Nothing is sadder in Alaska these days than watching people in Cordova grieving when they should be celebrating. Twenty-one years ago, the Exxon Valdez smeared Prince William Sound with 11 million gallons of oil. Today, there is a stinking 21,000 to 15,000 gallons still to be found, hidden out of sight beneath beach gravels.

Yes, Exxon -- now Exxon Mobil Corp. -- remains a big, fat, profitable company, a capitalist colossus that once soiled the Sound, but Mother Nature has cleaned up after the company. Few, outside of some scientists who don't want to talk about this much, seem to realize how little oil is left. It is now more historic artifact than environmental disaster.

Consider the worst estimate -- 21,000 gallons. An Olympic swimming pool holds in excess of 660,000 gallons -- more than 30 times as much. Your average eight-lane municipal pool contains 325,000 gallons -- more than 16 times as much. A 20-foot by 40-foot backyard pool holds a third again as much. Down in the 21,000-gallon range, we're talking about one of those 30-foot diameter, four-foot-deep pools in the backyard. The above-ground blue vinyl ones.

Want to look at this another way? Your average railroad tanker car holds one-and-a-half to two times as much oil. When the Alaska Railroad ran 15 tank cars off the tracks near Gold Creek north of Talkeetna in 1999, it poured 120,516 gallons of noxious jet fuel into the ground.

The grieving over that spill was done within a year or two. It is long forgotten now. Nobody grieves. Nobody seems to care about any long-term effects on the nearby Susitna River with its valuable runs of salmon. Somehow it is different in the Sound, though. Sometimes it almost seems grieving has become a business there. As New Orleans Times-Picayune journalist Cindy Chang recently reported form Cordova:

Cynicism, normally a stranger to small towns, has lodged permanently in people's craws, receiving a fresh injection two years ago when the U.S. Supreme Court whittled a $2.5 billion punitive-damages judgment against Exxon down to $500 million.

Oil remains just below surface, 21 years after spill

Eleanor Island is one of many uninhabited slips of land scattered across Prince William Sound. Its rocky beaches are home to purple starfish and colonies of tiny mussels. Closer to the treeline, the rocks get smaller. Remove a few shovelfuls of the gravel-like surface and you will strike oil -- not naturally occurring oil but Exxon Valdez oil, buried for 21 years. The water welling up in the hole has a rainbow sheen. Dark brown globs float on the surface, and the smell summons up a gas station.

This is true. The litigation all ended two years ago, and if you dig around in the right places in the Sound, you can still find oil. The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill trustee council estimates about 20 acres of beach in the Sound still has oil buried beneath it. Twenty acres is a wee bit over one-fifth the acreage of the new Tikahtnu Commons shopping center in Anchorage. That Muldoon development covers 95 acres.

It's safe to say the asphalt-covered parking lot at Tikahtnu Commons -- a vast area in the middle -- covers a lot more than 20 acres. The asphalt is a form of oil even more permanent than that crude in the Sound. It will be with us for a long, long time, although Mother Nature, left alone, can take even asphalt back.

Of course, nobody really wants that to happen. The asphalt all over this country is part and parcel of the oil people want to spill so they can drive around in oil-fueled motor vehicles and smash to death all sorts of life from gnats to dragonflies to birds to deer to moose and even grizzly bears.

Yes, here in Alaska people road kill grizzlies, animals extinct in most of North America. We will have more of these road kills, too, as the state keeps paving in pursuit of the goal that ex-Gov. Sarah Palin used to describe as "progressing Alaska."