Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggaugagoggchaubunagungamaugg, a guy-thing

Where were you?

I needed to relax, so I went for a drive.

I grew up in car-culture, where there was space to coast gently or even speed up without experiencing stress.

Really? That’s so funny. It’s such a guy-thing.

She was genuinely surprised, even though she had known me for a long time. But she had grown up in a city built for boats, surrounded by countryside originally designed for tractors and cows. Automobiles have extended their influence at an alarming rate over the past half-a-century, but this has happened with a competitive core feeling, and many drivers lurch at top speed from one red light to the next, not associating cars with calm.

I had never specifically thought about life in cars that way, although it’s true that driving a car was definitely a guy-thing while I was growing up. My mother drove if Dad was off at work, but when both parents were in the car; my father was always at the wheel. We sometimes drove to a favourite nature site in the Watchung Hills for a Sunday afternoon walk with the dogs. Vacation expeditions usually meant packing a picnic for a full day’s drive: parents in front, four daughters in the back. We sang songs together, practiced tongue-twisters, clung to long series of numbers to deliver a final sum and we answered riddles. All of this was administered by my father, who must also have felt that driving was a guy-thing, if only because he was doing it and there were no other males present. The arithmetic and riddle litany became familiar enough so that we were eventually able to recite the full answer as the question was being posed. When stories wore out, they were shelved, repeated no more. New and challenging riddles were introduced to keep the bar high.

Just around the time when I decided to start relaxing by going for drives, I was revisited by one of the archived riddles, in an otherwise inconspicuous article about long place names, naming Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggaugagoggchaubunagungamaugg as the fifth longest word in the world (Guinness Book of Records) and the longest name for any lake anywhere.

My father would ask:

What’s the meaning of Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggaugagoggchaubunagungamaugg?

We learned to answer:

You fish on your side, I fish on my side, and nobody fishes in the middle.

The riddle was one of Dad’s favourites, and having never heard it again since the childhood car-drive days, I felt as though his story-telling powers had somehow willed the Lake into existence, as a real place. I do accept the version which says that as a young man his imagination was piqued by this word of Algonquin origin, which he stored and passed on to his children as few others had done – I never had friends who were familiar with the sounds. But it felt, it feels, like a tribute to him that the lake is there, albeit officially known as Webster Lake, in the town of Webster MA, named after Daniel Webster (who left us a dictionary). The riddle was something of an oratorical exercise, and from a contemporary perspective, it was a lesson in Native American culture and New England geography. The competitive origins of this story would bear out years later as a girl-thing.