A crude business, this going green

GUSTAVUS -- As this is written, rain is falling gently on the green pastures and gardens that cover the broad moraine near the entrance to Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, and I am contemplating the virtues of crude oil. More than 130 years ago, it took naturalist John Muir weeks to reach this special place, coming first by steamship from Seattle to Wrangell and then by canoe north through the islands of the Inside Passage to the bay of ice.

Traveling south now from Anchorage -- a place that didn't even exist in Muir's day -- the trip took us only hours, even counting large chunks of time wasted sitting in airports. Actual travel times were the least of the trip. The journey from home to Ted Stevens International Airport in a small sport utility vehicle powered mainly by gasoline (it's a hybrid that runs electric at slow speed but needs the motor on the highway) took less than 30 minutes. The flight to the state's capital city on an Alaska Airlines jet powered by JP4 consumed another hour and a half. And lastly there was a 15-minute hop on another jet from an airport on the edge of the Mendenhall Glacier suburbs to the oddly huge airport on the edge of the wilderness here.

Oddly huge because one does not expect to find a runway over a mile long serving a rural Alaska community of less than 400 year-round residents. Hooper Bay in Southwest Alaska is home to more than twice as many people, but has a runway only half as long and only recently paved. The one here has been paved and jet serviceable a long time thanks to the odd fate of war. The strip was originally built in 1942 for refueling bombers headed for the Aleutian Islands. America and its allies triumphed in that great world war in part because they controlled oil.

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After WWII the runway here transformed to help serve the tourism businesses that sprang up around the Glacier Bay National Monument. From the worst of things can come the best of things, or at least the best of things if you are one of the few people living in this community of retirees, business people and National Park Service employees.

Or, better yet, if you are one of those who get to visit.

There is nothing better than to be a tourist in Alaska in the summer, no matter for how short a time, and few better places to be than at the Gustavus Inn, which was just this year named an American Classic by the James Beard Foundation. The best part of that award, in turn, might be that people in Gustavus are so down to earth that few (if any) had a clue as to the significance of the honor.

Foodies, of course, will know immediately. The New York-based, nonprofit Beard Foundation is dedicated to promoting the legacy of the late James Beard, the chef and food writer who is pretty much credited with adding the word "gourmet" to the lexicon of the American upper class. People in Gustavus don't use that word, but they do talk about "really good food," and this Inn happens to have it.

"Supper is served family style and usually features local catches like Dungeness crab, salmon, halibut, and sablefish, as well as produce from the Inn's munificent garden. Despite the challenges of a short growing season, that garden produces berries, potatoes, rhubarb, myriad greens, and edible flowers," the James Beard Foundation noted in declaring the Inn, one of those "award-winning restaurants (that) have timeless appeal and are beloved in their regions for quality food that reflects the character of their community."