At Long Beach, North Carolina, I sit on the porch of the shabby, comfortable house we are renting for a week. The wind is from the southwest; I can tell by the direction in which our neighbor’s windsock is blowing. Being reminded of the Southwest, I think of the beautiful word “scirrocco,” the name for the desert wind said to make women crazy with desire. I am mesmerized by this word and where it takes me, how conscious it makes me of my own surroundings. Even though the wind is indeed hot, it is also laden with microscopic droplets of seawater, and so, I think, sadly, it cannot be a wind that affects me thus. To confirm that I am a staid, maternal figure and not a wanton woman stalking men in the desert heat, I look down at the damp grains of sand sticking to my pale thighs beneath the pages of the book in my lap and then up again at this quiet family beach. My daughter plays in the waves with the eldest of our minister neighbor’s five children.

“Find out his name,” I say to her concerning her new friend, when she comes in for a snack.

“Why?” she asks. It’s a good question. In return, all I offer is, “So you can quit calling him ‘that boy’.”
She graciously accepts my bad answer, then goes back out into the world of water, sand and wind: her world that makes sense. I’m not sure why I want her to know his name, why I want to know his name, or why we need, sometimes deeply, to know any name. Maybe it is because in naming things, in giving them a word, we place them, order them and create, in our articulation, a connection to them. So it was in the tale of Adam and his daunting task of naming and categorizing the creatures in Eden. So it is with us in what remains of Eden. Naming what surrounds us, or simply knowing the names of what surrounds us, creates a link that gives significance and meaning.

My West Virginia husband told me he heard a piece on public radio about natives of his beleaguered state rising up in indignation as newcomers attempted to change place names. It seems that the newcomers want to make them more aesthetically pleasing, more palatable on the back of an envelope.

The West Virginians were upset because in changing names the new people were also changing history. They were disregarding the fact that the names already in place had been given for a reason. The names were indicative of lives lived, joys felt and pains suffered.

This made me think about the names of places here in the western part of North Carolina. As one who enjoys stories, both human and otherwise, I have always loved the Cherokee place names here: Tuckaseegee, Oconaluftee, Cowee, Cullowhee, Nantahala, Cheoah, Lauada, Alarka, Stecoah. The names sing themselves off the tongue, even now, centuries after the Cherokees who coined them are gone and their descendants live in a world created by a people with entirely different values, beliefs and mores. Many of their meanings are lost to us who live here now and speak the words given to these places in years previous. But we can recognize the poetry, even if we don’t know the story.

From a Cherokee Place Names Internet site, (transcribed by Don Chesnut from R.I. Jarrett’s 1916 “Occononeechee: The Maid of the Mystic Lake,” published by New York’s Shakespeare Press), I gleaned a little information about a few familiar names with meanings that have not been completely lost. “Cowee” may mean “place of the deer clan” and “Oconaluftee” means "by the river.” “Nantahala” has long been known as “land of the noonday sun,” even though the cliffs are only high enough to block the morning and afternoon sun in one section of the gorge. And for all of my life I have heard two different meanings for “Cullowhee,” (where I now live) — the first, “valley of lilies” is, in its loveliness, the favorite of most people. However, the second one I heard, “where ravens fly up” is, I think, the most haunting. One similar to that, and far more entertaining, if one considers fraternity houses and their inhabitants, is one a friend recently told me: “buzzards circling over swamp.” From the website I mentioned, I learned a possible fourth meaning — “place of [an unidentified] edible plant” — not a very exciting definition to someone doing amateur research.

However, if this meaning (given to the word “Gula'hi,” from which, perhaps, “Cullowhee” is derived) is correct, the people who gave it the name could certainly have identified the plant. The point is that the names seem to have been given because of the significance of a place, or to recognize a geographical feature. The names are a part of a place. They seem to have grown there. They do not feel imposed.

The same is true of the names given by those who came centuries later, and who lived alongside but learned little from the people who (as George Ellison wrote so well in a recent column on “Sourwood”) “woke up as a part of the glorious world that surrounded them.” Though less musical, the names given to places by the Scots and Scots-Irish who settled here are colorful, and they speak to us about the humor and practicality of the people who invented them: Hogback Gap, PawPaw Ridge, Needmore, Bear Pen, Bearwallow Knob, Meetinghouse Mountain, Burningtown and Pumpkintown. Like the Cherokee names, they are fitting, organic and unforced. They have relevance because they are names that came, somehow, out of the land and the lives of its inhabitants, and they reveal the tie between the two. Often, these names are the very short versions of much longer narratives, and so they have their own odd bit of integrity. The places and names are intertwined. It seems that to really know a place, in the case of our Appalachian ancestors, was also to give it a name. And, on the other side of the coin, to name a place was an indication that the people who named it also knew it in every sense. (At least this is so in names other than those given in honor of famous figures — “Webster” after the orator and politician, Daniel Webster; “Jackson County” after the president, war hero, and Cherokee removal anti-hero, Andrew Jackson. Even in those instances, and in others of famous-figure names, what people valued [or de-valued] was evident in the names they gave.)

I spent part of this summer in northern New Mexico assisting a friend at a creative writing camp for gifted teenage writers. Though talented, intelligent, and savvy in all matters pertaining to popular culture, most of these students were, as my friend noted to me one day, remarkably incurious about the nature and names of the flora and fauna with which they were surrounded. Previous groups, she told me, had wanted to know everything, beginning with the names. Because she needed to satisfy them, she had learned the names of a host of plants and animals (primarily dry little reptiles) from the collection of desert guidebooks she had gathered. Learning and passing along these names had strengthened her own connection to the living things to which these names were attached.

