Where Is Chase When You Need Her

As we have been working on our project for the Adirondack Invasive Plant Program, Annie and I have come face to face with a pretty comprehensive list of waterbodies here in the park, and consequently, just how terrible their names are. Bill McKibben noticed too; he mentions it briefly in Wandering Home. I probably wouldn’t have noticed were it not for this project, but it does actually slow our work down when we have to figure out which pond our spreadsheet is actually referring to (there are often more than one lake with the same name) before collecting data. For example, our data, which consists of the lakes and ponds that have been monitored by APIPP, include two Deer Ponds (different from the Deer River Flow), both a Round Pond and Round Lake, Long Lake, Long Pond, and one of my favorites, Little Long Pond. Apparently this pond defies the physical world by being both long and little.

Another deeply original selection is the Fulton Chain of Lakes. There is First Lake, Second Lake, Third Lake, Fourth Lake and so on until Thirteenth Lake. I could understand if there are a few lakes near one another, but did someone really have to rely on numbering them until thirteen? And then there are the dozens named after animals. While this is probably at the very least accurate (there must have been a bear once at Bear Pond), it implies that going to this place would reward you with sights of nothing but this particular animal. If I went to Beaver Lake would I be surrounded by beavers and only beavers? The same goes for Eagle Pond, Otter Lake, Fish Pond, Siamese Pond (that’s just plain misleading), Bass Lake, Crane Pond, Loon Lake, Moose Pond, Turtle Pond,  and Buck Pond. What further confuses me is Big Moose Lake - are there no small moose allowed there? And what about Little Fish Pond? Do fish get evicted from that pond if they get too fat?

I must say, one of the all-time best categories is the one that names a body of water after a geographic feature that it is not. Mountain Lake and Mountain Pond, for example, are probably not land masses. Blue Mountain Lake is not only not a mountain, but mountains are also not blue. They are probably located near a mountain though - imagine that! Not to mention Bog Pond, which is clearly having some sort of identity crisis. Bogs and ponds are not synonymous. Rainbow Lake most likely does not produce perpetual rainbows.

Finally, there are those names that I just can’t make any sense of. Sucker Lake… Stoner Lake… I have no explanation. If those were people, they probably could have gone for one of the cop-out names like Big Pond or Rock Pond. Although technically, a big pond would be considered a lake. Towards the beginning of our project, I assumed that this must just be how lakes and ponds came to be named at the time. Then I came across the Twelfth Lake however, and realized that just because the easy route was taken the first time doesn’t mean it should stay that way. After all, first thought, worst thought.

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