When Elder Parley Pratt came up and over his namesake canyon toll road in the late 1840s, he named the giant meadow he found Parley’s Park. A park was a mountain man term for a high mountain meadow, like Park Meadows, Winter Park or South Park, and not a place to play, live or park your car. “We don’t get up ta Park too much anymore,” said the Summit County ranchers years ago. “Too many yuppies and hippies.” The old timers called this place Park like we just call it Heber, and dropped the City part. Deer Valley’s Snow Park was called Frog Valley before it was drained for lakes, lodges and parking lots. This place we call  Park was originally just the meadows, streams and wetlands. The city, mines and ski resorts came later. This place grew and changed but the name remained: Park City, paradise paved and a place where winter is now shorter than summers used to be. Should we let these places become No Snow Park or No Park City?When I was small, they called me Ginty, a name my Irish nanny gave me. When I was in grammar school, they called me Little Lindon following in my big brothers’ footsteps.  In high school, I was the philosopher Lindonian and in college, I added Rex as the king of Lindonian, but you don’t get to pick your own nick names.  I’m just glad it wasn’t Buttface.  When I got out of school I was called an engineer on my business card, even though I didn’t know squat. I was a very civil engineer building ski resorts where the slopes face north and the condos face south. Then I was called a dam inspector, the best job I ever had, but that sounded too pedantic.  Getting more involved in dam design, they called me a dam safety engineer. In the winters, I got more involved with weather modeling and called myself a hydro-meteorological engineer even though I couldn’t say it, let alone spell it. Then I became an assistant state engineer — of what I wasn’t sure, but it was a nice title. Finally, focusing on water and admitting that’s what I liked and was good at, I just called myself simply a hydrologist and owned it. It took me a long time to figure out what I was and what I wanted to be, gaining wisdom by experience, not just osmosis.  People and places make us what we are. You are who you meet. You are what you read. You are your soul, and you just have your body for a short while. We become what we are, deliberately and accidentally, but admitting what that is can be the hardest part.  We’ve heard of “be where you are” to be present, or “be who you are” to be self-accepting, and finally “be what you are” to admit to what you have become. Decide what to be and go be it.How often do we obscure what things are with names and titles downplaying what they really are. Remember they started calling garbage men sanitation engineers.  Killer air quality is called fog or smog, haze or schmutz by fake weather readers.  Climate change is called “natural chaos” by big oil to help deny, diffuse, delay, deflect or diminish it and separate themselves from the rising seas and killer wildfires they cause.  Dakota, Snow Park, East Village, Main Street and the Canyons Base Village are noxious expansions, not improvements, that do not pay for themselves or make our traffic or our quality of life better. Those nice names are like putting lipstick on a pig. Now instead of being a pedophile, they can call you a congressman or Cabinet member or even president if you are a felon, insurrectionist and a sex offender. It is even more essential during these trying times to call things by their real name. Titles, names and respect are earned and not just bestowed. You are what you do and not what you say you will do. We should not call our narcissistic conman, gangster huckster a dictator, oligarch, autocrat or king, let alone president. It doesn’t matter if you are a vegetarian, transsexual, Republican or a Buddhist. What matters is that we are more honest and self-accepting of what we really are, and that we call things by their real name.  I’m a hydrologist, haze is pollution, climate is changing, growth and expansion are toxic, and our presidential con man is a clown. Our Park is a beautiful mountain meadow and not a Disneyland destination, cash-register megalopolis. Let’s be what we are and call things by their real names. Like Parley Pratt did.Matthew Lindon lives in Snyderville. His website is Waterandwhatever.comThe post Call things by their name, be what you are appeared first on Park Record.