Sarah Palin: Valley Girl V.P.

We went to the Alaska State Fair yesterday in Palmer, Alaska, Usually I make it a point not to go to the fair unless it’s guaranteed to be sunny. On a sunny day, the fair is everything a state fair should be: the ferris wheel, cotton candy, painted faces and baby farm animals. Oh, and giant cabbages and other outsized vegetables looking like they were grown in the front yard of a nuclear power plant. That’s what summers with 24 hour light will do to a zucchini.

On a rainy day, though, the fair is like a scene from a Ray Bradbury story or a Stephen King book. Leering carnies, limping freaks, cranky kids, and the smell of wet dog everywhere. Who needs it?

But this year, the weather was so unpredictable, and with only three days left, we decided to brave it and head out. And miracle of miracles, we got sun. Perhaps it was the Valley’s way of celebrating the ascension of hockey-mom-turned-Republican-pin-up-girl Sarah Palin to the Republican vice presidential nomination.

The mood at the fair was jubilant. Newly printed “McCain/Palin” t-shirts were already out in full force and going faster than barbequed turkey legs. Every other conversation was abuzz with the talk of how our governor, our own home-grown Valley Girl, was now in the national spotlight.

Even I, a staunch Massachusetts Democrat, have to admit there’s a certain wow factor in having one of our own be chosen. Alaska is so small in population, and so forgotten on the political map, that having someone we practically KNOW be catapulted into the limelight does give you a little thrill. No one’s ignoring us NOW. Suddenly, my voice mail and e-mail is flooded with people wanting to know: JUST WHO IS THIS ALASKAN CHICK?

We first heard the news about Sarah’s nomination from -who else? – my father, calling at 7 in the morning from the east coast to ask what we thought. We watched the coverage in a haze of disbelief. I found it hard to shake the thought that we were really viewing a Saturday Night Live skit, with Tina Fey playing the Palinista.

Is she attractive? Sure. After all, she was Miss Wasilla in 1984 and a runner-up to Miss Alaska. One of our friends jokingly describes her look at “porn star librarian”; you can’t accuse her of pantsuit frumpiness. Is she spunky? Let’s just say if Sally Fields were 20 years younger, she’d be playing her in the bio-pic. Does she superficially represent the demographic that McCain hopes to entice? Probably. She’s young. She’s hot. She’s a hunter and an evangelical Christian and a mother of five. Yeah, she’s being used shamelessly, and she’d be an idiot not to know it. Hell, isn’t that what politics are all about?

But let’s get real for a minute. Wasilla is a town of approximately 7,000, composed mostly of the kind of folks that inspired my post on aerial shooting of wolves (which, I might add, Sarah’s administration heartily supports). The joke about Wasilla is that after a divorce, you can still be brother and sister. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Still, Sarah has been governor here for less than two years. She is currently embroiled in a local controversy involving her sister’s ex-husband that would make a fantastic Mexican telenovella. I’m not underestimating her smarts – she’s no dummy, and I respect that – but from governor of Alaska to the now-cliched “heartbeat away” from running the country?

As a Presidential hopeful, McCain’s decision is not only foolish, it’s downright irresponsible. When I help people with estate planning, I tell them to pick guardians and trustees for their kids as if they were going to die tomorrow. And the chance of that happening to McCain is a whole lot higher than most of those new young parents. “Plan for the worst, hope for the best” is a wise strategy; instead, McCain is hoping for the best and making the worst plan.

And about that whole gender issue. I’m all for women rising up in the political world, but to think that Sarah Palin could somehow steal the Hillary voters is ludicrous and offensive to women. Ms. Palin is no advocate for women when it comes to social and political issues that concerned Hillary’s supporters, especially on the issue of abortion rights. She may be a woman, but she’s not THE woman, and I’d like to think women have made it far enough that they can be judged on their merits, not on their gender. Hey, McCain – we’re not stupid.