In my own classroom at Swain County High School, I do not teach Natural History. The names I teach are parts of speech, authors, literary terms. But I also try to convey to students that their own stories are important, that they are part of a place, that the environment in which they live is worthy of their engagement, worth their knowing. Many of them desire so much to become part of the world they see on MTV, in Teen People, and in Abercrombie and Fitch, that they fail to see what lies more easily within their own reach. Among these students I teach, those who hunt are often the ones who know the mountain environment better than any of the others, including those few who consider themselves environmentalists, and that includes myself. The students who hunt are the ones who can tell me where patches of “seng” are to be found, where they’ve seen the largest stands of blighted locusts, what day the lacewings took flight. They know the names of the trees, of the flowers, of the tiny salamanders that are still managing to survive in the increasing acidity of our streams. The names they know may not be the same as those found in the Audubon Society Field Guides, but they are the names that have been passed down from grandparents to grandchildren.

They know the names of places because the names are connected to tales they have heard. They are names like Hazel Creek, bringing with it the story of Pawpaw camping there, and the bear that woke him by licking his feet that lay too close to the frying pan of trout from the previous night’s supper.
They are names like Big Cove, where their great-grandmother grew enormous gourds in a patch of rich ground. They are names like Watia, where their neighbor’s dogs got out one night and killed their cow, and it took a while for peace to be made between the two families. They are names like Smokemont, where a panther once prowled too close to my father’s boyhood home, and his uncles had to walk him to school until the panther was no longer seen or heard in the vicinity.

In an article by Judith Larner Lowry in Orion magazine, she writes about her discomfort with a group of friends and their “imposed” spirituality, their “imported” ceremony, a combination of religions and rites from all over the globe, to be incorporated into a fall equinox celebration. She admits the need for ceremony, but wants it to be local in the best sense of the word, a celebration related to their own location. She suggests a ceremony taken from the White Mountain Apache, in which people tell stories by first naming a direction, then a place that lies in that direction, and then telling a story related to that place. She suggests this because she believes that in naming and telling stories that go with those names, such a ceremony can “educate us about our place, [deepen] our understanding of the animals and plants, the swing of the seasons.” I go even further than Lowry in my dislike of ceremony, in that I prefer it to rise on its own out of a situation, that it be completely authentic and even unplanned, that it spring forth in the middle of a conversation between paddlers upon mention of the West Prong of the Pigeon River, or in the night by a campfire upon recognition of the call of the whippoorwill.

As I travel in this area, I note old names, as well as the new names on road signs given as a part of the area “911” project: Dolphin Lane, Toy Cove, Serendipity Drive. Many of the new signs simply tell the name of the people who live there, an old practice. And some of the names irritate me, even though they’re none of my business, even though I understand people’s desire to be original, to use words that please them and say something about themselves. I just think the name should be the first word of a narrative, one that can have a long run, one that is tied to something genuine.

When I drive through the ever-spreading outskirts of cities, I always notice the names of housing and apartment developments. The more expensive they are, the more likely they are to have be graced with names like “Fox Ridge,” “Turtle Cove, “Partridge Hollow” — even if there are no foxes, turtles, or partridges within a hundred mile radius; even if all the ridges, coves, and hollows have been bulldozed long ago. Sometimes the names make me sad.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling superior, they amuse me. Mostly they remind me how much of what we do is done without thought, or, maybe worse, with an eye toward consumers and their sentimentality, the same kind of sentimentality that names sleek automobiles after endangered animals and Indian tribes. The names conjure up images of adventure, of risk, of everything that's wild and real, of everything that’s disappearing as fast as we create its inauthentic and unworthy namesake.

Because they are the first word of a story, names have power. We know this when we name our children. The names we give them are the names with which they face the world, their first “front.”
They are the first words people learn to write, the opening act in the play, the beginning of the autobiography, and we recognize their importance. I would suggest that the same care be given in the naming of places. As one who wants to know more about my “place,” I need to give more attendance to knowing the names of the animals and plants which still flourish, as well as those which need to be recognized because they ail, because they need “attending to.” The names in Western North Carolina are integral to the identity of this place. In many cases they are a story, a piece of a history encapsulated in a word or phrase. Being able to name them is the beginning of being able to know them because it shows that we value them enough to give them articulation, to give them a word. They are important enough to have their own place in our mind, to be part of our order. The names we give, the names we keep, the names we remember — all of these reveal as much about the bestower of names as they do about the named object. The names we bother with knowing say what has relevance in our lives. The names we give say something about our character, about what we value.

At the ocean, you can sometimes watch the rain move towards you across the water as a wall of misty darkness, though it doesn’t always reach you. There is no name for that. When it rains at home in the southern Appalachians, I love to watch the heavier showers move down steep slopes and across valleys.

Sometimes the rain reaches my home. But if it does not, there is no name for that. But in the desert, there is rain that evaporates before it can even reach the ground. One can look up and see a ceiling of water, then of mist, then of nothing but hope. The name for this rain, for this disappointment, is “virga.” We give what is significant to us a name, and that name reflects what we are, and sometimes tells a story about us.

When my daughter came in from the beach at the end of the day, she told me that the boy's name was Nathaniel. I looked it up — it means, "“gift of God.”

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young teaches in Swain County. She can be reached youngericyoung@aol.com)

 

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