[Devils-list] Denver might be a nice place to visit, but ...
Jennifer Ellis
bud8gurl@hotmail.com
Tue, 05 Jun 2001 12:56:30 -0230
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<H1>Denver might be a nice place to visit, but ... </H1>
<P><I>Saturday, May 26, 2001</I>
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<P><!--HEADLINE: Denver might be a nice place to visit, but ... -->
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<P>By BOB IVRY<BR><I>Staff Writer
<P><B>-- DENVER
<P></B></I>C</FONT>olorado stinks.
<P>Not in the way you might think. Not in the way Devils fans think the Rangers stink.
<P>By all accounts, Denver is a wonderful place to live. If you have to.
<P>It's just that there's this, well, how to put it? This smell.
<P>"You mean the flowers?" suggests Amy Jewett Sampson, a resident of Colorado's capital city for 26 grueling years. "There are gardenias and roses. Everywhere. Planted in the medians of the streets. And we have plenty of parks, too. Filled with flowers."
<P>Devils fans visiting the Colorado Avalanche's unpleasantly pungent home city for the 2001 Stanley Cup Finals -- the puck drops here in the opening game tonight at 8 Normal (Eastern) Time -- will encounter a quaint agrarian society so bereft of the routine comforts found in North Jersey that it may take a day or two to acclimate.
<P>Of course, that's the typical warning the hilltop folk of this Rocky Mountain State issue to flatlanders about the thin air. In fact, the 12th step leading up to Sampson's office sits </B></I>one aromatic mile above sea level. There's even a plaque to tell you so.
<P>Imagine bragging about being chronically light-headed? Never happen in North Jersey!
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<P>The cultural chasm is so unbridgeable </B></I>that Sampson's boss, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, has embarrassed himself by making a laughable wager with New Jersey's acting Gov. Donald T. DiFrancesco on the outcome of the best-of-seven Cup </B></I>finals.
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<P>According to Sampson and her colleague, Dick Wadhams -- senior press officers for the governor with nothing better to do in this drowsy outpost -- Owens, a Republican who bears an eerie resemblance to Woody, the cowboy doll character in the "Toy Story" movies, will spring for a three-day skiing trip in Colorado when the "Avs" lose. In the unlikely event </B></I>that the Devils fall short, DiFrancesco will oblige his aw-shucks counterpart with a bit of real <I>cult</B></I><I>cha-- a basket of Italian meats.
<P>Is that the best these Denverians can do? Cappicola, </B></I>prosciutto, pepperoni, a little genoa -- nectar of the Jersey gods! -- and all Owens can pony up is a chance for Donny </B></I>D</B></I> to fracture his hump on one of their lousy piles of rocks.
<P>Rocks, rocks, rocks. That's all Denverites talk about. Of course, they charmingly call them "mountains," but a savvy Garden Stater knows what's what.
<P>They're still skiing on those rocks this weekend. It's May everywhere else, but in Colorado, well, foolishness. According to Kim Forse, a snowboarder who works at Gart Sports in downtown Denver, the numerous leg-breaking mills around the state offer a strange snow surface virtually unknown to Nor'easterners.
<P>"Powder," Forse calls it.
<P>Never happen in North Jersey! Once again, visitors from Devils country -- after tackling the icy slopes of their own region -- might want to prepare themselves for this odd and disorienting experience. Or just skip it entirely; it's simply not real skiing out here.
<P>Another unsettling local ritual practiced by Denveros is the </B></I>ingestion of burritos for breakfast. Barb Mora, who has weathered 40 winters in this provincial play-town, actually trades them for $2.50 American. She wraps them in aluminum foil (technology!) and sells them out of a trio of coolers on the sidewalk in front of a downtown office building.
<P>At 7 in the morning? Never happen in North Jersey!
<P>Office workers </B></I>stand in line</B></I> -- an endearing variation on the proper English, "to stand on line" -- and politely wait to be served any number of burritoesque variations, available mild or spicy. There are beef and potato; potato, egg, and ham; bean and beef; egg and chorizo; and many others, including an especially hefty specimen marked "BOB" in blue ink.
<P>"That's an egg, cheese, and potato," says Mora, who starts mixing up the morning meals at 1:45 a.m. and typically makes 144 of them a day -- all of which get sold. "I had a customer named Bob who always liked that kind, because it's vegetarian. So I just named it after him."
<P>As yet, Mora offers no burritos named Troy Stubby, but one day she might. Stubby is an athletic young man whom North Jerseyans would like to eat for breakfast -- and frequently do, in the land where roads are for cars and the rest of <I>yuz </B></I>be hanged.
<P>Stubby, you see, rides his bicycle four miles every morning to his job as a lighting director for the Paramount Theater on the 16th Street Mall, which is vaguely reminiscent of pleasure palaces </B></I>such as Garden State Plaza, but, rustically, primitively -- unthinkably -- without a roof.
<P>"I've never had a problem with motorists," Stubby claims. And the fact that he's pedaling his Huffy Yosemite Falls without a helmet? "I never thought of wearing a helmet," he shrugs.
<P>That's because -- and Garden Staters ought to be seated before they read this -- Stubby commutes solely on paths assigned exclusively to bicycles.
<P>Never happen in North Jersey! Bicyclists: Crunchy on the bottom, chewy on top.
<P>Meanwhile, over at the Denver Drug & Liquor on picturesque East Colfax Avenue, beverage sales are brisk. This is no doubt an antidote for Avalanche fever, which is sweeping this sleepy hamlet like a wave of dysentery.
<P>"We have consistently good sales of liquor and beer," says clerk Mark Davenport, a transplant from Salem, Mass., in 1978. "We have our regular alcoholics who visit us daily."
<P>Their favorite? King Cobra -- 40 ounces of malt liquor for the bargain price of $1.30.
<P>Prices are more Jerseylike in the gentrified part of Denver called LoDo. LoDo, a former skid row, is the location of Coors Field, home of the baseball Rockies, and the Pepsi Center, where the Avalanche have sold out every game since moving here in 1996. Lining the adjacent streets are a half-dozen sports bars where </B></I>brewskis will set you back $3 or $4.
<P>LoDo? What anthropological tale is told by that colorful designation? An antediluvian native American appellation, surely, or a moniker from pappy's old pick-and-shovel days?
<P>Wadhams, of the governor's office, shrugs. "Not really," he says, reluctant to disappoint. "It's short for Lower Downtown."
<P>A cutesy nickname like that? Never happen in NorJer!
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<P>Staff Writer Bob Ivry's e-mail address is <A href="mailto:ivry@northjersey.com">ivry@northjersey.com</A>
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