On Monday I watched the Senate Resources Committee talk about natural gas. Apparently, there’s fucking loads of the stuff. I sort of knew this intrinsically, through cultural osmosis, having lived in Alaska my whole life, but having the Natural Resources Commissioner-Designee John Boyle talk about trillions of cubic feet of natural gas swirling around under Cook Inlet put the whole thing into perspective for me.

Put me on edge, I’ll tell you what. The only thing under my feet should be dirt and grass and snow and eventually bedrock, and then, from what I remember of ninth grade geology class, a kind of big ball of orange molten metal somewhere below that. Then you come out the other side into China or New Zealand or whatever country occupies Alaska’s opposite coordinates. The fact that there’s trillions of cubic feet of gas under there, for some reason, doesn’t jive with the picture of Alaska I’d built up in my head.

Now, the existence of this gas is probably pretty common knowledge to a fair amount of people. In all fairness, I’ve never claimed to be anything but a dumb guy, a living example of the Peter principle – kind of like if Drew Magary got hit in the head a lot. As it happens, for most of my childhood I grew up in a bedroom that had secret black mold under the floorboards, only to be uncovered when we replaced the shitty linoleum and found damp, dripping fungus, emitting spores right under my bed. Ever since, whenever I can’t remember somebody’s name or don’t have a good metaphor in a column I’m writing, I blame the mold.

My larger point is this – growing up in Anchorage, I always perceived “natural resources” as things that existed in other parts of the state. Oil was hundreds of miles north in Prudhoe, salmon were in the Copper River, gold was in craggy mountain passes and Robert Service poems about the Yukon and hookers and prospectors named, like, Suffering Susan McGraw and Deadshot Dan DeWitt. The old saying about how “Anchorage is 30 minutes away from Alaska?” We scoff at it, those of us who reside in Anchortown, but to an extent, it’s true.

Living in Alaska’s population center skewed my perception of how resource-rich this state actually is – or was. In Cook Inlet alone, whose waters lap at the trails on which I cross-country ski and walk my dog, there’s enough natural gas out there to satiate even the hardest core Hank-Hill-heads. You could run a million grills until Judgment Day, cook a billion wieners and flanksteaks on the those gas reserves, if we could access them.

For one reason or another, we don’t. From what I gathered in the committee meeting, it’s too expensive, and there’s not really a confirmed return on investment. Senator Bill Wielechowski (D – Anchorage), in a final statement to the committee and the DNR guys that were presenting, argued that we’d have to think outside the box if we wanted to access the vast swaths of natural gas under Cook Inlet.

Something I’ve been turning over in my head, ever since I stepped off the plane in Juneau, is how disconnected Anchorage seems to be from the rest of Alaska. In that sense, that disconnect perpetuates itself in other, subtler ways. I know I’m not the only one who didn’t realize how large the Cook Inlet gas reserves were, and I’d be willing to bet there’s thousands of other Anchoragites out there who are in the same boat as me.

When you grow up in Anchorage, you’re removed, in a sense, from the tangible resources that make our state more than another chunk of land with a couple of Air Force bases and a federal highway project. To an extent, some people try to mitigate that by immersing themselves, a few times a year, in activities or experiences that get through to the heart of “true Alaska.” You take the four-wheeler out to Kenai and wrestle with a dipnet for a few days, or kill a Kachemak Bay black bear. You wrench on the snowmachine (never, EVER, a snowmobile) and get stuck in the powder, or sit in your ice-fishing tent and pass around a bottle and a blunt. These are things we do to make ourselves Real Alaskans.

But if you don’t live in the bush, or work in a field that requires you to produce something tangible related to our natural resources, you’re missing something. I know I am. You get lost in a sea of modern conveniences, and end up drifting away from the thing that makes the 49th state different than all the other ones.

If I had the time and the resources, I’d take a boat out into the middle of Cook Inlet, position myself somewhere above those trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, and look down. It wouldn’t do anything, but at least I’d feel like I was there. Put another way, you have to deliberately go looking to expose yourself to Alaska, or Alaska’s going to slip away from you, bit by bit. And when that happens, you might as well go live in Texas or something, because you’ve lost that sense of frigid, untamed charm that makes our state what it is.

None of this is to rag on Anchorage or claim that it’s somehow lacking – hell, it’s my hometown. If someone from Palmer or Fairbanks tried to write this article, I believe I’d leave a rude comment. But it is important to realize that, beyond the city limits, up the Glenn or down the Seward and even farther, there’s a whole enormous state whose resources fuel the electricity we use, the cars we drive, and the food we eat. We forget that at our own peril.

Unless we acknowledge the precarious nature of our energy dependence, and the rapidity with which natural gas is running out, we’re going to run into serious trouble. Profit motive aside, the gas under Cook Inlet and on the North Slope is the only way to keep our state powered in the short term – not importation from foreign countries.