40.

• Author: Rundles, Jeff
• Position: RUNDLES wrap up

LONG ABOUT THE END OF THE FIRST WEEK in July--the 7th to be exact--I will have been a Coloradan for 40 years.

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I didn't set out from Michigan with that as a goal. I was, like so many younger folks at the time, headed to California, but had a friend here and thought a short vacation in the Rockies would be just the ticket. I joke sometimes that I stopped here for a two-week vacation and that am still on it, and, to paraphrase The Grateful Dead, what a long, strange--and wonderful--trip it's been.

I'm not alone in that particular background. As a business reporter and editor for most of my Colorado tenure, I have come across not a few people who got posted here on their rise up the corporate ladder, only to reject the move to the next highest rung--Chicago, LA, Dallas, New York--and look For a way to stay in Colorado. Some of them would take the next post and then, soon enough, miss Colorado and come back. In many .ways I think this phenomenon is what has propelled Colorado as a leading small business and entrepreneurial haven: Many smart, driven businesspeople--and other smart people like lawyers and physicians simply decided that the lure of Colorado was (and is) irresistible. They started businesses and practices here. Moving somewhere else meant living to work, while Colorado is the ultimate place where people work to live.

The rise of the Internet and the "virtual" work world has only fueled this. I meet more and more people all of the time in banking and financial services, international business, technology, consulting, advertising and marketing, and many other pursuits that once were tied to centers of power, influence and certain types of business and industrial infrastructure. Untethered once-necessary proximity, many folks realized they could do business anywhere and that Colorado is attractive geography.

It is as if, I will say snobbishly (borrowing, liberally, from Gatsby), that "a sense of fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth." Or in my case in terms of Colorado, at adoption. Here in Colorado I have always found the green light, "the orgiastic future," and I have, for 40 years, always been borne ceaselessly toward it. I, like so many people, find hope and romantic readiness in Colorado. After all, "those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away" are located right here in our...