Going Rogue: An American Life (7 page)

Dad’s best ftiend, Dr. Curt Menard, had been working with
his sao, Curtis Jr., to drape fluorescent flagging over a power
line that ran low across their homestead propetty. Curt, a dentist who had moved up from Michigan, was, like so many Alaskans, also a private pilot. He wanted ro increase the visibility of the power line so that he could land his Citabria safely at home. While Curtis was holding the bottom rung of the metal ladder and Doc was standing on the top slinging the

over

the wire, the tip of his finger brushed the line. Current licked out

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SARAH

P’ALIN

like a snake’s tongue, snapped his right hand around the wire, and shot enough electricity through his body to melt the ladder rung he’d been standing on, fry the outside of his legs and torso, and stop his heart. When the wire finally let him go, Doc plunged to the ground. Medical workers said later that the impact probably started his heart again and saved his life.

Miraculously, Curtis had let go of the ladder a split second before the accident and was physically unharmed,

When Dad took the phone call, he found out that physicians had to amputate Doc’s right arm. I’ll neVer furget the stricken look on Dad’s face. I could see that he was crying. I had never seen him cry before.

Until then, I remember our family life being pretty idyllic. No real tragedies. No deaths among close family. After Doc lost his arm, Mom and Dad explained to us that every family goes through struggles and times of testing.

“We haven’t really been through that yet,” Mom said in a gentle warning.

That scared me at first. But then she comforted me, saying,

“Maybe our challenge will be to care for other families who do.” For me, that conversation laid the foundation that you help other people. That everyone has a struggle and that when you
don’t, you comfort and support those who do. Plato said it well:

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” The conversation also warned me to not take our comfort for granted. Doc fought his battle bravely. He retrained himself to be a left-handed, one-armed dentist. His staff would be his right arm, he said. My dad volunteered to be one of his first patients. Doc went on to serve as our borough mayor and in our legislatute. For nearly four decades our two families’ lives intettwined like flourishing vines, so much so that Curtis Jr. even grew up to be my firstborn’s godfather.

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Going Rogue

5

In the Heath home, vety little time was spent watching the “boob tube;’ as my folks called it. Even in the ‘70s, television shows were still tape-delayed in Alaska by as much as a week, and a lot of news was old news by the time it filtered up north. It was sometimes easy to fall Out of the news loop, but still, in 1974, I noticed that the newspapets kept running front-page stoties on what they wete calling Watetgate. News broadcasts kept tepeating the same theme: President Richard Nixon was in ttouble.

That year, when I was ten, we traveled back down to Skagway for a visit. Chuck, Heathet, Molly, and I stayed with the Mootes, the big

whose house I had

on my way to the day I

tried to fly. Duting out visit, Mom and Dad took some ftiends mountain-goat hunting and trekking. Sometimes Dad guided in the summets and would take groups of travelers on the Chilkoot Trail, the same route used during the Klondike Gold Rush. One summer it was a Flotida businessman named Tad Duke and a group of his friends. (Many of those people started out as toutists and wound up as lifelong Heath family friends; Tad Duke was one who ended up helping me thirty years later on the campaign trail.) Our

loved that rugged Chilkoot hike, and Dad was

happy to be out on the trail again that summer. I distinctly remember my folks returning after a week away and walking into the Moores’ big kitchen. They hadn’t had access to television or newspapers for days.

“Well, who’s our president?” Dad asked.

Omigosh, that’s right,
I thought.
He doesn’t even know that Richard
Nixon resigned.

has a new president!

I had been keeping track and was fascinated with the civics
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SARAH PALIN

lesson that unfolded across Ametica that summet. It amazed me that the whole countty seemed riveted, unified by watching the events unfuld. It was the fitst time since the moon landing that r d seen that, so I knew this Watetgate thing had ro be big. When Gerald Ford took ovet, I knew who he was because I temembered teading about him and seeing a pictute in a scholastic magazine. He’d been Ametica’s vice ptesident then, sitting parade-style atop the backseat of a convertible, waving at the ctowd. Now he was our president!

Looking back, it seemS significant that many of my clearest childhood memoties involve politics and current events. I don’t remember my ten-year-old friends being especially interested in who the president was, but to me it was a pretty big deal. We finally got a TV at home, but Dad was clever with his limitations on it. He and his Idaho buddy Ray Carter, by then a fellow Wasilla teacher, built an unheated, gravel-floored garage attached to our house. On top of the sttuctute they built what they called a family room, uninsuIated and unfurnished, with only a woodstove to heat it. It was rarely wotth chopping and hauling extra fitewood, stoking the flames, and waiting hours for the ftozen room to heat up enough to enjoy watching anything-a dynamic that Dad was well aware of when he put the TV out there. But on
Friday nights we sometimes braved thirty-below temperatures to
watch
The Brady Bunch,
huddling together in down sleeping bags, so cold that when Greg, Marcia, and the gang finally solved the family problem of the week, we foughr over who would have to venture out to change the channel. On Sundays, it was
The Law—
rence We!k Show, 60 Minutes,
and
The Wonderful
of Disney.

In our teen years, if we stayed awake long enough, we’d sneak upstairs and watch
Saturday Night Live.
Having grown up in a house where “butt” was a bad wotd and we had to say

“bottom;’ we assumed we had to sneak. It wasn’t until years

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