Going Rogue: An American Life (4 page)

SARAH PALIN

of mutual aid. People still come to Alaska seeking adventure and a chance to test their mettle in the wilderness.

Good people like Chuck Heath. He arrived for the hunting and fishing but actually hit the’ trifecta: he got rhe adventure he yearned for and earned his master’s degree in education and gor a pay raise to boot. The State of Alaska was paying a premium,

$6,000 a year (more rhan twice whar he was paid in Idaho), to attracr more teachers. So Chuck and Sally Hearh packed up their rhree babies, all under the age of rwenty-eight months, and headed north to Alaska on the adventure that became their life. In those days, it was unusual for an entire family to pull up stakes and relocate ro the Last Ftontier. Unless you were a member of a multigenerational Alaska Native family like my husband Todd’s, it was usually rhe family breadwinner who trekked north to seek adventure and job opportunities, while the nuclear family remained in the safe, known confines of the Lower 48. Five years later Mom and Dad piled our six-person clan into a blue 1964 Rambler, barged it on a ferry to the Alcan Highway, and drove us through part of Canada into Anchorage and a new chapter of Heath family life.

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We moved to a duplex fifteen miles outside Anchorage so Dad could teach at Chugiak Elementary School, in a town that was a little smudge on the map outside the state’s biggest city. Mom worked part-time as the school lunch lady at Eagle River Elementary School, and I loved the fringe benefit of her bringing home leftover homemade rolls from the cafeteria. She later became our school secretary.

My first clear memory of school was when my kindergarten teacher wheeled a black-and-white television into the classroom

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Going Rogue

so we could watch American astronauts land on the moon. The lunar landing had happened in July 1969, before school started, but even watching taped images of an American walking on the moon stirred in me an overwhelming pride in our country-that we could achieve something so magnificent. A similar feeling stirred in me as my class recited the Pledge of Allegiance. I felt proud and tall as we pledged on our hearts every morning. on, I gained great appreciation for the words we spoke: “… the United States of America … one nation under God,
indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
I knew those words held power. And not just those words. I developed a

of reading and

writing early on. Leaning on Mom’s shoulder in the pew at Church on the Wildwood during a Sunday sermon, I heard the pastor use the word”different.”

“I can spell ‘different!”’ I excitedly whispered in her ear, and scribbled it in the margin of the church bulletin.
It
was my first big word, and I was proud to have figured it out myself. It was the first time Mom

give me her stern don’t-talk-in-church look

bur instead smiled warmly and seemed as proud as I was. Reading was a special bond between my mother and me. Mom tead aloud to me-poetry by Ogden Nash and

Alaska writer

Robert Service, along with snippets of prose. She would quote biblical proverbs and ask me to tell her what I thought. She found clever ways to encourage my love of the written word-by reading cookbooks, and jokes out of
Reader’s Digest
together, and writing letters to grandparents. My siblings were better athletes, cutet and more sociable than I, and the only thing they had to envy about me was the special passion for reading that I shared with out mother, who we all thought ranked somewhere up there with the female saints. When the VFW announced that I won a plaque in its annual flag poetry contest for my third-grade poem about Betsy Ross, Mom tteated me like the new Emily Dickinson. Years
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SARAH

PALIN

later, when I won that patriotic group’s annual college scholarship, she was just as proud. My appetite for books connected my schoolreacher father and me, too. For my tenth birthday, his parents sent me
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,
and Dad read it to us at night, I appreciate that now even more, realizing he spent all day teaching elementary school science and coaching high schoolers and then came home no doubt a bit tired of kids.

We still had only one old Rambler car, so we walked most everywhere in our small town, even on icy winter days. Our big trips were drives into Anchorage, and on those rare occasions we’d sing along to

No Mountain High Enough” and “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree” on rhe scratchy AM radio.

“Shut your ears!” Dad would holler when the news came on, in case a sports score was broadcast that would ruin the next week’s game for us. (We avoided the

page, too, so that we wouldn’t

spoil the NFL games we didn’t get to watch until a week after they were played because television broadcastS were tape-delayed in Alaska’s early days.) There was no need ro drive to town often because Mom sewed a lot of our clothes, and we shopped for some via mail order through the Sears catalog.

It wasn’t common in Alaska to have many fresh fruits and vegetables from the Lower 48, and transportation costs drove food prices through the roof. So a lot of what Alaskans ate, we raised or hunted: moose, caribou, ptarmigan, and ducks. Dad and his friends became their own small-game taxidermists. Even today, my parents’ living room looks like a natural history museum. And when an earthquake hits, Dad can tell the magnirude by how fast the tail wags on the stuffed cougar that crouches on a shelf over their big picture window.

When we were kids, we raised chickens, caught fish, and dug for clams.
In
summer, we picked wild blueberries, cranberries, and

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