The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin

ALSO BY JOE MCGINNISS

The Selling of the President
The Dream Team
Heroes
Going to Extremes
Fatal Vision
Blind Faith
Cruel Doubt
The Last Brother
The Miracle of Castel di Sangro
The Big Horse Never Enough

rogue (rōg),
n.:
An elephant that has separated from a herd and roams about alone, in which state it is very savage.

—
WEBSTER’S REVISED UNABRIDGED DICTIONARY

I
MOVED IN next door to Sarah Palin today. It was a dazzling Alaskan spring day: sky blue, air cool, sun warm, the water of Lake Lucille glimmering, mountains standing in bold relief beyond the southern shore, resident grebes tending noisily to their nests.

Sitting on my deck overlooking the lake at 11:00
PM
, I consider myself as lucky as a man can be. It has been more than thirty years since I last spent a summer in Alaska, yet here I am. A light breeze blows from the northwest, riffling the lake’s surface. The glowing mountains on the far side reflect the day’s slowly waning light.

(illustration credit 1.1)

I arrived in Anchorage ten days ago. I stayed with my old friends Tom and Marnie Brennan in their house on Government Hill while looking for a place to rent.

The first possibility was an “executive apartment” in a grubby East Anchorage neighborhood populated mostly by empty storefronts and overflowing garbage bins. (Question: How can the stores be empty and the garbage bins full?) The apartment was in a squat concrete six-plex. The rent was $2,400 per month, utilities not included. I arranged to see it on Wednesday, three days ago.

At 11:00
AM
, I pulled into the asphalt lot outside the apartment building to wait for the rental agent. I got out of my car to stand in the warm spring sunshine. Almost immediately, the main door opened and a young woman holding a baby emerged onto a concrete landing a few steps up from the parking lot. The baby was crying. The woman put the baby down on the concrete and sat in a plastic chair. She covered her face with her hands and she, too, began to cry.

A moment later, the door flew open again. A young man in a T-shirt and blue jeans strode out. His head was shaved. He wore a goatee. His arms and neck were covered with tattoos.

“Get back inside, bitch!”

The woman lowered her hands and looked at him. Through her tears, she said, “Can’t you understand that I’d rather be dead than stuck here living with you?”

He grabbed her by a bare arm and yanked her to her feet.

The baby continued to cry.

“Listen, bitch—”

“Hey!” I shouted. “Take it easy there.”

He let go of the woman’s arm and looked down at me from the landing. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Your new neighbor?” I said.

“Let me tell you, mister,” the woman said, “you don’t want to live here.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

She nodded, then went back inside with the man, leaving the baby crying on the landing. The rental agent still had not arrived. I got back in my car and drove off to resume my search.

The next day, Thursday, May 20, I found a “mother-in-law” apartment in a house owned by a schoolteacher in the Hillside district of Anchorage. Hillside wasn’t the most convenient area—it was at least a twenty-minute drive from downtown and more than an hour from Wasilla, where I’d be spending most of my working hours—but at $1,650 a month it was better than $2,400 and the need to put the domestic abuse hotline on my speed dial. I arranged to see the apartment at 6:00
PM
.

I’d bought a cell phone the previous fall, when I’d spent a month in Anchorage and Wasilla doing research. I turned it off when I left the state and had only just reactivated my account. The missed-calls list showed half a dozen from someone named Catherine Taylor, every three or four weeks, from December through April. My voice mailbox was full because I didn’t know how to empty it, so she hadn’t been able to leave a message. The phone rang on Thursday afternoon.

“This is Catherine Taylor. I’m so glad I finally reached you. Colleen Cottle told me last fall that you’d be coming back in the spring to work on your book about Sarah Palin and that you’d need a place to stay. I’ve got a house in Wasilla that’s available.”

I told her I expected to sign a lease on an Anchorage apartment within hours.

“Oh, that’s too bad, because I thought you might find my place convenient. It’s actually right next door to Todd and Sarah.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. In fact, they were renting it themselves until October. Todd renovated the whole upstairs.”

“This could be a pretty amazing stroke of luck. Can I come up tomorrow to take a look?”

We arranged to meet at the house at 1:30
PM
. Catherine gave me directions: Take the Parks Highway to Wasilla, proceed past all the big-box stores and fast-food outlets to the sign for the Best Western. Turn left, then left again at the stop sign just before the Best Western parking lot. That’s called West Lake Lucille Drive, but it’s only a dirt road, about a hundred yards long. Turn right at the end, just before the fence. Catherine Taylor’s house will be up the short driveway, toward the lake.

At dinner, I tell Tom and Marnie what happened. They find it hard to believe.

“You come back here to work on your book about Sarah and a woman calls up out of the blue and offers to rent you the house right next door?” Tom says.

“Yup.”

“It must be a trick,” Marnie says.

Tom agrees. “It can’t be for real. Nobody could be that lucky.”

I DRIVE TO Wasilla the next morning. In good weather it’s an easy forty-mile trip on four- and six-lane highways. Halfway up, the Matanuska-Susitna Valley suddenly opens out in all directions, suggestive, even in 2010, of grand dreams and infinite possibilities. It’s only when you hit Wasilla that the possibilities shrivel into lost opportunities and the dreams mutate into a nightmare of exurban sprawl.

