Free Going Rogue: An American Life by Lynn Vincent, Sarah Palin Page A

day, I was in our apartment on Peck Street in Wasilla when the phone rang.
    “Sarah, turn on the TV! ,. It was Blanche. The intensity of her voice did not spell good news.
    I flipped on the TV and was smacked with live footage so surreal it seemed broadcast from another planet. I listened to a somber voice-over explain the images that were coming from Prince William Sound, America’s northernmost ice-free port, our busy shipping inlet on Alaska’s coast about 260 miles from Wasilla. Growing up, we had driven many times to the fishing community of Valdez and taken the choppy ferry ride across to Cordova. We’d chug rhrough rhe clean, steel gray waters past rocky, tree-sheltered shores that were part of the Chugach National Forest. The waters were full of incredible sea life that is typical and abundant along our coast.
    Now, though, on the television screen, the Sound appeared as a vast dark field of heaving sludge. The oil tanker Exxon Valdez had run aground on Bligh Reef and some of its cargo of 53 million gallons of North Slope crude
    pouring into the water.
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    Instantly, Alaskans thought of the fisheries. Most everyone in the Valdez-Cordova area relied on the fishing industry for livelihoods and subsistence. They supplemented their purchased groceries with clean, healthy organic salmon, halibut, and other seafood. The industry employs thousands of people-in fact, fisheries are the state’s top privatesector employer. More people wotk seafood jobs than oil and gas, tourism, mining, and forestry combined. The commercial fishermen in the Sound lived much the same lifestyle as our Bristol Bay fishing family.
    I remember Todd used the wotd “heartbreaking” to describe whar he saw as he watched the coverage. The land and sea are sacred to Native
    who seem instilled with a special
    connection to God’s creation that can only be described as spiritual. “How?” Todd wondered aloud. “How will this ever be cleaned up?”
    It was a good question. Ultimately, rhe tanker would spill 11
    million gallons of oil into the water, which spread across 10,000
    square miles of coastal seas-an area larger than Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island combined-and contaminated 1,500
    square miles of shoreline. Many Americans remember the Exxon Valdez spill as a series of tragic environmental images: Litters of dead seabirds slicked in shrouds of slime. Sinister black muck surging against the rocks. Workers in fluorescent haz-mat suits swabbing the
    of oil-drenched ducks and sea otters. But in addition to being one of the wotst manmade environmental disasters in histoty, the spill was an economic and social disaster. And like the earthquake that had rocked the state on Good Friday exactly twenty-five years before, the spill would change Alaska fotever. Although the spill’s epicenter hammered communities along the Sound, the effects rippled through the state like aftershocks. Todd knew immediately that it would have an effect on all wild Alaska fish products, which today make up an $8 billion industry •
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    and produce more rhan 62 percent of all ,the United States’ wild seafood.
    “There will be a taint on our fish, too, Sarah,” he told me, ferring to the harvest from Bristol Bay, as well as fisheries north. “Buyers will assume all Alaska salmon is oiled. Watch our price drop this summer.”
    He, was right. Fishermen watched helplessly as fish processors posted the price they’d pay for our wild salmon caught that season; it plummeted by 65 percent, from $2.35 to 80 cents a pound. The fish srill fetched tel) times that much once it hit markets in the Lower 48 and overseas, but processors insisted they could pay the fishermen only minimal prices for a product perceived as “tainted.” With the polluted Sound unfishable and incomes dried up, banks repossessed scores
    commercial fishing vessels,
    ing hundreds of people jobless, unable to pay their mortgages and other bills. Entire