Not Afraid of Life (2 page)

Chapter One

Where It All Began

A
few years ago, if I’d told you I was from Wasilla, you would’ve looked at me blankly with a polite smile, trying to search your brain for any sort of connection. You probably haven’t been to Alaska, even though it’s America’s largest state, and you probably hadn’t heard of my hometown before John McCain chose my mom to be his running mate for vice president. Shocked reporters (undoubtedly prepared for a more conventional choice) scrambled to outdoor shops to buy heavy coats and then to the airport to fly to our small town of ten thousand people. Some weren’t even aware of how to pronounce the name.

These reporters gave the whole world a crash course on my town, however. Some said it was a beautiful town, surrounded by mountain ranges, eagles, and lakes that turned into gigantic playgrounds for snowmachines and cross-country skiing for months out of the year. They described the amazing wildlife and the clean cool air. But others described it as an ugly city of rednecks who shopped at half-abandoned strip malls.

I just know it—and love it—as home. It’s surrounded by mountain ranges, so no matter where you go, you feel protected . . . cradled almost . . . by these majestic formations. We have a lot of cloudy days, which hide the peaks, but it’s amazing when the sun comes out. People smile, have a quicker step, and enjoy the sun more because it’s relatively rare.

I was raised here because my mom’s parents moved to Alaska five years after it became a state, where teachers could make twice the salary ($6,000 per year!). Grandpa was ready for change. He’d had a rather harsh background, which pushed him when he was in high school out of the house and onto friends’ couches. He was attracted to Grandma’s conventional, stable family life and was determined to create the good, loving family he grew up craving.

They moved with two-year-old child Chuck Jr., one-year-old Heather, and three-month-old baby Sarah.

I wonder what Grandpa would’ve thought if someone told him that his infant (a girl at that!) would someday be the governor of America’s forty-ninth state?

They rented a tiny wooden house in Skagway, the site of the 1898 Klondike gold rush, where at one time 40,000 people lived. By the time my mom’s family arrived, the population had dwindled to 650. Make that 656, because after the Heath family of five moved in, they added one more to the family. Aunt Molly was the first member of my mom’s side of the family to be born in Alaska.

They fished, hunted, and hiked in that amazing untamed wilderness. Mom’s dad taught school, coached ball, seasonally tended bar in tourist areas, and worked on the Alaskan railroad. After saving money for a new and bigger house, in the early 1970s, they moved from Anchorage to Wasilla in the Matanuska-Susitna (Mat-Su) Valley.

Though my grandpa wasn’t much for “organized religion,” he “forced” the kids to go to church with Grandma. It was at a Bible camp one summer when Mom gave her life to Jesus. Later, she and her siblings were all baptized together in the cold waters near Big Lake.

This was when Mom started to pray a lot about big things and little things. One day she started to pray about finding the right guy to date. Because Wasilla was such a small town, the boys at school felt like brothers to her instead of possible boyfriends. So she asked God to bring in someone new.

She wasn’t overly concerned about boys. In fact, her dad warned her about getting too obsessed with guys too soon. Once she had written a guy’s name on her hand. When her dad noticed it, he gave her some advice.

“You have a choice between boys and sports,” he said. “You’re at an age when I start losing my good athletes because they start liking boys. You can’t have both.”

Mom played softball and volleyball, ran cross-country and track, and was an excellent point guard, too. In her high school championship game, she hit the game-winning free throws while playing with a stress fracture in her ankle!

It turns out that she
could
have sports and boys—at least if it was the right boy. And the funny thing is, the same dad who shooed off her crush was the one who first introduced the idea of Todd Palin into Mom’s head.

Grandpa had gone to school to set up his classroom when he noticed my dad practicing basketball. He was a native Alaskan—part Yup’ik Eskimo—who’d moved into town from Dillingham and was going to play basketball his senior year. He was talented on the basketball court, hardworking as a commercial fisherman, and smart enough with his money to have lots of toys—a Mustang, a truck, and two snowmachines. When Mom finally laid eyes on him, she literally said, “Thank you, God,” because she knew immediately he’d answered her prayers.

