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Several fortnights ago, I received an e-mail from John Andrews, former state senator and 1990 Republican nominee for governor, advising that we would soon be colleagues, for he was going to write columns for the Denver Post.
He thought that I might be tempted to call him an
impostor, since he would pretend to be writing from an
imaginary mountain town called Backbone,
whereas I
write from a real one, called Salida.
From what I've read of Backbone, it is inhabited by sturdy folks. Backbonites expect the government to protect them from gay couples and liberal college professors, but don't want the government to protect them from starvation, disease or water raids by the south metro area.
I suspected Backbone might be loosely based on Buena
Vista, where Andrews has some boyhood roots. But Buena
Vista sits by the river, while Andrews puts his town
high atop the Continental Divide.
Colorado boasts
only one post office on the Divide: Climax, 80429, which
has been pretty much a ghost town since Ronald Reagan was
president.
Andrews has mentioned another imaginary Colorado town: East Tincup, created in 1951 by Denver radio personality Pete Smythe, who spoke as its mayor.
But there are many other fictional Colorado places. The
most influential is probably Galt's Gulch, where the right
people sequestered themselves in Ayn Rand's 1957 novel
Atlas Shrugged.
It was a popular and
thought-provoking book, and it plays to a common fantasy --
hiding out in the mountains with the few enlightened people
who are just as superior to the common run of humanity as
you are.
Where was it? In a letter to a friend, Rand wrote that Ouray was the closest physical cognate, since it was remote and ringed by mountains, although her Galt's Gulch sat in a broader valley.
The best-known imaginary Colorado town today must be South Park, the setting for the cartoon show on Comedy Central. South Park appears to be based on Fairplay. But in the few times I've watched it, I've never seen what I most remember about Fairplay during the TV season -- brutal white-out zero-visibility ground blizzards. One of those should be easy to draw, even for these folks.
Another famous fictional Colorado town now is Holt, out
on the high plains. From what I've read about it, it seems
to have a full complement of good and bad folks, all
interesting. But I have to confess that I haven't read
Plainsong
or Eventide,
even though author
Kent Haruf lives near Salida and I've probably stood in
line behind him at Safeway.
I've put off that reading because one of my most trustworthy book previewers, my mother, said that the lack of quotation marks annoyed her to no end and would probably drive me batty. She may be right, so I'll postpone that literary foray until I need to feel batty.
My favorite imaginary Colorado town is Wonderful, the
setting for Steve Frazee's hilarious 1961 novel More
Damn Tourists.
Frazee lived here, so I presume that
Wonderful was based on Salida -- especially since the more
eccentric characters bore an astonishing resemblance to
certain people in town. But I'm probably wrong. Steve told
me once that it wasn't based on Salida, and some people in
Montrose claim that their town is Wonderful.
It can be easy to guess the real city that inspired the
fake one. The city of Newlife in Sinclair Lewis's last
novel, World so Wide,
was obviously Denver, and
Shale City in Dalton Trumbo's novels Eclipse
and
Johnny Got His Gun
was certainly Grand Junction. Nor
was it difficult to find Silverton in the Baker of David
Lavender's novel Red Mountain.
The most prominent of all fictional towns in Colorado is doubtless Centennial, from James Michener's immense 1974 novel of the same name. The imaginary town had to sit about where the real Kersey is, but when tourists started to show up looking for Centennial, Greeley hastened to install a Centennial Village Museum, lest they be disappointed and spend their money elsewhere.
Years after the book came out, Colorado got a real Centennial in 2001. Andrews lives there. It is about 70 miles from the imaginary Centennial in Weld County, but its name may show that life imitates art.
And in that case, there could be a real Backbone, Colo., someday. However, it will doubtless emerge as Backbone Heights, Backbone Terrace, or The Estates at Sierra del Backbone -- whatever works best with the marketing consultant's focus groups.
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