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Perhaps it results from all those parties on New Year's Eve. Or with our starting a new year in the dead of winter, a singularly inappropriate time for celebration. In Roman times, and indeed until 1752 in the English-speaking world, the year began on March 25, which makes a lot more sense than January.
Whatever causes this annual epidemic of necromancy, this is when otherwise reasonable people take up the occult arts of divination, soothsaying and prophecy. I am not immune, so here's what will happen in 1987:
· The Sawatch Range will disappear. Making it vanish is a major undertaking, because the Sawatch Range extends for more than 75 miles. Holding 15 peaks over 14,000 feet, it is the highest segment of all the Rocky Mountains, from Canada to New Mexico, and it has the three tallest summits in Colorado: Elbert, Massive and Harvard.
With a slow natural process like erosion, eliminating
the Sawatch Range would require millions of years.
Colorado's careless writers are doing the job more rapidly.
Since a few summits in the central part of the Sawatch
Range are named for universities, we now read frequently of
the Collegiate Range.
The Collegiate Peaks sit in the Sawatch Range, just as
the Indian Peaks sit in the Front Range. That hasn't made
the Front Range the Indian Range,
but the central
stretch of the Sawatch Range has vanished.
I also read of the Massive Range
and the Holy
Cross Range,
so the northern end of the Sawatch Range
is sinking. All that remain are Shavano, Tabeguache, Ouray,
Antero and a few other southern peaks. An ignoramus will
soon christen them the Ute Range
or somesuch, and
after 60 million years, that will be the end of the Sawatch
Range.
When it disappears in 1987, I'll miss it, as will Jake Wolcott and Steve Voynick, but we'll probably be the only ones.
· Much progress will be announced in 1987 toward a new Denver airport, Two Forks Reservoir and a metro convention center.
You will get the opportunity to pay higher taxes and higher prices for these things. You will receive the increased noise and congestion and the diminished quality of life. You will not make money from these things, but even at that, you might believe that these things, like castor oil, are somehow good for you.
· No president, senator or representative will come out in favor of nuclear war during 1987. All, in fact, will denounce it strongly, as will the entire population of the United States. With the possible exceptions of Michael Rosen and the late Herman Kahn, no one is for nuclear war.
Although everyone is against nuclear war, people will continue to pay taxes and the United States will spend billions of their hard-earned dollars for nuclear warheads. Throughout 1987, this process will still be known as democracy.
· Every month, the U.S. Department of Commerce will announce that all indicators are excellent and the economy is booming. No matter how favorable these announcements, neither I nor anyone I know will have any more work or any more money than before, and we will continue to believe that these glowing reports concern the commerce of Saturn.
· I will break my annual New Year's Resolution again. Every year, I vow to spend my time more efficiently: I will specialize and quit taking on new projects that require extensive research.
Right now I'm under contract to write two adult Westerns, edit a quarterly newsletter for users of the SNOBOL4 computer programming language, prepare a long magazine article about how rural telephone systems have been affected by the AT&T break-up, oversee the weekly newspaper in Westcliffe while the publisher goes to India for six weeks, devise sales literature for townhomes in Fraser -- and there are probably some other things I won't remember until someone calls to nag.
None of these jobs has any discernible relationship with the other. Seldom can I use something I learned on one when I'm doing another, so I don't get a lot of paying work done on any given day. Tired of poverty, on New Year's Eve I again vowed to specialize.
By no later than March, however, something new will come along that sounds interesting. And I will resume telling my creditors that it isn't every day they have the opportunity to dun a world-class Trivial Pursuit player.
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