Not Afraid of Life (8 page)

I wonder what that commercial would be like if Nana had sung it. Not only can she hunt for her own food, catch thousands of pounds of salmon, and make clothing out of squirrel hides, she also sometimes breaks into prayer in Yup’ik (a language of indigenous Alaskans). She makes frying breakfast meat in a pan seem a lot less impressive, huh? Nana’s store sits on Second Avenue, right in the middle of town, and when the commercial fishermen start showing up, her shop buzzes with activity.

The fishermen come every year, because the town is at the head of Nushagak Bay and the mouth of the Wood and Nushagak Rivers. These rivers have all five species of Pacific salmon—coho, chinook, sockeye, humpies, and chum—along with freshwater rainbow trout, Dolly Varden, arctic char, and northern pike. Plus, Bristol Bay has one of the largest salmon runs in the world. (This is ironic, since I’m named after this famous area, and I’m the only Alaskan who hates the taste of fish.) It’s one of the most beautiful places in the world, as it sits at the edge of rolling tundra where caribou, moose, and bear roam through ridges of birch and spruce trees.

Everyone in Dad’s family is in the fish business. My grandmother has a boat called
Bristol K.
My dad’s cousin Ina lives in the village of Ekuk, where they run a fish camp and all of our extended family comes during the summer to fillet and smoke the fish. (In Alaska-speak, Aunt Molly is an Alaskan because she was born here. But my dad is a true Alaskan because his roots are so deeply here, and his family members are Alaska natives, belonging to the original people of our state. And one of the neat things about his heritage is that if you’re related, you’re family. There’s no such thing as “extended family,” everyone is simply a “cousin” no matter how far down the line.) Now that my brother Track is home from Iraq, he’s taking over the family fishing business. It’s a way to make money and to keep the family tradition alive.

The hardware store provides gear to Dillingham and even more remote native villages only reachable by water or air. The fishing season lasts about four weeks, so we’d stay in Dillingham and help Nana sell merchandise to the fishermen. Unfortunately, Willow and I weren’t much help that summer of 2007. Did I mention we fight a lot?

One day we were cleaning the glass shelves under which guns, knives, and other valuables were showcased. She was on one side of the glass and I was on the other. She kept bugging me, so I took the Windex and sprayed it in her general direction. Even though I was a mile away from her, she immediately started screaming, “My eyes! My eyes!” Nana, sick of listening to our constant bickering, grabbed us both by the arm and said, “That’s it! You’re going home!”

As she shoved us into her van, the cold harsh reality sank in. My own grandmother had just fired me. (As I sit here and think about it, I doubt we were even getting paid. It takes a lot to get fired from a job you do for free, but we managed it.) This is the only job from which I’ve been fired.

The fishing season was still going, though, so Dad wasn’t going to let us get away with being bad workers. The next night, we went out in his open-air fishing boat. There are two different ways to commercial fish in Bristol Bay. One way is to drift out in the ocean with nets behind the boat, and the other is to set nets on the beach. Because we have a permit that lets us use the required shore space, that’s where we fish. So we set nets.

Okay, so I know this is a little harder than cleaning the gun cases at the hardware store or pouring coffee, but the way it worked was simple. We’d go to Dillingham, anchor our gillnet on the shoreline, and run it out a couple hundred feet into the water by a small boat called a skiff. When the salmon swam along the shore they were unknowingly right in the path of our net and didn’t realize they were about to be caught and harvested for someone’s dinner. When the fish put their heads into the mesh, the gills got caught in the webbing and they couldn’t escape. (That’s why the net is called a “gillnet.”)

Alaska has some of the most stringent environmental laws on the planet, so there are only certain times you can go out to fish. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game looks at the tides and says, “You can only fish for three hours between the hours of two
A.M.
and five
A.M.
” So that’s what we did. We’d wait for the tide to go out and get on a boat in the middle of the night.

On that particular fishing night, it was freezing cold, and we had no pillows or blankets. (Dad is all business and never tried to make things unnecessarily comfortable for us!) Plus, there is no cell phone service at all out there on the water. At Nana’s house, she has one home phone and one computer, but the only way to communicate with her is through a radio on the boat.

After we set the net, we had to wait. Because the boat was open air, there was nothing to stop the harsh wind from cutting right through us. There was a lot of wind and smashing waves, but it wasn’t dark. It’s rarely dark in the summers in Alaska, so we get to pack in a lot of fun (or, in my dad’s case, work) at all kinds of hours. We were always pretty close to land, but I felt so isolated out there on the water. It was just me, my family, and nothing but waiting. It seemed we waited out there the whole night, and I gradually felt the tips of my ears, fingers, and toes go numb.

