PAGE SEVEN
"I was just three months old..."On p.7 of Going Rogue, we make a sudden bound and spring back through time. At the bottom of p.6, Sarah was taking THAT phone call from Senator John McCain in the final, dying days of August, 2008; on p.7 we are suddenly back in 1964, the year of Sarah's birth; the year of the great Good Friday earthquake in Anchorage.
Sarah describes that time as follows.
"From Sandpoint, Idaho, where I was born, via Juneau, Alaska, I touched down in the windy, remote frontier town of Skagway cradled in my mother's arms. I was just three months old, and barely sixty days had passed since the largest earthquake on record in North American history struck Alaska, on Good Friday, March 27, 1964."
And further down on the page, she continues:
"The quake altered the topography of Alaska forever. Mother Nature showed her might and reminded us that she always wins. But that did not scare my parents, Chuck and Sally Heath, who weren't about to change their minds about pulling up stakes in Idaho, where my dad was a schoolteacher, and settling in America's untamed North. Instead, my parents thought the Good Friday quake--with a 9.2 magnitude, the second largest ever recorded--added to the aura of rugged adventure that lured them to the forty-ninth state, which was then only five years old."
I have two strands of reflections and thoughts to share with you about the connection between these two events of the Year of the Lord 1964, the birth of Sarah and the great earthquake (and earthquakes in general).
First, obviously, we should contemplate the guts and the hardy spirit of Sarah's mom and dad. They were already planning to migrate to the Great North Country, the Last Frontier...then this terrible disaster struck. It was like a test of their courage and resolve. Would they boldly persevere, or would they take the safe path of abandoning their dreams? They chose the Road of the Brave!!
Now, of course, little kids are very sensitive to all that goes on around them. This is why infants learn a language so thoroughly and completely when they hear it all around them in their first months. As we get older, we lose this "absorbent" faculty, as other powers and faculties replace this one. This is why, as adults, we cannot learn languages in quite the same way we did as infants.So, can we doubt that Sarah, as a baby, sensed the great-hearted spirit in her mom and dad!?! Already, in those first months, she was absorbing an example of noble, brave, and loving hearts. God bless Chuck and Sally forever for all that they have done...but especially for this crucial and fateful decision they made in the springtide of '64!!!
The second line of thought I would like briefly to pursue is the idea of balance and compensation, if I may so put it, in Nature. I may illustrate what I mean by an example. It is a well-known phenomenon that people who become blind develop a particularly keen sense of hearing. Other examples of this kind can easily be cited.
I wonder if it may be true too that at least some people who live in earthquake-prone country, if they have strong characters in general, develop a firmer spirit, a stronger resolve, as a result of their environment. To put it another way, perhaps, because the ground on which they stand is shaky, they become more grounded mentally and spiritually. Or, to put it in yet a different way, maybe for such people a psychological compensation develops, one that is parallel to the example of physical compensation cited above.
Anyway, whether or not there is any truth in this, we know for sure that we have, in Sarah of Alaska, a great lady who is grounded in all the principles that made America great in the past, and can and will make her great in the days and years to come!!
However...
That's a hell of an earthquake she is going to bring with her from Alaska to Washington when she is inaugurated in January of 2013!!!
