The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin (30 page)

Stevens survived a 1978 crash in Anchorage that killed his first wife, but he is not among the three survivors of this one. Many Alaskans, including friends of mine, will forever remember him as the saintly “Uncle Ted,” because for so many years he went to Washington and scooped up hundreds of millions of federal dollars that he sent back to the state, keeping only a small portion for himself.

Flying in a small plane in Alaska in good weather can be among the most transcendent of experiences available to those of us who don’t climb to mountain summits. Flying in a small plane in Alaska in bad weather is a bitch. Also, it can kill you.

When I was here in the 1970s, almost everyone I met who’d lived
in Alaska for more than a couple of years knew someone who had been killed in a plane crash. This doesn’t seem as true now, but it’s been a notably ugly year in Alaska’s skies. Since January 1, twenty-three people have died in eleven different crashes. Undoubtedly, the relentlessly pissy weather this summer is a factor. It was chilly and wet when I left, and it’s chilly and wet when I return, and I’m told it rained every day I was gone.

The first thing I do is catch up on Sarah’s tweets. In one, she stakes out her claim to the job of Cheerleader in Chief: “Watching Blue Angels about to fly at the Alaska Air Show, Elmendorf AF Base. No better place to be! USA! USA!” She did not mention that on July 28 four air force crew members were killed in a crash at Elmendorf as they practiced for the show.

In another tweet, she squeezes all her scientific knowledge into 140 characters: “Earth saw clmate chnge4 ions; will cont 2 c chnges. R duty2responsbly devlop resorse4humandkind/not pollute&destroy; but cant alter naturl chng.”

Other than pointing out that “ions” are not “eons,” what can you possibly say to that except to bemoan the existence of Twitter?

Sarah’s newest campaign is on behalf of Laura Schlessinger, a right-wing radio personality who recently berated an African American woman who’d called in to her program. In the course of her diatribe, Schlessinger used the word
nigger
thirteen times. Afterward, she promptly resigned, a choice that, though voluntary, struck Sarah as a violation of Schlessinger’s First Amendment rights:

Neither at Wasilla High nor at any of her five colleges, apparently, did Sarah learn that the First Amendment protects individuals against government interference with their right to free speech. Schlessinger’s vile expression of racist sentiment during a commercial broadcast and her decision to quit before she was fired have nothing to do with any constitutional amendment.

Next, I catch up on the soap opera episodes I’ve missed. Apparently Bristol and Levi are splitsville again. As soon as the check from
US Weekly
cleared, Bristol bared her heart to
People
, picking up another check in the process. Whatever skills the Palins may lack in other areas, they are grandmasters of the art of gaming the glossy magazines.

Bristol is upset because Levi might be the father of Lanesia’s baby. (Lanesia is a new character with only a bit part in the series.) But “the final straw,” she says, “was him flying to Hollywood … He’s just obsessed with the limelight.” Bristol doesn’t mention that she’ll soon be flying to Hollywood herself to appear on
Dancing with the Stars
.

Levi’s sister, Mercede, is not surprised by the breakup. “I could not help but have serious doubts that Levi and Bristol would make it to the altar,” she blogs. Nonetheless, Mercede is irked. “There is no way Bristol didn’t know about the rumors circulating about Lanesia! Especially because of how much attention Bristol still pays to Lanesia out of leftover middle school jealousy.”

Levi denies that he’s the father of Lanesia’s about-to-be-born baby. Lanesia, herself no raw recruit to the tabloid wars—in 2008, she spilled to the UK’s
News of the World
that she was “distraught for a year” after Bristol stole Levi from her—tells
US Weekly
“exclusively”: “It’s not true … We haven’t hung out since eighth or ninth grade.”

But hold the line!
E! News
reports that the real cause of the breakup is not Lanesia, but another of Levi’s exes, Briana Plum, who either dissed Bristol in an interview somewhere and/or was seen with Levi in a picture posted on Facebook.

Whatever the truth, Mercede remains displeased. She blogs that Bristol once called her mother, Sherry, and “exploded in anger, screaming and saying, ‘How dare you allow Lanesia to stop by your house!’ … She then claimed that we had a chaotic f**cked up family and then went on to compare Lanesia to the woman my father had cheated on my mother with.”

Boldly, Levi tries to reclaim the high ground by announcing that he’ll run for mayor of Wasilla in 2011. He’ll do it only because a “reality” show will pay him to, but that doesn’t mean he won’t mount a vigorous campaign against Verne Rupright. To those who doubt Levi’s commitment, his spokesman, Tank Jones, points out, “People questioned Jesus Christ.”

Rupright is not exactly shaken by the news. Taking note of Levi’s lack of education and his posing nude for
Playgirl
in 2009, he says, “I think it would be wise for him to get a high school diploma and keep his clothes on.”

God, it’s great to be back.

I’M STOPPED at a red light next to a guy in a pickup truck. The bed of the truck has been fitted with a large cage. Inside the cage are at least half a dozen pit bulls. A sign on the cage reads
YOUR PICK—$200
.

I’m tempted, but I don’t want to scare the neighbor’s children.

