When you say the name of a place, it comes 
into view almost as if you’d opened the door to a room and could look around inside. Say “Cape Pogue” and on my internal visual screen the pond 
appears, and I see the peat at the edge of the water where I used to sink my bare feet down into the cold, wet muck. I see the beach where we had the family clambake and got eaten alive by no-see-ums. Or I 
see the pond in winter with ice piled up on the shore in shelves, with the tide seeping through onto the frozen beach. I see these images not like snapshots, but living entities, with waves breaking on the shore, people crowding around, and hermit crabs squatting in shallow water.
    
A name seems as if it should stay the same, 
but a place never does. We may think it does because 
we like the security of a world that’s not always changing. As a child at Gay Head, I used to climb across bare, slippery clay on vivid tones of brick red, sulfur yellow, and brilliant white. Now many of the cliffs are covered with brush, like fur on the back of an old wildebeest, and other cliffs have eroded to 
colors of tan and muddy gray.
    
With a lot of attention, a place might look unchanged for a long time, as when a lawn that’s fertilized, irrigated, and mowed looks like exactly the same patch of green year after year. In places that are maintained less scrupulously, change is more apparent. Fields grow up into bayberry, scrub pine, and then oak and beech woods; beaches appear or 
disappear; and in the same way, names of places evolve over time.

Sometimes the name indicating a certain locale becomes the name of a different place, the way Katama, in Edgartown, used to refer just to the area down near Katama Bay, but now refers to the beach along the south shore and all of the former Great Plain as far as Edgartown Great Pond. A sign in town directs people to Katama Beach, pointing toward a location that didn’t even exist until a couple of years ago; it was always called South Beach. On Chappaquiddick, the beach once known as South Beach is now known as Wasque, a name that once referred only to the point at the far end of the island, which people presently call Fishermen’s Landing.
    
Sometimes a place name can outlast the function it was named for, such as Telegraph Hill or Shear Pen Pond, where flocks of sheep were shorn of their woolly overcoats. Or a place changes and the name doesn’t, as in Norton Point, the peninsula of sand that kept growing longer until it became the beach connecting Chappaquiddick to Edgartown.  

Giving a place a name, such as the Southern Woodlands in Oak Bluffs, gives it better odds to survive intact.
    
Occasionally places seem to disappear because their names have fallen into disuse. The Great Plain, which runs from Wasque all the way to Tisbury Great Pond and encompasses the whole of what is now the State Forest in the middle of the Island, has virtually disappeared as a geographical feature. This flat stretch of land is the outwash plain from the last glacier melt, and areas of it hold some of the Island’s most fertile farmland. The eastern part of the Plain used to be a separate part of Edgartown and the people who lived out there were known as the plains men. A friend of mine who grew up on the Waller Farm near the old Edgartown Airfield (now called the Katama Airport) remembers the isolation of living out on the Great Plain in the 1940s and ’50s, and how far her house seemed to be from town.
    
A name can be tied to a place almost like a geographical feature, and we generally don’t like to let go of a name we’ve used for years – or maybe we just can’t remember the new name. Over twenty years ago, Island Elderly Housing built Hillside Village in Vineyard Haven where the old turkey farm used to be. I usually can’t remember the name of the housing development, and resort to calling it “the turkey farm.” It would have been easier if they had just named it Turkey Farm Village in the beginning.      Some locations change names when they go from public usage to private ownership, the way Jungle Beach in Chilmark did when it was sold. The path to the beach passed through a true Island jungle, a tunnel of bushes and vines in a swamp adorned with lush skunk cabbage. In the 1960s and ’70s, when it became a popular nude beach, people openly trespassed until it was sold to a man who wanted to possess his costly purchase just for himself. Later the town of Chilmark acquired the land for use as a town beach. The marsh filled in, the trees grew up, and Jungle Beach, which in a sense belonged to the whole Island (or those who were willing to trespass) now belongs to the residents of only one town, which I guess is better than belonging to the 
residents of only one house.

