Getting stuff wrong is an occasional hazard of this occupation, and I managed to do plenty of it in Sunday’s column about the sesquicentennial of Colorado’s counties.
It is our Baca County, not Bent County, which abuts Oklahoma’s Cimarron County, the only county in America that borders four other states. How did I type Bent when I was looking at Baca on the map?
That error inspired the most correspondence, but there were others. An e-mail from my birthplace, Weld County, said that its namesake was Lewis Ledyard Weld, not my Lucius L. Weld. The state archive website has Lewis. My Lucius source was a 1958 Colorado Yearbook (think of a World Almanac just for Colorado; the state, alas, quit publishing them circa 1964). Further research thus seems warranted, and in the meantime, “L.L. Weld” should work.
And Boulder County’s borders have changed since it was one of the original 17 counties of 1861; part of our newest county, Broomfield, came out of Boulder County in 2001. That’s what I get for using a 20-year-old Historical Atlas of Colorado and not then realizing that it predated Broomfield County.
That leaves Gilpin and Clear Creek as the only counties whose boundaries have not changed in 150 years, But there’s some room for debate, according to my Zeke informant. The legal boundary between them is the divide between North Clear Creek and the main stem of Clear Creek. Over the years, rockslides and erosion must have altered the ridges. So do you go by where the run-off divides now, or where you think it divided 150 years ago?
Now for my lame excuse. On March 20, I quit tobacco, mostly because this seemed like the time to do it. My friend and colleague and fellow Camel-straight connoisseur Allen Best said he got through quitting by thinking, “The most important thing I can do today is not smoke.”
That worked for several slothful days until a day came when there was something else important to do — i.e., write a column.
The whole idea of writing without smoking was terrifying because the two seem intimately connected, perhaps because I started both habits when I was 16. When I pondered a transition or a preposition, leaning back and lighting up gave me time to think about my work. Another smoke or two while re-reading slowed the pace and often caught mistakes.
It seemed impossible to write without nicotine. That’s what had killed my previous efforts to quit: “Just one or two, so I can get this column written, then I’ll go back.” I’d go back to 20 or 30 a day, and this time around, I knew that desire would come and I would need to resist it.
When I think of some of my favorite writers, maybe there’s something to the connection. Mark Twain supposedly observed that “Quitting smoking is easy. I’ve done it hundreds of times.” H.L. Mencken took up tobacco in his youth and years later said he was “still more or less in its loathsome toils.” Hunter Thompson with his jaunty cigarette holder, U.S. Grant consuming 40 cigars a day, Sinclair Lewis lighting one off the other.
But decent prose has doubtless emerged from smoke-free environments. So it must be possible to write without smoking, and I should be able to figure out how that’s done. But I sure hadn’t figured it out last week, and I apologize.
Now the challenge is to get through a day without thinking about “smoking” or “not smoking,” but instead keeping my mind on my work.
Freelance columnist Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) of Salida is a regular contributor to The Denver Post.
