The mountain of many names. This iconic mountain in West Marin once had a Miwok name, but that is lost. Dewey says it’s Oyen Mucsis, but no one really knows. It has had many, many settler names. The Russian names and the Californio names are lost. James Black was merely an owner, so it was called Black’s Mountain. As in the man who paid the taxes. It was a name on a geodetic map. We never used it because we didn’t even know it was his mountain. In those days, who had geodetic maps? Who can own a view like that?
As it lay dreaming, it was variously called Knuckle Mountain, Sleeping Elephant, and Elephant Foot Mountain, that’s what we called it when I was ten, and Marin hadn’t yet been invaded by the rockstars—so we can’t blame them. From the top of Mt. Barnabe, it looks like an elephant’s foot. An elephant dreaming of the sea.
As for the current coloquial name Elephant Mountain, it was called that long before Jesse Colin Young moved to Inverness and named his album after it in deep homage. Banana of the Youngbloods knows the backstory, he confirmed to me that a local, Hannah Bauer, gave them the name. (NB Hannah grew up in Sausalito.)
And yes, there were once elephants here, once upon a time, both mastodons and mammoths—and they grazed on the lush sweet grasses of the verdant lush plains that rolled all the way out to the Farallon Islands. They wore the rocks smooth itching their butts near Goat Rock. And then they all died.
But the mountain that arose from the depths as pillow lava, is sleepwalking towards the sea. It endures our the fog of our transgressions, it forgives us our erosion of names, and still it feeds our imaginations. This mountain of many names.
From a Facebook photo post, you can see it here, but for this blog I used my latest iteration of the mountain.
No comments:
Post a Comment