Downtown Denver looks good. Shining high-rise office buildings stand next to a row of restaurants and stores, arrayed along the 16th Street Mall like skiers in a lift line, while free alternative-energy buses lug shoppers and business people up and down the hill in front of the state Capitol.

It’s what downtown Des Moines could look like today if no one had invented West Des Moines.

The scene suggests a great community attitude, people devoted to pulling together. And just by chance, we experienced the camaraderie they feel every time someone lands a new job. While we were visiting last week, all of a sudden the bus riders, the people in the shops and everybody else couldn’t stop talking about one successful applicant.

Television reporters diligently gathered the opinions of people on the street, where a community’s true wisdom can always be found, unless it’s raining.

And just when we thought all of the story angles had been exhausted, Channel 2 ran a piece on homes for sale that might suit the new resident’s tastes. The anchors suspected that a 15,000-square-foot house going up in Breckinridge might do.

We felt happy for this Peyton Manning fellow and wished him well. I got the impression that he’s somewhat old for his line of work, so let’s hope he takes his employer’s safety rules to heart and doesn’t put himself in dangerous situations just to earn a living. On the other hand, $98 million buys a lot of Aleve.

More impressions from Colorado:

• Maybe social scientists already have written several papers and held a couple of seminars on this, but I had never realized the connection between oxygen levels and homelessness. Denver has only 60 percent of the oxygen found at sea level – leaving more room for kites and astral projection – but the city has homeless people the way Iowa has corn farmers with brand-new pickup trucks.

Our son is involved in social work out there, giving us a more up-close take on the situation than the average tourist. For example, we drove past a scruffy, slightly sinister-looking character who was standing by a busy street, holding the usual cardboard sign. “That’s Dave,” our son said. “He’s a nice guy.” Wait a minute, I thought. You mean he’s, like, an actual person?

• And maybe you thought the 1960s had passed away and were no more, but it’s not so. They’re alive and high in Boulder. The Pearl Street Mall is way cool, with intriguing retailers such as the Buddha’s and Goudha’s smoke shop and a below-street-level spot devoted to left-wing literature. And out on the plaza between the stores, you find the business model that was all the rage back in the Days of Rage: unemployed dope smokers begging for cash.

Every time we stopped to eat, it cost me 50 or 60 dollars of my somewhat hard-earned money, and now these slackers wanted a cut, too. Hitch a ride down to Denver and talk to Dave, I thought. He might have some useful insights about your future.

• Slackers make up just a small fraction of the Rocky Mountain populace, however. We drove to Golden and then up to Red Rocks Amphitheatre, passing dozens of bicyclists as they labored up the steep road. By choice, we assumed, not as part of the judicial process.

Red Rocks is a marvelous entertainment venue carved between huge slabs of rock, where we could have seen the Beatles for $6.60 if we had only arrived 48 years earlier. There we found many more fitness fanatics jogging back and forth in the long rows of bench seating. It looked like a well-funded experiment testing willpower, oxygen conversion efficiency and peer pressure.

Very impressive, but I doubt that any of them could hit a receiver on a long post pattern. So no $98 million contracts for them.