The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin (3 page)

Even so, it sure is nice to look at on a fine spring evening. I play music on my laptop and enjoy a glass of wine on my deck, listening to the grebes squawk and the Alaska Railroad trains whistle in the dimming light of midnight as they race along the tracks that run parallel to the highway, less than fifty yards behind my house.

As a red-and-white floatplane lands on the lake and taxis toward
the Best Western dock, I can’t help but feel that I’ve never been off to a better start researching a book.

Did Catherine rent me this house because, as she says, she wanted a tenant who she knew would respect the Palins’ privacy? Or was she motivated, at least in part, by lingering raw feelings over the way Todd steamrollered her when he wanted to build? I don’t know. I’m just glad to be here. I move to a state two and a half times bigger than Texas and I wind up living fifteen feet from the subject of my next book. Forty years in the business and I’ve never had a piece of luck like this.

It’s not that my proximity to Sarah will enable me to learn anything about her that I wouldn’t discover if I were living in Anchorage, as I’d planned to: I’m not going to spy on her, or crouch in the backyard with my ear pressed up against the fence. But being here will certainly give my book a sense of place.

At first, Sarah probably will be less than thrilled to learn I’m here. I wrote a cover story for
Condé Nast Portfolio
magazine in 2009 that was highly critical of her proposal for a natural gas pipeline, and she expressed irritation about it at the time. I also wrote a piece for The Daily Beast that pointed out that while she was claiming to tour the country by bus to promote her book
Going Rogue
, she was actually doing most of the tour by private plane. Now I’m here to work on a book about her.

So, no, she won’t be happy to learn that I’ll be living next door for the coming few months. And who can blame her? Nonetheless, once she understands that I’m not here to hassle her, or to invade her family’s privacy in any way, maybe we can become, if not friends, then at least reasonably cordial summer neighbors. She got along fine with the Oxford House guys, so why not with me? All things great and small seem possible on a magnificent night such as this.

S
ARAH WAS BORN February 11, 1964, in Sandpoint, Idaho, then a town of fewer than five thousand people, almost all of them Caucasian, about fifty miles from the Canadian border.

Her father, Chuck Heath, grew up there. In
Going Rogue
, Sarah describes his childhood as “painful and lonely.” Chuck’s father, Orville Wayne “Charlie” Heath, earned a living taking photographs of boxers and wrestlers in Los Angeles. In 1948, when Chuck was ten, his father abandoned photography, uprooted the family to Idaho, and opened a fishing lure shop, while his wife, a Christian Scientist, taught school.

Sarah writes, “Dad doesn’t talk much about his childhood.” This is peculiar, because in Wasilla, Chuck Heath is known as a raconteur. Why no stories of growing up in northern Idaho in the 1950s? Sarah doesn’t say, but
Going Rogue
contains this striking passage: “Through the years I heard enough muffled conversations between my mom and dad to know that his parents’ acceptance of pain must have translated beyond the physical.”

What can a reader make of that? Or of this: “Sports and the outdoors were Dad’s passion, but his parents thought they were a waste of time.”

Chuck’s father, a sports photographer who left L.A. to sell fishing lures in an area of the United States where hunting and fishing were almost sacred parts of communal life, thought sports and the outdoors were a waste of time?

Whatever the case, as a teenager, unable to tolerate what Sarah calls “his family’s brokenness,” Chuck moved out. “He went from couch to couch,” Sarah writes, “staying with different families … and was virtually adopted by a classmate’s kind family, the Mooneys.”

The adoption may have been more than virtual. A 1992 obituary of eighty-year-old Dorothy Mooney, of Sandpoint, lists among her survivors “an adopted son, Chuck Heath of Wasilla, Alaska.”

Sarah’s mother, Sally Sheeran, grew up—less traumatically, it appears—in Richland, Washington. Sally’s father worked at the nearby Hanford nuclear plant.

Chuck and Sally met at Columbia Basin, a junior college in Pasco, Washington. They married in 1961.

Chuck began to teach school in Sandpoint. Chuck Junior was followed by Heather the next year, and by Sarah a year later. Molly arrived two years after Sarah.

SARAH WAS three months old when the family moved to Skagway, a historic gold-mining town in southeastern Alaska. After five years they moved to south-central Alaska, living in Eagle River, just north of Anchorage, for two years before settling in Wasilla in 1972, when the town’s population was less than five hundred.

