{"id":8257,"date":"2014-08-01T22:49:07","date_gmt":"2014-08-02T04:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"\/nashvillereview\/?p=8257"},"modified":"2015-02-14T14:51:33","modified_gmt":"2015-02-14T20:51:33","slug":"on-naming-women-and-mountains-lucy-bryan-green","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/archives\/8257","title":{"rendered":"On Naming Women and Mountains"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThis naming is no simple business, I see.\u201d
\n\u2013 Adam Trask, John Steinbeck\u2019s East of Eden<\/em><\/p>\n

I have known these mountains before, worn the dust of these trails, sipped from these streams. A few days shy of my twenty-first birthday, I slept beside my first love in the fragrance of these evergreens. I lay next to him four years later, a wife failing in love, and watched the Milky Way bridge these jagged peaks. Five years have passed since then, and I have returned, now alone, to spend the summer in Yosemite National Park.<\/p>\n

Here, memories make me feel like a stranger to myself. My own name scratches and constricts like an ill-fitting sweater. It comforts me to be with wild things that do not speak it. As I walk among Steller\u2019s jays and Brewer\u2019s lupine and Douglas firs, I think, you, too, wear someone else\u2019s name<\/em>. This is also true of mountains, valleys, rivers, and lakes\u2014names within names. I wonder about the people and the motivations behind these names, which I feel hesitant to say aloud.<\/p>\n

A few days after my arrival in the park, I discover my favorite Yosemite waterfall two miles east of the backpackers\u2019 camp at Little Yosemite Valley. There, Sierra snowmelt races down a hundred-foot granite slide, an uninterrupted ribbon of white water dissolving into a broad, round pool. This basin, when viewed from above, conjures a human iris. Golden green rings the shallows, deepening into jade at the center, and stones beneath the surface reflect the sunlight in varying hues.<\/p>\n

Wandering through a flat stretch of cedars, pines, and fir after my early morning ascent of Half Dome, I enter a canyon between the soaring walls of Moraine Dome and Bunnell Point, where the Merced River spills out of the mouth of Lost Valley. I approximate my location on my topographical map and misidentify the falls as Bunnell Cascade.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Lafayette Houghton Bunnell was many things\u2014career soldier, surgeon, explorer, writer, historian\u2014but foremost in my mind, he was a bestower of names. In March of 1851, at age twenty-six, he and fifty-seven other militiamen of the Mariposa Battalion became the first whites to enter Yosemite Valley. Their commission: to capture the Yosemite tribe of the central Sierra Nevada, responsible for recent raids on mining settlements, and forcibly relocate its members to a reservation in the San Joaquin Valley.<\/p>\n

And what to do with the newly appropriated land\u2014with its glacial valleys, imposing rock faces, plunging waterfalls, and granite domes? As Steinbeck writes of California\u2019s early settlers in East of Eden<\/em>, \u201cThey had to give everything they saw a name. This is the first duty of any explorer\u2014a duty and a privilege. You must name a thing before you can note it on your hand-drawn map.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

As it is with mountains, so it is with people. We name children so that they can be recognized, known, found. We give them strings of letters, a cluster of sounds by which their friends and family, their teachers and employers, and the Social Security Administration and Internal Revenue Service will identify them. We pick names that mean<\/em> something. We investigate etymology, examine translations and significations. We choose the names of beloved grandparents, literary characters, historical figures, and biblical heroines.\u00a0 We consider possible nicknames, we sample pronunciations, and then we eliminate choices likely to garner teasing from unkind playmates. We contemplate alternate spellings and tally syllables. According to our preferences, we choose names that are modern, popular, exotic, old-fashioned, or unusual. The names must be beautiful, must delight the ears. And they must fit. As it is with mountains, so it is with people: to name is a privilege and a duty.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Lafayette Bunnell was nothing if not a man of duty. He executed his orders and, along with his fellow soldiers, assigned names\u2014Half Dome, North Dome, Nevada Fall, Vernal Fall, the Three Brothers, Cloud\u2019s Rest.<\/p>\n

