By Christy Rasmussen-Ford

After 20-plus years of living here, I finally got curious about what Sol Duc meant.

I foolishly assumed that the first word meant sun.

Three years of Spanish in high school and I successfully (only) took away that sol translates to sun and verde translates to green. These two words will no doubt come in handy if I should ever venture to a Spanish-speaking country. A person can never go wrong knowing how to say, “Green sun.”

Unfortunately, though I deduced that sol meant sun, I could not figure out what duc meant.

Duc didn’t sound like a Spanish word to me. Again, I studied the language for three years. I have the expertise.

I decided to Google the word.

Google informed me that sol duc actually means sparkling waters.

Sun … sparkling, it appears that I was not far off with that one.

I was wrong about it being Spanish though. It is actually Quileute.

I’m going out on a limb with this one, but I think I have deduced that the Quileute people came up with the name for this river.

I’m not one to mess with tradition, but I’m proposing a name change to this river and all other things with the name Sol Duc.

I propose we change the name to Soul Duck.

It’s much catchier and less difficult to translate.

Although I’d like to take credit for this brilliant idea, I’m borrowing the concept from former Forks Forum interim editor Mark Couhig.

He suggested “Soul Duck would be a good name for a column.”

I agree but I think we should take it one step further and just change everything over to Soul Duck.

I’ve thought this idea out.

We could use little rubber duckies from the duck races as our mascot. You know, the ones with the sun glasses.

When I think of a soulful duck, I think of those rubber duckies. Maybe we could add a little saxophone in there somewhere.

I went over some numbers to see what it would cost to change everything over. According to my calculation skills and budget skills (which are slightly worse than my Spanish language skills), the project should cost about $3,086,739. Broken down, it’s $9 to add two letters to every sign, letterhead, etc., and $3,086,730 for the rest of the construction team to stand around and watch.

Also, the wages for the flaggers are included.

Who knows how big this could get. Maybe we could turn into the Soul Music Capital of the World? Maybe it would surpass even Twilight?

Instead of Twilight firewood or sleepless vampire hotels, we could have James Brown duck-hunting decoys, the Marvin Gaye “What’s Going On?” visitor center or Otis Redding firewood. (That firewood marketing is brilliant.)

The possibilities are endless with just a few letters added to the current name.

Sol Duc to Soul Duck.

Think about it people, and let’s get this transition started.