"WYOMING: It is for everybody!"

You can find some strange truths in bumper stickers.

I saw one the other day in Cheyenne. It was on a pick-up. It read: "WYOMING: It's not for everybody."

At first, I thought it was another in a series of "Unique Wyoming" bumper stickers: "Wyoming is what America was." "Wyoming: Like No Place on Earth."

The theme that unites them all could be summed up into the fact that Wyomingites like the state the way it is and its residents don't need any of your newfangled coastal ideas.

That's no revelation if you live here. We're a conservative state, more libertarian that right-wing fundamentalist -- although there's a streak of that here too. At best, the libertarian streak reveals a healthy distrust of big government. At worst, it's venomous, mindless gubment-hating more akin to Nativists and neo-Nazis than any sane political philosophy.

But as I mulled over the "WYOMING: It's not for everybody" bumper sticker, I began to wonder: What if Wyoming was for everybody? What if everybody in the U.S. moved to the Equality/Cowboy State? Latest state population figures show 532,668 in an area of 97,818 square miles. That makes for about 5.4 humans per square mile. So, if Wyomingites were placed equidistant from one another across the state, nobody could see his/her neighbor.

That's impossible, of course. You can't tell Wyomingites where and how to live. Besides, everyone wants to live in scenic locales such as Jackson, Sheridan and Cody, or the not-so-scenic-but-already-settled-places-with-jobs such as Cheyenne and Casper and Gillette.

But what is everybody in the U.S. moved to Wyoming? Sure, there would be a lot of gun play, but let's say that most of the immigrants survived the melee. Wyoming would have some 303 million new residents. Suddenly, there would be 3,108 people per square mile. That's a big boost, for sure. A lot less elbow room, especially if you landed in one of the square mile parcels with citizens from "fat states" such as Mississippi and Arkansas. But if you're sharing space with skinny-state Coloradans, you could stretch until the cows came home, although there would be no room for them if they did.

How crowded would it be? Well, if you increased Cheyenne's population of 56,915 by a factor of 575 times, the city would become a teeming metropolis of 32 million. Now that would put a strain on city services. But hey, we still have the Wal-Mart Regional Distribution Center west of town. Wal-Mart, with its super-efficient delivery system, could keep all 32 million of us supplied with Chinese-made snack foods and diapers for the foreseeable future.

But what if I'm giving short shrift to the bumper sticker's message? What if everybody meant "everybody," even the Chinese, North Koreans and Iranians? Now we're talking a population explosion. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates the worlds population at 6.76 billion souls. If you provided a 4-square-foot space for everyone, Wyoming could easily accommodate everybody in the entire world, with a bit of room left over for rivers and lakes and mountaintops and bears and prairie dogs and Wal-Marts.

So the bumper sticker is incorrect: Wyoming is for everybody. Every person on the planet.

Happy Birthday, Colorado

It’s bad form in Wyoming to call yourself a Coloradan, let alone actually be proud of the fact. But I do, and I am. So on Colorado Day, Aug. 1, we’ll celebrate my birthplace.

I’m a native, born at Mercy Hospital in Denver in 1950. Our family pulled up stakes and moved to Washington State in January 1960, then lived in Kansas, and returned (briefly) to Denver for six months in 1964. We then moved to Florida, where I graduated from high school in 1969. I attended college in South Carolina for two years, dropped out, traveled, lived in Boston, and landed back in Florida from 1973-78, moving to Denver after college graduation. Denver, 1978-88, and then Fort Collins, 1988-91, and then off to Wyoming. We moved to Maryland for a temporary D.C. assignment from 1993-95, and then returned to Wyoming where we have stayed for 12 years. We moved three times during that span, but all within the same neighborhood.

My parents were Denver natives, and my son was born there too. I was baptized there, and so was my son. On a cold winter night, I proposed to my wife in downtown Denver after a raucous party. I love Colorado. It’s not, as they say on Oprah, an unconditional love. There are some aspects of Colorado that I can’t tolerate. Tom Tancredo and James Dobson, to name two. There’s the Sand Creek Massacre and the Ludlow Massacre. There’s Vail. And some lousy Denver drivers.

But Colorado’s positives outweigh its negatives. It’s one thing to be born in a place. It’s another to choose it as an adult. That’s what I did, spending 13 years of my working life in Denver and Fort Collins. I made some good friends. Spent time with cousins, aunts and uncles, and other assorted relatives. My wife and I and later our kids camped and tramped all through the mountains.

But it’s not only scenery. It’s the state’s cantankerous reputation and shifting political winds. It’s the way thunderstorms boil up out of the prairie on a July afternoon. Picnics with old friends. Watching the Colorado Rockies get whipped on a summer evening.

On a recent business trip to downtown Denver, I walked from my hotel in the rapidly gentrifying Highlands neighborhood to the shuttle bus stop for the 16th Street Mall. A long walk on a hot day. But as I passed the new Gates Rubber Company HQ near the Platte, I stopped and talked to two women employees taking a smoke break. I told them I used to work at Gates in the 1980s, back when it was a family corporation located at I-25 and Broadway. Through a haze of cigarette smoke, they told me Gates had been going downhill since its purchase by a British company 10 years ago. "You left at the right time," one said.

As I resumed my walk, I thought about that. Maybe that’s what it’s all about, leaving at the right time. But how do you know when it’s the right time? And what if you’re wrong? What the hell. I like my job and I like my life. Would I be able to say that if I hadn’t bugged out?

It was a pleasant morning in The New Denver (see photo). And I'm just another native turned visitor strolling downtown.