COLUMN ONE : Virtuoso on a Horn of Plenty : Gov. Walter J. Hickel believes Alaska’s vast natural resources are there to be exploited--and the sooner, the better.

The big dream--that’s the stuff of Alaskans. And, down through the generations, they have answered its lyrical wind song: Bring your hopes north, here to the vast wilderness of gigantic bears and ancient ice and riches aplenty for anyone with a gun, spade, drill or saw.

That is what shaped modern Alaska, and what is heavy on the minds of those who wonder about the shape of tomorrow here.

For Alaskans have brought back from the past one of the biggest drillin’, sawing’, diggin’ dreamers in all this big, wild state to be their governor. He has just finished his first year in office, trying to lead the charge toward his grand vision of another free-spending development boom for oil, minerals, timber, railroads and highways.

Many people believe this campaign has turned into a circus. “I agree,” Gov. Walter (Wally) J. Hickel told Alaskans recently in a broadcast state-of-the-state speech. “Sometimes it was like a circus, but circuses are fun.”

Well, not always.

Hickel, champion of the great Alaska oil rush at Prudhoe Bay, the political wildcatter who promoted the colossal Alaska oil pipeline, flamboyant Wally Hickel who stood up to Richard M. Nixon, the hard-hewn Hickel who made himself a millionaire out of 37 cents in pocket change, is today, at 72, smack up against a different dream for Alaska--the dream of preserving it against the large-scale development he champions.

This is one of those times, it seems, when the page of history is about to be turned, a watershed for Alaska. And the rest of the nation is being drawn into the battle.

If Hickel is right, history will call him a visionary who saw that the Arctic regions had to be exploited to sustain all the people in the temperate zones. If his opponents are correct, he will leave office ridiculed as a clown in his own, lonely sideshow. “Wallyworld,” they call it.

Such are the everyday extremes used to refer to this blocky frontiersman with the pug fighter’s face and the Golden Gloves championship to go with it.

One oil company official who has known Hickel for years said: “His own experience, his own success leads Wally to believe he is an instrument of a higher purpose. . . . He believes he can do things, and that’s his destiny.”

Born in Kansas and led by wanderlust to Alaska in his youth, Hickel, a Republican, was a champion of admission for the 49th state and became its second governor, serving from 1966 through 1968.

As legend has it, in the autumn of 1968, oil explorers had drilled so many dry holes they were about to lose faith in the potential of Alaska’s North Slope. So Hickel went up there, stood in the slush of Prudhoe Bay and urged the drillers onward. When they sank the well called DS 1-1, it punched through the rock and ice into America’s largest and most remote oil field.

“I told them to drill right there. I told them there was 40 billion barrels down there,” he now recalls proudly.

Hickel’s tenure was cut short when Nixon named him secretary of the Interior. He was the first ever to use the endangered species act to try to save an animal, in that case whales. But when this free-thinking upstart urged the President to listen to the anger of young Americans after the shooting of Vietnam war protesters at Kent State University, Nixon fired him.

Loses Elections

Hickel ran for governor and lost three more times, only once getting more than a third of the vote. He drifted into the role of Alaska’s elder gadfly. He was a champion of states’ rights, a ho-hum politician and the operator of the best hotel in Anchorage.

Late in 1990, on the day before the registration deadline, Hickel strode out of the shadows as an independent, third-party candidate. If he could not command a majority of Alaskan voters behind him, here was an exploitable alignment of political forces: The Republicans and Democrats nominated moderates who wore the drab grays of consensus politics.

On Election Day, after spending $700,000 of his own money, Wally Hickel rode his colorful reputation and his dreams of a new boom into the governor’s office, squeaking past the others with 39% of the vote. Wags note that this is the same percentage of the vote David Duke drew in the 1991 Louisiana governor’s race.

But Walter Hickel never worried about the size of his mandate. Throughout his life, his confidence has been nourished by the dead reckoning of an inner voice he describes as “the little man.”

His dreams remain as wide-eyed and unshakable as a young Klondike prospector’s: Push roads through national parks, drill for oil in wildlife refuges, cut more timber from the vast national forests, activate a gigantic gold mine in the capital, build another pipeline from the North Slope, to carry natural gas. Bigger ports, longer rail lines, more and wider highways--these, too, are in Hickel’s big dreams.

To accomplish it all, he is setting out to free Alaska from the restraints of federal land and environmental controls. As the centerpiece of his 1992 agenda, he has promised to go to federal court and wage war against the preservation restrictions Congress established for more than 60% of Alaska in the name of all Americans.

And Hickel has changed the terms of the argument. Previously, oil and other development issues here were debated in the national interest. Oil from the North Slope, by law, must go for domestic consumption. That was the whole reasoning behind the pipeline. He now says the state should develop in its own interest. One of several pending lawsuits will seek to put Alaskan oil on Asian markets.

