WASHINGTON D.C. — Having apparently looked at a map of North America and decided there are still entirely too many geographic features without the word “America” stamped across them, President Donald Trump announced Thursday that Lake Superior will be renamed “Lake America,” extending the same naming philosophy that gave us the Gulf of America to the largest of the Great Lakes.
“Lake America. It’s a beautiful name. A tremendous name,” Trump said while unveiling the change. “They call it Lake Superior, but superior to what? Nobody knows. I’ve asked people. Very smart people. Nobody can tell you. We’re America, it’s a great lake, maybe the greatest lake, so we’re calling it Lake America.” The president also reportedly noted that the United States has been “very generous” in allowing Canada to use the northern half of it, which is an interesting interpretation of the international boundary but probably not the weirdest sentence uttered in Washington this week.
The announcement immediately raised questions across Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where Lake Superior is less a geographic feature than a 31,700-square-mile weather machine that occasionally permits humans to stand near it. The lake produces snow by the foot, rearranges beaches when irritated, has swallowed entire ships and remains approximately 38 degrees in July just to make sure nobody gets too comfortable. Calling that enormous blue bastard “Lake America” is therefore unlikely to change the relationship Yoopers have with it, although it may provide something new to bitch about at the gas station.
Canada is also expected to present a minor complication, considering roughly half of Lake Superior belongs to Canada and Canadians may be reluctant to wake up one morning and discover that one of their largest bodies of water has been renamed after the country next door. Under the new arrangement, a boater leaving Grand Marais, Michigan, could theoretically travel north across the international boundary and discover that Lake America has somehow turned back into Lake Superior without the water itself giving the slightest shit.
The biggest obstacle to the change, however, may not be international diplomacy. It may be convincing Upper Peninsula residents to actually use the new name. Washington can print maps, update federal websites and order enough new signs to keep a reflective-aluminum contractor employed through retirement, but this is a region where people routinely give directions using buildings that stopped existing during the Reagan administration. If somebody tells a Yooper to take County Road 550 until reaching Lake America, there is a respectable chance the response will be, “You mean Superior?” followed by a silence just long enough to communicate that the conversation has already become tiresome.
There are historical complications as well. The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald occurred on Lake Superior, and Gordon Lightfoot already wrote the damn song. Nobody is going back into the studio to change the lyrics to “the lake, it is said, never gives up her dead when the skies of November turn gloomy over Lake America,” particularly because that sounds less like a maritime tragedy and more like something playing behind a Ford commercial during halftime.
The announcement has also created concern that the administration could begin examining the rest of the Great Lakes. Lake Michigan would presumably be safe because Michigan remains, at least as of publication time, part of the United States. Lake Erie has done nothing to attract attention and would be wise to continue doing exactly that. Lake Huron could probably survive by keeping a low profile. Lake Ontario, however, has a Canadian province right there in the name and should probably start getting its paperwork in order.
Any broader campaign against the word “Superior” could cause considerably more chaos in the U.P., where seemingly every third business, township, credit union, construction company, coffee shop and bait store has “Superior” somewhere in its name. Renaming all of those would require an administrative effort not seen since somebody decided every road in rural Michigan needed three different names depending on which map you happened to be holding.
There is also the inconvenient fact that “Superior” is a pretty damn good name for the lake. It is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area, contains roughly 10 percent of the planet’s surface fresh water and holds enough water to cover all of North and South America in about a foot of it. Calling it Superior was not exactly an act of reckless marketing. The thing showed up with credentials.
Whether the federal government could actually convince Americans, Canadians, mapmakers, historians, mariners and several hundred thousand stubborn Upper Peninsula residents to adopt “Lake America” is another question entirely. Governments can rename geographic features on official documents, but language tends to belong to the people actually using it, and the people living along Superior have had a couple hundred years to get comfortable with the current arrangement.
Besides, Washington may be solving a problem that doesn’t exist. Around here, plenty of people don’t bother saying “Lake Superior” in the first place.
They just call it the big lake.
And unless Trump plans on making the damn thing smaller, that name probably isn’t going anywhere.
Editor’s note: This is satire. President Trump has not announced plans to rename Lake Superior. Please do not email the Canadian government.
