Going Rogue: An American Life (5 page)

Going Rogue

raspberries. We grew produce, like carrors, lettuce, and broccoli, but never could compete with the world-record-setting cabbages like you see at the Alaska State Fair. (The 2009 cabbage winner was a Valley farmer who grew a 127-pounder-twice as big as Piped) We usually baked our own bread and drank powdered milk that was sold in big red-and-white Carnation boxes.
In
so many ways, Alaska is a playground. When Lower 48

parents tell their kids, “Go play outside!” there may be limited options in suburban backyards. But Alaska kids grow up fishing the state’s 3 million lakes in the summer and racing across them in winter on snowmachines, kicking up rooster tails of snow. We hike, ski, sled, snowshoe, hunt, camp, fish, and fly. We have the highest number of pilots per capita in the United States.
In
Alaska, we joke that we have two seasons: consrrucrion and winter. As I grow older, it seems construction season-summernever lasts long enough. Even in a year, summer speeds past in a three-month flash, from mid-May to mid-August.
In
contrast to our long winter darkness, the blessed summer light creates a euphoria that runs through our veins. Hour afrer hour, there is still more time and more daylight to accomplish one more thing.
If
we told our kids to be home before dark, we wouldn’t see them for weeks. The never-ending sun so elongates the days that by September, newcomers to the state (or “Cheechakos”) say rhey’re exhausted enough to hibernate until spring.

In
the early ‘70s, after two years outside Anchorage, my parents saved enough to buy a little house about an hour up the road in the Matanuska-Susitna (Mat-Su) Valley in the one-horse town of Wasilla.

Growing up, there was always work to be done: canning, picking, cleaning, and stacking, stacking, and stacking more firewood, which we burned to heat our home. (My sisrer and r were rereading our girlhood diaries recently, and we must have stacked

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SARAH

PALIN

firewood every day, because on nearly every page we wrote about it!) When it came to chores, there was no arguing: you did them. We always ate at home because there were only a few restaurants around, and after dinner our routine was always the same: washing!” Heather would say.

rinsing!” said Molly.

singing!” I said.

Then Heather washed the dishes and Molly rinsed, while I sat on the washing machine, which was squeezed up against the sink in our sunflower yellow kitchen, and sang until the dishes wete dry. Then I put them away.

I remember banging on the upright piano in the living room and twirling around the floor to Heather’s first record,
The Sound
of Music,
which she bought after seeing the movie. My sisters and I stayed out of trouble, seeming to find it only when hanging out with Chuck and his typical mischief Like the time he and I snowmachined down an empty dirt road and got pulled over by one of the few state troopers in our part of Alaska. It was Christmas Day; we were out in the middle of nowhete, a couple of kids on a snowmachine up against a big dude with a gun and a badge. couldn’t help wondering about his priorities, if he really didn’t have more important things to do, like catching a bad guy, or maybe helping a poor old lady haul in her firewood the night.

Looking back, maybe that was my fitst brush with the skewed priotities of government.

Not far from home, near the Talkeetna Mountains, I learned to hunt. Traveling on skis and snowshoes, we harvested ptarmigan and big game. I love meat. I eat pork chops, thick bacon burgers, and the seared fatty edges of a medium-well-done steak. But I especially love moose and caribou. I always remind people
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Going Rogue

from ourside our state that there’s plenty of room all Alaska’s

animals-right next to the mashed potatoes.

In our northern state, with some communities locared hundreds of miles from big grocery stores, Alaskans have for generations lived on local, organic protein sources Anti-hunting groups are clueless about this. It always puzzled me how some of the people who think killing and eating animals in the wild is somehow cruel have no problem buying dead animals at the grocery store, wrapped in cellophane instead of fur.