Chuck taught at Iditarod Elementary School. Sally found part-time clerical work. She also left the Roman Catholic Church and joined the Assembly of God, soon becoming a committed evangelical.

Paul Riley, the founding pastor of the Wasilla Assembly of God church, remembers Sarah first attending services when she was in second grade. In addition, she became active in a church program for
girls called Missionettes. By the time she was twelve, Riley says, “She began to have a strong desire for the Lord.”

The major event of Sarah’s childhood occurred that summer, the summer of 1976. Immersing themselves—or being immersed—in the waters of a nearby lake, she and her mother were baptized together by Pastor Riley. “Sarah loved the Lord with all her heart,” Riley says, adding, “I know that she did receive an experience of the Holy Spirit, and that she received a calling on her life.”

The baptism also affected Sarah’s mother. She seemed to lose interest in both husband and children. “These days,” an old friend says, “we’d call it a dysfunctional family. Primarily because Sally never really functioned as a mother. Once she got caught up in Assembly of God, all her energy went into the church and none of it into raising her children.

“Sarah’s older sister, Heather, was the mom. She cooked, cleaned, took care of everything in the house. Sally was always off doing something with the church. You’d go there any time of the day when school was not in session and Heather was baking or cleaning, making sure that everything was ready for everybody.

“The kids were not tended to as children. The house was run-down. Where the kids slept upstairs, they had a room with a woodstove in it, and the girls had an attic where they slept, and there was no heat, so if they didn’t leave the door open it was cold.” Another childhood friend of Sarah’s says, “I spent the night over there a couple of times and I remember Sarah and Molly and I all sleeping in the same bed because it was that cold.”

A longtime Wasilla acquaintance recalls that “Chuck Heath was a good teacher and a terrific track coach, but he had a mean streak, and very high expectations for the kids. They were forced to do sports. Sarah liked playing basketball, but she only did cross country and track because her dad made her. She did it to appease him. She didn’t want that meanness turned on her.

“Chuck was definitely not a nice dad with Chuck Junior. I remember one summer he actually threw him out of the house for not cutting firewood when he was supposed to. And whenever anybody got involved in any sport, they had to win. There was no such thing as losing. Being competitive is one thing, but Chuck carried it way beyond that.

“Bottom line, there was not a lot of tenderness or loving in that household, mostly because Sally never really was a mom. She just wasn’t a nurturing person. Sarah’s not either, of course, but maybe that’s because she never received any nurturing as a child.”

As Sarah entered adolescence, her religion seemed to define her. She liked boys and hard rock and heavy metal—Molly Hatchet and Lynyrd Skynyrd being particular favorites—but she loved the God she learned about from Pastor Riley.

Not that this was unusual in Wasilla. “In high school, if you wanted to play on a varsity team, you had to join the Fellowship of Christian Athletes,” J. C. McCavit, a classmate of Sarah’s, says. Sarah became a leader of the Fellowship. A former basketball teammate recalls, “Her group was always making us pray before games. I hated that. They’d start talking over each other, saying, ‘Lord Jesus protect us’ and ‘Praise Jesus,’ and on and on. Why should I be forced to do that if I didn’t believe that way? But if I didn’t, I’d be blackballed.”

When the boys’ and girls’ basketball teams took long bus trips to away games, the girls would sit in the front, leaving the back to the boys. But Sarah didn’t sit still. “She’d come back there with these Assembly of God pamphlets,” McCavit says, “and start preaching to us all about ‘the Rapture.’ We’d be like, ‘Yo, Sarah, go back and sit down. We’re playing cards.’ I remember even way back then she kept talking about how the Bible said the Middle East was going to be a bloodbath and that the end-times were upon us or drawing nigh or some such shit. Nobody paid her any attention, not even Todd.”

One idiosyncrasy recalled by another schoolmate was Sarah’s propensity
for sleeping naked on athletic trips. “We’d all sleep on the floor of a classroom, on little mats about an inch thick,” the schoolmate recalls. “The boys would be in one classroom and the girls would be across the hall. The girls were amazed: there would be these pictures of Abraham Lincoln looking down, and Sarah would be walking around naked. It was a little bit weird. They said they’d all be getting ready for bed, wearing T-shirts and pajama bottoms, and Sarah would be naked. She said it wasn’t healthy for girls to sleep with clothes on because you needed to, more or less, air it out after having had clothes on all day. I don’t know where she got that from. Maybe it was something her father taught her.”