Eventually I had to take matters into my own hands. On the boat we carry “brailers,” which are enormous bags in which you can put up to two thousand pounds of fish. Suffice it to say they don’t smell too great. But I was desperate. I crawled right into one and got a little protection from the wind coming off the water.

That night, as I snuggled in that stinky brailer, I was wet and tired and couldn’t keep myself from complaining.

“Come on, Dad,” I begged. “Don’t you care your oldest daughter is freezing to death?”

He didn’t. We were out there to catch sockeye, we were out there to make money, and that’s what we did.

Finally, we checked the buoys, and it was time to pull in the net. That’s when I got out of the nasty, wet brailer and started picking the fish out of the net. Because the salmon swim in such tight schools, you don’t have many “extra” fish that sneak in that you have to get rid of. To get the fish out of the net and into my former “sleeping bag,” the brailer, I had to rip them out of the mesh and toss them into the container.

Not only is this our family tradition, it’s usually a good way to make money, though it’s a big gamble financially. Sometimes you make lots of money and some years you barely break even. A drift boat in a good season gets about a hundred thousand pounds of fish. These days, the price hovers around a dollar a pound. When Dad was Piper’s age, the price was a dollar and twenty-five cents a pound. Even though that’s a long time ago, it’s how the price fluctuates. In other words, a good season depends on how many fish you catch and what the market is. If you get a hundred thousand pounds, but are only getting twenty cents a pound, there’s no way around it. It’s just not a good season.

“How many pounds did we get?” I asked Dad after we picked out the salmon.

He could tell I was busy calculating. “So it’s going for sixty cents per pound, and I get 10 percent, that’s . . .” Suddenly, I wished I hadn’t skipped so many of Coach Brown’s math classes.

“It’s not much,” Dad said as he skipped to the point. “But can’t judge the season off one night, you gotta look at the whole season.”

I remember being so glad to see the “tender boat” (the middlemen who buy fish directly from fishermen on the water). They tied up the boats, weighed and unloaded the fish, and took them to a shore-based cannery and processor.

But our part on the boat was done, and we went home to Nana’s, where more work awaited. We washed the boat, packed the fish we were keeping for our family, and made sure we kept the truck and gear nets properly. In other words, summer “vacations” weren’t really all that relaxing, but it did teach me the value of hard work.

But I still won’t ever eat salmon.

Chapter Five

Failing the Test

I
’m having trouble admitting it here, but something else happened that summer of 2007 in Wasilla. Somewhere between all of the coffee pouring and fish catching, I broke my promise to myself and God.

I wasn’t drunk, it wasn’t an accident, and I did it on purpose.

After the original incident with Levi on Point MacKenzie, guilt settled around me like an unwanted friend, tagging along wherever I went, whispering to me in the night when my head hit the pillow. The way I dealt with it was simple. I tried to ignore the constant tugging at my spirit. And when that didn’t work, I reasoned with it.

We’d messed up just once, I thought. I hadn’t been sleeping around like a lot of my other friends. I wasn’t known for being rowdy. Although we had an up-and-down type of relationship, Levi had committed himself to me, and we’d been dating on and off for one year by this time. Plus, we were going to get married anyway.

And that’s what made things worse. I began thinking of a wedding in a totally twisted light. Instead of it being a romantic conclusion of a long dating experience or the poignant beginning of a long life together, it became my Band-Aid—the thing that would somehow make our bad decisions okay.

The side effect of grasping onto the idea of a future marriage is that I suddenly become very dedicated to the idea of a “happily ever after” scenario. So I ignored a lot. I overlooked his lies, his inability to attend school, and his occasional romps with other girls.

Yes, I knew about them. I saw them. But, again, I ignored a lot.

It wasn’t like I had no other options. I was popular, had other guys asking me out, and—by this time—had already been on other dates and even had been interested in other guys. When I came back from Juneau at the end of the school year, I was driving to Aunt Molly’s when Levi and I passed each other on the road. He was driving a new Silverado he’d gotten for his seventeenth birthday.

Hey, babe

he texted.

I just passed you. Pull over?

I pulled into the Yamaha parking lot, rolled down the window, and, when he drove up, I noticed he had more than just a new truck. There were hickeys all over his neck.

“What is all that?” I said, pointing to them. “Puke!”

“I was superdrunk the other night.”

It doesn’t sound like a good way to reignite the flame, but we did.

Believe it or not, we had a good summer. He was faithful to me during those two months, and things felt comfortable between us. We were inseparable. We didn’t go out with friends, we didn’t party, we didn’t drink, and we didn’t even really go out on dates. Even though we were so young, I felt like I was half of an old married couple.

Around this time, Levi started to spoil me materialistically. He gave me Coach purses, nice rings, Abercrombie clothes, as well as Coach and Juicy rain boots. It was nice to be treated well. He bought me whatever I wanted—and many things I didn’t know I wanted—because he was trying to make up for straying so much in the past. Since he was trying to make things right, I had hope for our future.

