wyoming state legislature would decide that “Stinking River” was not complimentary enough.  In an attempt to make the river’s name inoffensive, boring, and bland for the ostensible benefit of future pantywaists, the legislature renamed it the “Shoshone.”  Bad call.  Norman McLean, in the short story USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky, tells the tale of the stream that his Trail Crew called “Wet Ass Creek.”  It was a delightful name: did it mean that the creek was, for some reason, unusually damp?  Did it mean that the creek’s discoverer, when crossing, fell backward on his butt?  Or did it mean the discoverer had a nasty case of swamp ass?  A map reader could only grin and guess.  But instead of savoring the ambiguity, the Forest Service’s Survey Crew decided that the name was too indelicate.  At least the Survey Crew bypassed such obvious alternatives as Deer Creek or Jones Fork: they called it “Wetase Creek” and passed it off as an Indian name.

The American west is in need of better names.  There’s no use faking humility; I think cartographers should begin by consulting me.  “Lazy Lab Creek” would be a good start, and then they could add “Stinking Pants Spring” for the pit of bovine excrement that I fell into a couple months back.  And “Rocky Mountains?”  Talk about an uninspired name for America’s most inspiring topographical feature.  As Del Que shouted in the movie Jeremiah Johnson, “the Rocky Mountains is the marrow of the world,” and we have named them after the generalized substance that exists in every mountain range everywhere: rock.  Dull.  That has to change.  I propose calling them the “Marrow Mountains,” in honor of Del Que, and then changing “South Pass” to “The Narrow in the Marrow.”  And while I’m at it, I’ll reach back to my home state – Atlanta should start calling itself Tohellwithsherman, Georgia.  This would require Yankees to say the words whenever they bought plane tickets into our state.  And if they refused, what would be the loss?

I would allow some relatively dull names to remain, but only if the name had an interesting story behind it.  For instance, Wyoming’s “Sweetwater River” has three nominal stories.  One historian says that an early trapper gave the river its name because the water tasted sweet.  Warren Ferris, the trapper who wrote Life in the Rocky Mountains, says that the river got its name while a mule laden with sugar slipped in the river and drowned.  Still another historian records that a bunch of traders in a “drunken carousel” accidentally dumped a bag of sugar into the water.  If we combine all of these stories to ascertain the truth, we learn that the river’s discoverer was drinking downstream of some drunk traders who, in the course of “carousing” with their mule, knocked a bag of sugar off the animal’s back in mid-stream.  I’d rather have called the watercourse “Fond-of-Mule River,” but the story is good enough that I’ll settle for “Sweetwater.”

Duke ran down the opposite bank of Lazy Lab Creek and stopped where he’d started.  He sniffed the ice at the creek’s edge, then stepped onto it.  He waded into the water.  Duke’s legs are unusually short for a lab, and although that’s an advantage for slipping under barbed wire fences, he paid the price now.  The water splashed against his stomach.  I realized with a vicarious wince that other sensitive parts of his anatomy hung at the same elevation.  He stepped over an ice floe in midstream and the ice rubbed against his underside.  He commenced to running, and bounded the last few steps out of Otter Creek.

He ran to me and I knelt to pet him.  He was wet but wagging his tail.  Maybe “Lazy Lab Creek” isn’t right.  Henceforth, in Duke’s honor, I’ll call it “Retract Creek” instead.