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The rivalry between Colorado and Texas shows no signs of abating. Governor Lamm I continues to apologize for stale jokes. With each campaign, the annual Twin Lakes Tomato War attracts more splattered soldiers. The Denver Post even devoted several Sunday columns recently to the relationship between the Centennial State and the Lone Star State.
No one seems to know how this started. Perhaps it was with the Adams-Onis treaty of 1819, which set the boundary between the United States and the New World possessions of Spain. Following several revolutions, that boundary -- the Arkansas River and a line north from its source -- separated America from the Republic of Texas. Texas visitors thus may represent something beyond tourism. They could well be pilgtims, visiting lost portions of their ancestral homeland; 60 percent of Colorado, including the major portion of the mountains, was part of Texas until 1846.
Not one Colorado resident in 20 has heard of the Adams-Onis Treaty ar the Battle of La Glorieta Pass. Texans are pumped full of lore about the Alamo and San Jacinto and Sam Houston, and can spout it interrbinably whenever primed with a sixpack of Pearl. A Colorado resident who knows of Bloody Bridles Waite or the Grand Lake War is a historian.
That's why I find it difficult to hate Texans. As a Colorado native, I'm supposed to loathe turkeys, flatlanders and all those loud-mouth, whoop-it-up Texans.
But instead I am jealous. For better or worse, Texas has
an identity, and Colorado doesn't. You can close your eyes
and envision a Texan. The stereotype will be as inaccurate
as stereotypes must be, but the important thing is that
there is a shared image of Texans. A bit of reflection, and
you'll almost hear Heidi, yawl?
and feel your back
being slapped.
Now turn to Colorado: You'll find it's simpler to
imagine a great city than it is to envision a Coloradan.
You can't even make up jokes about Coloradans. We can't
decide how to spell Coloradan
(some newspapers
insist on Coloradoan
), much less figure out what one
might be. Someone in a mud house with a dirt floor in the
San Luis Valley, whose family has been there since time
began? A laid-off miner in Leadville, hoping he has enough
beer, pinto beans and firewood to get through another
brutal winter? A cocaine importer in a $350,000
white-on-white palace in Boulder? A sodbuster on the High
Plains, praying for rain, and getting it during hay
harvest?
Judging by the articles in national magazines about Gary Hart's candidacy, the Colorado stereotype may be the white wine and Perrier yuppie joggers who devise software and go skiing on those weekends that they aren't networking in fern bars. But there is nothing specifically Colorado among the experience-sharing Volvo set; Colorado is just another rung on the career ladder.
Texans cherish a sense of place; someone from the Staked Plains who never sees a tree or a Republican until he is well past majority comes from a different place and is thereby a different person than if he had come from the Gulf Coast or the Hill Country.
Coloradans seldom hold any sense of place. It's nearly impossible. Our places change continually, always toward some homogeneous mellow experience, almost as if someone sold franchiess. Mountain towns used to present differing characters: Leadville was a raining town, Aspen a cultural mecca, Durango a railroad center. Now they're an after tourism, and it gets harder and herder to tell them apart. Greeley, Boulder and Fort Collins all once had identities. Now they all have downtown malls and development commissions bent on attracting more high tech.
My envy of the sense of place and identity held by Texans would not necessarily make me like them, of course. There are lots of people I envy whom I don't like. But I have come to like Texans, more or less. Of all who come here, they're the easiest to tolerate; I have finally realized that they come to Colorado because they like Colorado just the way it is.
Our other invaders, intent on subdividing valleys, establishing world-class enterprises and making a billion by next week, are worse -- much worse. They're missionaries who see native Coloradans as heathen savages that must be forcibly converted. During my employee days in assorted Colorado towns, I often received clothing lectures from ambitious Wisconsinites and speech lessons from transplanted New Englanders. Never has a Texan informed me there was anything untoward about being a Coloradan, or dressing, or talking like a Coloradan. Never has a Texan tried to make me ashamed of my origins or told me to overhaul my personality.
Being surrounded by auslanders is one of the prices one pays for axing in Colorado. But if we must be invaded, let it be by Texans. They're so happy and secure being Texans that they'll let us be Coloradans.
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