That’s why, so many months after Point MacKenzie, we had sex again. It was part “thank you,” part “security deposit.” After all, it seemed Levi had needs. If I wasn’t going to fill them, I feared he’d go back to his old ways. And I hated the idea of him being with other girls.

After I started talking about this story on a national level—trying to get teens to think about waiting until marriage to have sex—every single reporter asked me, “Did you use contraception when you had sex with Levi?”

I think they desperately wanted me to say that no, we didn’t. I think they wanted to find a chink in my mother’s political armor, and to be able to say that my pregnancy was the result of my mother’s old-fashioned values.

However, it couldn’t have been further from the truth. Like most teens, society had taught us (wrongly) that “safe sex” would prevent pregnancy and heartache. So we used condoms.

I thought giving in to him would finally secure his attention on the way to the marriage altar. I thought he’d now think only of me. I thought it would get rid of the shame that followed me around day and night if I simply lowered my expectations.

And it worked for a while.

It was a pretty good semester. I only played indoor soccer league, which was different from my normal multisport level of activity. I worked at two espresso shops, and I was also elected copresident of the Prom Committee. That meant I was supposed to help select our theme, purchase the decorations, set up the photo shoots, and make sure that prom was one of the best nights of high school for our seniors. With my extra time, I also took online classes from BYU to get ahead in school. I wanted to get as many credits as possible so I could move forward in life. This was a slightly different approach than Levi was taking to high school. He didn’t even attend, except for maybe a class or two at the alternative school to enable him to play hockey.

No one in my life supported my relationship with Levi. Track always looked like he was on the verge of kicking his ass, my cousins never understood what I saw in him, and my aunts didn’t think he was worth dating. Mom and Dad, who had no idea we’d been dating so seriously for nearly two years, didn’t like that I was spending so much time with him. Dad even offered one day to buy me a new truck if I’d just break it off.

I thought Levi was handsome, but my family would ask a million questions and make unflattering comments: “What do you see in this kid? He always has a fat lip because of all his chewing tobacco, he has a goofy haircut that looks suspiciously like a mullet, and he never goes to school!”

They were right, of course. I see that now.

As the end of the semester approached, Mom prepared to return to Juneau for the next legislative session in January.

“Don’t make me go back there,” I said. I loved my time in Juneau, but the thought of going back to that high school with the catty girls didn’t sound too appealing. Plus, even though Levi had pledged to be faithful, I didn’t want to be so far away from him.

“Well, you’re not living alone here,” she said. Dad’s job on the Slope meant I’d be way too alone for a girl my age.

Thankfully, we always have family to rely on. When Mom asked Aunt Heather for help, she didn’t hesitate to offer a place for me to stay—in her daughter Lauden’s bedroom—about an hour up the road in Anchorage.

During the last week of school at Wasilla in 2007, I put one of my Coach purses down beside my desk in my human relations class and slid into the seat. My teacher, who was my eighth-grade basketball coach’s wife, got up in front of the class and announced a new assignment. “Class, tomorrow I’d like for you to bring in five items that represent your life. They can be anything at all; I just want you to speak to the class about what those objects mean to your life.”

I don’t remember what the other four items were, but one of my items was a pair of scissors.

As I prepared to go to my third school in three years, I had another precious chance at a new start. I brought the scissors in because it represented a question I was struggling with in my mind.

I wrote, “Should I keep dating Levi, or should I totally cut ties with him?”

I may have made an A on the homework assignment, but I ultimately failed that test.

A
nchorage is Alaska’s largest city, and it was close enough to Wasilla that Levi and I could maintain some semblance of a relationship. Aunt Heather was like Carol Brady. She woke us up at 5:30 every morning with a hot breakfast and served a home-cooked meal at night . . . even though she worked a full-time job as a teacher of children with special needs. She and Uncle Kurt own the cleanest Chevron Gas Station in the state, so I enjoyed talking to him about business. In fact, I peppered him with so many questions, he let me borrow a book called
Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
Frequently, I’d bounce ideas off him about how to become financially independent through real estate and investing. They have three kids: Landon, their son who’s the youngest in the family; Karcher, who has autism; and Lauden, who’s one of my best friends. We always dreamed of being able to live closer to each other, and now we were sharing the same bathroom! It was like having a sister, which meant . . . twice as many clothes! We wore the same size, so we had fun trading out jeans and jackets.

I was nervous attending West Anchorage High School, which is one of the biggest and oldest high schools in Alaska. My first day there was even more intimidating than my first day at Wasilla High. As I walked through the doors, I saw all of the teeming people—natives, Samoans, African Americans, and Asians—about two thousand students packed into the school. Security guards stood at doorways, ready to stop trouble before it started. Everything seemed rougher, tougher, cooler, and much more exciting than my small-town life in Wasilla.

