The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin (23 page)
I mean
leaked
. I had to stop every fifty miles and refill it from a five-gallon water jug. It was like a trip through Death Valley. My kids never saw the scenery: they were on the lookout for sources of water.
It was still light out when we pulled into a roadside cabin at about 10:00
PM
. This was my children’s first experience with the concept of no running water, which meant no indoor toilet, which meant an outhouse. Because it was only for one night, they decided to treat it as an exotic adventure.
I unloaded the car and cooked dinner. As I recall, we ate bacon and eggs and grilled cheese sandwiches. After they went to bed, I put what I hadn’t cooked in a cooler on the porch.
It was dark out—and it wasn’t dark for long, so this must have been about 2:00 or 3:00
AM
—when my eight-year-old, Suzy, woke me up to tell me she’d seen a bear.
“I was coming back from the bathroom by the woods,” she said, “and I saw him. He was eating all the stuff you left on the porch. Can you get my camera out of my backpack? I want to go back and take his picture. He’s so cute.”
Thus was I almost responsible for the mauling or premature death of sweet Suzy, now the mother of three of my grandchildren. It was Suzy, in fact, who’d been thinking of bringing her husband and children to Wasilla to stay with me on Lake Lucille for a couple of weeks this summer, until the Andrew Breitbart commenter wrote, “can’t wait for your grandkids to show up and play in the woods and water.” After that I told her to forget it.
In the morning, we drove on to Fairbanks. Even with the water stops we got to the airport in plenty of time. I spotted a bank thermometer registering ninety-two degrees. My nine-year-old, Chrissy, said, “I can’t wait to get out of Alaska: it’s too hot.”
Now I’m heading north again, in a Toyota Rav4, rented from
Andrew Halcro’s Avis franchise in Anchorage. The radiator works. Even in summer, in daylight, it is still one hell of a drive. I encounter a half-hour delay due to road construction between Willow and Talkeetna. Just outside the entrance to Denali National Park, I come upon the astonishing apparition of “Glitter Gulch,” an explosion of private-enterprise resorts. There’s even a traffic light!
Cruise ship passengers who have arrived by bus wander from hotels on one side of the highway to restaurants and souvenir shops on the other. I sit at the red light, stunned at all this construction thrown up in the middle of what had been nowhere. Glitter Gulch is a good name for it, however unofficial. It’s like the sudden, shocking sight of Las Vegas in the middle of the desert, and it’s every bit as artificial.
I reach Fairbanks at 4:00
PM
. My first appointment is at 5:00. I need a place to stay and I head for the most obvious, Pike’s Waterfront Lodge, on the Chena River, near the airport. Holland America and Princess cruise line tour buses are parked in front. As unlikely as it seems, even Fairbanks has become a summer tourist destination. I get one of the worst rooms in the joint, and it costs nearly $200. The hotel is owned by a Republican state legislator, Jay Ramras, who’s currently running for lieutenant governor. Ramras used to be known as Chicken Man because he’d stand in front of his chicken wing restaurant dressed up like Big Bird from
Sesame Street
, hoping to entice customers.
The people I’ve come to see tell me they can’t make it at five, but they’ll call back by six thirty. They don’t call. I call at seven and seven thirty and eight and get only voice mail. I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s too magnificent a night to waste worrying about it. (It turns out to be a medical emergency, and I see them in August.)
It’s only three nights after the longest day of the year and in Fairbanks there’s literally midnight sun. Even with the smell of smoke from forest fires in the air, how sweet it is to sit at Pike’s Landing with a glass of white wine and feel the warmth of the sun and enjoy the sights on the river.
I’m reminded of what my old Alaskan friend Ray Bane said during our Brooks Range hike in August 1976: “All this is a lie. A beautiful lie. Winter is the truth about Alaska.” Ray and his wife, Barbara, I should note—after many winters of running dog teams in Bettles, where the average lows from November through March are below zero—now live in Hawaii.
I have breakfast with Jim Whitaker, former mayor of Fairbanks. Whitaker, fifty-nine, is a Republican who served as mayor from 2003 until 2009. In his final run for reelection, in 2006, he received more than 75 percent of the vote. He endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and spoke at the Democratic National Convention.
“It was an easy choice,” he tells me over buffet-line scrambled eggs at Pike’s Lodge, “and it had nothing to do with Sarah. I simply felt Obama was better suited to lead the country than John McCain. I spoke at the convention before the choice of Sarah was even announced. But I must say I was surprised by the choice, and also disappointed.”
“Why?”
“Surprised because I had spoken to her in March, right here at Pike’s Landing, at the finish of the Iron Dog. I’d heard that she’d been trying to promote herself as a vice-presidential candidate and I asked her if it was true. ‘Absolutely not,’ she told me. ‘I have a job and I intend to see it through.’ I was disappointed because I realized she’d lied to me, and also because I’d persuaded myself that she’d meant all the other things she said: about caring for the state and about the need to rise above political considerations. She fooled me like she fooled a lot of others.”
Whitaker had been impressed by Palin’s exposure of Ruedrich’s improper conduct at the oil and gas commission. “I knew Ruedrich from when I was first elected to the statehouse in 1999,” he tells me. “I was one of four newly elected Republicans. As soon as we got to Juneau, Ruedrich brought us into a room with two guys from Bill Allen’s company, Veco, and told us, ‘These are the guys who put you in office. I wanted you to listen to what they say.’ ”
Whitaker shakes his head, as if still in disbelief more than ten years later. “This shit really does happen,” he says.
