Bad news: Lake Ontario no longer exists
Donald Trump has renamed it Lake America, creating an urgent administrative crisis for anyone who had the old lake on their bucket list.
Bad news if “visit Lake Ontario” is sitting somewhere on your list: you may have missed your chance. On 27 August, Donald Trump signed an executive order telling the American federal government to call it Lake America and remove Lake Ontario from its geographical database. The water is still there, Toronto and Rochester haven’t drifted into the Atlantic, and the fish appear to have accepted the change with admirable calm. But Lake Ontario, in one official American database at least, is being escorted off the premises. This creates an immediate bucket-list problem. If you stand on the Canadian shore, are you visiting Lake Ontario, but on the New York shore you’re visiting Lake America? If you sail across the middle, can you tick both off during the same afternoon? I don’t generally encourage cheating, but two bucket-list achievements for the price of one boat trip is exactly the sort of efficiency that founders are supposed to admire. Google Maps has dealt with the situation by showing Lake America to users in the United States, Lake Ontario to Canadians and both names to everybody else . The lake has effectively become geographically bilingual, although neither version appears to have been consulted. Apple was slower to make the change, so Trump reportedly contacted the company himself , which is an extraordinary amount of presidential attention for a map label. Meanwhile, the lake has carried on being a lake, a role it has performed successfully for several thousand years without needing a branding consultant. Maps have always had a flexible relationship with the present. Photo: Ruth Bourke on Unsplash . Trump explained that the change only required “a good pen, and some intelligence”, which is certainly a quicker process than consulting the other country attached to it. It also opens up a world of possibilities for the rest of us. I’ve never especially liked the name English Channel, so perhaps France and I can expect my revised paperwork by Friday. The North Sea feels unnecessarily pessimistic too, although I’ll wait until I’ve checked whether Norway has already claimed naming rights. Place names do change, of course, although usually an entire population, a war, a revolution or at least a council meeting is involved. Saint Petersburg became Petrograd in 1914, Leningrad in 1924 and Saint Petersburg again in 1991 . A particularly ambitious traveller could have put all three cities on their list and completed the set without changing hotels. The canals and palaces stayed where they were; it was the paperwork that developed commitment issues. Saint Petersburg: three names, one hotel bill. Photo: Nikolai Kolosov on Unsplash . Sometimes the reasons are stranger still. In 1950, the New Mexico town of Hot Springs renamed itself Truth or Consequences after a radio programme offered to broadcast from the first town willing to take its name. The springs remained hot, but the address began sounding like something shouted during a particularly tense pub quiz. In Quebec, the town of Asbestos became Val-des-Sources in 2020 , which feels less like rewriting history and more like a long-overdue intervention by the tourism department. None of those quite matches renaming a shared lake from one side of it, though. The executive order itself describes a body of water bounded by New York on one side and Ontario on the other, which makes Lake America sound rather like somebody renaming a semi-detached house without mentioning it to the neighbours. Canada’s official geographical database still calls it Lake Ontario , and the name was recorded as early as 1641 and is believed to have Indigenous roots. It has, in other words, marginally more history behind it than a Thursday afternoon press conference. For anyone who already has Lake Ontario on their list, the answer is simple: don’t delete it. A bucket list shouldn’t require synchronising with every government database before you’re allowed to enjoy yourself. If you wanted to stand beside that enormous stretch of water, take in the Toronto skyline or watch a sunset from its shore, that experience hasn’t vanished because somebody has ordered new letterheads. You can update the label if you like, but the point was always the place rather than the latest preferred spelling. So go and visit Lake Ontario. Or Lake America. Stand beside it, take the photograph and tick off whichever name you originally wrote down. If Google offers you both, resist the temptation to claim two completed activities; we do have some standards. The lake won’t mind what you call it, Canada probably will, and there’s every chance the map will have changed again before you’ve found somewhere to park. Header photograph: Tyler Rooney on Unsplash .