Back at the fair, the Bug and I rode on a little roller coaster that made me want to hurl, and he rode the ferris wheel with his dad. We ate crab cakes and bisque and Denali cream puffs and a baked potato filled with chicken curry and shave ice and a pulled pork sandwich and ice cream and pizza and jambalaya. I felt like the rat, Templeton, from “Charlotte’s Web.” And when we got home, my husband actually complained that he forgot to get the newest food hit, a pork chop on a stick.

Then the Bug won a stuffed penguin and a toy snake by fishing rubber ducks out of a pond. We patted every animal in the petting zoo, and the Bug cried for the donkey who was muzzled so he wouldn’t eat the goat food. We watched the BMX guys and a dog catching frisbees. All in all, a great day at the fair. And all that time, we tried not to think about our nation with Sarah Palin in charge, because it made the day a little chillier.

On the way out, all tired and nauseous from overindulgence, we ran into some friends. As we all stood there surrounded by Palin supporters in their newly-minted grey t-shirts, I joked that we should start selling “NO McCain/Palin” shirts, while my husband said, “Sarah Palin? What a nightmare!”

Our friend looked around nervously. “Keep it down,” he hissed. “You could get lynched out here for saying that!”

Probably. Or at least beaten senseless with a giant zucchini.

Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?

Since moving to Alaska, I’ve resigned myself to the way Alaskans think all evil emanates from either California or New York. “Don’t Californicate Alaska” is the ubiquitous cry of bumper stickers, usually on giant souped up gas-guzzling pick-up trucks. Environmentalists, anti-death penalty folks, gun control advocates, anti-Big Oil Companies: all of these tree-hugging, latte-chugging, wolf-fugging liberals need to GO BACK TO CALIFORNIA. RIGHT NOW. Unless they’re from New York, in which case, GO BACK TO NEW YORK. It doesn’t matter if you’ve lived here all your life; if you’re liberal, you’re really from one of those two states. And the saddest part is that Alaska Democrats would be moderate Republicans in Massachusetts.

Think I’m kidding? Here are a few comments on the issue of whether limits should be placed on the state’s “predator control” program, which currently allows wolves to be shot from airplanes by civilians. This measure was voted down, meaning that the Alaska Department of Fish and Game retain total discretion to allow wolves and bears to be gunned down from the air, in the interests of boosting moose and caribou populations. Because Nature, you know, has only been around for millions of years and has no idea how to handle things like we do.

Here are just a few choice quotes from the comments on this issue in the Anchorage Daily News today:

Anyone who would be against Alaskans putting meat on the table probably SHOULD go back to California. Somehow I doubt anyone will be standing in your way. Have a delightful journey.

Nice spin here: if you don’t like aerial hunting of predators, it’s because you WANT PEOPLE TO STARVE.

Now you transplant Californians can go home and leave the PREDATOR CONTROL up to the people who get paid to make decisions. All of the liberal bunch of phony, bunny hugging, whining anti-hunters smoking alder leaves can go cry in your Osama Barack Hussein covered Rolling Stones magazine. Boo-hooo-hooo!

Sticks and stones, buddy, sticks and stones.

You enviromentalist wacko’s have been stuffing my mailbox all summer with “THIS ISN”T HUNTING” vote YES on “2″. Now if you can’t read your mail like any literate human being, then you need to be shot down like the filthy wolves. I pray for lots of deep tracking snow and good flying weather. If the ADFG needs to borrow my hammer to crush some puppy skulls, give me a call!

Looks like someone’s been hitting the meth a little too hard.

By the way have you wolf huggers ever watched a wolf when it comes upon a moose that is trying to give birth and is defenseless? Nah, you would not beleive the horror the cow experiences as the wolf only eats the tender inners and leaves the rest to rot.

Oh, right – because those hunters are deeply concerned about the emotional state of moose.

I’m not even going to bother posting counter-arguments here; it would just send my blood pressure through the roof. But I guarantee you every one of these commenters has one of those Calvin stickers pissing on “Obama/Osama/Ford/Chevy/my ex-wife” on the back of their pick-up truck, along with one of those licenses to hunt terrorists. And a few missing teeth.

