ALONG THE WAY

All of us have wondered at some time if the beginning was not the very best place of all. In 1911 when Sharlot Hall, who helped tame the raw Territory of Arizona, explored the Kaibab Plateau on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, the same thought struck her. "The whole big plateau," she noted in her diary with pleasure, "is a national game preserve and I was interested to know that there have been plans for making it the finest thing of the kind in the world." She wrote that a nearby herd of buffalo produced robes worth $1,000 apiece and wondered if they might not achieve a better future for the ground than cattle. Then she drifted off into those reveries of progress that are natural to all of us: possible villages, lumber mills, and roads.

Eighty years later, we are no wiser than our forebears and probably not as tough, but we have had more time to look and to mull things over. And the land as we found it begins to look better and better.

We live in a world of numbing problems: holes in our ozone layer, hints of a greenhouse effect, decline in air quality, the press of human numbers. Arizona cannot cure these ailments, but its immense still promises moments of relief. We've got the ground. Save for a few cities, the land still is empty and capable of being free for all forms of life.

Which brings us to a tantalizing possibility: that the highest use of Arizona is fostering a primal experience, a sense of the wild and the free. As the nation and the planet fret over shortages of everything, we should become the place that feeds the imagination. Like the great sanctuaries in Kenya and Tanzania, we should offer what money cannot possibly re-create herds of free-roaming antelope and elk, the bear grubbing for food in the meadow, the deer moving through the gray light of dawn, the lion and jaguar gliding over the mountains, the bighorn ruling the desert ranges, the falcon soaring overhead.

How would such an idea be stated as policy? Like this: natural systems and wild animals always would be the priority in our decisions. What I am suggesting is an overriding idea, one that does not abolish the cattle industry or the lumber industry or the real estate industry, but rather puts a paramount concern on the table when we consider how to use the land. Imagine the State Legislature looking kind of like Noah's Ark, and you've got the picture.

What we will have is a place with a few modern cities, a skein of roads, and then ground with great herds of wild beasts, space beyond comprehension, quiet beyond belief, the ancient heartbeat slowly throbbing in the rhythm that once drove this entire hemisphere.

We cannot abolish our cities anymore than we can will them into being. But we can decide what use to make of the open area that surrounds these urban islands. Instead of animals as some kind of roadside attraction, as in the rest of the nation, here they would be recurring bursts of life, like that coyote prancing across the road and back into the desert. Not something inside the fence kept to its little designated area, but life innocent of fences. Plains dotted with animals, mountains where all the tracks on the trail are not made by boots, deserts like those that greeted Coronado in 1540.

And it would pay. Not just for our sanity and pleasure, but at the bank. If we permitted this ground to become the place of dreams, we can be sure that visitors longing to experience Nature would come. Where else could they go? Let other places pride themselves on concern for endangered species; we will obliterate the idea of endangered. Let other places boast of their zoos filled with biological curios; we will open the cages. Let other places create sanctuaries on the edge of mayhem; we will be the great ark.

For Europeans, the story of Arizona almost begins on a note we should heed. When Coronado and his caravan of dreams marched through here, Pedro de Castañeda de Nacera moved with that army and became its historian. Afterward he wrote, "I always notice that for the most part when we have something valuable in our hands, and deal with it without hindrance, we do not value or prize it as highly as if we understood how much we would miss it after we had lost it, and the longer we continue to have it the less we value it, but, after we have lost it and miss the advantages of it, we have a great pain in the heart, and we are all the time imagining and trying to find ways and means by which to get it back again. It seems to me that this has happened to all or most of those who went on the expedition which Francisco Vasquez Coronado led in search of the Seven Cities. Granted that they did not find the riches of which they had been told. They found a place in which to search for them, and the beginning of a good country to settle in, so as to go on farther from there. Since they came back... their hearts weep for having lost so favorable an opportunity."

Now is not the time for our tears. We've got the ground - ground unlike any other. This is the pioneer state, the place that drew people who dared to leave behind the old ways and the easy destinies. We've got the chance to be pioneers again. We can show the rest of the world the way back to the beginning, the best place of all. Sharlot Hall would understand.