Anchorage Daily News

HAINES -- Totem Park in Sitka, with its trails winding among the towering spruce trees and somber totem poles, with the waves lapping the shore, the gulls calling and diving on one side, a fishy river plugged with spawning salmon right in the middle, is my favorite place for a high school cross-country meet and one of my favorite places anywhere. Sitkans have been walking or running on its paths for centuries.

The instinct is to whisper when you enter the trails and first see the poles and trees side by side in the misty rainforest. It is also a place that changes your perspective on time and politics. The park's original totems were collected and placed here by territorial Gov. John Green Brady a hundred years ago. He thought they would become relics, symbols of a dead culture. Today, Tlingit carvers demonstrate their skill in the nearby park headquarters. They still speak Tlingit in Sitka.

It was especially good to be in the park again this weekend because it lends a historic perspective to all the heady, and not so heady, news about our governor.

I was in a school van in the Juneau ferry terminal parking lot listening to NPR at 6:30 Friday morning with the window rolled down, chatting with the other folks waiting for the boat to Sitka taking us to the meet, when the announcer said the best guess was that McCain would pick Palin as his running mate. Like you, I'd heard this before and figured it was not true. But then, just as the guy in the orange vest waved me onboard, the announcer said that Gov. Sarah Palin indeed was the pick.

It is lucky I didn't launch the van right off the dock into Auke Bay.

Either the rest of the world wasn't as surprised as I was or the news traveled really fast. Because I was only halfway down the ramp to the ferry's car deck when my cell phone rang. It is new, one of those pre-paid ones, kind of like a calling card. I bought it for when I'm traveling, and I don't use it much.

So when it rings it takes me a minute to figure out how to answer it. This time, when I did, my daughter in Haines said that I was getting calls about the governor from all over and that she had just given my number to a guy from CBS. "Really?" I asked. "Yes," she said. "It's totally crazy." I told her it must be a joke. She said it didn't sound like it. I pressed the off button and sure enough, the phone rang again and someone on the other end said, in an odd accent, that he was calling from CBS and did I have time to answer a few questions.

I was pretty sure it was my friend Matt from the newspaper in Haines teasing me, and I said so. But proper Mr. CBS was not amused. Neither was the ferry's purser, who wanted to see my ticket before I could drive into the ship's hold. He ordered me to turn off the phone.

"But," I wanted to say, "this is CBS, and they want to know what I think about a national political matter. Can't you see I'm an important person?" That sounded so silly that I told whoever was on the phone I was getting on a ferry and would call him back.

Turns out the guy from CBS did not want to make me a talking head on the national news shows. I am not replacing Barbara Walters, either. He Googled Alaska and got my name, and asked me to help him answer a few questions. Like, where is Wasilla?

Later, I thought, my initial reaction must have been kind of like what happened at the Palin house when John McCain called. Sarah may have had that same disbelief, switching quickly to the thrilling, heart-racing flush I got, times about a thousand, since her call to fame was the real deal.

Like just about everyone I speak with, I am full of thoughts and opinions about the way the eyes of the world are suddenly on Alaska and what they may be seeing and thus thinking about us as our governor's star zips up and down and around faster than a carnival ride at the state fair.

And while I love Southeast Alaska, and while Southcentral is too crowded and much too built up for me, I wish now that Sitka were closer to Wasilla. I wish that some of those folks judging our state could see Totem Park on an early fall morning, full of real Alaska boys and girls doing something so perfectly Alaskan as running through the big woods, next to the beach, and over a river full of spawning salmon in the pouring rain, the way Alaskans have been doing here since, as the Tlingit people say, time immemorial, and no doubt will continue to do long after we are gone.

I don't know about you, but in the middle of all of this instant messaging, cell phoning, minute-by-minute blogging and commentating about everything Alaskan, I find that comforting, very comforting.

Heather Lende lives and writes in Haines and is the author of "If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name." She can be reached at hlende@adnmail.com.

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