Going Rogue: An American Life (13 page)

I joined him on the Bristol Bay fishing grounds. During slow salmon tuns with Todd, I worked messy, obscure seafood jobs, including long shifts on a stinky shore-based crab-processing vessel in Dutch Harbor. Another season, I sliced open fish bellies, scraped out the eggs, and plopped the roe into packaging. All of us on that job thought it was hilarious that the company would slap a caviar label on the … er, delicacy … and sell it to elite consumers for loads of money. Practically every kid in Alaska has spent at least one summer working some kind of “slime
line.”

At the end of one summer, twenty-one-year-old Todd finished up the salmon season by celebrating over beers with his fishing partners in Dillingham. Then he jumped into his truck to drive

Going Rogue

the empty dirt road home-and got busted for a DDI.. It was a humiliating mistake, a big wake-up call to be charged with drinking and driving in his hometown. He’d later tell an employer in a job interview thar it was his most critical lesson, because ir woke him up to the danger of making stupid decisions. He said it changed his life.

In the summer of 1988, I fished again with Todd, but this time during slow runs I waited tables at the towdy Bristol Inn, where drunken fishing crews doled out more in tips than I earned on the water all season. Still, money was tight because we had to reinvest our earnings in new nets and boat motors that season. By the end of summer, Todd and I didn’t want to spend more time apart. So we took our broke butts down to the Palmer Courthouse and lassoed a magisrrate to pronounce us man and wife. Our witnesses would come from where they often do at this courthouse, across the street ar the old folks’ home. I walked over to the Palmer Pioneers Home ro see who was available, and Todd followed me in rhe car, saying, “See if you can find a couple of people who can make it to the car without wheelchairs.”

I couldn’t find any who fir the bill. Bur I found a nice elderly man with a walker and a kindly old lady in a wheelchair who agreed to see us into matrimony. They couldn’t squeeze into Todd’s litrleHooda coupe, so we had no choice but to escort them across the street, where, on August 29, 1988, those nice Alaska pioneers witnessed the beginning of two lives joined together at the Palmer Courthouse. The magistrate, Mrs.

was young and

brand new to the position, and she cried as she read the boilerplate vows. Then walked our witnesses back across the street

and scopped by the Wendy’s drive-thru for our wedding dinner. Very much in love and oblivious to the idea that we needed to do anything conventional for anyone else’s sake, we left flowers

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SARAH

PALIN

on our parents’ front porches with nores announcing that we’d eloped. I heard later that Mom bawled. I’d do the same. I tell my kids now that I’ll wring their necks if they do what I did. I want my kids to have the wedding I didn’r have.

Todd moved into the apartment that my sister Heather and I shared in Anchorage, and the three of us undertook a whirlwind work schedule that turned our tiny apartment into a revolving door. Todd worked as a baggage handler for an Alaska Airlines subsidiary during the day and worked at night plowing snow and clearing the steps of the BP Exploration Alaska office building until the fishing season would start again. I worked customer service at an Anchorage electric utility during the day and reported for a local station part-time in the evenings and on weekends. Heather put her college degree to work, working with audiologists in special needs children’s classrooms. Todd applied for a fulltime job with BP working in the North Slope oil fields. We hoped he’d land the kind of Slope job so many young Alaskans dream of so he could work a schedule that would allow him to enjoy as many of our outdoor passions as possible while making a good living. While he waited, he worked. I remember him working so hard that he dropped to about 150

pounds from handling the bags in the belly of the plane. (Surely it couldn’t have been my newlywed cooking skills that conttibuted to that.)

While he slimmed down, I porked up, pregnant with our first child. As the months went on, Todd’s prayer was answered by an offer for a permanent position with BP: he’d move up from plowing patking lots to working a week-on, week-off schedule in the rich oil patch that BP partially controlled in Prudhoe Bay near the top of the continent, earning a king’s ransom of $14 an hour. When I made the happy announcement that Todd would be a Sloper, Dad responded, “Is that good news or bad news?”

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Going

He knew the pros and cons of the physical sepatation endured by Slope families. He’d seen many of his students whose parents’

marriages collapsed under the demands of Slope life. Todd and I were excited about it, though. We’d been together but separate for many years already, so we figured we could handle whatever life dished out. We put it all in God’s hands.

9

On April 20, 1989, my life truly began. I became a mom. I had no idea how this tiny person, my son, would turn me inside out and upside down with the all-consuming love that swelled my heart from the second he was born. As

as it sounds, that

was the happiest day of my life.

The two previous days, however, were not.

On April 18, I went into labor. I called Todd and asked him to fly home early from his weekly hitch on the Slope-a mere 858mile commute, one way-to meet me, my mom, and Blanche at my parents’ house. I had set up camp there for the night, trying to find comfort while ignoring Dad’s attempt at humor: “I’m sticking close to home for the next few days,” he told a buddy on the phone. “Sarah’s ready to calve.”

I was quite a cocky young mom-to-be. I’d gone through the requisite childbirth class (we were going to use the Lamaze method), and, being an athlete used to pain, I figured,
How tough
could giving birth be?

Oh. My. Gosh. I thought I was going to die. In fact, I began to pray that I
would
die.

A laserlike searing rolled through me in waves, from my knees to my belly button. Had any woman ever hurt this much?

I didn’t think so. I gritted my teeth and willed myself not to
scream.

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Todd made it down from the Slope the next day. Between nuclear-level contractions, I couldn’r climb into our truck, so I squeezed sideways and backward into the passenger seat of Mom’s Subaru, my belly poking out like a medicine ball, and Todd drove me ro Valley Hospital. We saw the sign where were supposed

to gO-DELIvERIEs-and followed the arrows.

He parked the car, helped me out, and we entered rhrough a rear entrance. Struggling down hallway after hallway, stopping for contracrions in the industrial zone, I glanced over to see Todd near a janitor’s closer telling a maintenance worker: “You guys need better signage to ger people through ro deliveries!” Since I rhoughr I was dying, I didn’t care that we were in the warehouse part of the hospital. I figured I’d just die there near the delivery rrucks. I even came close to thinking that someday we’d laugh about it.

All rhrough my perfect, healthy pregnancy, I had pictured this peaceful Earth Mother birth experience, the lights low in the delivery room, maybe even some of that nature-sound music playing in the background. Like a pioneer woman, I would bravely deliver our firsrborn, Todd beaming beside me, wirh the Alaska wilderness waiting ourside to welcome our son, the newest addirion to Nature’s grand march of creatures great and small.

Instead, by the time the nurses gor me prepped, I was sweating and panting, trying to do those infernal breathing techniques, when what I really wanted to do was scream bloody murder and beg for drugs. Blessed Mother ofJesus, I finally got them!

The delivery room was chaos: the doctor and nurses bustling around; Todd and my mom saying sweet, soothing, irritating things; my motherin-law angling for a better shot with a video camera that I cursed evety time she aimed it.

Many hours later, though, chaos evaporated when Track CJ

.

.