Before Bunnell came to me by way of a misread map, I made his acquaintance in several brief, glossy histories of Yosemite National Park\u2014the kind found in brochures and travel guides. The physician-adventurer held a certain charm for me then, as the excerpts most commonly drawn from his writings reflected a thoughtfulness uncommon among men of his time and ilk (admittedly, I have a weakness for wanderlust-afflicted intellectuals).<\/p>\n

In his memoir, Discovery of the Yosemite, and the Indian War of 1851, Which Led to that Event<\/em>, he gave this account: As the men of the Mariposa Battalion discussed what to call the wonderland they had \u201cdiscovered,\u201d a great many names were proposed\u2014most of them romantic, foreign, canonical, and scriptural. A number of soldiers favored \u201cParadise Valley.\u201d But Bunnell, according to his recounting of the conversation, suggested naming the place for its native inhabitants. \u201cI could not see any necessity for going to a foreign country for a name for American scenery\u2014the grandest that had ever yet been looked upon,\u201d he wrote. \u201cYo-sem-i-ty\u2026 was suggestive, euphonious, and certainly American<\/em>.\u201d Despite protests by several who expressed distaste at naming the valley after \u201cvagabond murderers,\u201d Bunnell got his way.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

On July 2, 1983, my parents gave me this name: Lucy Rebecca Bryan. My first name belonged to my father\u2019s maternal grandmother, my great-grandmother, Lucinda \u201cLucy\u201d Collins. This is what I know of her: When Lucy was in her late twenties, she married a much younger man, a man she called \u201cdear boy\u201d in the love letters my father discovered in a cousin\u2019s attic years ago. She was from Missouri. And she died when my grandmother was only sixteen. Along with her name, I inherited twelve place settings of her silver, monogrammed with the initial we both share.<\/p>\n

Lucy means \u201cbringer of light.\u201d When I was a child and my father was particularly enchanted with me, he would address me by this Latin translation of my name.<\/p>\n

Rebecca is the name of my father\u2019s sister, whose red hair I\u2019ve always admired. The name ornaments many branches of the Bryan family tree, all the way back to the distant aunt who married Daniel Boone.\u00a0 It is an alternate spelling of Rebekah, the beautiful shepherdess of the Genesis account who married Abraham\u2019s son Isaac, endured years of barrenness, and connived to help her favored son steal his brother\u2019s blessing. This woman knew what it was to be loved, as she knew what it was to suffer. She was a complicated woman, which endears her to me.<\/p>\n

Bryan. My father\u2019s surname. An Irish name meaning \u201cnoble.\u201d A name taken by my mother. The final in the succession of names fastened to me at birth.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

After naming Yosemite Valley, Bunnell discovered that the natives living there actually called themselves the Ahwahnechee\u2014\u201cdwellers of the valley of the open mouth.\u201d The name Yosemite, meaning \u201cthose who kill,\u201d was given to the region\u2019s occupants by neighboring Miwok tribes who feared them. But Bunnell was disinclined to change the name he\u2019d already assigned.<\/p>\n

As Yosemite expert Daniel Anderson has pointed out, \u201cIt was common practice by European settlers\u2026 to either ignore [a Native American] place name and rename it, or, as with Yosemite, to use another Indian word for a place name.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even so, Bunnell had a keen interest in learning the Ahwahnechee names for the Valley\u2019s features. In his memoir, he said he actively lobbied for the adoption of these names, \u201cbut this proved to be a thankless task, or at least it was an impossible one.\u201d So he instead dedicated himself to finding suitable English substitutions, often vetoing the fantastic and absurd names submitted by his companions, such as \u201cGiant\u2019s Pillar\u201d and \u201cDevil\u2019s Nightcap.\u201d<\/p>\n

Should I praise Bunnell\u2019s efforts? After all, he did preserve fragments of the language and culture of the people he had come to exile\u2014vestiges that would otherwise have vanished. But I believe that the surgeon-historian\u2019s obsession with place naming was not as innocuous as it seems.<\/p>\n

