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Every so often, I suffer from a temptation to apply for
pioneer license plates,
which indicate that you had
ancestors in Colorado a century ago.
However, it looks like a lot of work to delve into musty old repossession records, foreclosure proceedings and bankruptcy filings to establish my Colorado lineage, and so I have manfully resisted the pioneer-plate temptation.
Further, if one needs to display Colorado roots while nervously scanning for patches of black ice on the road, the vehicle itself is a better mechanism than a license plate or bumper sticker.
For 16 years, I owned a wonderful old pickup, a 1967 Chevy. It was a three-quarter ton with a narrow box, a four-speed manual transmission with compound low and a stump-puller 292 six-cylinder engine. It did not have power steering, power brakes, power windows or power anything except the rear wheels.
It was painted road-department orange, and when I bought
it used from Jameson Chevrolet in Kremmling in 1977, it
still had Routt County. District 1 A-3
painted on
the doors. I was somewhat leery on that account, but the
salesman assured me that it had been the pickup assigned to
the foreman in the Oak Creek district, so you know it
got good care and never got worked real hard. Now, if it
had been a crew member's truck, you'd be right to be
worried.
The truck did not age gracefully in my hands. Its windshield cracked, it acquired dents and it began to burn some oil.
And when I saw a sticker I liked, I put it on what was left of the rear bumper (it lost some pieces during a towing effort along Halfmoon Creek west of Leadville during a failed effort to ascend Mount Elbert, which had followed some serious pre-climb training at the bar of the Golden Burro the night before).
One sticker said Ch*ng* el ingles oficial,
which
perfectly expressed my attitude about Colorado's official
English law, and which certainly could not be deemed
legally obscene, since the obscenity was in an unofficial
language (the sticker had vowels rather than
asterisks).
The other was a Native
sticker. Martha said it
was superfluous. That pickup obviously wouldn't make it
to the state line,
she explained, so what's the
point of the sticker? Nobody except someone bred and born
in Colorado would think you could get away with driving
that thing on a public road.
The state patrol apparently agreed with her. Every time
I drove the truck out of town with the ingles
oficial
sticker, I got pulled over. Never for the
sticker, at least officially -- it was always something
like a possible intermittent brake light.
One night in the Victoria Tavern here, I spotted a friend who had been a state trooper for about a decade before going into business for himself. I asked why I always got pulled over but never ticketed.
We're trained to look for things that don't quite fit
together. You've got this classic good-ol'-boy redneck
pickup, complete with gun rack. As far as the typical
trooper is concerned, it should have an 'NRA Life Member'
or 'Get US out of the UN' sticker, and it would all add up
and you wouldn't get pulled over all the time.
But you've also got a bumper sticker that could be
construed as some radical left-wing Chicano protest
statement, which would be OK if you were driving a
low-rider '64 Chevy Impala, but you aren't. This odd
combination is going to make any trooper curious, and he's
going to want to find some excuse to pull you over and
check things out.
That was about a decade ago, and I sold the pickup in 1993. But I suspect that our state troopers are still trained to look for unlikely combinations, and so I offer a suggestion to those who get pioneer plates.
First note that most Colorado pioneers came here with one primary idea -- to get rich quickly and then move back to civilization.
Thus, those who stayed and had families here were failures, since they didn't make enough money to leave. And so pioneer plates would fit perfectly on a vehicle with bald tires and a cracked windshield that hasn't been washed since the first Reagan administration.
But if you put pioneer plates on a new car, especially something ostentatious like a Lexus or Mercedes spewt -- well, don't blame me if you get pulled over frequently for strange reasons. After all, you've now been warned about the danger of taking an anomaly out on the public roads. Be consistent, or be prepared to spend a lot of time talking to troopers.
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