Their story had at least a few echoes of Grandpa meeting Grandma, such as Dad being drawn to Mom’s big, stable family. These stories were ingrained in me as a kid and helped define my view of love and marriage, and even my sense of identity.

I idealized both my parents’ and my grandparents’ marriage—Mom and Dad have been married twenty-two years, and Grandpa and Grandma have been married fifty years. Without even realizing it, their wonderful stories shaped my own outlook on men and dating. So when I met my own hard-living man from a troubled family, it didn’t faze me as much as perhaps it should’ve.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

After Dad and Mom got married, they formed a very good life for themselves.

In the early 1970s, Dad purchased a limited-entry permit from his grandpa in Dillingham, which has the best salmon runs in the world. Just like taxicab medallions in New York City, there are only a certain number of permits out there. And Dad got the best spots to catch salmon in Bristol Bay because they’re farther north than the other areas. He always got to take the first shot on the fish coming south, which meant he’d be able to bring more fish in. This job—though lucrative—was seasonal. The salmon runs last only four weeks per year, and he needed to stretch that money throughout the year as he worked other jobs.

After Mom and Dad married in 1988, however, my father landed a job in the North Slope oil fields. Being a “sloper” might not mean anything to you in the lower forty-eight, but around Wasilla it means good money, health insurance, and a challenging job that never gets boring. Alaska’s North Slope oil and gas industry is not for everyone. But for people who aren’t afraid of long hours or harsh, remote environments, these jobs are highly valued. When my dad got a job working for $14 per hour as a production operator at Prudhoe Bay, my mother was thrilled and maybe a little apprehensive. Many marriages don’t survive the sloper schedule and the separation. However, Mom was working two jobs (and Dad was working two), so the idea of the better-paying Slope job was too appealing to pass up. So my parents placed his career—and their marriage—in God’s hands.

This was beginning to become a recurring theme in their lives.

Being a sloper meant that every week Dad would drive to Anchorage. There, he’d get on a 737 jet to land in the unfortunately named area of Deadhorse, where he’d then get on a shuttle to get to Prudhoe Bay. He slept in a dormitory-style camp building with other workers and ate at a cafeteria.

During the week he was working, he’d have long days (usually twelve hours), which resulted in lots of overtime. His facility separated water from crude oil and gas before sending the oil down the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and the water back into the ground. He loved the job in spite of the fact that it would sometimes be seventy below zero up there.

In spite of their time apart, they were excited about his new job and about how it would help create a nice future for them as a newly married couple. But, in 1989, their lives—and family—expanded, when Mom gave birth to her first son, Track.

Yes, Track.

His arrival began the long and complicated explanations about how my parents named him—and all of their future children. If you’re wondering, Track is so named because he was born during spring track season and my folks loved sports. Seventeen months later, they named me Bristol, but told everyone different reasons for my name. Apparently, Dad grabbed the birth certificate and wrote in my name before Mom could get to it. He told everyone I was named after Bristol Bay—where he had fished since he was a kid—but Mom told everyone I was named after Bristol, Connecticut, home of ESPN, where she had hoped one day to be a sportscaster. Again, I’ll have to explain this over and over for the rest of my life, but I like my name because it’s very Alaska oriented (or Connecticut oriented, depending on who you believe). I was born on October 18, 1990, Alaska Day, and showcased my native roots with dark hair and eyes.

We lived in a nice three-bedroom house built on the far western boundary of our town. It was located right in the center of downtown, on Wasilla Lake, directly across from the highway. As a toddler, I began showing the same personality that would follow me throughout life. I was a complete perfectionist. My mom says I even potty trained myself at fourteen months, a shocking fact I only now appreciate as a mother. I also pretended to speak fluent Spanish, figuring my brother couldn’t understand Spanish anyway, so it was a pretty good trick. Plus, I had an imaginary friend I called “Dudda.”

But mostly, I had a very nurturing personality and loved helping babysit all of my cousins and younger siblings. And speaking of siblings, they kept coming. Willow was born when I was four, during the salmon run. That meant that Dad was in Dillingham when Mom went into labor, and he missed her arrival into this world by a few hours! Though Mom and Dad were disappointed, making a living in Alaska sometimes requires a lot of travel, hard choices, and time apart.