There’s a big new sign on the Parks Highway side of Catherine Taylor’s property, urging support for Dianne Woodruff in her bid to retain her seat on the Wasilla City Council. Dewey Taylor called Catherine to ask her permission to put up the sign, and Catherine was glad to oblige.

Dewey tells me that a couple of days before I got back he parked his truck on the Nevada right-of-way that cuts across Catherine’s property to the Palins’ driveway, hauled the sign out of the back, and was in the process of putting it up when three vehicles turned on to the dirt road and surrounded him.

Track jumped out of one. He told Dewey to take down the sign and get out. “You can’t put that there,” Track said.

As he demonstrated when someone shot out his truck window in retaliation for his bringing me a couple of chairs, Dewey is not a man who responds well to what he perceives as belligerence. He told Track that he was on Catherine Taylor’s property and that she’d given permission for the sign to be put there and that he was going to put it there. Period.

“But it’s right next to our driveway, so people will think my mother is supporting Woodruff, and she’s not.”

Dewey explained that he didn’t care what people would think. He also told Track that he and his friends had best move their vehicles. He’d be leaving when he finished putting up the sign and it would be a shame if he bumped into any of them on his way out.

At that point, Dewey told me, Track’s attention shifted from the sign to Dewey’s truck, which boasted a new driver’s-side window. Track told Dewey how much he admired the truck. Then he asked, “How much would you sell it for? I’d love to buy it.”

Dewey said it wasn’t for sale, but everything ended amicably. “I had to give him a lesson in the concept of private property and ownership rights. I think he believed that everything back there belonged to his parents, or even if it didn’t, that they controlled it just because they were the Palins. But once we got to be just a couple of good old boys talking trucks, things were fine.”

As for Sarah during my absence? She hasn’t spent enough time at home even to realize I wasn’t there. She’s been flying all over the state filming episodes of
Sarah Palin’s Alaska
. Apparently, it hasn’t all been smooth sledding.

The crew drove down to Homer to do a halibut fishing episode but had a hard time finding someone willing to take Sarah out on his boat. Producers approached one prominent commercial fisherman, Todd Hoppe, and he said, “Not my boat. I’d sucker-punch Todd Palin if I had half a chance.”

The Palins are not popular in Homer, which describes itself as “A quaint little drinking village with a fishing problem.” In Homer, authenticity and common courtesy are considered to be among the highest of civic virtues.

While in Homer, Sarah posted on Facebook that she was “out on a commercial fishing boat, working my butt off for my own business” and that because “the Left” was getting so “wee-wee’d up” by her criticism she would “go back to setting my hooks and watching the halibut take the bait.”

On Jeanne Devon’s Mudflats blog, Shannyn Moore, who has actually earned a living fishing commercially out of Homer, points out that “The Palins’ fishing business doesn’t include IFQ’s [individual fishing quotas] necessary for commercially harvesting halibut.” So Sarah is breaking the law if she’s actually working her butt off for her own business, unless by “my own business” she means appearing on TLC, which is paying her $250,000 per episode. Also, “Her baiting hooks and keeping a manicure is laughable,” and, finally, “Halibut are on the bottom of the ocean, hard to watch them ‘take the bait.’ ”

Unsurprisingly, Homer voted for Tony Knowles over Sarah in 2006. Her popularity in the town declined further as she embarrassed herself and Alaska during her run for the vice presidency. But the bottom really fell out when she quit as Alaska governor in July 2009. Homer has no respect for quitters.

A fifty-two-year-old Homer schoolteacher named Kathleen Gustafson, wife of a commercial fisherman, decided to show Sarah how Homer felt. She hung a thirty-by-three-foot banner that read
WORST GOVERNOR EVER
from a railing outside a fish-processing shack owned by her friend Billy Sullivan, at the top of the boat ramp on the Homer docks. Gustafson was rankled by Sarah’s pretending to do, for a television stunt, what Gustafson’s husband and many others in Homer did for real: fish for halibut.

Sarah and her entourage were more than fifty yards away, at the other end of the public dock, when Gustafson put up her banner. The TLC crew was setting up for filming while members of Sarah’s private security force were spreading across the area patting down citizens who happened to find themselves on the dock.

Coincidentally, Walt Monegan and Gary Wheeler and their wives were in Homer that day and had considered a morning walk along the dock. What would have been a classic moment in Alaskan history came very close to happening: Sarah Palin’s private security guards trying to frisk her former chief of security and the man she fired as director of public safety before letting them continue on their walk.

That confrontation did not occur, but Sarah could not resist provoking another. Having spotted Gustafson’s banner, she was unable to ignore it. Trailed by Todd and Willow and a couple of her security specialists, she marched straight toward it. Billy Sullivan saw Sarah coming and took a cell-phone video of what happened next.

As Sarah rolls her head, mother and daughter exchange a glance that seems to say, “That explains it!”

Once Sarah becomes aware that the encounter is being recorded she shifts to conciliatory mode and wraps things up within a few sentences, as one of her security people sticks his hand in front of the camera and then tries to stand in front of it. Later, members of Palin’s
entourage come back and tear down the banner, in a display of Sarah’s respect for the right of free speech.