Golf would seem to be an illogical pastime in Gustavus, Alaska, but thanks to the efforts of one man hooked on the game, that may soon change.

When Morgan DeBoer looks out the window from the second floor of his house -- and if he stood there all day you wouldn't blame him, such is the magnificence of the vista that unfolds before him -- he is overcome with such a sense of awe it is nearly staggering. How is it possible, he must ask himself, that nature could be so incredibly beautiful?

From his simple wooden structure, the cool, rich greenery of the Alaskan terrain flows in soft, gentle ways. A faint rise here, a shapeless dip there.

Out in the distance, the ground eventually meets the clear, pure waters of the Icy Strait, but it does so with great hesitancy. The land gives way in near-imperceptible levels, bringing the strait up to the brink of safe ground during high tide and yielding a broad, spacious expanse of marshy beachland when the tide has retreated.

Beyond the calm waters of the Icy Strait, home to some of the world's best halibut and salmon fishing, rises a low range of mountainous peaks. They are posed in front of a larger group of mountains, and another set of taller peaks beyond them, and another further in the distance. On a clear day, of which there are many, it is possible to see all the way to Mount Fairweather, at 15,320 feet the ninth-highest mountain in North America, 60 miles away.

Here in southeastern Alaska, the sky is clearer than you and I know it. The water is cleaner. Life is simpler. And as Morgan DeBoer examines the wondrous gift Mother Nature has set upon his doorstep, he reasons this panorama is darn close to what his great-grandparents must have seen when they first came upon the property at the turn of the century. More than anything, it is that sense of heritage, of sameness, that fuels his resolve that this plot on the fringe of Glacier Bay National Park and Reserve remains as pristine as his forebears found it.

The 46-year-old DeBoer, rugged Alaskan, former carpenter, former sawmiller, former construction worker, has a standing offer from at least two corporations: When he's ready to sell, they're ready to buy. They'd put some kind of housing, probably condominiums, on the site, which is as heinous an act as redoing the Sistine Chapel with a coat of ceiling white or outfitting the Colosseum of Rome with a dome.

As long as DeBoer has a choice, he will have no part in turning this shoreline into Miami Beach. In fact, he still cringes over his decision to sell two acres a few years ago. But that, along with the rental of some land to an asphalt company working at the local airport last summer, has helped finance his ambition of bringing golf to Gustavus, Alaska, which, upon examination of the circumstances, is a somewhat puzzling desire for three simple reasons.

First, there are -- or were -- no golfers in Gustavus, a remote outpost of 500 or so year-round residents located about 60 miles west of Juneau.

Second, what golfers may exist in and around Alaska's capital city can't drive to Gustavus; access is by plane or a three-hour (one-way) ferry ride.

And, lastly, the man who has made golf his life's ambition isn't a golfer; by his own admission he's swung a club on a regulation 18-hole course less than a dozen times in his life.

"When you're building a place like this, in a place like this, you're doubting yourself all the time," DeBoer says. "I tell people about the movie "Field of Dreams." I didn't get Kevin Costner's looks, but I sure got his project."

Lock, stock and flagsticks. While Costner carved his baseball diamond from a cornfield, DeBoer has essentially single-handedly created an unpretentious, yet sincere, golf environment with barely more than the farm equipment in his barn and his own ingenuity. The land had such natural mounding, the tees and greens virtually identified themselves. All DeBoer had to do was figure out how to get from the first tee to the ninth green.

Should DeBoer's Mount Fairweather Golf Course open on schedule Memorial Day weekend, he will have seen to fruition an idea, three years in the making, some of the townspeople were less certain about.

"People wouldn't say to your face, ÔYou're nuts,' but they had that look," he recalls. "But it's fascinating the way it's evolved in people's thinking. It's gone from ÔYou're crazy to try the course' to ÔI don't even think I'll try the game' to ÔI was hitting the ball out in the yard the other night and that was fun' to ÔI'm going to be down on your course, I'm sure.' "

When the regulars gathered at the Strawberry Point Cafe on Dock Road, where the tops of DeBoer's homemade flagsticks could be seen stirring gently above the brilliantly colored fields of fireweed and wild strawberry, some questioned his sanity. Others were daring enough to venture over to the collection of free clubs and balls he'd made available in an area cleared for a practice range. That's when they put hands on grip and waggled a club for the first time in their lives.

As you might imagine, some of it wasn't a pretty sight. "The people in the community . . . they were my guinea pigs," DeBoer says. "I tried to encourage them to come out and play. I probably lost 2,000 balls. . . . I can't believe I learned so much about the players without the course being opened. That time was very beneficial."

After DeBoer cleared one fairway, then another, a few bold souls wandered from the practice range and tried playing on the rough approximations of actual holes. Their propensity for hitting balls far off line, into the waist-high grasses, taught DeBoer another lesson. "I didn't want this to be a lost-ball course," he says, "and that's a big thing because you certainly want people to enjoy it. It was so easy to want to put in so many bells and whistles, to get sidetracked."

Though the humble facility DeBoer has envisioned will be a perfect fit in the small-town environment, clearly Gustavus cannot provide enough golfers to make the project financially viable. But if just a minute percentage of tourists to nearby Glacier Bay National Park are persuaded to add golf to their itineraries, then the whole outlook changes. Proclaimed as one of the world's most spectacular tourist destinations, some 350,000 people visit Glacier Bay annually for the hunting, fishing, hiking, whale-watching and magnificent drama of glaciers calving into the sea.

