SOMEWHERE IN the Declaration of Independence there seems to be a clause about the rights of Westerners to drive their off-road vehicles wherever they durn well please. Or maybe it's in the Emancipation Proclamation. Or the Ten Commandments.

Whatever. What's right is right - and no federal G-man is going to keep the Utahan off his chosen path.

Come to think of it, it looks like no G-man even wants to try. There's all this land out there, and just because it's owned by all the people of the United States (the government), that doesn't mean they can keep some of the people of the United States (the locals) off it, does it?

Heck, no. In 1866, Congress passed a law saying anyone who wanted to could build a road across federal land, and you can bet that's just what the folks who went West proceeded to do. In 1976, that law was repealed. Then a couple of years ago, people in Washington started to talk about preserving the land - the wilderness, they called it. You know what that means.

But the people out West aren't a bunch of nitwits. Somebody realized that all those roads that the hardscrabble pioneers carved out or put down or dreamed up between 1866 and 1976 are still public rights-of-way. The feds agreed (sort of), but some spoilsports tried to point out that you can't just call anything a road; it's not a road, they said, if a lonesome cowpoke headed down that way once and that was it.

Never mind that. A road is what we say it is - that's what all the counties out that way are arguing. The nifty thing is, nobody's got anything like a map or a deed or a record on any of this. The road is in the mind of the beholder - and what a beautiful thing it is, too.

Now some judge has gone and taken the side of the spoilsports. But the governor of Utah and the bigwigs at the Department of the Interior have been having some talks on the QT about how to solve this problem, and they'll come up with a way to keep those wheels moving through the red-rock country. Don't know how, because they aren't saying, but they'll do it.

You know, the federal government owns two-thirds of the state of Utah, and that's why the first battle's being fought there. What if some do-gooder finally succeeded in getting that big 9-million-acre wilderness area set aside? Where would Utah be then? Well, the surest way to stop a wilderness is to put a road through it.