Bunnell\u2019s memoir records his initial impression of Yosemite Valley: \u201cAlthough I had suffered losses of property and friends, the natural right of the Indians to their inheritance forced itself upon my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

He knew<\/em>. The goodness within him rose up against the Battalion\u2019s mission. What philosophical acrobatics he must have done to silence that inner voice! I believe that Bunnell\u2019s impassioned arguments for indigenous names were attempts at alleviating his guilt, that his preoccupation with Indian names allowed him to view himself as sympathetic to the Ahwahnechee, when in reality he was complicit in a campaign of genocide.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I married my college sweetheart three weeks after my twenty-second birthday, and according to custom, dropped my middle name and took his surname. I have a vague recollection of penning what would become my new name, Lucy Bryan Green, on a barroom napkin sometime during my engagement\u2014writing it over and over again in loopy cursive. The image is so silly, so absurd, that I\u2019m not convinced my memory didn\u2019t swindle it from a cheap paperback. I am certain, though, that changing my name excited me. It symbolized a transition into adulthood. It meant that I would be a wife, would build a family with the man I loved. Besides, green had always been my favorite color, and my new name made a clever email handle for a budding environmentalist: lucybgreen.<\/p>\n

I dropped my given name without hesitation, without a second thought. A generation after the women\u2019s liberation movement, it didn\u2019t occur to me that an alternative existed. How can this be? Geography had something to do with it, I\u2019m sure. Women (and men) of the American South have a long history of clinging tenaciously to traditions, and my religion taught that it was my Christian duty to leave my family and join my husband\u2019s. I wanted to belong to him, to be possessed. I said as much in my vows, in which I promised to submit to his leadership. Abandoning my name came easy; surrendering my stubbornness did not.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

To put your name on something, whether a woman or a mountain, is to signify ownership, to proclaim dominion. Few of the white explorers who flocked to the Yosemite region intended to settle there, but that doesn\u2019t mean they weren\u2019t interested in cementing their legacies and fortunes by slapping the names of their heroes, their wives and daughters, and themselves on Yosemite\u2019s most prominent and beautiful geographical features.<\/p>\n

John Beck, an iron prospector, named Beck Lakes for himself in 1882. Homesteaders John Snyder and William Walker marked gulch, ridge, lake, and creek with their surnames. In 1909, Robert Marshall of the U.S. Geological Survey named Elizabeth Lake for his niece and Flora Lake for his cousin. He named Forsyth Peak for his close friend William Forsyth, acting superintendent of the park, and he named Mary Lake, Dorothy Lake, and Polly Dome for Forsyth\u2019s daughters. Charles Hoffmann of the Whitney Survey affixed his wife\u2019s name to May Lake, which reflects the mountain bearing his name. In 1932, Al Gardisky named Odell Lake for a \u201cfriend\u201d and Lake Helen for a \u201clady friend.\u201d Park Ranger Otto M. Brown, who served as camp cook for Eleanor Roosevelt when she visited Yosemite in 1934, named Ardeth and Avonelle Lakes for his daughters. Billy Lake, Bugg Meadow, Cecile Lake, Ediza Lake,\u00a0 Gertrude Lake, Hart Lakes, Holcomb Lake, Laura Lake, Lily Lake, Lois Lake, Olaine Lake, Rosalie Lake, Stevenson Meadow, Sullivan Lake, Ward Lakes, Weber Lake\u2014time has swallowed the stories of the people these places memorialize, but their names make a crowded cemetery of Yosemite maps.<\/p>\n

In 1906, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names attempted to limit the self-interest and nepotism inherent in place-naming by implementing this policy: \u201cNames of living persons should be applied very rarely, and only those of great eminence should be thus honored. No personal names should be attached because of relationship, friendship, or personal interest, nor should names of obscure persons be given. Names of eminent men now dead may be thus perpetuated, particularly those of early explorers, naturalists, geologists, topographers, etc.\u201d<\/p>\n

The policy aims to curb some of the basic human tendencies that attend the act of naming. Underlying each name is a set of values predicated on personal experience, cultural norms, and the desire for immortality. To name a place is an act of power, intrinsically self-interested.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

