Why Name a Street After Locusts?

EDIT: In record time, we have an answer. Thanks, Nancy! Is it weird that I had never heard of a locust tree before Nancy told me about it?

Look at a map of any city street grid and you’ll see what the city used to be and how people want it to seem. In among numbers, letters and cardinal directions, the last names of founding fathers and other notables intersect with trees and animals suggest nature even when the existence of the asphalt street and cement sidewalk quite likely displaced nature. Newer housing developments do this in a degraded way: Instead of historical people, it’s the developer’s wife and daughter and mother-in-law, and they’re criss-crossing absurd, contrived combinations of nature words. If you find yourself at the corner of Amber Leigh Avenue and Shadypalm Street, you almost definitely wandered into a part of the city that didn’t exist 20 years ago. Also, you probably made a wrong turn.

But I have a question that I was unable to answer by searching on the internet, and I’m wondering if posting it here might make the answer come to me. (It’s worked in the past.) What’s up with Locust as a street name? There’s a Locust Street here in Los Angeles, there is a Locus Avenue in my hometown and Google Maps tells me that there are Locust Streets all throughout California. Other states have them too, but I’m more interested in the Californian Locust Streets just because, unless I’ve misunderstood, we don’t often get locusts here, not like Midwestern states did back in Laura Ingalls Wilder times. (EDIT: Apparently there was an incident in Sacramento County this year.) But even for the states that did historically suffer those scary, farmland-decimating clouds of locusts, it seems odd to me that you’d want to namecheck something so unwanted and destructive, even considering the occasional tendency to give streets strange or unpleasant names.

So I’m asking you, internet: Why would anyone name a street after a locust? Why is there a Locust Street anywhere? And why are there so many in California?

Camera Angles and the Way We Dream

I dream like a movie. I’m guessing you do too — with intro scenes and changes in angles in which the “camera” moves from a first-person perspective to a broader one that lets the dreamer see himself or herself at a distance, interacting with other characters. As far as my own experience, I can sum it up more or less with this: I’m me. Then I’m not. Or at least there’s a second me and I’m floating there — as a camera? as an impartial ghost who just materialized in time for the night’s entertainment? — and none of these “cuts” seem strange to me at the time.

I suppose it’s possible that I’m actually just waking up from a dream, asking “What the hell was that?” and then stitching a series of unrelated images and emotional impressions into my best attempt at a story, because the human brain wants a narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end. But regardless of whether the “camera angle” vocabulary figures into in at the subconscious or the conscious level, it’s there, and I feel like every conversation I’ve had in which someone told me about a dream has sounded like a recap of a movie by someone who had never seen a movie before and therefore doesn’t know how to articulate a scene change of a shift in perspective. (“I was on a boat, and it looked like the Titanic but all the doors had carpet on them, and then all of a sudden I was watching myself run down this hallway and I could see these guys chasing behind me.”)

So my question, then, is this: Do I use all this camera angle vocab to discuss my dreams because I’ve simply watched enough movies and TV that my brain can’t imagine a visual story being told any other way? Or is this just the way the human brain wants to process dreaming, and we’ve structured cinema to mirror the perspective shifts and angle changes that dreamers have been experiencing forever? Would someone who had never watched a movie or a TV show be familiar with the “camerawork” even if he wasn’t familiar with cameras?