But Levi was never very far away.

Even though a short distance separated us during that semester, we made frequent trips between Anchorage and Wasilla.

And sometimes I went even farther to be with him. When his high school hockey team was playing in Homer, Mom wouldn’t let me drive there with him. The trip would take two hundred miles, and she didn’t want me to spend that much time with him. Instead, she suggested I fly and stay at a hotel with Ben’s mom. But I was stubborn and urged Mom to let me go with Levi—I didn’t want him to drive up there alone, I reasoned with her. Really, though, I simply wanted to be with my boyfriend.

I was so proud when she finally relented and said she trusted me.

We didn’t leave Anchorage until eight or nine o’clock at night. It was March and the roads were icy and the snow was coming down. Instead of that worrying me, however, I was just so happy to be with Levi. Lauden and I always made fun of girls who sat in the middle of trucks to be next to their boyfriends. But on that trip I sat right there in the middle of his new red Silverado. He was so proud to have me in that truck, which he kept so clean. He’d put a sound system in it, painted the interior, and even put a sweet-sounding exhaust on it. He put his arm around me in that truck, and the world just felt right. I felt protected and loved.

Levi and I stopped for gas at a station near Girdwood, and we both got out to get pops from the store. At the same time, a few people were walking out, including a big guy who was strutting right toward us. Our fingers were intertwined. I remember that Levi was also holding a can of Copenhagen in his palm—and he just kept on walking. He stuck his chest out and walked straight to the door, right into that guy’s path. When we got back to the truck, he said, “You can’t ever let anyone get in your way. If you walk straight, they’ll move.”

I thought Levi was so tough, so wonderfully protective. I loved the feeling of being with him. We finally made it to Homer at one or two in the morning and went to the hotel Levi’s team was staying in. Sammy, who was also there for the game, and I got a room there, too, and I put it on my debit card. I was proud to be able to afford my own hotel room because of the money I’d made at the coffee stand. After Levi got his gear out of his truck and we waited a long enough time for the coaches to be asleep, we snuck out to be with each other some more. That’s when I knew I could marry Levi. Even though we’d just spent all evening together in the truck, we wanted to still see each other! I would’ve married him then if I could’ve.

The next day, Sammy and I drove Levi’s truck to the ice rink. It was so cold inside the arena that the people in the crowd were all huddled up, trying to keep warm. I went out to Levi’s truck between periods and got the only coat he had out there—a huge fleece pullover camouflage hunting jacket, which swallowed me up. When he went back to the locker room after the next period, he texted me saying that he loved the way I looked in his jacket. This brought a smile to my face, and I didn’t care that I looked ridiculous in that coat. Levi was my man, and I didn’t have to impress anyone else.

They won the game, which put Levi in a wonderful mood. Even the weather seemed to perk up! We drove home under clear, sunny skies. I sat right there in the middle of the truck, with Levi’s arm around me, and everything was exactly as I wanted it to be.

Just a few weeks later, I was flush with the excitement of a relationship that was finally on track. I loved Levi, and loved watching him glide over the ice in his hockey games. And so, when I heard he had a game in Wasilla, I bundled up, jumped in my car, and drove the hour to the ice rink. I climbed up near the top of the stands and was happily chatting with my friends Sammy and Chelsea. They were filling me in on all the details of Wasilla High School life that I was missing. That’s when my eyes landed on a girl a few rows down.

“Look,” I said to my friends, pointing at the girl’s back.

“What?” they said, not knowing why I was visibly upset.

“That girl is for sure wearing Levi’s jacket!”

“How can you tell?” they asked.

“Because I’d know that jacket anywhere!” I said. “Trust me. It’s his.”

After the game, I got a ride home with Ben, one of Track’s hockey friends. As we were pulling out of the parking lot, we drove past Levi and that girl walking out to Levi’s truck. She was stepping on my territory. I was fuming.

Levi lied about it, but I knew what I saw. During that time, I started hanging out more with Ben. He’d stayed with my brother at our house while his parents were in the lower forty-eight the previous year. He was also a friend of Levi’s. So when my heart was broken—once again—by Levi, he understood in a way that many people couldn’t. After all, he knew all of the characters in my dramatic life pretty well. Though things didn’t get romantic between us, I appreciated Ben’s willingness to listen to my complaints and concerns. He became one of my best friends, a relationship that helped me make it through that semester of relationship ups and downs.

Levi was like an old pair of shoes I should’ve gotten rid of but kept around because of the comfort.

W
hen, a few weeks later, a guy from West Anchorage asked me out I thought,
Why not?
He was a cute hockey stud, seemed very respectful, and I said yes. What did I have to lose?