CONTOOCOOK, N.H. – I engaged in fund-raising not long after I passed this intriguingly named town as I headed south on Interstate 89 recently, doing my best to avoid presidential candidates.

I was in the parking lot of a combination rest stop and New Hampshire state liquor store south of Concord when I spotted a penny on the blacktop. I raised it up and put it in my pocket.

That, friends, is true fund-raising, even though I didn’t come to the Granite State to raise funds. Rather, I came through here a few days ago to get to Vermont and I came through here again to get to Massachusetts. But while I was here, I tried not to meet presidential candidates, who already are showing up here to win votes in the primary next February.

It’s not that I’m disinterested in the presidential race or don’t need time to study candidates. It’s just that it’s more than a year before the general election, and a year in politics is like 9,200 light-years in cosmic time.

Besides, I’m more interested in the fact that New Hampshire has put a liquor store at an interstate rest stop. What’s the message? That you need one more for the road? That the only way to get through this menagerie of presidential candidates and stay sane is to have a buzz on? I hope Mothers Against Drunk Voting knows about this.

As you may know, the official motto of New Hampshire is “Live Free or Die.” What you may not know is that New Hampshire is the only state that has no seat belt law. Combine that with putting booze stores at rest stops and the motto should be “Live Free AND Die.”

Actually, people in New Hampshire do both – live and die. The other day I had brunch in Hanover, home of both Dartmouth University and the new Von Bargen jewelry store. (My brother- and sister-in-law own it and force me to mention it whenever I talk about Hanover.) Anyway, after lunch, my bride and I wandered the streets and I noticed a well-kept monument engraved with names of local folk who fought in World War I.

It wasn’t clear whether all the soldiers listed had died in the war, but surely they’re mostly all dead by now. What I don’t know is whether they lived free and then died or, like me, they had to pay to get through life.

Which calls into question the entire meaning of New Hampshire’s idiotic motto. You can’t live totally free. You inevitably end up paying for something.

One thing New Hampshire citizens pay for is holding the nation’s earliest presidential primary. The price is having endless waves of ambitious – often preposterous – people washing over the state, covering it with absurd promises. But at least candidates spend money here. Enough of it, apparently, that it makes people so careless they leave pennies in rest stop-liquor store parking lots.

New Hampshire, by the way, could be named East Vermont. Why, you can make a wrong turn off of most I-91 exits in Vermont and end up in New Hampshire before you can turn around. That’s one reason Vermont’s former governor, Howard Dean, is leading the polls among Democratic presidential candidates here. Either most people in New Hampshire know and like him or they know and dislike him so much they want to vote him out of the neighborhood.

I mentioned my brother-in-law a while back (oh, I did, too). He’s a Vermonter, but he has lots of respect for the wisdom of New Hampshire voters. He says he’d be happy to scrap all presidential primaries except for the one in New Hampshire and just make the winner there the party’s nominee.

Well, that seemed to me like a nutso idea at first. But it’s growing on me. For one thing, it would save the nation a lot of headaches. For another, it would add to the importance of New Hampshire, filling it with more people to patronize his new Hanover jewelry store. Eventually, he might make enough dough to pay me the $5 he owes me from a bet we made on the stock market several years ago.

I’d use it to buy a nice gold setting from his store to show off the penny I found here. Either that or I’d run for president so I could outlaw joint rest stop-booze stores on the interstate.

Bill Tammeus is an editorial page columnist for The Kansas City Star.

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