Oops, I’m engaging in the same kind of stereotyping I just condemned. Still, there’s a certain kind of proud asshole mentality that reigns here in Alaska. We’re resourceful, we’re independent, we’re rugged, and we’re mostly on our own. It’s what makes people do things like rebuild a local restaurant after it burns down, as happened in Hope. It’s also what makes them so close-minded and unwilling to learn from the mistakes of others, or to think of anything but their own immediate interests.

As everyone who saw the Simpsons movie knows, every Alaskan gets annual money from the state from oil revenues, through a program called the Permanent Fund. This year it’s supposedly going to be about $2,000 per person. Talk about bribery. We have no state income tax, no sales tax, and we’re sitting on close to THIRTY SIX BILLION DOLLARS. But if you asked Alaskans whether they’d give up the their dividend for a state-subsidized health care system, I am pretty sure they’d say NO FUCKING WAY, I’ll take my money and buy myself a snowmobile, thank you.

Yep, it’s an odd combination of entitlement and paranoia – one hand out, the other reaching for a rifle. Alaska consistently votes Republican, yet of all states, we have the highest percentage of its population on welfare: that’s big government subsidized programs, people. See any irony there? Here’s another telling fact: in fourteen years of drafting Wills for people, I can count on one hand the number of clients who have left money to charities. We keep our money buried in the yard here, preferably in gold, and no profiteering non-profit is going to lay hands on it.

At least one commenter on the ADN website gets it:

So it’s okay to vote for more government to make it easier to kill moose, but it’s not okay to vote for more government when you can’t afford to see the doctor.I just want to make sure I’ve got my Republican hypocrisy straight.

In the fourteen years I’ve lived here, I’ve changed my mind about a lot of issues. For instance, growing up in Boston, I never really understood that guns could be used for anything but killing other people. Here, I have friends who carry guns solely to protect themselves from bears while hiking in remote areas. I have rural Native clients who hunt for subsistence. In a semi-rural environment, having a gun means something entirely different than in the urban ghetto. I still support gun control and I won’t be joining the NRA any time soon, but at least I have a better understanding of the issues involved.

Unfortunately, Alaskans are often not willing to entertain that kind of discussion in a rational way, as can be seen from the hideous gloating now occurring on-line and in hearts everywhere. Maybe this state is still just too young and selfish, sort of like a teenaged boy who won’t put on his seatbelt because it’s uncomfortable and stupid, and anyway, he thinks he’ll live forever. And in the meantime, he’s gonna go out and shoot himself some wolves.

The thingness of things.

A debate with my brother in the comments over the value of texting led me to use the expression “the thingness of things.” At that moment, I was alluding to the question of whether reading a book – by which I mean holding a collection of printed pages – results in a different experience than reading the same book downloaded onto your Blackberry. I believe it does. To me, there’s something more satisfying about the tangible, the dimensional, the THINGNESS of a book in your hands.

Then I realized this philosophy extends to other areas of my life. I’ve always liked the crackle of notebook pages filled with handwriting. When I was in junior high school, I would press as hard as I could when taking notes just to get the handfeel of a well-used page. I was especially picky about pens back then because of being left-handed; the ink had to flow without smudging and dry quickly. I also love journals filled with pasted photos and scraps and well-worn pages, THINGS that have a tactile THINGNESS to them.

Along those lines (no pun intended), I was once hugely obsessed with people’s handwriting. When I was younger, I used to covet the writing style of certain people whose qualities I admired. Did they make their “a” with or without that loop on top? Was their “g” two circles or a closed “y”?

My friend Sarah made the most wonderful “S’s, casual squiggles, no two ever alike. Her writing was messy and slanted, and she rarely followed the lines of notebook paper. I don’t think this habit was anything she affected. It was more a sign of her creativity and rebellious nature that she would not be kept to the straight and narrow, her thought process too rapid to be fettered by convention. My husband has the most legible handwriting of anyone I know, and that’s his personality too – clear, direct, nothing to hide or obscure, no tangle of alphabet (he saves that for fishing line).

