Timeless names

From the moment we learned that our 40th president, Ronald Reagan, had died, a refrain went up, one we hear every time a popular leader dies: “Let’s name something for him or her.”

We’ve heard rumblings of replacing Alexander Hamilton’s image with Reagan’s on the $10r bill, of exchanging the Roosevelt dime for a Reagan one. There’s also talk of renaming the Pentagon to honor the popular president. With a Washington building already bearing Reagan’s name, will the military headquarters be called the Ronald Reagan Pentagon Building? With our penchant for shortening names, will we end up calling it the RRPB or just drop the president’s name and continue calling it the one it’s had for years.

Much of the time, commemorating someone for a job well done is done in haste. In their zeal to immortalize their hero, supporters give little thought to what site or object would best symbolize the person’s accomplishments; they give almost no thought to preserving the integrity of the site or thing they plan to rename. Their mission is to find a way to put a name in front of the most people.

That’s fine, if the place or thing is not welded into the fabric of a people and their community and changing its name changes its soul. For example, we should guard against zealous supporters who would one day like to see the Golden Gate Bridge called the William Jefferson Clinton Bridge; the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, the George Walker Bush Bridge-Tunnel; or, closer to my home, the New River Gorge Bridge changed to the Robert C. Byrd Bridge. What history and mystique would be lost if we were persuaded to rename American symbols, like renaming the Statue of Liberty for Hillary Rodham Clinton or the Empire State Building for Rudy Giuliani.

Many manmade structures and everything sculpted by nature should shun cumbersome names attributed to people who won’t survive as long as they will.

The man who loved the way words rolled off the tongue would shudder to hear his name -- Ronald Wilson Reagan -- replace the melodious “Shenandoah” that fits so well the broad, fertile Virginia valley bounded by mountains on the east and west.

He might approve of placing his name in front of Interstate 81, the major highway that cuts through the valley, but I expect that a westward bound one would suit him better. Leave the Appalachian Trail alone, though. How boring to hike the Ronald Wilson Reagan Trail from Maine to Georgia. Somehow giving that path a man’s name diminishes the hiking experience. And makes the trail name forgettable, the exact opposite of what name changers seek -- commemoration and immortality for their hero.

People shouldn’t ruin a perfectly fine site by taking its name away and giving it another one when the first one is instilled in a region’s identity. That’s what’s happening in Bluefield. A well-meaning group of business leaders plan to take down the simple, metal letters that say East River Mountain Tunnel, a name embedded in concrete over the entrance to the I-77 tunnels that run through the great mountain’s heart. In their place they want to erect a new name for the tunnel complex. That name is H. Edward Steele Tunnel, named for a journalist who campaigned tirelessly to have the interstate built. The business and coal page editor for the Bluefield Daily Telegraph for many years, Steele deserves having something named in his honor.

But not the tunnel that passes through the mountain that’s stood for eons, the mountain that gives its name to many area businesses and is entwined in the people’s daily lives. I’ve written about that mountain many times. I’ve said that it dominates the landscape of the two Bluefields, and that characterizing it is difficult for it wears a thousand different faces. The mountain changes its character and mood with the light and time of day, with the seasons of the year. Sometimes the mountain is sharp and clear, sometimes it is a deep, brooding green. Sometimes it is misty, hazy, and foggy; sometimes it is crystallized with a visible frost line drawn by fairies during the night. Sometimes it is snow-covered with low-lying clouds trying to get over the ridge, a ridge formed eons ago when St. Clair’s Fault that runs along the mountain’s base shifted, lifting massive rock up toward the sky.

Today the mountain is tree covered, but the top remains difficult to hike for it still a rocky ridge, evidence of that ancient cataclysmic event. Below the ridge running along in the shadows is U.S. 460; pastureland, housing developments, and businesses butt up against it. The mountain is a comfort, for it’s always there, and the tunnel that has run through it since the early 1970s should retain its name.

There is another option that would be a more enduring and fitting tribute to honor Steele, a man committed to bringing the road into the coalfields to keep southern West Virginia’s economy alive. The interchange for I-77 and proposed I-73 can be named the H. Edward Steele Interchange. That interchange will happen at the tunnel’s exit on the West Virginia side of the mountain. I-73 will go right through the middle of coal country -- the dream of men like Steele -- on to Huntington, and north. The newspaperman’s supporters could go one step further and erect at that site a monument to coal, a monument dedicated to Steele.

But they will have to have patience. Reagan supporters will have to do the same in Washington, where a law says they have to wait 25 years to honor their hero. Bluefield’s leaders won’t have to wait that long for the interchange to come about. If they wait, though, the mountain can keep its integrity, and Steele will receive immortality for service well done.