Fact and Fiction

What can I call this mountain?  

Take the name away from the land.  Ask yourself what it is.  That is what people do: the Lenape did it, the Dutch settlers and the English and the Department of Environmental Protection and all the native people born and raised on the land and every flatlander who visits does it.

Pepacton Reservoir
Where there was once
Pepacton, a town.   

Give a name to a place, base it on how you want to use it. Name it to show ownership of a place.

Hudson River School
Redefining A Place

The Catskills were at first unnamed by European's.  It was wilderness: chaotic unknown.  But give it a name Blue Mountains because they look blue from the Livingston estate, the Kaats Kill Mountains because the Dutch settled there, the Catskills because the English came and the tourists knew the English ways.

Shale.  Outcroppings everywhere.  An industry mined it.  But a mile below the fields and the mountains there is Marcellus Shale.

People lived for thousands of years without a name for it.  But now the fact of the rock generates new meanings.  Hydraulic fracturing, gas, property values of second homes, tourist trade, pollution, wealth, jobs.

Fiction comes from naming the facts.