That’s why I keep in a box in the closet THINGS that are meaningful to me, not only those letters from my beloved friend Sarah, but silly drawings my sister and I made, letters from my grandfather, the few precious notes in English my grandmother painstakingly wrote me on special occasions. And a brief letter from my father upon my passing the Alaska bar exam, written in blue ink during a plane flight on Al-Italia’s first class menu. Over A selection of fine olives he wrote words he could never say aloud except under hypnosis: “I am proud of you”.

Sentimental? Perhaps. But to me, it’s not just about remembering, it’s about EXPERIENCING thingness, and the ways things preserve experience. I like to engage as many senses as possible on a single pursuit, rather than multi-tasking, which feels to me like trying to make your eyes go in two different directions. It’s why I prefer blackjack to craps, and why I love thrift shopping. When I go to Goodwill or Value Village, I’m there for the hunt, that visceral thrill of finding not what you were looking for, but something else entirely. It might be the perfect shirt for your friend’s son, or a great vintage dress. Shopping this way satisfies all of my hunting and gathering instincts, only instead of killing something, I’m rescuscitating it. And saving money. And recycling. And of course it sounds better to say, “Honey, I’m going out to rescue endangered clothing.”

Like rock climbing, thrift shopping sharpens my focus, though I could do without the smell. I can glance over a rack of pants and tell you which ones are expensive designer brands. I can run my fingers across the sweaters to pick out the cashmere. If I were a superhero, my name would be SuperCheapGirl, or maybe Thriftora, saving doomed clothing around the world.

When I was in law school, my sister and I regularly got our clothes at a place we called Rags. We never did find out the real name, and it was semi-secret, word of mouth only. This place, located somewhere in the maze of streets behind M.I.T. in Cambridge, in the garment district, was basically purgatory for clothes at the end of the line, about to be shredded into industrial rags. Like the Hogwarts stairs, it would seem to disappear and materialize at random. On weekends only, from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m., they would open their doors to the public, letting us up the wooden stairs to a dark warehouse sized room filled with shredding machines that looked like medieval torture devices, torn bits of clothing hanging from their fangs. It smelled just like you would imagine, like machine oil, unaired laundry, and cat pee.

And piled on the floor was an ocean of clothes and old blankets and shoes, through which we all – bleary-eyed college students, homeless people, parents, vintage clothing sellers – would dig in the hopes of uncovering buried treasure. More than once I uncovered a cat snoozing in a nest of clothing. It was a complete free-for-all, wading knee-deep in other people’s cast-offs. Whatever you found went into a giant trashbag, to be weighed on a huge scale at the door and paid for at $1 per pound.

It was a real melting pot. It’s hard to feel superior to anyone when you’re all digging through what’s a step away from trash. The only time I ever saw someone angry was when a reporter starting snapping pictures; one woman covered her face and hollered at him that she didn’t want to be seen in the paper. I have to confess I was also slightly enamored of the guy who ran the place, a grizzly middle-aged leather-clad biker type who sat in a folding chair drinking coffee, looking like he lived there. He had gnarly grey hair and peaceable blue eyes, and I especially loved that he was always reading the New York Times. Once I asked him if he was drinking Irish coffee; he dipped his pinky into his cup and said with a grin, “Now I am.”

We Ragsters even kept a journal of our finds. We had categories: Best Find of the Day (the best find ever was a 60’s lime green mod-style suede miniskirt); Ugly Find of the Day, etc. We had rules, too, like if you ever found a matching pair of anything, you had to keep it. Or if everyone else hated it, you had to throw it back. We even had a theme song, “The Ballad of the Lone Clog”, composed in honor of a beautiful single leather clog my friend Robyn once found.

After a victorious outing, we would eat breakfast at a local diner, still only half-awake. When we got home we would re-sort through our bags, do laundry, and at my mother’s insistence, all take hot showers to wash off the contagion. My family from India found the whole used-clothing thing revolting – what if I was wearing the clothes of some dead person? – while for me, that was the very appeal of it. Going to Rags was the most fun I had in law school until I went to Hawai’i.

