Fish Out of Water.(The Talk of the Town)(Todd and Sarah Palin)

A couple of Fridays ago, when the weather was warm and office workers all over the city were streaming up the avenues at lunchtime, a group of Alaskans gathered at Alaska House, on Mercer Street, for a buffet lunch celebrating a program called Alaska Benefisheries. The program works like this: Every spring, salmon across the Pacific are seized with an urge to swim to Alaska, to spawn in the tributaries of the rivers where they were born. But, before they get there, most are caught by fishermen and sold to restaurants all over the world. What's not sold is canned and shipped to countries that have food shortages--Bolivia, Laos, Cambodia, among others. Often, the people in these countries have never encountered wild salmon, and the lunch menu at Alaska House consisted of recipes that the recipient countries had improvised: salmon salad with green papaya and peanuts (Jamaica), curried-salmon samosas (India), salmon-and-corn fritters (Guinea-Bissau), and salmon ceviche (Guatemala). The bagels and lox were local.

Governor Sarah Palin was supposed to be the guest of honor, but she had been called home to deal with a flood in the Yukon River valley, and so her husband, Todd, was the biggest fish in the room. Todd Palin has a set-net operation in Bristol Bay--he fishes close to the beach--and an informal poll of attendees suggested that he is respected in the industry. "Nushagak Bay," Kevin Adams, a board member of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, said, referring to the location of Palin's nets. "That's a very nice net site. There's lots of sites, but he happens to have one of the more competitive ones." Palin was wearing a black suit, a yellow shirt, and a red tie that looked a few inches too short. He seemed relaxed, having just escorted his daughter Bristol through a gruelling round of talk-show interviews. (Matt Lauer: "Do you think there is also room in this entire discussion for the concept of practicing safe sex?") "I've enjoyed it," he said, of his time in the city. "We walked down to Central Park, and we walked around Times Square." He said that he was looking forward to the start of salmon season, next month, but he cautioned that his day job is not as exciting as it looks on the TV show "The Deadliest Catch": "Anytime you tell someone you're a commercial fisherman, they automatically think you're one of those tough guys on the deck out there."

Adams broke in. "Don't let Todd kid you," he said. "I fish in the same fishery. It's in the same general area where 'The Deadliest Catch' goes on."

Palin smiled. "We're ...