The outing of a big-time poser lake

Maybe NAMES CAN’T HURT YOU THE WAY STICKS and stones can. But they can nag and haunt and nudge and even needle, especially when someone tries to change labels on a big piece of public landscape. Just look east about 600 miles, to the liquid landmark on the Arizona-Utah border formerly known as Glen Canyon.

For the last 40 years, most people have been calling it Lake Powell. And it feels lakely enough if, as my wife and I did on our honeymoon, you set aside history and spend your days drifting past mile upon mile of jutting and curving red, pink and white walls. Cool waters. Finger canyons.

But is that the whole picture? Here comes the Coalition to Rename Lake Powell on a mission to remind us what lies below those cool waters.

The coalition, a Durango, Colo.-based alliance of half a dozen wilderness groups, argues that the Lake Powell we know, the one created in 1963 by the damming of the Colorado River at Glen Canyon, doesn’t deserve that name. Instead, the coalition says, we should call it Glen Canyon Reservoir, or maybe Reservoir Powell -- monikers that serve to remind everyone that the lake is man-made and that a much-admired canyon was flooded in order to create it.

And if this seems a lot of energy to expend over mere words, look north to Alaska for a minute. There, the highest peak in North America was named for President McKinley in the late 1890s, but locals have long preferred the native word for it, Denali. Since 1975, state officials have been hoping to get the feds to change the name, and in 1980, the national park that includes the mountain did take the Denali name. But here’s the rub: McKinley came from Ohio. And for nearly 20 years, U.S. Rep. Ralph Regula (R-Ohio) has fought off every effort to rename the mountain. When he retires, watch what happens.

The jousting over Lake Powell started in early 2003, when the coalition wrote to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names in Reston, Va., which carries authority over such things unless Congress weighs in.

First, the coalition asserted, there’s the reservoir issue. Then there’s the other Lake Powell -- a smallish body of water, near the Continental Divide in Colorado, that got its name years before the Glen Canyon Dam was completed.

Plenty of people, however, think changing the name now is a rotten idea. They see it as a propaganda move by environmentalists who want to do away with the dam -- not a popular idea in communities like Page, Ariz., which lives on the 2 million tourists who yearly drift in houseboats and otherwise frolic on the captive water. “To put it simply, it would be easier to drain a ‘Glen Canyon Reservoir’ than a Lake Powell,” the Central Arizona Conservation District’s board of directors warned in a recent letter to the names board. “The proposal to rename the Lake in the name of linguistic purity masks a deeper motive -- to remove Glen Canyon Dam and eliminate Lake Powell from the face of the earth.”

Susan Jacques, the Durango-based writer and environmental consultant who has led the name-change charge, insists that her agenda has nothing to do with draining the lake.

“I work with semantics, and I know how powerful words are,” Jacques says. When skeptics suggest that her approach would require full disclosure from every reservoir doing business as a lake, she continues, “my retort is, ‘Why not?’ When you stand looking at a resource, and you’re aware that it’s not a natural body of water, you have a different relationship with it.... The point is to know where you are, especially in the West, where water is so rare.”

Meanwhile, in the offices of the Board of Geographic Names, Executive Secretary Roger L. Payne says he doesn’t expect a Lake Powell decision until March, maybe later.

The board, Payne says, gets about 200 requests for name changes annually. Board members, who are appointed by the secretaries of federal departments and meet monthly, grant 80% to 90% of them. (All these years I’ve been pushing to have a creek in Tucson named for River Phoenix, and I never knew whom to call. But now ... ) In November, the board restored Arizona’s Nail Canyon to Naile Canyon (it was named for a person, not a carpenter’s tool); updated Oregon’s Squaw Creek to Dunawi Creek (to reflect the native Kalapuyan language) and changed Japanese Lake in Cook County, Minn., to Paulson Lake.

The Minnesota story holds a lesson for any changer of names. For years, those waters were known on maps as Jap Lake, until the name was changed to Japanese Lake as part of a nationwide move in 1971 to do away with old pejorative terms. So why change it again? Because JAP was an acronym for the area’s 19th century settlers John and Addie Paulson.

As for the board’s position on Lake Powell, it will consider public sentiment, which so far amounts to about 100 e-mails (about 75% against a name change) and about 15 pieces of conventional mail (similarly opposed).

Because the big and little Lake Powells are 300 miles apart in different states, says Payne, name duplication isn’t an issue. Nor is the lake/reservoir question, he says; of the nearly 70,000 reservoirs in the U.S., about 23,000 are called lakes and about 22,000 are called reservoirs. The rest carry other designations.

In other words, the name-changers are looking at long odds. But Jacques says she can live with that. “We threw a concept out there,” she says. “It’s either going to catch fire or not.”

Either way, it’s good to be reminded what George Orwell said about political language: that it’s “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

To e-mail Christopher Reynolds or to read his previous West Wild columns, go to latimes.com/chrisreynolds