The President has ordered the federal government to call Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Around here, we’ve learned that changing the sign and changing everybody’s map are two different jobs.
I went into North Country Market the other morning for a furnace filter and somehow wound up helping a delivery driver find North Country Market.
This is the sort of thing that happens more often than it probably should up here.
North Country Market is the general store on the east end of town, assuming you accept the fairly broad northern Minnesota definition of “general store.” Kate Larson sells milk, bread, furnace filters, fishing line, aspirin, propane, work gloves, birthday cards, windshield washer fluid and enough miscellaneous hardware that Earl once repaired a boat trailer with things he found in two drawers and a coffee can.
Kate bought the place a few years ago from the Lundeens and changed the name.
This was reasonable, mostly because she is not a Lundeen.
She put up a new sign. Changed the receipts. Changed the Facebook page. Changed the invoices. Changed whatever you have to change so the people delivering frozen pizza know where to send the bill.
The town continues to call it Lundeen’s.
Kate has mostly accepted this.
Mostly.
She was ringing up my furnace filter when the phone rang.
“I’m looking for North Country Market,” a man said loudly enough that I could hear him from where I was standing.
“You found it,” Kate said.
“No, I’m over at Lundeen’s.”
Kate looked through the front window.
There was a delivery truck parked directly beneath a sign that said NORTH COUNTRY MARKET in letters roughly the size of a northern pike.
“You’re here,” she said.
“At Lundeen’s?”
“At North Country Market.”
“The guy at the gas station said this was Lundeen’s.”
“It was.”
“So where’s North Country Market?”
Kate closed her eyes for just a second.
“You’re parked in front of it.”
There was a pause on the other end.
Apparently this did not settle matters.
The driver had a part for one of Kate’s refrigerated cases, which had been making a noise she described as “expensive,” and he needed to get the truck around to the back door.
Earl happened to be there buying a package of electrical connectors, so naturally he decided to help.
“Tell him to come around by the old creamery.”
Kate put her hand over the phone.
“Do not tell him that.”
“Why?”
“There is no creamery.”
“Well, not anymore.”
I understood what Earl meant.
“You go past the old school,” I said. “Then take a right just before the creamery.”
Kate looked at me.
“The old school is the community center.”
“I know.”
“The creamery is gone.”
“I know that too.”
“So you’re giving a lost man directions using two things that aren’t there.”
“They’re there.”
She waited.
“The buildings are there,” I said.
“The creamery building is a plumbing shop.”
“Well, sure.”
“And the school hasn’t been a school in twenty years.”
“Everybody knows where the old school is.”
“The man is presently unable to find the store he is parked in front of.”
That seemed unnecessarily personal.
I took the phone.
“Okay,” I told him. “Pull out of Lundeen’s—”
Kate made a sound.
“North Country Market. Pull out of North Country Market, go toward the old school—community center—and take the alley alongside Johnson’s.”
Kate stared at me again.
“What?”
“That hasn’t been Johnson’s since 2012.”
“It’s still the Johnson building.”
“No Johnson owns it.”
“Well, somebody named Johnson used to.”
“You’re doing great.”
At that point a young fellow buying an energy drink asked which old school we were talking about.
I said the old elementary school.
He said, “The one by the ball field?”
“No, that’s the other old school.”
Kate folded her arms.
Earl studied the electrical connectors as though none of this involved him.
Eventually Kate took back the phone and gave the driver directions using street names, which struck me as unnecessarily formal but did result in the truck arriving at the back door.
“See?” she said.
“Guy still found Lundeen’s first.”
“That,” Kate said, “is because three people sent him to Lundeen’s.”
Earl nodded.
“Everybody knows where it is.”
Kate looked at me.
I decided I had already contributed enough.
While she went out back to deal with the refrigeration part, I started thinking about how much of our town apparently no longer exists.
We have the old school, which is not a school.
The old creamery, which is not a creamery.
Lundeen’s, which is not Lundeen’s.
There is also a corner some people still call Peterson’s even though nobody named Peterson has conducted business there since most people kept a road atlas in the glove box.
The peculiar thing is that none of this seems confusing until somebody comes along who believes buildings should be called what the signs say.
Most of us are carrying around an older map.
The dates vary.
Earl’s map is older than mine. Mine is older than the energy-drink kid’s. Old man Henderson has a map that occasionally includes establishments I suspect required hitching posts.
Kate’s may be the most interesting because she grew up around here, went away for a while, then came back. She understands all the old directions.
She just recognizes that they are ridiculous.
When she came back inside, I mentioned this.