Willow’s name came from a small community that began in 1897 when miners discovered gold on Willow Creek. Also, she was named after Willow Bay, one of my mother’s favorite sports reporters. Because we were four years apart, we were each other’s best friends and worst enemies, depending on the day.

While Mom took care of small kids, she filled in as a weekend sports anchor in Anchorage, freelanced for the local paper, and did other odd jobs. In 1992, she ran for city council and was elected to two terms. She helped develop our town’s infrastructure, focused on making the politicians fiscally responsible, and ensured that the citizens knew what was going on in the government.

Of course, this was when the direction of her life was set into motion, but we didn’t know that then. She gave herself to the responsibilities completely, learned what concerns the citizens of Wasilla had, memorized all the lines in the budget, and took great care not to spend the taxpayers’ money too casually. While she fulfilled her duties in “Seat E,” she still was simply Mom. Once, she even breast-fed Willow while taping a radio segment on local politics!

I was too young to really be aware of the fact that Mom was “in politics.” We just knew she was working for something she believed in.

As Mom learned all the ins and outs of city government however, she started having sharp differences of opinion with the local mayor. He actually wanted to
force
some of the outer areas of the Mat-Su Borough to become a part of the city, to broaden the tax base and become more prominent . . . even though those outside areas didn’t
want
to be governed by a city government. Mom has always held the same positions that revolved around small government and maximizing individual freedom, and she believed Wasilla would be better off if the mayor’s vision of the future was never realized.

While my mom was off making a difference in our town politically, we had some great bonding time with Dad. From the moment I was little, I followed in my dad’s footsteps—or his sled tracks?—and rode on a snowmachine. Yes, in Alaska, we call those motorized snow vehicles “snowmachines,” though I understand people in the lower forty-eight call them snowmobiles. I think the difference might have to do with the fact that Alaskans consider these sleds as more of a necessity, and not just arctic toys. Many people who don’t have cars have snowmachines, and all kinds of people use them for daily commuting to and from the office. Plus, “snowmobile” just sounds weird. (Really!)

Arctic Cat is the manufacturer of my favorite snowmachines . . . and I’m not just saying that because they sponsor my dad in the Iron Dog! They make smaller snowmachines for kids (called “kitty cats,” get it?) that limit the speed and allow little three- to five-year-olds to have their own fun on the snow. I had a little 120, which is what my son, Tripp, has now, and my brother and I rode all over the lake. Sometimes Track would even race in “kitty cat” races, in which racers go in a circle around cones. I loved to watch Track do that, and once or twice I participated in my own races. I never won! But even though we learned how to ride snowmachines early on, we still had mishaps. Once my cousin Payton and I were riding outside Dad’s Polaris store. He leaned out the door and told us to knock it off, advice we promptly ignored. That’s when Payton rode right into Dad’s big old green monster truck, denting it with his helmet!

Another time when I was older, we went on a family ride out to a cabin. We rode all in a row—like ducks—and I was the last one in the row. At first, I was having so much fun . . . looking through the goggles at the big snow-covered trees and mountains. There were no cars, buildings, or other people milling around. But as I watched my family zip through the trails ahead of me, I started getting nervous. What if I had a breakdown, what if I got snagged by some branches? They’d never know it! I’d be lunch for some bear!

After worrying for several miles, finally the inevitable happened. I
did
get hung up . . . barely.

“I got stuck,” I yelled when they finally stopped after realizing I wasn’t following them. Normally, I wasn’t a “drama queen,” but I’d gotten a little more fearful with every mile. Finally, when they rode up to me, I threw off my goggles and helmet and yelled, “And I almost died!”

But in spite of our mishaps and dramatics, snowmachining has always been a part of our lives and my childhood. (Piper started riding hers out to the cabin—through trails without cell reception, between trees, over frozen lakes, up hills, and even through an open creek—when she was six . . . and the ride is eleven miles!)