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" IT IS A MATTER OF HONOR, even though I never gave my word. It began seventeen years ago, as I stood at a counter in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a little-visited backwater of the national park system on the Mexican line in southern Arizona. Julian Hayden, then about seventy, was leaning forward and speaking to a young woman. Hayden had rolled into Arizona on a motorcycle in the 1920s, when the roads were dirt and the only way to cool the air was to wait for winter. He knew more about the deserts of southwestern Arizona and northwestern Mexico than any other man alive. He was a lean man, almost fatally handsome, and that day he was all but charming the pants off a young woman working for the Park Service. When we left, he explained to me that she was a descendant of Don Alberto Celaya, and I was stunned. You have to know the bloodlines here to understand why. In the first decade of this century, a pleasantly crazed Norwegian named Carl Lumholtz came into the country, and in the tiny village of Sonoyta, on the edge of the great desert, Lumholtz hired a boy named Alberto Celaya to guide him into a vast wilderness, a trip that eventually became his book of the place, something he called New Trails in Mexico. In the 1950s, Julian Hayden started wandering the place, and Celaya as an old man became his teacher. In the low rainfall--zero to three inches a year--things have a way of staying the same here. A bone tossed aside a thousand years ago will rest next to a cigarette butt. Hayden found early-man sites that go back into a cauldron of debate--ten thousand years? Twenty thousand years? A hundred thousand years?  When Hayden entered the country, the game knew naught of man, and once, a badger waddled up and sniffed his boot and then ambled off again. I&amp;#039;ve lain on the hard ground and had bighorn sheep walk by fifteen feet away and treat me for what I am--an ungainly but apparently harmless biped. And so when Hayden flirted with the young woman of the family Celaya, he touched a chord of knowing this unknown ground that stretched back all of the twentieth century, a kind of lineage of desert rats.  Seventeen years ago, we went into that country, my first time, into a place on the Mexican side, a place of volcanic craters and vast lavas and old intaglios left by earlier lovers and abandoned camps from back of the beyond and sleeping circles--low rock enclosures to block the wind--and old stone hammers and total silence. The tongues of lava licked north across the line into the United States, where yet more emptiness loomed, a tract of five thousand square miles without a house, a person, a cow, or a voice.  I was in. And the better part of me never came back. Julian and I became friends. The desert and I became lovers. That was the beginning of it, and now that I&amp;#039;ve bounced down some hard years, I know it will never end for me. I&amp;#039;ve got personal ties. Hundreds of miles of walking where there are no trails and damn little water. A friend is buried in the emptiness in a simple hole so that he can watch what he loved forever. I think of my friend a lot. He always figured to come back as a vulture, and when I see a buzzard wheeling overhead now, I always smile to myself. Julian himself once took me to a knoll out there where he&amp;#039;d scattered the ashes of two premier desert rats--Malcolm Rogers and, later, Ronald Ives. And now Julian is gone, passing away peacefully in his eighty-seventh year, his head no doubt filled with the dirt and heat and silence of a thousand camps he&amp;#039;d made. About a year or so ago, a friend of mine and one of Julian&amp;#039;s prize students in desert-rathood, a man named Bill Broyles, came to me and said, &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve got to do something.&amp;quot; So we sat in my backyard and he spelled it out. That&amp;#039;s where this matter of honor came in and the power of the vow I never recalled taking. We sputtered an hour or so and set on this notion: We&amp;#039;d create a five-thousand-square-mile national park on the U. S. side, a dab of ground big enough to swallow the Grand Canyon and Yosemite together. We&amp;#039;d build it out of three chunks of federal land--Organ Pipe, the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, and the Barry Goldwater Gunnery Range. Firing would continue on the gunnery range until an epidemic of peace broke out or the military changed its training methods to the world of laser beams. No matter. Parks are forever, and we could wait out the needs of the gods of war. All we wanted was to protect the ground now. And forever. We&amp;#039;d call it the Sonoran Desert National Park, and it would be the last stronghold in our nation for silence, for the rare Sonoran pronghorn, for botanical originality such as the elephant tree, and for the haunting scale of bigness that was the making of the American people--the sense that things were much too large to be conquered or ever owned by the likes of us. We would create a reserve for the soul as we, as a people, hurl ourselves into another millennium. The place would link up with the desert on the Mexican side, that volcanic wonderland that the Republic of Mexico has already made a federal reserve. And this desert would in turn embrace the protected zone of the upper Gulf of California. When we stared at the map sitting in my yard, we realized we were looking at the biggest potential zone of silence and space and  life left in the Western Hemisphere south of the Arctic. And we knew, in fact and in our bones, that this natural bounty was already starting to disappear as the six billion Homo sapiens on this mobbed planet finally turned even to this hard desert in their desperate search for escape from the ugly machine world they&amp;#039;d fashioned. It was a handshake deal out