Names can change by being shortened, the way people call someone by a nickname. I used to swim at Uncle Seth’s Pond. Now I never hear the pond off Lambert’s Cove Road referred to as anything other than Seth’s Pond. Other names change to reveal a place’s true nature, as when the Martha’s Vineyard Cerebral Palsy Camp came to be called Camp Jabberwocky, a much more appropriate name for the kind of wacky fun happening there. People can also decide to suddenly change a name, the way Gay Headers did when they voted to call their town by its earliest name of Aquinnah.
    
Most people who live in a town don’t know the names of the streets they drive  every day. In Edgartown, we may know Main Street and Pease Point Way (even if we don’t correctly call it Pease’s Point Way), but the little streets in town are very likely known as “the one that ends opposite the courthouse,” “the left at the Whaling Church,” or “the road next to the first gas station.” A surveyor friend of mine told me he gives up trying to explain to people which is Oyster Pond Road and just says, “It’s Bill Clinton’s 
driveway,” and they all know where it is.
    
A few years ago, when Edgartown started using the 911 system, all the roads in town had to be named and marked. On Chappy, people resisted naming the roads that didn’t already have commonly used names, and they especially resisted putting up road signs. Only after the highway department threatened to start putting up green metal street signs was there a compromise. The town would provide four-by-four pressure-treated wooden posts and plastic letters, and Chappy people would name the roads and nail the letters onto the posts. 
    I ended up living on Knight Lane, much to my chagrin. I liked it better when I lived where the electric company said: “Off Chappaquiddick Road,” the one main road on the island. I liked the elusive nature of that address. Recently a repairman came to my house. He got out of the truck shaking his head, evidently in disbelief at finding my house after winding so far back into the woods. He said, “Do people ever ask you if you’re in the Witness Protection Program?”
    
Some people might be thrilled to live on a lane named after them. But I feel as if I’ve been relocated to some suburban development, some “Meadow Brook Farms” where there’s no actual meadow,  brook, or farm, but plenty of big houses spread out in a former field, as if a giant had tossed them down like dice in a crap game. To me “lane” is a fine name for a road that’s always been called a lane. But purposefully calling my rutted dirt road “lane,” especially Knight Lane, imposes a charm onto an everyday part of my life, as if I were to name my washing machine Margaret’s Sudsy Tub.
    
There are now many more people who have moved to Chappy than were born here, and we’ve brought with us our off-island sensibilities and habits of living that cause unintended changes. The tip of Chappaquiddick where the ferry lands and the cars park was always  called the Point. I don’t hear people, including myself, using this term much anymore. People say “the ferry,” which refers to the land as well as the boat. It’s as if the land has been subsumed by its function. Not that long ago, it was a spot to stop and chat with neighbors, to change gears before going to town. Now it seems more like just a place we pass through on our way to somewhere else.
   
There’s a beach on Chappy my family and others have always called the Bend-in-the-Road Beach. In the last ten years or so, the water off that beach has become like a parking lot for gigantic 007 super-yachts. Last summer I heard a friend of mine refer to it as Big Boat Beach. I feel strongly about traditional names, so I’m surprised by how much I like this one. Maybe because the name describes the way life actually is, it makes me feel more accepting of all those mega-yachts anchored out there. 
    
My little island is going through a lot of changes – some I like and many I don’t. I need to find ways to accept this. Maybe renaming some places would help.         
    
When some women marry, they just add their husband’s name to theirs with a hyphen. This is a sensible way to maintain continuity and helps people (including themselves) remember who they are. It might be useful for new businesses to layer their names the way Windfarm Golf did. The living museum of windmills became a driving range and might become a housing subdivision, perhaps to be called Windfarm Golf Estates.    
    
At the rate Island businesses change, it would be helpful if a new business 
always incorporated the old name so we’d know where it’s located. For instance, if the doughnut shop in Vineyard Haven ever became a dry cleaners, it could be called Dippin’ Donut Dry Cleaning. Other possible businesses of the future: Island Tire and Auto Service Yoga Retreat Collective, Wee Grapes Preschool Restaurant and Winery, and Gremlin Fog Pest Control Day-Care Center.