Sleeping nude in a room full of girls did not indicate promiscuity. In Sarah’s case, quite the contrary. “I know a few who took a swing at the plate and came up empty,” a classmate recalls. “She didn’t have any boyfriends until Todd. John Cottle used to call Sarah and her little gang The Nunnery.”

Not many Wasilla High boys considered Sarah attractive. “She wasn’t remarkable at all,” one says. “Round features, big, heavy-rimmed glasses, a goofy haircut, and that goofy voice. All the guys were after her sisters. Heather was a nice-looking blond girl, and Molly was also a blonde, cute as a button. Sarah was the homely brunette in the middle. She could never quite compete with either of her sisters for attractiveness.”

One who did find her attractive was Todd Palin, who arrived in Wasilla at the start of senior year and immediately created a stir. He was good-looking and he drove a classic Ford Mustang Mach 1, blue with a white stripe. He also owned a Datsun four-wheel-drive truck with a lift kit, which he quickly upgraded to a Toyota pickup with oversize tires and chrome alloy rims with gold centers.

J. C. McCavit remembers going with Todd to pick up the new truck. “He paid, I think, twelve thousand five hundred dollars cash, in hundred-dollar bills. That blew me away. Todd had a lot of spending
money from working in his grandmother’s fishing business every summer in Dillingham. Most of us didn’t even have a job. I worked for minimum wage at the Carrs grocery store.”

“Todd instantly fit in with the cool guys,” says Bitney. “At that time, the cool guys were on the basketball team. Hockey was for the renegades, the stoners, the misfits. They called themselves the Mob. The basketball team was the Beaver Patrol. Molly Hatchet’s ‘Flirtin’ with Disaster’ was the song.”

Adding to Todd’s panache was the fact that his mother, Blanche Kallstrom, was one-quarter Yup’ik Eskimo, making Todd one-eighth Native. (The word
Native
is used in Alaska to describe the state’s indigenous people.) Given the racism rampant in Wasilla—then and now—it was a tricky thing to be just Native enough to seem glamorous, but not so Native that it was obvious. Todd could easily pass for all white. But the first day he met McCavit and John Cottle, Rod and Colleen’s son, he got drunk on beer. “When he gets drunk he starts talking like a Native,” McCavit says, “so we all knew right away. A part-Native with wheels like he had and with all the money he had—it was just one more thing that made him cool.”

But there was another side to Todd that wasn’t so cool. Racism had come to the Valley with the influx of right-wing Southerners who arrived to work on the oil pipeline in the seventies. Wasilla was so white that there was only one African American in the entire school system. He was Clyde Boyer’s adopted son. Catherine Taylor was his stepmother.

One day, when the boy was in junior high school, Todd, then a senior, and two friends waylaid him by the gravel pit adjacent to Wasilla High and beat him up, simply because he was black. It was far from the worst beating he endured. “Not even in the top ten,” he would tell me. “Once, I wound up with seventy-seven stitches in my head after some guys kept banging it against the curb. Sure, Todd was a racist bully, but that just made him one of the guys. Growing up black in
Wasilla was hell, and I’d never have made it without the love and support I got every day from my dad and from Catherine.”

Sarah and Todd graduated from Wasilla High in 1982. Instead of the usual well-wishes or humorous remarks, Sarah inscribed Bible verses in her friends’ yearbooks. After graduation, she and Todd went separate ways—Sarah to the Hilo campus of the University of Hawaii, and Todd to a junior college in Washington State. Todd didn’t last long: college was not for him. He’d barely managed to graduate from Wasilla High. Not even his best friends would say he had an aptitude for the classroom or an interest in the life of the mind. Todd liked machines. He could fix things. In Alaska, this was a coveted attribute. But
Mechanix Illustrated
was as deeply as he delved into literature.

Sarah was hardly an intellectual herself. In her high school yearbook she declared that her ambition was one day to broadcast major sporting events alongside Howard Cosell.

She left Hilo after three weeks, without formally enrolling, because the many people of color there made her nervous. “They were a minority type thing and it wasn’t glamorous,” Chuck Heath later explained. Sarah and her closest Wasilla High friend, Kim “Tilly” Ketchum, enrolled instead at Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu. They shared a condo at the high-rise Waikiki Banyan on Ohua Avenue, less than two blocks from the ocean.