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I wondered where those 100 words went.

On March 1, after the cannon blast echoed off the snowdrifts in Strawberry Park and we were done raising our glasses to Hunter S. Thompson, I went back to my desk and edited all my thoughts, feelings and the exact dimensions and fire power of our cannon into the shortest essay of my life.

I was the voice of the Steamboat Artillery Irregulars -- Wayne Kakela, Clay Hangar and myself -- a trio of Thompson fans who entered the HST Cannon Blast-Off Contest in hopes that our cannon would be used to blast Thompson's ashes into the afterlife.

The essay ended, "Available at a moment's notice." I put it in the mail along with photos of the cannon, and we waited.

During the following months, newspaper articles appeared on my desk announcing changes in funeral plans after Johnny Depp took over. A Beverly Hills party planner was hired. The guest list was whittled to 250 people, security was hired, and the cannon essays, I imagined at the time, were thrown in the garbage.

I found out what really happened when I received a call from Los Angeles documentary filmmaker Blue Kraning. He bought the rights to the cannon essays from the organizer of the contest, Aspen Daily News associate editor Troy Hooper, and was traveling across the country in his 1993 Toyota pickup filming endless cannon fire and the stories of the people who entered the contest.

When Kraning pulled into Steamboat on Tuesday afternoon, we were busy making a small projectile out of packing tape and a modified toilet paper roll that would be filled with ashes -- simulated Hunter -- and fired from Kakela's Mountain Howitzer.

Kraning had just driven up from Creed, where he filmed a man who made a cannon that could fire a bowling ball as far as two miles. Earlier in the week, he had filmed a man whose cannon was set up to fire ham slices at bread targets.

By entering the contest, I had entered a strange world of creative, black-powder lovers who enjoy precision, beautifully crafted machines and the little-boy thrill of blowing stuff up and making incredibly loud noises.

Kraning's documentary, which he is calling "Blasted: The Gonzo Patriots of Hunter S. Thompson," is his third.

His most recent documentary is the story of him and his wife hiding in a remote cabin in December 1999, believing the world might end after a Y2K meltdown.

When Kraning approached Hooper about filming the people who entered the essay contest, Hooper wondered why he would bother.

In fact, a quick Google search of Hunter S. Thompson revealed several articles and blog entries that echoed the "I'm so sick of Hunter S. Thompson and all his fans" sentiment.

Since Thompson's death, Rolling Stone magazine dedicated an entire issue to first-person testimonials about the Gonzo journalist. The Mountain Gazette dedicated a cover and several pages to the man. Hundreds of people began a zombie pilgrimage to Woody Creek. Suddenly, everyone was a Thompson fan.

Even if you are annoyed, you have to admit it's a phenomenon.

Other great authors have died during the past decade -- Ken Kesey, Anthony Burgess, William S. Burroughs -- and none of them inspired this much noise.

Seven months after his death, we were standing in a meadow, firing last winter's fireplace ashes out of a cannon over and over again so Kraning could film it from every angle.

Then he interviewed us. Questions about Hunter quickly turned into questions about politics and the state of the world. I just as quickly realized the story of the cannon contest, to Blue, was the story of people who live in the unswept corners of a changing society.

Between diatribes and shots of whiskey, we read aloud from books by Hunter S. Thompson. Clay Hanger read an appropriate passage from "The Rum Diaries": "I sat there for a long time, and thought about a lot of things. Foremost among them was the suspicion that my strange and ungovernable instincts might do me in before I had a chance to get rich. No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction -- toward anarchy and poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat."