Tell me about the name, you said: how it happened was there were two towns, Union and Franklin—cut by the railroad; they'd gotten big enough for a post office, but the postmaster general says just one post office is enough, you'll share it, only Union or Franklin won't do, the names are already taken, you have to come up with a new name; there having been, at the time, a recent U.S. victory in its war on Mexico, the townspeople decide to unify not just the post office, but the whole place, re-christening it after the location of the aforesaid victory; Churubusco is a funny word, though: Spanish corruption of the name denoting the temple area of Huītzilōpōchtli, a solar deity, a god of war and sacrifice whose symbols are a ball of eagle's feathers, the hummingbird, and the blue snake; I don't know what it means that he is now enshrined here, in part (and you're the only one between us that's seen eagles, hummingbirds, and watersnakes, all three—though I rode the Eel River one afternoon by canoe, which is maybe a kind of blue snake) . . . but you meant the other name: there was an earlier Turtle Town, up the Eel, where the Miami made camp—not here, exactly, because the only way to the river is outside of town, where Blue River runs out of Blue Lake meeting up with the Eel and lulling its way eventually to the Wabash down at Longansport (limestone everywhere underneath, but only rarely exposed; that's where Wabash comes from, via the French corruption of the Miami: [shining] water [running] over [pure] white stones) and just over northwest of Blue Lake is a much smaller one, a pond really, called Devil's Lake, and between the two was where Chief Little Turtle is said to have been born, in a small encampment in the crook of river and woods (and some names I don't know about, if it's what the Miami called them or no: so much gets lost, effaced, desecrated, and forgotten, like how Little Turtle isn't "little" at all, but Mihšihkinaahkwa, which is the name of a specific species of terrapin, probably those same ones we see bobbing their heads above water and pull out sometimes for races—and I don't know whether that isn't cruel, come to think of it)—but that's not why, far as I know: how it happened was they drained Devil's Lake looking for the creature a farmer—like as not drunk—had spotted the century before we were born; some fifty years later, long after the farmer had died, the thing was seen again, whatever it was; day in and out there were rings of chromed cars, cops directing traffic; a LIFE magazine photographer even showed up to document the doings; they ran huge pumps over this temporary dam, almost got to the bottom, too, before it burst and filled the lake again; the photographer deemed the photos unusable, and of course the 500-pound turtle was never found, disappeared amidst the swamps and rivers, the courses and tunnels connecting them to other lakes.
And then it was dark and the lake was a lucid black not in keeping with its name. I remember when the sycamore came down, the willow too, now it's just the cottonwood, tallest and oldest tree around if it's an inch or day; and my whole life living there I looked for UFOs, ghosts—signs and wonders; but it was only that night, with you, that I ever saw anything worth reporting; across the water, in the direction of Devil's Lake (obscured fully by the darkening trees), the Hay Moon not up yet over the hill behind us: will o' the wisp wavering warm above the water, glowing in the night, burning bright as any of the house lights so that you could mistake it for one if you forgot there were no houses on that side of the lake which curls into river and swamp—it did not change or go out all night at our watching. In the morning we rode over in kayaks and found nothing: no limnades, only the quiet green rim of that ice age relic, glacial till shored up by weeds, grasses, trees: stalks of corn just visible beyond them. It is spring-fed, you said, as we rode back across the blue water, sun and moon reflected at either end.