"I'm dependent upon the fact that Alaska is getting to be more and more of a popular destination -- a safe destination versus overseas travel," DeBoer reasons. "But I'm going to have to rely a lot on word-of-mouth as far as saying the course is really puttable, because that's one of the big things in southeast Alaska. It can be tough country to grow grass and have anything that's really worthwhile as far as having something you can putt a ball on. . . . In some areas, I'm whistlin' in the dark on this."

Contrary to popular belief, all of Alaska is not buried under several feet of snow all winter long. Southeast Alaska enjoys a maritime climate similar to New England; spells of temperatures in the 40s or 50s are common even in the darkest days of winter. And in the height of summer, Mount Fairweather G.C. will enjoy its greatest commodity: 20 to 22 hours of sunlight daily.

Still, the question remains: What is it about golf that makes a non-golfer want to build a course in a remote location devoid of customers?

For the better part of 20 years DeBoer thought the prospect of golf in Gustavus was conceivable. But when he made the decision in the spring of 1995 to actually carve nine holes, he did so with a feeling of trepidation battling an overwhelming sense of exploration. "My first deed on this whole project was going out there with sticks and ribbons, trying to do a layout," he recalls, "and I remember feeling as though I was stepping off the edge of the world. All I had was my guts and determination and the realization that you were going to have an absolutely spectacular place where people can play golf.

"At the same time it was exciting. I wish everyone could go through this -- to live in the middle of the golf course you're designing. You think about something in the middle of the night and go check it out for yourself."

DeBoer's frontier spirit has been passed down through generations. His great-grandparents left San Francisco and joined the gold rush of 1898, hiking through the famed Chilkoot Pass in the relentless cruelty of a fierce Alaskan storm. "The way I look at it," he reasons, "is that if my great-grandmother can head up to the gold fields in some junked-out freighter that probably didn't belong in the water, with nothing but guts and determination, this is a piece of cake. That's a feeling I've always had."

His parents, Charles and Dorothy, homesteaded a 160-acre property in Gustavus in 1959, the year Alaska was granted statehood, and used the land to grow hay and raise cattle. Over the years, a geological phenomenon known as isostatic rebound -- in this case an uplift of land made by the movement of a glacier -- gave the DeBoer family another 173 acres.

"I can't remember what I thought when he first mentioned the idea," admits Charles, "but it's been quite an experience."

The elder DeBoer has purchased seed and fertilizer and helped keep the equipment running, and Morgan's son, 13-year-old Ben, hasn't minded jumping on a tractor to cut grass. "But the big advantage," DeBoer insists, "is that this land is so natural. This wasn't done with a huge amount of scraping equipment and irrigation stuff and the like."

Still, while the remoteness of Gustavus to Juneau and Seattle hasn't dampened DeBoer's spirits, it has forced him to do a better job of planning. "You just don't jump in the pickup and run down to the store and complete your deal," he explains. "You make sure you have extra parts, enough seed and enough fertilizer, because if you're not prepared you'll pay more.

"Still, I don't have it that bad. If I have to, I can call Seattle and have a part the next day. When my grandparents ordered a part for a tractor, the boat came once a month, and if you got the wrong part you'd wait a month to send the part back and then another month to get the right one."

Last summer, when he cut his fairway grass for the first time, DeBoer discovered first-hand how much time he'd need to devote to regular upkeep. The extended daylight hours may be a blessing to players; mowing, on the other hand, is an endless chore. "We're talking plants growing an inch and a half, two inches a day," he says. "That's flat gettin' it on." He has witnessed dandelions grow 18 inches, bloom and die in a span of three or four days.

DeBoer has no formal education in any related aspect of course design or construction. "I've done this whole thing in my head," he stated some three years after pounding the first stake in the ground. "I still haven't put any drawings on paper." What he knows he's learned from watching The Golf Channel -- do you think he draws a few blank stares from the folks at the Strawberry Cafe when he goes in for a cup of coffee and strikes up a conversation about Olle Karlsson or the course at Royal Mougins? -- and from reading several books on the subject, including the one he calls his Bible, Tom Doak's The Anatomy of a Golf Course.

"I devoured that book," he says, "and I heartily recommend it because he stressed staying within yourself. . . . Before you get carried away with the spectacular clubhouse, etcetera, etcetera, know what you've got; use your natural features. After all, Mother Nature's probably got it better than what you can do. All that just hit me like a bell."

If DeBoer's finished product is a little rough around the edges, that's fine with him. "I could have the lushest fairways anywhere," he says, "but I'm not sure that's the way I want to go. You've got approximately 5,000 geese coming through here in the offseason, and I've got dozens and dozens of eagles that live around the edges and on the course. . . . To look out in the winter and see two wolves cross the lower part of the course, and knowing that there could have been houses there and this property would look nothing like it does, and those wolves would not be there, it really feels as though you're helping Mother Earth."

Working without much of a formal plan, schedule or budget, DeBoer has managed to feel his way along. Every day he questioned what he would do next; every night he questioned if he'd done it right. "It's hard to explain unless you've done it," he says, "but you're constantly making changes and you get very discouraged. You get done late in the evening and it's raining and all your enthusiasm is just sucked out of you. You wonder what you're doing.

"And then the next evening it's just gorgeous, and you step out and see someone playing, or people out hitting balls, or you see a bunch of eagles sitting on some stumps. You can't imagine how good you feel."

Yes, Morgan, we can.