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For a television program that nobody I know has watched,
South Park
sure attracts attention. The Comedy
Central animated cartoon made the cover of Newsweek and of
Rolling Stone. Time gave it a couple of pages recently.
A news program on another network explained that teachers in a New England elementary school are talking to parents, hoping they will prevent their children from watching it. Even the Post has succumbed, with a recent story about how Denver-area TCI customers are demanding that the cable company start carrying Comedy Central so they can see South Park.
The real South Park, although very much a part of Colorado, appears on few maps. The Rocky Mountains, as they wend through our state, generally trend in two parallel ranges. Between the ranges lie four large basins -- North, Middle and South parks, and the San Luis Valley. Each holds the headwaters of a major river: North Platte, Colorado, South Platte and Rio Grande.
Two obvious questions: Why use the word park
for
a valley, and why is the southernmost basin called a valley
instead of a park?
When I was little, the word park
sure had me
confused. My parents once announced that we were going to
Estes Park up in the mountains, and I had visions of huge
swings and slides. Much to my disappointment, all I found
were a few rubber-tomahawk shops.
The term comes from the French parc,
originally
meaning an animal pen or similar enclosed space, rather
than an outdoor space set aside for public recreation.
French-speaking traders and trappers, who ventured into
northern Colorado in the 18th and early 19th centuries,
applied the term. They sometimes called North Park the
Bull Pen
or New Park,
while Middle Park was
occasionally Old Park.
South Park was also Bayou
Salade
-- the salt marsh, thanks to the brine springs
near Antero Junction.
The Arkansas River was an informal boundary between the
French and Spanish empires, reflected today in old place
names. North of the river, the names are French -- Grand,
Platte, LaPorte, Laramie. On the south side, Spanish
persists -- Rio Grande, Culebra, Costilla, San Luis -- and
the Spanish word for valley is valle.
That's why we have parks in the north and a valley in the south, and perhaps one of our statehouse Republicans will someday deliver us from the dangerous and divisive multi-culturalism of our state map.
As for the exact boundaries of our intermontane parks, North Park and Jackson County are pretty well coterminous. Grand County and Middle Park fit together pretty well, although Summit County is geographically, though not culturally or economically, part of Middle Park.
South Park and Park County are also a pretty good fit, but the border of Park County caused a lawsuit in 1917.
At issue then was the Climax Mine at the top of
Frémont Pass. Whether it was in Lake or Summit
County depended on an 1881 law that set the boundary as
running west from the northwest corner of Park
County
on Great Snowy Range.
As historian Steve
Voynick wrote, the vague statutory desription actually
suited two different points,
several miles apart. A
lawsuit ensued, and Lake County won.
But that's about South Park and Park County on the ground. The national media versions are different.
Rolling Stone explains that South Park the cartoon is
set in the Colorado county that is the supposed
alien-abduction capital of the world.
I get the weekly Fairplay Flume & Park County Republican, and I can't recall a single abduction account. If you collect Colorado UFO tales, the San Luis Valley, not South Park, is the leading source.
Newsweek displays similar ignorance: this snowbound
mountain hamlet -- named after a real Colorado county
notorious for alien sighting and other rural myths.
But
there isn't a real Colorado county
named South
Park.
From 1869-74, Fairplay was officially called South
Park City,
a name that remains on its fine museum, a
restored 1880s mining town covering several blocks on the
west side of town.
That's a real heritage, though. Given the power of television and industrial tourism, Fairplay will need to act quickly to capitalize on the South Park phenomenon.
Back in the 1960s, when Bonanza was the highest-rated television show, tourists descended on Lake Tahoe, Nev., looking for the Ponderosa. There wasn't one -- so an entrepreneur constructed one. It was easier than trying to explain that the Cartwrights were figments of the imagination.
Some years later, Dallas likewise needed to construct a South Fork to accomodate the myriads of Americans who can't tell the difference between television and reality.
If I owned land near Fairplay, I'd hasten to erect some billboard-like two-dimensional structures based on the primitive South Park TV backgrounds, and then I'd paint a squashed and stretched roadkill Kenny on the highway. The real South Park is an interesting and beautiful place, but not nearly as profitable as arranging for life to imitate art.
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