there in the yard under my mesquite tree, and now, a year later, we&amp;#039;ve cranked out a brochure, settled into an office at the University of Arizona&amp;#039;s Southwest Center, and become a medicine show thumping up enthusiasm for this park made out of ground the world calls nowhere. We&amp;#039;ve got a growing membership, editorial endorsements by the state&amp;#039;s leading papers, various visits to the congressional delegation--all this under our belts. The thing is rolling, sound, and better for you than a fistful of vitamins. I remember being out once with Julian on an early-man site. The ground was littered with hammers and choppers, and you could all but hear the scream of the dying game, the smack of the stone busting up the bones for marrow. Sleeping circles fashioned of stone a millennium or two or more ago dotted the ground. I curled up in one to feel the bodies of the ancient ones. The site stood on the lip of a crater, one named after that Don Alberto Celaya, Julian&amp;#039;s mentor in the long ago. Ives&amp;#039;s and Rogers&amp;#039;s shades watched us from a nearby hill where their ashes had been scattered. I all but expected a woolly mammoth to lurch into view. I could look north and know the desert swept clean and free well into the United States and that I might walk sixty miles and be alone every inch of the way. Julian said, &amp;quot;Come here,&amp;quot; and I obediently trotted after him. He led me into the creosote and soft sands, and then he stopped and kicked something with his foot. I looked down and saw a metate, an old grinding stone of green-and-white-flecked rock. The thing gleamed up at me like an emerald. He said, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m leaving this here.&amp;quot; And then we said nothing. I understood. Just as once I dropped down into the sacred cave of I&amp;#039;itoi up under a volcanic peak and found a prayer stick left by some other pilgrim a century or a thousand years before and I looked at it a moment and then shoved it deeper into a rock crevice so it would stay there forever. Just as my friend Broyles once wandered up a canyon in the Sierra Pintas and found two perfect ollas sitting out in the open and left them there forever. Just as proper folk tossed my late friend Edward Abbey into a hole in this country and left him there to become a vulture. Once I walked two hundred miles across this ground and nothing happened but the beat of my heart. Once I sat in the June heat for a week, the temperature in the afternoon banging between 115 and 120, and watched a family of vultures day by day disassemble a dead coyote. Each day the vultures would take a break and line up like penguins at a slimy rock water hole and one by one drink. We lived together for days without a cross word between us. So that&amp;#039;s what I&amp;#039;m going to do before I die. Help create this park. And the word park is just a buzz of sound to contain these memories and to make damn sure this place that does not need me or you or give a damn about us stretches out, untouched, into this thing we call the future. It&amp;#039;ll be a weird park. Hardly a road. Hardly a prayer of water. Frightening in the scale of its empty valleys and lonely peaks. And silent. I can&amp;#039;t scant this matter of silence. Once I stood in the middle of the Tule Desert in June, and the rains had failed for so very long and there were no insects and the birds in midday hid in the brush and left the sky empty. I must have been thirty or forty miles in any direction from another human being. Suddenly, I could hear this gurgling sound, and behind the gurgles I detected this faint thumping. I snapped alert, looked around for the intruder into my domain. Then I fell into an understanding. I was hearing the blood coursing through my veins, the beat of my heart. That&amp;#039;s what I mean when I use the word silence: a level of quiet the cemeteries only hear about through rumor. I know a guy who now and then wanders this country, and he once told me, &amp;quot;If you are out there and you find another person out there, you feel violated.&amp;quot; I mentioned to him that my friend Bill Broyles liked to scamper about out there. The man looked at me and flared, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve come across his spoor.&amp;quot;  It&amp;#039;s that kind of country. It&amp;#039;s beautiful, has its checklist of biological treasures and endangered this and that. There are turgid scientific papers measuring its flesh and bones. And I know with this park a bunch of damn rules will come and I will hate every goddamn one. No matter. It&amp;#039;s gotta be made safe from us before I die or I&amp;#039;m gonna go to my grave one pissed-off rat. For the next few years, I&amp;#039;m going to be giving speeches, pressing the flesh in congressional offices, and, late at night sitting in my yard, cursing all the details. But I&amp;#039;m going to help get it done. And when I&amp;#039;m dead, I&amp;#039;m going to be out there. Out there with Ed Abbey and Julian Hayden and Ronald Ives and Malcolm Rogers and early Americans and bighorn sheep and pronghorn and elephant trees and searing heat and hard rock. And silence. And it does not matter whether they toss my body in the local cemetery or burn it to ash. I&amp;#039;ll be out there. After that first time, I never left. The desert is with me. It scowls, washes my face with its furnace breath, and at night pounds my head with a billion stars hanging down like ornaments. It doesn&amp;#039;t give a damn about me. Or you for that matter. That&amp;#039;s not why I&amp;#039;m doing it. I gave my word. I just can&amp;#039;t remember when. Or why.  For the rest of list, make sure to read Esquire&amp;#039;s 175 Things A Man Should Do Before He Dies. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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