Going Rogue: An American Life (60 page)

Going Rogue

from the
Wall Street journal, Time,
the Associated Press,
Business Daily,
and
Forbes.
(Perhaps that’s why I was so shocked during rhe VP campaign when Katie Couric wondered which papers and magazines I read. Maybe I should have asked her what
she
reads. She didn’t sound very informed on our energy issues.) The combination of our commissioners’ hard work, our outreach CO the people, the national media barnstorming, and careful consideration by Alaska lawmakers paid of£ On Ftiday, August 1, 2008, Alaskans won again: the legislature overwhelmingly voted to award the AGIA license co TransCanada-Alaska. We still had a long way to go until our clean, safe energy flowed south to the Lowet 48, but aftet a thirty-year wait, we had turned the idea of commercializing our natural gas for Alaska’s economic future from pipe
dream
to
pipeline.

By then my governorship was only twenty monehs old. It had been a season of incredible change, both in Alaska and in my own life. I had been elected governor of the state I loved. And in just the past year, we had kicked off the pipeline, overhauled ethics in state government, slashed state spending with my vetoes, saved for the future, and pur money back inco the hands of the people. Plus, we radically changed the way Alaskans would be secured in the future with the natural tesources they owned.

On a personal level, we said “Hello!” co the new Palin son at one end of the childhood spectrum and clung in our heatts co the
other Palin son, to whom we had to say, “See you soon!” Then
came mote life-changing news. The moneh after Trig was born, Briscol came CO Todd and me and cold us the shocking news that she was pregnane.

Truthfully, I was devastated for my daughter. It wasn’t the morality of the situation-what was done was done. It was that I saw her future change in an instant. Briscol knew what our reaction would be, and that’s why she said giving us the news was

20J

SARAH

PALIN

tougher even rhan labor. It rook a while to absorb ir, too. We prayed about this next step in all our lives and began preparing to welcome this new child

a loving extended family. Though

things would not be easy for Bristol, we knew that with God somehow we could draw good from rhis change.

In
Alaska, we view change a bit differently. For example, wildfires in rhe Lower 48 are ofren rreared as narural disasters. Up here, we often let them burn, knowing that from fire-blackened lands new growth will spring. Often, a searing burn opens dead ground to new light and under the soil, long-dormant seeds germinate, covering fields in blankets of a tall, bright pink flower called fireweed. Here in the Great Land, fireweed grows wild every year. We mark out our summer as its blossoms open from bottom to rop, starting low on the srem around May and popping open higher and higher as the weeks pass undl the last bloom on top rums to new seed.

Month by month in the summer of 2008, from Brisrol’s news in May, to Trig’s first smile, to Track’s readiness Iraq, to the

awarding of the AGIA energy project in August, my life tracked the fireweed’s fuchsia climb. By the time John McCain called me at the State Fair in Augusr, the blooms had reached their peak, the sign that a new season was only a few weeks away.

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