Alaska Dispatch

Tony Hopfinger, my husband and the co-founder of Alaska Dispatch, and I are vacationing in Santa Fe, NM. Tony's parents have a house on a ridge a few miles outside town. In the house, you have to bend your neck far back to look at the ceiling. The walls are sand colored in one kind of light, a baby's-bottom pink in another. The floor tiles are the color of a freckled redhead's face after a lazy day on the beach. The tiles are warm on your feet. It's 9 a.m. right now. The sun's already high in the clear blue sky-the kind we only see a few times a year in Alaska. The rolling mountains covered in a soft white and deep green.

We came here to get away from Alaska. From the cold, from the mean little sun. Fast drivers and ashen faces. From low oil prices and bad news in the villages. We came here for blue-corn tortillas filled with white cheeses and narrow streets lined with galleries. To watch men with Robert Redford smile-lines and women with long, dark hair who look like they just jumped out of a folk song. We came here to lounge in cafes and listen to people talk about meditation and soy beans and "letting go," to read the flyers on the bulletin boards advertising "Leaping into the Quantum" classes, massages that will "touch your core," Vedic astrology and spirit circles on Monday nights.

Santa Fe is our respite before the real work begins. We're launching a new design for Alaska Dispatch in mid-January and it going to take more hours than we have to give it. Neither of us is into astrology, and both of us shudder at the idea of our core being touched. But there is a vibe in this adobe town we soak up; it provides a necessary perspective.

We need it this time of year. I need it this time of year. The glob of a gray sky sits heavily on my shoulders, weighing me down with all of the state's problems; all the problems in the world. Everything feels portentous and doomed under the dark Alaska night. I wake up feeling both drugged and itching for a fight.

Look at how Alaskans are fighting each other right now. On blogs. On the radio. A cursory search on the Internet finds the progressives and state Rep. Mike Doogan going at it for some indefinable reason. The editor of the Anchorage Daily News, Pat Dougherty, is having at it out on his blog with progressive blogger Philip Munger over a little photo in the Anchorage Daily News that Munger either did or didn't post with the paper's permission. No doubt the independent conservative types are still on the talk shows, railing about the nanny state and Snowzilla, pretending they wouldn't mind if a junkyard sprung up in their neighborhood. No doubt the liberals-those who protest when the FBI investigates anything except Republican politicians-are still railing against the Corrupt Bastards Club, yet mum on the fact that their sudden savior, the FBI, is accused of being as corrupt as the club the Feds supposedly broke up.

And now, here I am, in a coffee shop in Santa Fe. I can walk outside without a jacket, the high-desert sun instantly baking my skin, but instead I'm getting worked up about Alaskans getting worked up about Alaska.

The other night I experienced that "let it go" feeling briefly. Tony and I ate dinner at a tapas restaurant in the heart of the art district, a place of windy streets and glowing windows, where if you're still enough you can hear the horses of the Spanish conquerors clopping down the street. Our wooden table was filled with small plates of shrimp swimming in Manna-sauce, beef marinated in garlic and mint, chilies and pork and vegetables so fresh they sighed when you chewed them.

On the way home, we talked about whether Angelina Jolie or Jennifer Aniston would be a better date. Tony said Aniston, hands down. Jolie, he said, was too much like the bitchy girls he grew up with on the North Shore of Chicago. I said Aniston was too much like the pathetic sorority girls I went to college with at the University of Iowa.

This lasted until we got home and Tony's Blackberry began buzzing with the news that Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston had finally joined us into this world.

A few months ago, when I was accusing Palin on Alaska Dispatch of saying something in an interview that might or might not have been a conscious fib, someone wrote these two words in the comment section that have stayed with me: "Enough Amanda." Those words hit me; I almost wrote back and said, "okay," in sheepish lower case. I didn't because I didn't know if I could live up to it. The darkness was beginning to hit.

Maybe it's all the soft lines, the squat sand buildings, or the sorbet sunsets and the whole town that's touched, but from this distance the birth of Tripp is an absolutely beautiful thing. I picture Bristol's face, the most beautiful face of all the Palin girls. It's winsome and it's kind.

In the café in Santa Fe, I look at what the bloggers have to say about Tripp and his mother, but I don't have the stomach for it. People out there can be mighty mean. Santa Fe seeps into me. On New Year's Eve, I want to say enough to the meanness and pettiness plaguing Alaska. Tripp's one of us, born in a cold, dark place, in a strange time in a strange land with an uncertain future-a future, if there is going to be one, any astrologer worth her spit would tell us will require putting an end to the fighting over the small stuff.

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