When my husband left me after six years of marriage, everyone expected me to return to Lucy Rebecca Bryan. The lawyer friend who was handling our case called and asked for my maiden name so he could submit the form for me. I told him I wasn\u2019t changing my name.<\/p>\n

Why?<\/em> Everyone wanted to know. There aren\u2019t any children, thank goodness\u2014so no need to keep the name for the sake of unity. You\u2019re still young. You were a Bryan much longer than you were a Green. Do you really want to explain to future boyfriends that you still have your ex husband\u2019s name? Besides, why would you want to keep the name of a man who walked out on you and refused to even try to work things out? Don\u2019t you know how much this hurts your family?<\/em><\/p>\n

At the time I made the decision, I\u2019m not sure I fully understood it. I remember thinking, in the early days, that I couldn\u2019t bear to wait in line at the Social Security Office and DMV. It seemed too punishing on top of all the paperwork, the meetings with the bank, the dismantling of the life we had built together. And when people asked, I told them that I\u2019d published as Lucy Bryan Green, that I\u2019d already established a professional identity. That sometimes shut them up.<\/p>\n

The truth was more complicated. In my mind, Lucy Rebecca Bryan and Lucy Bryan Green represented two disparate identities. Lucy Rebecca Bryan was the girl who once argued that everything in the world was either black or white, right or wrong\u2014self-righteous enough to think that she knew the difference. She was the teenager who sustained a series of flirtations in hopes of converting her crushes to Christianity. She held the incongruous (and equally offensive) beliefs that she deserved all the good things in her life\u2014loving parents, a college education, thick hair and long legs, intelligence, sorority membership\u2014and that God had given them to her. It took my husband to drag me out of that box of my own making.<\/p>\n

It was Lucy Bryan Green, not Lucy Rebecca Bryan, who learned to embrace feminism, pacifism, and non-consumerism; who dared to befriend gays and liberals and atheists. She was the one who wrote a novel, who learned to garden by trial and error, who trekked all 212 miles of the John Muir Trail. The man whose name I took played a fundamental role in me becoming that person. I didn\u2019t want to go back. I wanted to move forward.<\/p>\n

I also wanted to take responsibility for my contributions to the mess that my marriage had become. Anger that would boil into door-slamming, hair-pulling, glass-shattering rage; my need to control everything, down to what time my husband woke up in the morning and the clothes he wore; my anxiety, which made basic tasks like doing the dishes or shopping for groceries seem insurmountable\u2014I wanted to work on those problems as Lucy Bryan Green.<\/p>\n

And I still liked my name. It didn\u2019t seem fair that he could take it from me. He\u2019d already taken the canoe, a whole bookcase\u2019s worth of books (along with the bookcase), half the set of glass nesting bowls, our nicest chef\u2019s knife, two watercolors I\u2019d painted, our cast iron patio furniture, our Honda CRV, the pine bedframe we\u2019d stained by hand, all of the power tools, and most of the money in our bank account. Those were just the things. When he left, so did his family, many of our friends, my sense of security, the belief that I was unconditionally loved, my trust in God, my identity as a married woman, my plans to have children, and my sense of self-worth. I wouldn\u2019t let him have my name. He\u2019d taken enough.<\/p>\n

When I am really honest, this reality surfaces: I hoped he would change his mind, would come back. I wanted to wear his name because I still loved him.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I like the idea of having a name that has emanated from me rather than been affixed to me like a cattle brand. What if we possessed names that reflected our identities\u2014our personality traits, our physical attributes, or the events that formed us? This practice has obvious shortcomings and limitations. Brand new babies don\u2019t have much to offer in the way of distinguishing characteristics (I\u2019m glad not to be stuck with Won\u2019t-Sleep-Through-The-Night or Eats-Dirt); and on a practical level, surnames serve vital administrative functions.<\/p>\n

