< PREVIOUS ] [ 1990 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Yesterday was Memorial Day, once set aside to honor Americans who died in battle at Antietam and Omaha Beach, and now known as the opening day of Summer Tourist Season, a status made official several years ago with the advent of Monday holidays. In a tourist economy, guaranteed three-day weekends are more important than honoring those who died fighting so that others might barbecue.
The competition for the tourist dollar so intense that
even Wyoming has entered the fray with TV commercials that
tout lakes, rodeos and mountains, all of which are
relatively abundant in Colorado. There must be better
places to promote those attractions, and besides, why drive
all that way north just to have people snicker and call you
a greenie
behind your back?
A Wyoming-born friend once explained to me how the
borders of the Cowboy State were established. I thought
they were just surveyor's lines on a map, like Colorado's,
but he put it this way: Take all the rocks that didn't
interest the greedy miners of Colorado. Throw in land that
was too miserable for the corn farmers of Nebraska or the
cattlemen of Montana. Add a few slickrock deserts that even
the Utah Mormons couldn't colonize, and you've got
Wyoming.
Even so, other states have been stealing tourist attractions from Wyoming. Most recently, Montana has used Wyoming geysers; Devil's Tower and the Grand Tetons have also migrated recently.
Wyoming has been upset about these thefts, but Wyoming
is not progressive state like Colorado. They've never had a
governor whose mission was Sell Wyoming,
and that's
about all we get in Colorado.
Since some states are so desperate for tourist attractions that they steal from Wyoming, we should sell them some of ours. One good place to start is the Denver Grand Prix. Denver is already full of people who drive like maniacs in loud, fast cars; nobody there in his right mind would pay good money to watch more of what happens every rush hour anyway. Sell the Grand Prix to some quiet little town that needs to rouse the sleeping dogs on Main Street.
We should also peddle the Royal Gorge. There's nothing
really wrong with it, except it costs $2 a head, a fact not
mentioned on any of the signs along the highway. You don't
learn about the stiff toll until you've driven 10 miles up
a side road. The Royal Gouge
gives us a bad name;
sell it to New Jersey, where people expect that kind of
treatment.
And then there's Aspen, specifically the Pitkin County Courthouse. Just watch. Hunter Thompson will get a stiffer sentence than Claudine Longet did 14 years ago, since all she did was kill somebody, whereas he has been obstructing the holy War on Drugs. Somebody somewhere will pay well for a building that appears on national TV so often, and Colorado will be better off if most people think it's somewhere else.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1990 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >