Naming Our Place

I live in a development where all the streets are named after birds. To get home I pull in at Ivocet, pass Whinbrel and Kestral, and take a right on my road, Petral Court. There’s only one problem. Skim through your bird guide and you will find no ivocet, no whinbrel, no kestral, no petral. The real names are avocet, whimbrel, kestrel, and petrel.

How did this happen? No one in the neighborhood seems to know. I imagine the developers sitting around and brainstorming: “Wouldn’t it be classy if we made our roads sound kind of nature-y . . . What about bird names?” But why they didn’t then actually look in a field guide, or at least a dictionary, is a mystery. Maybe they were just go-for-it kind of guys who said, “Screw those fancy word people.” The strange thing is that they got pretty close and knew enough to almost get the names right.

Why does it matter? you might ask. Half the people in the neighborhood likely aren’t even aware of the mistake, and certainly the birds don’t care, having never thought of themselves as avocets or whimbrels in the first place. Personally I think it’s kind of funny, and I can see how it’s no big deal: it is certainly more important to know that a kestrel is a raptor, a lovely little killer able to hover over the grass like a hummingbird’s big brother, than to know that the name humans have assigned it has more than one e.

But still. One of the central tasks of my tribe, those who write about place, is Adam’s task, that of naming the things we find in this world. It is an important task, as well as a somewhat strange two-way task, since the flow of words moves back and forth. What do I mean? I mean that if you happen to walk a lot, and think as you walk, you will have had the experience of the place you are walking through putting words in your mind, both in a simple sense—the word hummock pops into your head when you see a low mound of earth rising out of a swamp, though hummock is a word you never use—and in a much more complicated way. The woods at the university where I teach provide an example of the second, more complex relationship. Over the last year I have gotten to know these woods well, falling for them just as they have begun to fall to deeper development, and one day, upon seeing a new road making its incursion into this small patch of wild, I immediately stopped and wrote an essay in defense of the woods, an essay that, at the risk of sounding like a mystic, the woods themselves aided me with. How did they help? They provided me with the details—the sharp-shinned hawk I had seen the day before, the cool gulley where I always stopped during my walks, the blueberry bushes that the trail weaves through—that made the essay. They provided me with the inspiration, as well as with the things and the names.

This reciprocal relationship with landscapes occurs on a much grander scale in aboriginal cultures. In The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin celebrated the way that the Australian aborigines sang the landscape into existence. On the most basic level this meant that the songs, passed down through the generations, were also maps, celebrating a particular rock or tree, or winding path between the hills, to the extent that, if sung correctly, they could be used in a very practical sense to guide one through a landscape which, while unfamiliar to an individual, is known to the larger family and tribe. There are those, including Scott Russell Sanders, who believe that a similar, if less primal, naming and mapping form the roots for the profusion of the sort of writing that magazines like the one you are holding celebrate. In Staying Put, Sanders writes: “Right now, here and there throughout America, tough-minded people are trying to reconstruct a survival...