“Big projects define a civilization” is Hickel’s motto. And if Americans cannot see that, well, let them look a little harder at their own dependence on oil and gas and timber and minerals.

“What some idealists don’t realize is that the color of the environment is not just green. It is real. A person who is cold, hungry and unemployed is in an ugly environment. Poverty is the worst enemy of the environment. My question is, what has the Sierra Club ever done for the poor?”

Opponents say that Americans might, indeed, want to pay attention to Hickel’s agenda, for their own good.

Hickel asserts state control over all Alaska riverbeds, which means they could be opened to oil and mining interests regardless of what federal lands they cross. He insists the state has highway right-of-way in parks and refuges--and last year ordered bulldozers to begin a road to connect coastal Cordova with the state highway system, never mind acquiring things such as permits and environmental reports. When the federal government stood in the way, he threatened to press the National Guard into action as a road gang.

“You put all his proposals together and you have a strategy that would totally compromise all the parks and refuges of the (1980 federal) Alaska Lands Act,” said Allen E. Smith of the Wilderness Society in Anchorage. “(Former Interior secretary) James Watt couldn’t have developed a better spoiler’s strategy than this guy has. . . . This is a basic agenda of greed.”

This is not just another debate over development, however.

Resource Use Is Key

Here, more than anywhere else in the United States, the question of exploiting resources is not just a matter of jobs and economic growth. Here it is the foundation of a way of life.

Oil companies finance 87% of the budget of the richest state government in America--six times the per-capita spending of other states. Here, the thought of an income tax or sales tax is a joke. Every Alaskan gets an annual rebate of nearly $1,000 from oil revenues, and other goodies, such as a $250-a-month bonus paid to those older than 65.

But oil production is declining, and so, inevitably, is the underpinning of the state’s economy. By the year 2000, oil production will be less than half what it was during the 1980s boom, the industry estimates.

“For the last 15 years, we have been so busy counting our money that we lost our guts,” Hickel chides. “Affluence is often the enemy of creativity. We’re not poor. We’re thinking poor. It’s time to think rich again.”

Still, Alaskans have their doubts about the governor. Deep doubts. Political, civic and academic leaders across the state almost unanimously say that his 39% support has dwindled to perhaps 20%. Legislators smell blood. A recall movement is sputtering along.

Even many of the development interests, generally in agreement with his vision for Alaska, question his get-with-it-or-get-out-of-the-way approach.

Some say he is overreaching preposterously. His idea of building a water pipeline to California, for instance, was widely viewed as a waste of time and credibility.

Some complain that he foolishly ignores Alaskans’ desire to be involved in decisions that will affect their future. His rough boots have bruised the backside of many who stood in his way--such as a state fisheries biologist who would not bend rules to fit the governor’s goals. And such experts enjoy high standing with Alaskans.

Mostly, the argument over Hickel hinges on a more interesting question: When a man takes office with a dream but without a consensus, will he be regarded as a leader or a crackpot?

His supporters say Hickel has done what few others even imagine. Just three years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Hickel secured a $1.1-billion cash settlement and avoided an epic trial. (The battle over the Amoco Cadiz spill in France in 1978, by contrast, is still being waged in U.S. courts.)

Many others see Hickel as a relic, the last gunfighter in the West trying to hold off the 21st Century.

Ethics Question

What other governor, after all, would have the audacity to champion a multibillion-dollar natural gas pipeline at the same time he has a significant financial interest in the company seeking to build it? Only when he was charged with violating state ethics laws did he agree to divest himself of holdings in Yukon Pacific Corp. He told Alaskans, however, that he was always “innocent in my heart.”

“He’s not a modern man,” said Clive S. Thomas, political science professor at the University of Alaska in Juneau. “He’s not pernicious or dishonest, but he’s Rip Van Winkle. As far as government is concerned, he went to sleep in 1969, and that’s where he has ossified. . . . The problem is he’s got a Bozo image with the middle class.”

Hickel, interviewed in the cramped, blockish state Capitol building, insisted he is not only right, but, inevitably, he is righteously so.

“The environmental issue in the world is going to get stronger. . .Temperate, tropical and subtropical areas of the world, that’s where the mass of people will live and enjoy and want their way of life. And where they get the resources that are not in competition with that life will be in the oceans, the Arctic, the sub-Arctic and space. . . .

“The Santa Barbara (oil) blowout was sort of the beginning of the environmental movement in 1969. . . . It became very clear that people were not against the use of oil. They just didn’t want to see it in their back yard. . . .

“If you want to start a coal mine in Pennsylvania, even the coal miner doesn’t want it to be in his back yard. The Arctic and sub-Arctic is never going to compete for man’s living. No one ever is going to buy a lot on Prudhoe Bay and retire on it . . . so, thank God, the oil is there, and not at Second and Main. Thank God.”

Times researcher Doug Conner contributed to this story.