A few months ago, my sister called me to tell me that she found the Rags journal. As she read me the entries, we laughed till we nearly cried. THE BALLAD OF THE LONE CLOG? If not for that journal, I would have completely forgotten those details. And that lime green suede skirt, which I lost somewhere in my travels.

It probably wouldn’t fit me now anyway, but I still do miss it; it was just one of those things.

Belt me up, Scotty.

I had a fashion crisis yesterday. A serious fashion crisis. Normally my biggest fashion dilemma in the morning is: Am I dressed? In my own clothes? Am I adequately prepared for rain/snow/hail/hurricane-force winds? Am I still wearing my slippers? Whether I am in style generally does not even enter the equation.

That’s because Alaska is not exactly a trend-setting fashion hot spot. We’re more like a fashion dumping ground, unless you consider the fashion industry’s brief love affair with Carhartts, the official state uniform. I remember going to New York years back, seeing Carhartts in the window of Canal Street Jeans, and thinking OH MY GOD, NEW YORKERS DO MANUAL LABOR?

At the airport in Seattle or Portland, you can always spot the gate for the flight to Alaska by the way the passengers look. Mostly they are in Patagonia or North Face, or overalls, or else in flannel and acid-wash black denim Wranglers from two decades ago. Flying into Anchorage feels like traveling back in time. When people ask me what time zone we’re in, I tell them the truth: 1985. Feathered hair? Check. L.L. Bean duck boots? Check. High-waisted tapered-leg Lee jeans? Check.

In some ways, it’s good to be out of touch. I don’t know what benighted soul thought those puffy sleeve shirts were attractive. They were bad news back in the 1980s, and they are bad now. No one looks good in them. Yet they were even a huge fashion trend in India, and I remember wearing salwar kameez with gathered shoulders so wide I had to turn sideways to get in the door. Not flattering, believe me.

Plus, no one here judges you by what you wear, unless of course it’s outdoor gear related, in which case people can be as vicious as Simon Cowell. Mostly it’s debates like: Would you freeze to death more quickly in wool or polypro? And is that really the latest high-tech waterproof windblock fabric? Wherever DID you get it, dahling?

Otherwise, no one really cares. That homeless dude on the bench could have a couple of million dollars buried in his trailer lot. The hot woman dressed to the nines could be a hooker. I can wear my Uggs to court. Even the Performing Arts Center here actually encourages people to wear whatever feels comfortable to their shows. When you go to a play or concert, you might see women in full length evening gowns while their date is in, yes, Carhartts.

I think that’s cool, especially coming from the East Coast. A friend of mine from Alaska who visited Boston asked me why there were so many gay men there, and when I asked her why she thought that, she said, “Well, the guys are all so – you know – dressed up.”

Of course, if you wait long enough, everything comes back into fashion, even though some of us here never thought it was out in the first place. Like the puffy sleeve, or those skinny-leg pants that teenage girls covet today which can be seen on middle-aged women here, especially in colors like purple and green.

So yesterday, two events converged to make me realize just how out of style I am. One, my husband was able to pick up the Bug from preschool, meaning that I had a couple of hours after work to myself. And two, I went to a bookstore and flipped through a fashion magazine.

That’s how I discovered that BELTS ARE IN.

For absolutely no good reason, my heart started racing. Did I own a belt? A COOL belt? A belt that could be worn on the outside of clothing? And where was my waist, exactly?

Suddenly, I had a horrible flashback to 1983, when MTV videos were at their heyday, and that Eurotrashy Duran Duran look was in, as was neon, rubber jewelry, and Dippity-Do, when we all wore lots of pink spandex and grey paisley with white tap shoes, and I, sorry to say, owned a wide pink vinyl belt that I wore to cinch a white button-down shirt. Oh, the shame.

Of course, it looked TERRIBLE, and I was never comfortable because I had to fiddle incessantly with the shirt to make it poof just right over and below the belt. I may have even burned the entire outfit when the 80s ended and I could just wear old Levis and a zip hoodie like God intended.

