I have two bumper stickers on
my truck, and one I’d like to add if I could find it. The sticker
I’ve had the longest is also the best, making Gary Snyder’s poem,
“Jackrabbit eyes all night, breakfast in Elko,” seem wordy. Some of
you will recognize it: SILT HAPPENS. It was, for years, the
official motto of Silt, Colo. Now, the motto is “Where the sun
rises with a smile.” Boring.
Silt Happens has multiple
meanings. It means that Silt had it going on. It’s also an anti-dam
statement, saying to Glen Canyon and Flaming Gorge: You may be big,
but your days are numbered. And it says so with a play on the great
and profane American battle cry. This is the ultimate bumper
sticker because it makes you think, and yet, it doesn’t make an
overtly political statement that could get a brick tossed through
your window while you’re parked at a trailhead.
Bumper
stickers are a serious thing: You don’t attach them frivolously.
First, they’re hard to get off. Second, add too many, and you’ll
exponentially increase your odds of getting pulled over by the
cops. Trust me on that one. I tested the hypothesis with my old
truck, and despite my “I gave to the Fraternal Order of Police”
sticker strategically placed on the top of my driver’s side window,
I still got a lot of tickets.
My second bumper sticker is
local, unique and only understandable by a select few in the know
in western Colorado. It reads: SAVE the TAQ. The TAQ is the
Taqueria, a small dive of a Mexican restaurant in a dilapidated
shack on the way out of Basalt.
It’s the best Mexican
chow in the valley. It‚s the cheapest. It‚s the
friendliest. And it’s going away not because it’s unprofitable
— you can’t get in the door on a Friday night — but
because the town bought the property for a park and to manage
floodwaters, and it now intends to sell it to a developer.
Basalt is getting gentrified, and the last of the
cheap-rent joints are going down. No more chances for a guy named
Ishmael from El Salvador to break through in his shot at the
American Dream. And, in turn, no more good, funky, low capital,
start-up businesses. SAVE the TAQ refers to a community effort to
forego outsize profits in order to build affordable residential and
commercial space in resort areas. That’s too wordy; just say SAVE
the TAQ. The beauty of that sticker is that, unlike “Free Tibet,”
people who post it may do something about it.
My third
bumper sticker exists, but I haven’t secured one yet. The sticker
says: “Coal, Crank and Cribbage: Welcome to Paonia.” If you know
the town of 1,500 people, you get it. You got coal, the heart of
the economy. You got cribbage, the ultimate cowboy card game and
crank, the poor man’s cocaine, a particularly Southwestern drug.
The telltale sign of a house full of meth freaks is that the front
yard is covered with appliances that have been taken apart but not
repaired, hinting at what you might do if you didn’t need to sleep
for three days and felt like you just drank 50 cups of coffee.
The Paonia knock-off bumper sticker I found reads: “Coal,
Crystals and Cribbage: Welcome to Paonia.” A pithy cultural
analysis has become a nice-nice aphorism, the way new biblical
translations might transform Job’s “Man is born to trouble as the
sparks fly upward” into “Life is hard.” Speaking of the Bible,
there is a whole range of religious bumper-wear, the most prominent
of them being the Jesus Fish. In addition to all the other
stickers, I used to have a Darwin Fish on the back of my truck; it
was labeled “Darwin” and growing legs.
Driving in traffic
into Colorado Springs, a woman leaned out of her Taurus wagon and
yelled: “Did he make beauty?” I was stunned, finally yelling back,
“Yes!” as her lane crept ahead of mine, seemingly with God’s help.
The correct answer, I realized, minutes too late, was “Did God make
war?”
But this exchange illustrates just what you don’t
want to do with bumper stickers. You don’t want to start a fight,
you just want to give people something to think about, maybe ease
their boredom in traffic. The great paranoid conspiracy
bumper-sticker of all time is so good just because nobody feels bad
after reading it: “Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed.” If only that were
true. But he fell. Things go wrong. Silt Happens.
Auden Schendler is a contributor to Writers on the Range,
a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He
lives in Basalt, Colorado, and handles environmental matters for
the Aspen Skiing Company.
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