A Little Mountain Stream
For the past few weeks, I've been looking at old maps and wondering about the stories behind the names we find there — who put them there, what came before them and how something said often enough can become what a place is called.
This time, I'm turning the question around: instead of discovering the story behind a name already on the map, I'm rooting for a name trying to get there.
And this one is personal, because somewhere in the middle of learning how an unnamed mountain stream acquires an official name, I found myself thinking about the curious ways people — and water — find their way back to one another.
There are dates a mother carries differently from all the others, and October 6 will always be one of mine, the day 37 years ago when Celeste came into this world and made me a mother which seems like the right day to tell you about a little mountain stream.
Along the way, two more streams find it, as they have for who knows how long, through every rain and every season, the water keeps coming together again.
Andrew and I have been doing a bit of that ourselves since meeting in sixth grade, circling in and out of one another's lives until, forty years after high school, we found our way back to each other.
And three sisters who never could, somehow do.
There is a little mountain stream in Jackson County that has never had a name, which, until fairly recently, was not something I had given much thought to because I suppose I assumed creeks were like roads and mountains and towns — somebody had named them all long before I arrived, the names had found their way onto maps and into directions and family stories, and my job was simply to learn what to call them.
Apparently not.
Andrew and I discovered this particular stream while walking our mountain property, land we hope will become a gathering place for our blended family long after we are gone, which may explain why we had already begun doing what families have probably always done when they fall in love with a piece of ground: imagining who might sit beneath that tree someday, where a trail might wander, what view ought to have a bench and which little corners might eventually acquire names that make perfect sense to us and absolutely no sense to anyone else, until years from now someone will say meet me at such-and-such and everybody in the family will know exactly where to go without remembering who first called it that.
Somewhere along one of those walks, Andrew suggested we call the stream Celeste Creek, after my oldest daughter.
Celeste was born October 6 and died seven months later from a brain tumor, before her sisters Elyse and Sophia were born. They never knew her, but they have always known of her, which is not quite the same thing and yet is its own kind of knowing when a family makes room for someone who is missing.
Andrew never knew her either.
And still, it was Andrew who gave her the creek.
That made sense in a way I didn't immediately know how to explain, perhaps because we had already been talking about giving each of our daughters — Allison, Alivia, Elyse and Sophia — some small claim on this place — not legal claims involving deeds and surveys, goodness knows we have enough of those already, but the sort families make for themselves, where a favorite tree or a bench along a trail or a particular view becomes yours simply because it speaks to you and everybody else agrees to call it yours — and perhaps because Andrew and I, having found each other again forty years after high school and exchanged our vows in the mountains of our youth, were thinking a good bit about lost time, about what we might make of the years ahead and what we might leave behind for the family we had brought together.
Our daughters can find those places for themselves as the years go by, and I rather like the idea that we don't know yet what they will choose or what names they might give them.
Celeste cannot choose.
So Andrew chose for her.
A creek.
That could have been the whole story, except I have never been especially good at leaving a question alone once one occurs to me, and eventually I began to wonder whether our little family name could become the creek's actual name — not merely what we called it when giving directions or telling stories around the dinner table, but the name someone who had never met any of us might someday find printed beside a thin blue line on a map.
Well.
That question led me, as questions tend to do, somewhere I hadn't expected to go.
It turns out there is a federal process for naming an unnamed geographic feature, overseen by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, and before long I was studying maps, locating coordinates, researching whether the stream had ever carried another name and learning considerably more than I had expected to know about how a blue line on a map gets words printed beside it.
I also had to trace where the water actually went, following it beyond the portion we knew best and trying to understand the whole stream rather than simply our piece of it, which meant looking upstream and downstream and at little tributaries I hadn't paid much attention to before, following water across a map and then trying to reconcile the blue lines with what I had seen beneath the rhododendron.
And somewhere in all that looking, I realized the stream Andrew had named for Celeste doesn't make its way down the mountain alone.
Two smaller streams join it, each arriving from its own direction, until all three gather on our property and continue downhill as one.
Three streams.
And suddenly I was looking at my three daughters.
Now, I am perfectly aware that water follows gravity rather than family genealogy, that those streams had been finding one another on that mountain for a very long time before I arrived with maps and coordinates and a mother's inclination to find meaning where perhaps there is only water doing what water does, and that mountains are particularly good at reminding us they were getting along just fine before we showed up.
But mothers are pretty good at seeing their children where other people might not.
And there they were.
Celeste. Elyse. Sophia.
Three sisters who never had the chance to stand together in the same room, somehow finding one another on a mountain.
Once I saw them there, there wasn't much chance I was going to unsee them.
The proposal began moving through the federal naming process, and with it came another part I hadn't anticipated. Water doesn't particularly care where one parcel ends and another begins, so the stream crosses land belonging to several people, which meant finding those people, introducing ourselves in some cases, and telling our neighbors not only what we hoped to do but why we hoped to do it.
I wrote letters. We sent emails. We shared the map and Celeste's story and explained the peculiar little journey that had taken us from a walk in the woods to a proposal before a federal board, and then we asked whether they would support the name.
And they did.
Last week, the last letter arrived.
Every property owner along the proposed Celeste Creek, from the land around its source until the parcel holding its mouth where its waters join another branch, has now offered support for the name.
That doesn't put Celeste Creek on the map, and there is still a fair bit of road — or perhaps water is the better metaphor here — between where the proposal sits today and a final decision. It has more traveling to do through a federal process I am still learning, and ultimately the U.S. Board on Geographic Names will decide whether Celeste Creek becomes an official geographic name.
I don't know what the answer will be, or exactly when we'll have it, and for once I find myself surprisingly content not to rush ahead and find out.
Because October 6 would have been Celeste's 37th birthday, and this year, after all these years of finding ways to carry a daughter who had so little time to leave footprints of her own, her name is making its way through a process I didn't know existed because a man who never met her walked through the woods with her mother one day, came upon a little stream and thought of her.
Maybe someday Celeste Creek will appear beside a thin blue line on a map, and someone who doesn't know any of us will read the name without wondering where it came from, which is what happens to names eventually. They settle into the landscape until it seems they must have always been there.
But I will know.
I will know about the walk in the woods and Andrew saying her name. I will know about the maps and coordinates and neighbors who heard the story of a little girl they never knew and said yes. I will know about a family trying to leave something of itself behind on a mountain that was here long before us and will, God willing, be here long after.
And whatever the Board ultimately decides, I know something else now, too. Our family will call it Celeste Creek. Our neighbors already do. In that way that names sometimes begin — passed from one person to another until everyone knows what place you mean — perhaps the creek has a name already.
Somewhere beneath the rhododendron, water is tumbling over moss-covered rocks, picking up leaves and rain and two little streams along the way.
The map may someday call it Celeste Creek.
And I will know the other two by name, as well.
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