He was convinced Sarah would be different. “The real rub,” he says, “relates to her failure to uphold the public trust. I really believed that she would subordinate her personal interests. In the end, she didn’t. But I was also surprised and disappointed when she resigned. It was a cut-and-run to take the big money she knew was out there. Profiteering, pure and simple. I never thought she would do that.”
Nonetheless, Whitaker is quick to praise her political abilities. “She really understands the phrase ‘the theater of politics.’ I’ve never seen a person who could connect with thousands of people the way she can. It’s just too bad she’s unwilling and unable to understand issues. She can’t seem to grasp that there are situations out there that are bigger than her.”
He recalls a visit he made to her Anchorage office soon after she’d been elected governor. “I thought we’d have a discussion about substantive matters. Instead, I had to listen to a forty-five-minute diatribe about what was being said about her on talk radio.”
Some months later, after Track had enlisted in the army, Whitaker was with Sarah in the lobby of the Princess Hotel in Fairbanks. “There were about half a dozen of us, just having an informal chat about policy, when someone came in and told her that Track was outside. He’d just finished basic training and was on his way back to Fort Wainwright and she hadn’t seen him for several months. I said, ‘Well, I guess that’s our cue to wrap things up.’ But she said, ‘No, no, he can wait. Let’s keep going.’
“I said, ‘Governor, you need to go see your son.’ She wouldn’t do it. For at least another half hour we kept going, really just talking about silly stuff.”
The strongest and most disturbing recollection Whitaker has about Sarah comes from her appearance at the Fort Wainwright deployment ceremony on September 11, 2008, while she was campaigning for vice president. Track was among those being deployed.
“I said to her, ‘Look, I’ve spoken at these events and they’re very emotional, so know that it’s okay to show your feelings. You’re talking to 4,500 soldiers going off to war, and some of them will not be coming back. We know that and they do, too. And your son is one of them. So don’t be embarrassed if you cry.’ ”
He pauses, then resumes, speaking slowly and deliberately for emphasis. “I have never,” he says, “seen such a detached and self-absorbed speech to deploying soldiers. Her lack of emotional involvement was scary. Her speech was all about her. Then, at the end, it was suddenly, ‘Go! Fight! Win!’ That was the moment I lost the last of my faith in Sarah Palin.”
JOHN STEIN didn’t want to talk to me. He said that recalling his last years in Wasilla and Sarah’s campaign against him made his heart sink. I kept trying to persuade him. Eventually he stopped answering my e-mails.
In mid-June, at a social gathering in Wasilla, I met Clyde and Vivian Boyer. Clyde was Catherine Taylor’s ex-husband. He and Vivian, who were just returning from a trip to Russia, now lived in Homer, the town 222 miles south of Anchorage that lies at the very end of the North American road system. Because there are not six degrees of separation among Alaskans, but fewer than one, they also knew John Stein. They said they’d contact him about talking to me. A week later, they wrote back: “John responded that he doesn’t have the emotional energy at this time to talk to you.”
I kept trying. I e-mailed Stein the story about T. C. Mitchell getting fired by the
Frontiersman
. He wrote back, “And you wonder why I don’t want to go there. Makes me want to puke.” But at least he wrote back. That gave me the chance to guilt-trip him.
I wrote, “To the extent that those who can keep the record straight decline to do so—and emotional exhaustion with Palin is certainly
understandable—it becomes easier for her people to repaint the past and thus more effectively position her to run for president in less than two years. It will be a lesser book without my having access to your recollections. You were there, in the cross-hairs, during her first step up the ladder. I’d be sorry to have to publish without your input.”
His sense of civic virtue finally outweighed his entirely understandable desire to refrain from dredging up such a harrowing chapter from his past. He wrote back, “You SOB, and I mean that in the most friendly and collegial way. Reliving that period will be both painful and engaging. My heart is not in it. You had better come here. I can pick you up at the airport. Let me know your itinerary. I have a bedroom and bath for your use. We can cook king salmon I caught yesterday. There is a cat in the house.”
I stayed overnight in Anchorage on June 28 and caught the early flight to Sitka in the morning.
As promised, he’s waiting for me. Stein is sixty-five years old and about to retire as executive director of the Sitka Sound Science Center, a nonprofit “dedicated to increasing understanding and awareness of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems of the Gulf of Alaska through education and research.”
John Stein
(illustration credit 13.1)
We have a quick lunch, then he’s off to a meeting at the science center, which gives me a chance to stroll through picturesque Sitka on a rare sunny day. I’m not a photographer, but I snap a picture of a small piece of the Sitka Harbor.
Stein drives a battered blue pickup. He lives with his cat, three miles east of town. His oldest son, Reber, thirty-two, who is running for a seat in the Alaska statehouse, and his youngest son, Jackson, twenty, live in Sitka. Two other sons live out of state. His second wife, to whom he was married while mayor of Wasilla, died of breast cancer in 2005.
He shows me to comfortable private quarters downstairs. When I come back up, I’m faced with an awkward moment: after putting all this effort into persuading Stein to see me, I have to request a slight delay. In the chaos of my departure from Lake Lucille—my attention
deficit disorder tends to make all my departures chaotic—I neglected to record the Spain-Portugal World Cup match, being played this afternoon, Alaska time.