The day may come for some Alaska musher or skier or snowmobiler when the most important work of President Obama's stimulus money is a cabin between Iditarod and Shageluk.
Federal stimulus money includes $400,000 for cabin and trail work on the Iditarod National Historic Trail, the gold rush route from Seward to Nome. Some of that money will go for cabins along the way, and that will be a step closer to creating a permanent trail as close to the old trail as possible.
Those cabins should provide some work for young people from Alaska villages, and that element harks back to the Civilian Conservation Corps of the Depression '30s, when unemployed young men went to work building trails and roads, fighting fires and planting 3 billion trees.
Among their legacies are the Blue Ridge Parkway and Shenandoah National Park, and much that they built is still in use several generations later.
So it's not hard to imagine a bitterly cold night in some future year when an exhausted musher and weary dogs find their way to the shelter of a simple cabin in Innoko River country. There should be a stove and wood. There likely won't be any thoughts of the politics of 2009, although maybe there will be a small plaque to say that this cabin was built by a dozen young workers from Shageluk with money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to shelter travelers on the Iditarod Trail.
Bailout? Sure, for musher and dogs.
Frank Gerjevic