Pork and pilot bread

HOOPER BAY -- Everyone agreed the new, 74,000-square-foot school that rises like a battleship above the flat, wet, coastal tundra and ponds along the Bering Sea coast here was a facility on par with the best of any in America.

To get there, though, the visiting gang of Obama cabinet secretaries endured a bumpy, mile-long ride on a sandy, potholed road now threatened by erosion from a rising ocean. Riding in a convoy of battered pickup trucks, they bounced past gray, weathered deteriorating houses and a landscape littered with the carcasses of abandoned snowmachines and four-wheelers.

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On a clear day, the dreariness of the scene might have been broken by the beauty of a green landscape alive with birds stretching off toward the blue ocean.

But the secretaries of Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, Energy and Education arrived on an hour-long flight from Bethel as the winds of the North Pacific Ocean brought in the fog and rain that so often settles over the western edge of the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta. A few of their aides, accustomed to the East Coast heat and feeling almost brutalized by the Alaska weather, wrapped themselves in Arctic parkas to fend off the cold.

But while the weather was unfriendly, the people were everything but. The secretaries were greeted with the the warmth and welcome that has met them everywhere in their travels in Alaska.

Bush Alaskans might not have much, but what little they have they seem always ready to share.

U.S. Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, said it was good for the rural-touring secretaries to see this. Begich recognizes that he, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and U.S. Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, are now fighting a rear-guard action to save the federal funds former Sen. Ted Stevens -- the man Begich defeated in November -- once brought north to Alaska. Citizens Against Government Waste once gave Stevens its "Whole Hog Award" for taking home the most pork per capita.

Steven's was famous for using raw political power to muscle home what it is easy for those outside Alaska to label "pork." Some might well see the $50 million in federal aid pouring in Hooper Bay to help with costly construction of the school, new housing, airport improvements and wind-generated electricity as that sort of "pork."

It is all very costly. And it is all being spent to reinforce a village on the edge of nowhere.