I lived in Alaska for about four years when I was little. It was an idyllic place to be a child. All winter long we cross-country skied, skated on the dark ice that covered the unpaved roads, built snow forts and tooled around on kid-sized snowmobiles. (My poor mom hated those winters, because she had to drive). On Halloween, in snowsuits and face paint, we’d pile into an Eskimo sled like a shallow bathtub behind our dad’s snowmobile and he’d buzz around to the neighbors in the dark.
There was no such thing as a “snow day” at school, since it snowed all the time. Kids who lived near enough to school were expected to walk, and the rest of us got dropped off and picked up by snowmobile. We’d walk home from the bus stop at 3:15 and a blue twilight would already be stealing across the snow. It was heartbreakingly lovely. On weekends, we’d spend all day outside playing in the snow. At lunchtime we’d tramp inside and peel out of our soaking-wet one-piece snowsuits, and while they hung drying near the wood-burning stove we’d guzzle tomato soup and hot chocolate.
I remember the utter stillness of the winter woods, black branches against drifts of snow, my breath hanging in the air, the hush pierced by a dropping pine needle or a faraway shout. I would lie on my back, alone in the forest near our house, staring up into the drifting whiteness, feeling the cold seeping through my snowsuit as the silence rang in my ears.
In the summer there was fireweed along the roads and berries to pick: raspberries along the river (where moose liked to bathe), cranberries on the forest floor and blueberries on the mountains (where we would avoid the bears, who liked the berries too). Moose mamas would bring their babies to our garden to poach brussels sprouts and broccoli. During those long summer days I would lie on my bed reading for hours, and at night my parents would call us inside at nine or ten, when it was still light out, and pull heavy blankets over our windows to block out the midnight sun.
Downstairs in the garage there was a freezer full of salmon, courtesy of my dad the fisherman, and also paper-wrapped packages of weird-tasting caribou sausage, caribou steak and caribou hot dogs, evidence of a successful hunting trip. One caribou lasted a hell of a long time, even in a family of six. Our neighbors across the road had their own salmon smoker, an old converted refrigerator. Fresh smoked salmon, warm and juicy from the smoker – ambrosia. They also had a cache, a box high up in a tree to keep food away from bears. Like the spooky, marvelous Northern Lights, to me these things were uniquely Alaskan. Life was different here.
I loved going to school in Alaska. We had Rendezvous Day, where we learned about the fur trappers and gold prospectors of yore and cooked sourdough pancakes right there in the classroom. The whole school sang patriotic songs in the auditorium every Friday: the national anthem, America the Beautiful, My Country ’tis of Thee, and also songs that were peculiar to Alaska, like the catchy Eskimo ditty “A Oony Coony Chuck A Oony.” When we moved back to the Lower 48, I was perplexed to find out that my new classmates did not know these patriotic songs, much less bellow them unself-consciously in the auditorium.
It was in school in Alaska that I began to learn what it meant that we were a democracy, to feel pride in our founding principles: freedom of speech and religion, liberty, the shrugging off of the yoke of tyranny. It was thrilling to learn of the early Americans’ revolutionary fervor in the face of oppression and injustice. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Paul Revere – these were freedom fighters, embodying a high kind of honor, truth and courage that reached down through the centuries and resonated with me, an elementary school kid in rubber breakup boots. (Breakup: the slushy, icy-puddled weeks when a winter’s worth of snow began to give way to spring.) It was then that I began to understand why dissent – speaking truth to power – is patriotic, that those who love their country the most are the ones who will stand up, despite intimidation and name-calling, when its founding tenets are desecrated. It was later that I learned about the genocide of the Native Americans and the many other stains on our country’s honor, but I also found that it is possible to execrate our country’s failings and still love its immense potential, the core values for which it stands. We denounce its failings precisely because they undermine those ideals.
There are certain similarities between Sarah Palin’s Alaska and mine. The snowmobiles, the caribou in the freezer, even the patriotism. I learned to love my country there, its blue-shadowed, bear-haunted beauty as well as the ideals that had formed it. From every mountainside let freedom ring, and crown thy good with sisterhood from sea to shining sea. But for Palin, a kind of stunted xenophobic parochialism parades as patriotism. For Palin and her cronies, it is “unpatriotic” to question the tyrants who’ve been shredding our Constitution with gleeful abandon for the past eight years. If the authors of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were around today, Sarah Palin would accuse them of “palling around with terrorists,” because they would certainly decry unfettered Executive power, a citizen-funded $700-billion corporate bailout, state-sanctioned torture, preemptive war in support of oil profiteering, the Orwellian “Patriot Act” and Cheney-flavored fascism.
For Palin, the glorious, irreplaceable, ancient tundra exists to be tapped like a glorified gas station, and the cherished tenets of our democracy are to be mocked and twisted beyond recognition. Yes, my dad hunted caribou – something I would shudder to do – to help feed his family on an Air Force salary, but he is as horrified as I at Palin’s enthusiastic championing of aerial wolf-hunting, and the bloodthirsty bounty she proposes to offer for each chopped-off left wolf foreleg.
I hear my Alaska has been paved over with WalMarts and Targets. From the photos I’ve seen of the down-on-its-luck strip mall known as Wasilla, you’d never know just what a beautiful place it is. Unlike my dad and brothers, I have never been back. I know you can’t go home again, and people say that things were never kinder and gentler the way we like to remember them – although perhaps a happy childhood is an exception, creating memories of peace and wholeness and idealism before divorce and loss and disillusionment can establish their toeholds. I take heart from the anti-Palin Alaskans who are coming out in droves; her brand of jingoistic Americanism doesn’t entirely hold sway in the Last Frontier. But still, now more than ever, I choose to remember Alaska the way it was.
Walking my spotted hound tonight, I counted about a dozen Christmas trees twinkling inside houses and apartments, and lots of houses and trees festooned with lights. This is a good neighborhood for decorations, starting at Halloween. I thought about all the friends I've made in my nearly two years on this street. We share news, gossip, power tools, parties and, last week, the joy of the new downstairs baby. 
