No, I haven’t seen “The Da Vinci Code,” and I probably won’t until it comes out on DVD. I did read the book, though, and while the plot was preposterous, the book was good escapist entertainment. The protagonist was an expert at interpreting symbols, and it was so engaging that we might try applying the process to other matters.
For instance, there’s the new Colorado quarter, soon to be in circulation, which our governor says will be an “ambassador for Colorado.”
Gov. Bill Owens chose this design from five finalists. He had a chance to select Pikes Peak, Colorado’s most famous mountain. It sits near the geographic center of our state and is visible far and wide, from way out on the Plains and from deep in the mountains. This is the bicentennial of Lt. Zebulon Pike’s visit. It would have been the perfect choice for a state that took form after the “Pikes Peak Gold Rush” of 1859.
Instead, Owens chose what he said was a generic Rocky Mountain range. But the coin’s designer, Len Buckley of Damascus, Md., had vacationed in Rocky Mountain National Park two decades ago. He went through his slides and found a jagged ridge of Longs Peak which he used as a basis for the design.
Was our governor dissembling when he said it was generic? What’s he trying to cover up?
Pike never climbed Pikes Peak, but Long never climbed Longs Peak, either. However, Dr. Edwin James of the 1820 Long expedition did make the first recorded ascent of Pikes Peak. His name went on a different mountain, one that more or less sits over the Moffat Tunnel, and one he didn’t climb and probably never even saw.
The first recorded ascent of Longs Peak was in 1868 by a party that included William Newton Byers, founder of the Rocky Mountain News and speculator in lands around Hot Sulphur Springs, and Maj. John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran who went on to fame for his exploration of the canyons of the Colorado River.
Both were Republicans, just like our governor, so perhaps Owens was secretly engaging in some partisan politics even as he said he “didn’t know” that the image was of a specific place.
Further examination of the Colorado quarter shows the top of a cloud just visible above the right side of the ridge. We all brag on Colorado sunshine, perhaps because rain is such a rarity in the Centennial State. So it must be another kind of cloud – doubtless the smoke from a forest fire. Perhaps they are using subliminal messages to prepare us for another season when, as the governor said four years ago, “All of Colorado is on fire.”
Already more acres have burned in 2006 than in all of 2005, so it’s probably a good idea to prepare us for a fiery summer by making a smoky sky look like a normal part of our scenery.
The words on the coin are troubling, too. We’re a state with Official English, and the U.S. Senate just passed something about English being our “national language.” So why the Latin “E Pluribus Unum”? If English is our official and national language, why isn’t it used for our national motto? Is there some hidden multicultural agenda at work here, and if so, why isn’t our governor trying to root it out?
Further, the Spanish word “Colorado” is used not just once, which was probably unavoidable, but twice. That can’t be an accident. Is this more covert multiculturalism? Hidden support for illegal immigrants who fail to assimilate? Clandestine preparation for the Reconquista? Somebody is going to catch on and start demanding answers.
Now note that there are two numbers on our Colorado quarter, 1876 and 2006. Ostensibly they represent the year Colorado became a state and the year the coin was minted.
But take the two final digits, and you have 6 and 6. Add what’s left: 200 plus 187 gives 387, add those three digits to get 18, divide by three to get 6, grab the two sixes we got earlier, and the result is three sixes, or 666, the mark of the Beast in Revelation. Are we ready for that, especially with the 6/6/6 date coming up next week?
It’s fun to ferret out the hidden meanings in Colorado’s new quarter, but alas for my bank account, I can’t imagine how to turn this into an action-packed best-seller.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
