The Little Town That Could : GOING BACK TO BISBEE, <i> By Richard Shelton (University of Arizona Press: $35 cloth, $15.95 paper; 320 pp.)</i>

In 1958 a young man with the clean-cut looks of a Mormon missionary and the zeal of a Baptist preacher arrived in a little mining town in the remote mountains of southern Arizona. In fact, the man was neither a Mormon nor a preacher of any sort. He was a soldier stationed at nearby Fort Huachuca about to be released from the army, and he had a young wife and new baby to support.

He also had a teaching degree that he’d earned while selling shoes during college in Texas. He had come to the mining town to accept his first teaching job, or as he might have put it, to begin his real life--his adult life--and he was as nervous about this prospect as he was excited.

By all rights, the town he chose to settle in should have perished long before he arrived. It had burned down three times, survived countless devastating floods, plunged from good times to bad times, from booms to busts, seen mine cave-ins and typhoid plagues wipe out a number of its citizens. At the moment the young man arrived, the town wasn’t going through its darkest time (that was yet to come), but neither was it a thriving place. Like so many mining towns in the West, it was facing decay and obsolescence. The ore was playing out, and so too were the people who struggled to make a living among the gray and poisonous mounds of old mine tailings.

The man was Richard Shelton, who would go on to become a distinguished poet and Regents Professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, author of the poetry collections “The Tattooed Desert” and “The Bus to Veracruz.” The town was Bisbee, Ariz., a stone’s throw from the Mexican border, a place where miners’ shacks clung to steep hills and faded brothels and bars attested to a colorful past.

Bisbee would also go on to become a story in and of itself--a particularly American story, and a Western and contemporary one. It is precisely this story that Shelton recounts in his moving memoir, “Going Back to Bisbee,” winner of the 1992 Western States Arts Federation award for creative nonfiction.

There must be many subtle and complex reasons for writing a book like this, based as it is on nostalgia, a wistful, unusually strong yearning to return to some irrecoverable time of life. But one senses with Shelton it is also a yearning to celebrate a land he has come to love over the years, a place that has a feeling of spiritual loci, of home, and of personal and tribal history.

Arizona does have a rich past. Native Americans created extraordinary cultures in this land. After the arrival of the conquistadors, it was part of New Spain until 1821, when it came under the jurisdiction of a newly independent Mexico. Then, in 1854, when the United States acquired the territory in the Gadsden Purchase, the area began to attract prospectors, and the fortune hunters and cattlemen who would forever change the country.

It never has been a particularly hospitable land. When the wind blows, the bellflowers on the yucca shake like a necklace of a shaman’s skulls, and much of the time it’s arid and hot. Life was hard for settlers. The Apache of southern Arizona were among the fiercest of all Native Americans, raiding neighboring tribes long before the whites arrived. Early efforts to establish forts were abandoned.

Yet when the stakes got high enough--meaning when gold and copper and silver were discovered in the mountains--the whites redoubled their efforts, and before long mining camps dotted ravines, cattle were moving down grassy slopes and trampling riparian areas, and there was no question “civilization” had arrived.

The modern-day effects of this “civilizing” activity much concern Shelton, as do the still pristine aspects of the land. He knows his desert flora and fauna, and writes about them with the sureness and sensitivity of a born naturalist. From him we learn that coyotes are exceptionally good parents, that there are two seasons for wildflowers in Arizona, and that by some miraculous intervention, the fragile San Pedro River that flows through much of this country has been given protected status, and its banks are now known as the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area.

We also learn that historically, after the Indians, Bisbee was a “white man’s mining camp”: No Chinese were permitted to live there, and Mexicans had to go home before dark. The caste system of Bisbee was so firmly entrenched that remnants were still in place when Shelton arrived in 1958. He writes of one student so poor he arrived for class each day with a lunch bucket full of nothing but green chiles, which he would trade to Shelton for part of his sandwich.

The whole thrust of the book is a skillful interweaving of memory and the account of the journey in Blue Boy, Shelton’s aging van. We are told that the Phelps Dodge company, which gained control of the Copper Queen Mine in Bisbee in 1885 and owned all mining operations since then, decided to close down the mines in 1978. As Shelton slides inexorably toward his destination--a rendezvous with his youthful self as well as a former teaching colleague, a woman named Ida who is now in her 80s--we wonder what he will find there.

He discovers a town that has survived because it somehow has always survived, and now includes a new class, made up mostly of artists, trying to graft itself onto a society whose base is made up of retired miners, “one of the most conservative cultures in America.” He also discovers that the Phelps Dodge Corp., thanks to a new process that allows ore to be reclaimed from low-grade material, is planning on reopening mining operations--this time on a grand scale, by strip-mining entire mountains.

It’s an ending that drives home a central struggle in the American West today--in the world, for that matter. Are jobs and renewed prosperity worth the price of the destruction of the land? Long-term, the answer is clearly no; but in the short term it’s a hard question to answer.

There’s so much in this book to discover, so many evocative passages and entertaining side trips. But one thing that seems lacking and that I came to long for was a clearer picture of who Richard Shelton is.

His own life story is conspicuously absent or softly romanticized in this book, and yet not once but several times he hints at a complex and dark personal history. I wanted to know more about this, so that it might balance the lighter aspects of his writing.

One cannot exactly fault a writer for what he chooses to leave out, but I sensed a richness in the story of his early years, suggested in the following passage, and I wish he had told us more:

“My father had taught me three skills: how to chop kindling without cutting my fingers off, how to pour a glass of beer so it didn’t have too much head, and how to open his cigarette packages neatly. Beyond that, I had learned many things from him--attitudes, prejudices, funny songs and witty stories--but no skills. Those I have had to pick up along the way as best I could, and they are few.”

One skill Richard Shelton has picked up is the ability to write carefully and with great beauty about matters close to him. One need only pick up “Going Back to Bisbee” to find the evidence that he has taught himself well.