“You think Lundeen’s is bad?” she said. “Ask Arlene how long people called the café Mabel’s.”
I looked at her.
“Mabel’s?”
Kate smiled.
That was how I learned I am apparently not as old and locally informed as I had been feeling five minutes earlier.
Arlene was behind the counter when I got to the café.
“Kate says this used to be called Mabel’s.”
Arlene looked up from filling the sugar dispensers.
“Sure.”
“You never mentioned Mabel’s.”
“You never asked.”
There isn’t much defense against Arlene when she is technically correct.
Mabel, it turned out, had run the place years ago. Arlene worked there before eventually taking over herself. When she did, she changed the name to the Up North Café.
She changed the sign, changed the menus and answered the phone “Up North Café.”
And for quite a while, apparently, the town ignored her.
“People would call and ask, ‘Is this Mabel’s?’” she said.
“What did you tell them?”
“Depends. You looking for breakfast?”
I laughed.
“Didn’t that bother you?”
“Oh, probably.”
She went back to the sugar dispensers.
“I had eggs burning.”
That may be the best explanation of local government I have ever heard, although Arlene was not talking about government.
She said some people switched to Up North Café right away. Some kept calling it Mabel’s for years. Earl was apparently among the last holdouts.
“I wasn’t holding out,” Earl said from his usual table.
“What were you doing?”
“Didn’t see the hurry.”
Arlene nodded.
“There you go.”
Eventually, though, people did start calling it the Up North Café. The sign had changed on the first day. The habit took longer.
New customers came in. Kids grew up. People who had never known Mabel started eating there. At some point more people said Up North Café than Mabel’s, and eventually Mabel’s became something people mostly said while telling stories about how things used to be.
I asked Arlene when the change finally happened.
She thought about it.
“Don’t know.”
“Five years?”
“Maybe.”
“Ten?”
“Could’ve been.”
“You ran the place and you don’t know when people started calling it by the right name?”
Arlene looked at me.
“They were paying for breakfast.”
Fair enough.
A little while later, Henderson, who had been reading the paper, looked over the top of it.
“Lake Ontario is Lake America now.”
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Earl finally looked up.
“What?”
“President renamed it.”
Arlene was carrying a plate to a booth.
“Canada know?”
That seemed to me like a reasonable first question.
The President signed an executive order Aug. 27 directing the federal government to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.” The order gave the Interior Department and the Board on Geographic Names 30 days to make the change, but they didn’t need that long. The federal Geographic Names Information System now says Lake America, and Google says its Maps service is rolling out the change. People using Maps in the United States will see Lake America. Canadians will continue to see Lake Ontario. Everybody else will see both.
Which sounds complicated until you have spent a morning at Lundeen’s.
We have, of course, tried this before. The federal government adopted Gulf of America in place of Gulf of Mexico last year. Google handled that one the same way: Gulf of America for U.S. users, Gulf of Mexico in Mexico and both names elsewhere.
Canada has made clear it intends to keep calling Lake Ontario by the name it has carried for centuries, a name with Indigenous origins. The United States can decide what its government calls the lake. It cannot make Canada—or anybody else—come with.
Earl considered all this.
“Lake America sounds all right.”
“Nothing wrong with America,” I said.
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“Still got Canada on the other side.”
He thought about that too.
“They can call their half whatever they want.”
Henderson lowered the paper.
I could tell from his expression that there were several geographic and hydrological reasons why this was not how international lakes worked.
I pointed at him.
“Don’t.”
He went back to the paper.
And that was about as much discussion as Lake America received because Arlene had a lunch crowd coming in and Kate stopped by for coffee and reported that the refrigerated case was running again.
That seemed appropriate.
There are only so many hours in a day, and apparently some of them must still be reserved for running the country.
Names do matter. Arlene had a reason to change Mabel’s to the Up North Café, and Kate has every right to expect the business she owns to be called North Country Market. Governments need official names too, unless we intend to start issuing maps based on Earl’s recollection of who owned the hardware store forty years ago.
And new names can stick. The Up North Café proves that.
But Arlene changed the sign in an afternoon. Changing everybody’s map took considerably longer.
I’m not sure an executive order improves the schedule.
On my way home I stopped at North Country Market again.
The furnace filter I’d bought that morning was the wrong size.
Kate didn’t say anything about this, which was generous considering my earlier performance as a navigation expert.
She exchanged it and was putting the other one back on the shelf when the phone rang.
“North Country Market,” she said.
Pause.
“Yep. Lundeen’s.”
Another pause.
“What do you need?”
And she reached for a pencil.
