People often ask me how I can bear to live in a stony-broke garrison town full of Bible-thumpers, Birchers and boneheads, a place that can’t afford to keep its streetlights on unless you care to adopt one, where economic development seems confined to the crucial tattoo, pawnshop and medical-marijuana sectors and nearly half the respondents to a recent survey think we’re headed in the wrong direction (unless you’re ripped to the tits and pawning your deployed sister’s iPod to get some fresh ink).

I ask myself the same question every time I venture out of our little enclave northeast of Colorado College. Here the streets are wide, the trees tall and the neighbors friendly. It feels like the sort of small-town America that probably never existed beyond the confines of a black-and-white TV screen — until you head north, east or south and experience the real Bibleburg in full color, 3-D, with SurroundSound, a collaboration between Steve Spielberg and Terry Gilliam with an assist from Stephen King.

So mostly I don’t do that. Beyond the once-weekly dash north to Whole Paycheck my north-south peregrinations are generally restricted to cycling along the Pikes Peak Greenway/New Santa Fe Regional Trail, which offers a 35-mile auto-free roundtrip if taken south and a 60-mile out-and-back if ridden north. I used a portion of the trail for a time trial to the North Gate of the Air Force Academy on Tuesday and failed to medal even though I was the only contestant.

East I head mostly never, having learned in the Seventies that the real Bibleburg stops somewhere around Hancock Avenue, about six blocks from here. But I will venture in that direction as far as Palmer Park, a trail-rich, 730-acre reminder of what that side of town looked like before Bibleburg dropped trou’ for the developers. I spent an hour and a half there yesterday trying to remember how to ride a mountain bike.

This is a survival mechanism learned from Ernest Hemingway, Jim Harrison and other word-slingers who often longed to be somewhere other than where they were. “Do not scorn day trips. You can use them to avoid nervous collapse,” writes Harrison, who should know.

In fact, I feel a day trip coming on as we speak. I just put new tires on the Nobilette and I am so out of here.