But it has been done. A 1907 text from the Bureau of American Ethnology describes a handful of Native American naming traditions, including naming people for dreams, noteworthy events, and personal qualities. The Maidu often called infants and children nothing more than \u201c\u2018child,\u2019 \u2018baby,\u2019 or \u2018boy\u2019 until they were old enough to exhibit some characteristic which suggested something appropriate.\u201d In many indigenous cultures, people acquired multiple names and changed their names at \u201ccritical epochs of life\u201d such as \u201cbirth, puberty, the first war expedition, some notable feat, elevation to chieftainship, and\u2026 retire\u00adment from active life.\u201d<\/p>\n

I wonder if I would feel more at ease with my name if it were a recent acquisition (perhaps received on the summit of Cloud\u2019s Rest?) or if I knew I wasn\u2019t stuck with it, that it would change as often as I did.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know what to do about my name. After a time of mourning and deep dwelling pain and what felt like loss upon loss, something shifted, and I fell in love again. The man I love wants to be my husband, and I want to be his wife. Naturally, he thinks it\u2019s time for Green to go, and I think that\u2019s perfectly reasonable. Here is an opportunity for change, but I don\u2019t like my options: I can keep my ex-husband\u2019s name, take my new husband\u2019s name, or return to my father\u2019s name. Each of those choices perpetuates a patriarchal system of naming that reduces me to property (at least symbolically). None of them will leave me with a name I feel is mine.<\/p>\n

A number of my married friends have solved this dilemma by joining their surnames in some fashion or another. That solution seems sensible, albeit clunky. But my fianc\u00e9 is unwilling to drop his middle name (his father\u2019s first name) to adopt my father\u2019s surname.<\/p>\n

I envy Cheryl Strayed, whose recounts her journey on the Pacific Crest Trail in her bestselling memoir Wild<\/em>. As she filled out her divorce papers, the surname \u201cStrayed\u201d simply occurred to her. She adopted it as a symbol of where she had been and what she had overcome.<\/p>\n

I have searched my memories, maps, even the dictionary for a word that fits my identity in this fashion. For the same reasons I haven\u2019t gotten a tattoo, I don\u2019t think this possibility will work for me. I know what it is to love deeply\u2014so deeply that you want this person near you, as close as possible, for the rest of your life. I have felt this for two men, but I have never felt it for a word, picture, or symbol.<\/p>\n

\u201cReally, would it be so bad to take my name?\u201d my fianc\u00e9 recently asked. \u201cDon\u2019t you want to be part of my family?\u201d The answer to the second question is easy: Yes. I love his family. The idea of joining it thrills me. But the answer to the first question isn\u2019t so straightforward. It wouldn\u2019t be a travesty to carry his name. It\u2019s not a bad sounding name, and the old-fashioned notion of \u201ctwo becoming one\u201d still appeals to me. But I also feel an internal resistance, a need to create a protective space for myself. I want a name of my own\u2014a name not connected to any man\u2014because then he cannot walk out the door with it.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Yosemite and I\u2014we\u2019re both trapped. My present name is a burden, but I have none to go to, none that would truly be mine. And Yosemite wears a misnomer given by a willing participant in our government\u2019s oldest (and perhaps greatest) atrocity. Its landscape is littered with unfitting names. But those names will remain, and soon, I will have to choose another name.<\/p>\n

I recently bought an updated map of Yosemite and located the waterfall I visited in the Lost Valley. It\u2019s not Bunnell Cascade, which lies further upstream, at the head of the Valley. This particular cascade is marked only by a blue line and the word \u201cFalls.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think I will take my fianc\u00e9 there when he visits me in a few weeks. We will peel off our packs and our clothes and dive into that deep green iris at the base of the falls. And it won\u2019t matter that the place has no name. Indeed, that will make it all the more wonderful.<\/p>\n

Lucy Bryan Green<\/a><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThis naming is no simple business, I see.\u201d \u2013 Adam Trask, John Steinbeck\u2019s East of Eden I have known these mountains before, worn the dust of these trails, sipped from these streams. A few days shy of my twenty-first birthday, I slept beside my first love in the fragrance of these evergreens. I lay next […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[17],"tags":[24],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-29b","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8257"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8257"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10193,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8257\/revisions\/10193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}