It used to be said that Wasilla was a trading outpost bounded by two lakes: Wasilla Lake and Lake Lucille. Now it’s a city of 7,028 located between Chili’s and Wendy’s and stuffed to the gills with stores such as Wal-Mart, Sears, Target, Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Fred Meyer, and enough small-fry evangelical Christian churches to make Jesus himself weep from the effort of trying to count them all.

I don’t exaggerate. There are the Wasilla Bible Church, Wasilla Assembly of God, Church on the Rock (all three of which Sarah Palin
has attended), Sunny Knik Chapel, King’s Chapel Alaska, Abundant Life Church, Wasilla Lake Church-Nazarene, Mat-Su Evangelical Covenant Church, Wasilla Christian Church, Wasilla Community Church of God, King of Kings Evangelical Lutheran Church, Fairview Loop Baptist Church, Faith Chapel Pentecostal Church of God, New Life Presbyterian Church, Valley Church of Christ, Apostolic Worship Center, Independent Baptist Church of Wasilla, Glad Tidings Full Gospel Church, Church of Christ at Wasilla, Mid Valley Christian Center, Meadow Lakes Christian Center, Word of Faith Assembly, Frontier Christian Ministries, Big Lake Baptist Church, Pilgrims Baptist Church, Northern Lights Mennonite Church, Trailhead Wesleyan Church, Valley Open Bible Fellowship, Bread of Life Church of Mat-Su, Word of Life International Ministries, Slavic Evangelical Church Nadezhda, Gospel Outreach Christian Center, West Valley Family Church of the Nazarene, Christian Fellowship of Wasilla, Pioneer Christian Fellowship, Independent Baptist Church, Settlers Bay Community Church, Faith Bible Fellowship, Valley Christian Conference, North Bear Street Community Church, Valley Sovereign Grace Baptist Assembly, Birch Harbor Baptist Church, Schrock Road Community Church, and Crossroads Community Church, not to mention another dozen or more Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, Seventh-Day Adventist, Mormon, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Russian Orthodox, and Jehovah’s Witness churches, and at least another twenty-five or thirty just down the road in Palmer.

There are no synagogues in Wasilla, but there are more than thirty-five chiropractors, or approximately one for every two hundred residents.

Before seeing Catherine, I drive to the other side of Lake Lucille for coffee with Rod and Colleen Cottle, whom I’d first met the previous fall. In its early days, Wasilla’s two main business establishments were Teelands general store and Cottles gas station. Colleen was a Teeland. Her marriage to Rod was the Wasilla equivalent of a Cabot marrying a Lodge in Massachusetts.

Colleen knows everything there is to know about Wasilla. She and Rod are lifelong friends of Sarah’s parents, Chuck and Sally Heath. Sarah and her siblings grew up with the Cottle children, and Sarah spent many a childhood hour playing in their backyard.

Colleen wastes no time filling me in on all I missed over the winter. Bristol has broken up with Levi, but is practicing abstinence with Levi’s best friend, Ben Barber. Ben’s mother is manager at the Wells Fargo branch in Wasilla. His father, Jack Barber, is an old-time, oft-married bush pilot. There is also somebody who’s the boyfriend of somebody’s niece who knows Judy Minnick, who used to work as a hostess at the VFW, who’s a friend of Sarah’s sister Heather Bruce, in Anchorage. Speaking of Sarah, I should talk to Scott and Debbie Richter, who own land with the Palins—including the cabin at Safari Lake that Todd and Sarah didn’t pay property tax on—but they probably won’t talk to me because Debbie had an affair with Sarah’s former legislative director, John Bitney, and then Todd made Sarah fire him, and Bitney married Debbie after she and Scott divorced, and the Bitneys have a cabin on Big Lake. Also speaking of Sarah, Track is out of the army and still dating Britta Hanson, the daughter of a Lutheran minister, who’s not to be confused with Brad Hanson, with whom Sarah had the affair back when Brad and Todd were partners in the Polaris snowmobile store in Big Lake. Angie Johnson, one of the ex-wives of Mike Wooten, whom Todd and Sarah tried to get fired from the state troopers when Sarah was governor after Mike and Sarah’s sister Molly divorced, was just killed in a head-on collision on the Parks Highway, along with a couple of her children, but not the ones she had with Mike. If I want to talk to Mike, I can probably reach him through Conrad Holler at Rainbow Pawn, but it’s doubtful he’ll talk to me because he’s keeping a low profile because Todd is still obsessed with getting him fired, even though the whole Palin family ate the moose he shot without a permit because Molly, who had the permit, wouldn’t do it.
And speaking of Todd, he’s gotten real uptight and suspicious and doesn’t trust anyone anymore because, for the first time in his life, he’s got money and it’s just too much for him, especially because he knows people around here now are fed up with Sarah and him, and besides, he’s got Willow to worry about after the vandalism of Audrey Morlock’s house in Meadow Lakes.