Going Rogue: An American Life (2 page)

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SARAH

PALIN

for the people. This was the only way r d found to transform a grudging bureaucracy into a team that could try to reform government and shrink its reach into our lives. Since being elected governor in 2006, I had managed to rack up an 88 percent approval rating, and though I didn’t put much stock in fickle polls, I figured my administration must be doing something right. To me, it signaled that Alaskans, with their independent spirit, wanted principle-centered policies, not the same old politicsas-usual. I was grateful. All I wanted was the chance to work as hard as I could, serve the people honorably-and I figured that maybe berween changing state government and changing diapers, we’d help change our corner of the world. In the RTL booth, I smiled, dropped some dollars into the contribution can, and didn’t care who might be watching, including local reporters. Alaskans knew my pro-life views-no news there. At that moment, one of my BlackBerrys vibrated me back to work. I was thankful for the excuse to hustle hack into the sunshine. Piper tugged on my arm with sticky fingers, whispering reminders that r d promised if she was patient r d take her a roller-coaster ride, too.

“Just this one last call, baby,” I told her. I ducked behind the booth, hoping it was my son Track calling from his Army base at Fort Wainwright. He was set to deploy to Iraq soon, and his sporadic calls were something I lived for.

But in case it wasn’t Track, I offered up a silent fallback prayer:
Please, Lord, just for an hour, anything but politics.
I punched the green phone icon and answered hopefully, “This is Sarah.”

It was Senator John McCain, asking if I wanted to help him change history.

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Going Rogue

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From Sandpoint, Idaho, where I was born, via Juneau, Alaska, I touched down in rhe windy, remore fronrier town of Skagway cradled in my mother’s arms. I was just three months old, and barely sixty days had passed since rhe largest earrhquake on record in Norrh American history srruck Alaska, on Good Friday, March 27,1964.

The southwestern coasr had bucked and swayed for nearly five full minutes, shaking down a rock rain of landslides and avalanches. Whole mounrainsides of snow tumbled into rhe valleys. Near Kodiak, rectonic shifrs rhrusr sections of the ground rhirty feet skyward, permanently.
In
Seward, an enrire chunk of waterfront detached itself from the coast and slid into Resurrection Bay. Twenty minutes later, a towering tsunami swallowed the shore, carrying with it a sheet of oil that burned on the

ocean surface. Along Alaska’s Inside Passage, a massive submarine earth slide so destabilized the ground that the entire port town of Valdez had to be relocated to another site.

The quake altered the topography of Alaska forever. Mother Nature showed her might and reminded us that she always wins. But that did not scare my parents, Chuck and Sally Heath, who weren’t about to change their minds about pulling up stakes in Idaho, where my dad was a schoolteacher, and settling in America’s untamed North. Instead, my parents thought the Good Friday quake-with a 9.2 magnitude, the second largest ever recordedadded to the aura of rugged adventure that lured them to the forty-ninth state, which was then only five years old. My big brother, Chuck Jr” was two at the time, and my sister, Heather, was one, so they were old enough to sit up by themselves in the Grumman Goose we flew in on, a 1930s-era plane that ,

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SARAH

PALIN

looked like it came sttaight out of the movie
Casablanca.
By the time the Heath family arrived, the population of Skagway was only about 650, way down from its heyday in the summet of 1897

when the rown boomed with thousands of fottune hunters who srteamed in with the Klondike Gold Rush.

The people who ttekked north at that time weren’t just grizzled old ptqspectors, but also doctots and lawyers and teachets like my dad, Many of the gold hunters settled in Skagway and from thete ha.uled their hopes and supplies over the thitty-threemile Chilkoot Trail to the head of the mighty Yukon River, But Skagway itself remained the Las Vegas of the North. The newly wealthy rode in to celebtate and the newly busted drank away their troubles while piano music and laughter of dance hall

girls spilled onto the same raised-plank sidewalks that still lined’

Main Street when my family moved to town.

One of those wooden sidewalks was the scene of one of my earliest memories: my attempt to fly. I couldn’t have been more than four years old and was walking to my friend’s house all by myself because in such a small town, little kids gained their independence eatly, My friend and I were supposed to go to catechism together, and I was anxious to get to her big, busy, Carholic family, which bustled with a dozen brothers and sisters. I kept to the wooden
planks that paralleled the town’s main dirt road, and as the warm
boards echoed under my feet, I got to thinking: I had seen eagles and dragonflies and prarmigan fly, but I had never seen a person fly, That didn’r make any sense to me. Hadn’t anyone ever rried it before? Why couldn’r someone just propel herself up into rhe air and get it done?

I stopped and, looked up ar the summer sky, then down at the dirt road below. Then I simply jumped. I didn’t care who might see me. I wanted to fly more than I worried about what I looked like. My knees took most of the impact, and I scraped them both.

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