Blanding is an unfortunate name for a town. It was called first Sagebrush and then Grayson, and I think either one is better for a town that is essentially bland. The town changed its name because a wealthy investor promised a thousand-volume library to any town that would adopt his name (actually his wife's maiden name; his name and 500 of the books went to Bicknell, UT).
I did get a bit of the "adventure" promised by Blanding: many deep scratches from canyon bushwhacking, a serious case of road burn from getting tripped by an over-eager kid in the 4th of July 5k, a cold, and a speeding ticket. Not really the sort of adventure I was looking for, but oh well.
I also learned that Blanding has some serious class strife. The town was settled by two main groups: the "Hole-in-the-Rockers" and the "Pachecoites." The Hole-in-the-Rock contingency arrived first. These folks decided to ignore long, established routes to the area and created a "shortcut" to get from the west to the east. The shortcut took six months of ridiculously hard travel and they had to blast and build a variety of wagon pathways across slickrock and down steep plateaus. The Pachecoites came later--north from Mexico, abandoning Mormon settlements because of political unrest. In the town's social structuring, it is better to be of Hole-in-the-Rock stock than Pachecoite. (my family, btw, is equal parts of both). And amazingly, the division still matters. When my aunt was a teenager, she dated an outsider (a family that came to work for an oil company) who everyone disapproved of. My dad found him once outside their property yelling about how to be any good in the damn town, your grandfather had to come through the Hole-in-the-Rock. Everyone you meet down there has to tell you who their parents and grandparents were and where they came from.
What amuses me about the whole thing is the assertion that the folks who came to the area in the most ridiculous, foolhardy way possible are better. Many of my family members (me included) possess a legendary sort of stubbornness, and I think this is where it all started. Sometimes tenacity is a virtue, but other times it is just a waste of time.
2 comments:
We have something similar in my now defunct little Utah town (it was long ago absorbed by suburbiana): my great grandmother had a saying--"The only thing wrong with the Palmers is they think they are as good as the Gardners." She meant it.
Thinking grammatically, perhaps we should think of Blanding as the present participial form of a verb, "to bland" (e.g., "I worry that if I stay in this obscure little part of Utah, I will bland beyond all recognition"). Or, "I'm blanding! I'm melting!" Or, "Bland me, baby, one more time."
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