And now, right there in the pages of this magazine were these celebrities and fashion models somehow wearing THAT SAME BELT. Under their breasts, slung at the hips, cinching their ridiculously tiny waists. Most of them look awful, too, just like I did 20-odd years ago.

Maybe they all need to move to Alaska and get a REAL sense of style.

Fish on.

The Bug caught his first salmon this weekend.

Well, “caught” isn’t really the right word. The run of pink salmon, or “humpies”, is basically over, and as the spawned-out salmon return upstream to die, the river in Hope becomes a fishy version of “Night of the Living Dead“. You can practically hear “Thriller” playing as they swim.

Not that they’re really swimming. These salmon are so weak and decrepit, a two year old could wade in and pick one up with bare hands, as I saw one child actually do. They look the way I felt when I ran a half-marathon. And they’re not edible, either; they’re downright repulsive. Even the bears won’t touch them. Right now the riverbanks are littered with rotting fish carcasses, and the smell is enough to gag you.

So what the Bug REALLY did is snag one of these miserable zombie fish – suicidal and hoping for a merciful death, for all I know – and reel it in to shore. The fact that he was able to do this with his miniature Superman fishing rod and 5 pound test line says it all. This particular fish looked like it had been caught and released by psychotic toddlers about fifteen times already.

After due celebration, the Bug waved his hand magnimoniously, like the Pope granting absolution, and said, “Aw, let him go.” So my husband unhooked the salmon and threw it back in the water, where it lay on its side gaping at him mournfully, like that undercover cop at the end of “Reservoir Dogs”.

Nevertheless, the Bug was ecstatic to have actually brought in a fish. His bloodthirsty enthusiasm surprised me, given that he is a nature lover. This is a boy who loses sleep over the fate of endangered animals and wants to be an animal rescuer when he grows up. He has Sierra Club written all over him, or maybe even PETA. Yet the first time he watched people fishing, he was particularly fascinated by the filleting process, and oh yeah, that nasty little part after landing the fish when you bash the salmon’s head in with a rock until its eye pops out. I’m not sure he could actually do it, but he certainly wasn’t above watching.

Fortunately, we haven’t had to do any salmon-bashing yet. In fact, between my husband and me, in 15 years of living in Alaska, we have yet even to catch a fish. My husband is more bitter about this than I am, but the problem really is that he doesn’t have a fisherman’s personality. He’s just not the kind of guy who can repetitively cast and reel, cast and reel, without hope of reward. After all, he complains about eating salad because “chewing lettuce is boring”; he’s not about to spend the day tossing a hook around just for fun.

I, on the other hand, come from India, from generations of people able to squat motionless for hours on end. I’m not sure where the idea of meditation originally came from, but I’m pretty sure the original meditators were really just squatting around staring mindlessly. From there, it’s not a far stretch to fishing, only instead of squatting, you’re standing and shivering transcendentally in hip waders. I love fishing; I just don’t associate it with actually catching fish. I’d rather get my salmon at the grocery store, without all the eye-popping-out business.

So we warned the Bug that, given his lineage, he might not catch anything, possibly ever in his life, and he said he understood. My husband went out and bought him a little fishing rod, which the Bug proudly decorated with the included Superman stickers. They practiced casting out in the yard. All week long he pretended to bring me fish for dinner, caught fresh off our deck, and I pretended to fry and serve them.

And then the little stinker caught an actual fish, using nothing but a naked hook – no live bait or little flourescent sex toy lure. It blows me away. I mean, sometimes I look at this crazy, funny, amazing kid, with his own personality and passions and talents, and wonder how I could possibly have had anything to do with creating him. Hell, maybe he’s not even really my kid – they could have switched him at birth while I was delirious after 36 hours of labor and a C-section.

Then he says to me something like, “Mama, I love you so much, and is it okay if I put my finger in the dog’s poophole?” and I breathe a sigh of relief. Fisherman or not, he’s mine, all right.