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What's the Name
of That Lake? It's Hard to Say
 
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Robert Spencer for The New York
Times
Even the welcome sign in
Webster, Mass., misspells its lake.
(It has an O for one U and an H for one N.) |
By PAM BELLUCK
 LAKE
CHARGOGGAGOGGMAN- CHAUGGAGOGGCHAUBUNAGUNGAMAUGG, Mass. - It is
spelled just the way it sounds.
Unless you spell it differently,
like in the sign put up by the chamber of commerce at the southern
end of town, which has an O for one of the U's and an H for one of
the N's.
Or the postcards at Waterfront
Mary's, the lake's best-known restaurant, which have smuggled an
extra "gaug" into the name.
Even for the locals, this
sprawling central Massachusetts lake with the even more sprawling
name, Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg - the
longest place name in the country - is not for the tied of tongue.
Gone are the years when Ethel
Merman and Ray Bolger made it a name you could dance to in a tune
called "The Lake Song":
Oh, we took a walk one evening
and we sat down on a log
By Lake Chargoggagoggman-
chauggagoggchaubunagung- amaugg.
There, we told love's old sweet
story and we listened to a frog
In Lake Chargoggagoggman-
chauggagoggchaubunagung- amaugg.
Or the time, in 1949, when the
state, on a lexicographical mercy mission, wanted to remove two of
the lake's 15 G's, prompting a poet named Bertha A. Joslin to
write "Touch not a G of our big lake!" followed by 55 lines of
iambic tetrameter like:
Now puffed up with our pride were
we
As if a pedestal ascending
We basked in fame of such a name
With all its g's unending
These days, as often as not, lots
of people here call the lake Webster, after the infinitely more
prosaic name of the town that encompasses it.
"I can't spell it, but that's off
the record," said Bob Craver, the 52-year-old town clerk of
Webster, whose family has owned homes on the lake for generations
and who rows each morning, even in blizzards.
Jane Hill, vice president of the
Webster Lake Association, a recently formed group of some 400 lake
homeowners, rankled some folks by spelling the C-word on the
club's logo, T-shirts and jackets with 49 letters - instead of 45.
"I've tried a few different
spellings and every time, someone tells me I spell it wrong," Ms.
Hill said. "So now I just have the official Jane Hill spelling."
There is more consensus on the
meaning of Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, but it
turns out the consensus is wrong. In the 1920's, a reporter for
The Webster Times, Lawrence J. Daly, wrote that it was a Nipmuck
Indian word meaning "You fish on your side, I fish on my side and
nobody fishes in the middle." That stuck even though Mr. Daly
confessed repeatedly that he had made the whole thing up.
The real meaning, said Paul
Macek, a historian in Webster, a community of about 17,000 just
northwest of where Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts
intersect, is "English knifemen and Nipmuck Indians at the
boundary or neutral fishing place."
But today, a boat ride across the
slate blue water makes one thing clear: this is no longer your
English knifeman's Lake
Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.
"Our landscape is even starting
to change," said Judy Morrison, skimming across the lake on a
pontoon boat one recent brisk day. "The northern side of our lake
was all forest - there wasn't one house on that hillside. Within
the last three years people have gone in and cut out huge tracts
of trees, just so they could build a couple of houses and have a
wonderful view. That really burns me up."
Decades ago, the lake - 1,442
acres flowing through three interconnecting ponds - was a haven
for summer sojourners. Its shore was sprinkled with simple
cottages not meant for winter habitation. There was a dance hall,
theater, trolley line and steamboats.
Robert S. Reichenberg, 89, who
has lived his entire life - well, six months of every year - in a
cottage on one of the lake's islands, remembers when a floating
vegetable salesman would row from Goat Island to Checkerberry
Island and on, hawking green beans and corn.
"This place is just our home,"
said Mr. Reichenberg, whose cottage was on stilts until a
hurricane in 1936 pushed it flush with the ground. "A lot of
people didn't really know about it."
Now, most cottages have been
razed and the vast majority of the 800 lakeside homes are
year-round residences, some worth a million dollars or more.
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2)
Ms. Morrison, 54, is one of the
holdouts, living in a century-old cottage on Long Island, the
lake's largest island. Her home and the 19 others there get no
mail delivery and she stocks up on groceries from the mainland for
weeks at a time.
This summer, building a new roof
on her white, yellow and green cottage required dozens of
plywood-lugging pontoon trips, and a few years back her uncle
drove his pickup truck across the frozen lake with bags of sand to
put in her yard. Ms. Morrison's children, now grown, motorboated
to high school.
She even found her second (and
current) husband, Bob, without leaving home, on a Web site for
singles. When they later met in the flesh, she said, it was "at a
restaurant in town that I could get to by boat, which I thought
was a smart thing to do so he couldn't follow me home if he turned
out not to be a nice person."
But Ms. Morrison's world is being
towed into the mainstream. Until two years ago, she had no
electricity and rigged up plumbing by digging and emptying
cesspools by hand. Now there are lights and running water, but
because the water is turned off in November, she rents a place on
the mainland through March. Her cottage, which she bought for
$42,000 in 1986, was appraised last year at $328,000.
Not even Waterfront Mary's has
escaped the sea-change. Until recently, it was operated by Mary
Dow, a legendary figure who wore grass skirts or leopard-print
outfits and distributed silly hats and tambourines to patrons who
sat on chairs made from saddles and toilet seats and ate on tables
made from bathtubs. The bar had a sand floor and was what Ms. Hill
called "the kind of place where you'd only buy cans of beer and
wipe them off before you'd drink it."
Paul Kujawski, 51, a state
representative, said, "I met my wife there; she was sitting on a
beer keg."
Ms. Dow died last December at 84
and Waterfront Mary's new owners have revamped it with white linen
tablecloths, red and yellow chandeliers and a martini bar with
battery-powered ice cubes that change colors.
"People were kind of wondering
how that would work out, whether it would attract a kind of people
that we weren't used to," Ms. Morrison said. "But everyone seems
to like it."
These days, the lake's
homeowners, through the Webster Lake Association, are battling
another consequence of modernity: environmental fallout, including
contaminated water runoff and rapacious water weeds.
"We realize we have to teach
people how to take care of a watershed," said Dick Cazeault,
president of the lake association, which exterminates the weeds
and sends people out to test water weekly.
Still, not everything is
changing. Everyone knows a Webster Lake will never have the je ne
sais quoi (or the je ne peux pas le prononcer) of a Lake
Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.
"There's some things in life that
ought to be able to live in exaggeration," Mr. Cazeault said.
There is even talk here of trying
to get into the Guinness Book of World Records, but there is no
category yet for longest lake name, said Sam Knights, a spokesman
for Guinness World Records.
There is a longest place name
and, alas, it is someplace else. The honor goes to what the
Guinness people call the "most scholarly transliteration" of the
official name for Bangkok: krungthephphramahanakhon
bowonratanakosin mahintharayuthaya mahadilokphiphobnovpharad
radchataniburirom udomsantisug.
Now that would have made a catchy
Ethel Merman song.
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