The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin (31 page)

Almost everywhere she goes this summer, Sarah is shielded from the once-adoring Alaskan public by either private security or by throngs of cameramen and soundmen and television producers and technicians. The days of her high approval ratings are long gone. A majority of Alaskans now disapprove of her. They don’t even like her. They don’t like how she walked out on her duties as governor in order to become an instant millionaire and they don’t like how she’s made the state, in the minds of outsiders, synonymous with herself.

It used to be that when an Alaskan traveled Outside, the questions would be about bears or cold winters or mountains or darkness or fish. Now, invariably, the only questions are about Sarah. I’m meeting many Alaskans who have taken to claiming to be Canadian when traveling Outside, just so they won’t have to talk about her.

Nonetheless, despite what Willow said, Sarah is inarguably a celebrity, and therefore the center of attention in public places. She once basked in this, confident of her popularity. Now she can only do that Outside. Within Alaska, she shies away from unguarded public places, aware that glances in her direction are likely to be less adoring than disgusted.

Both she and Todd have become hypersensitive to cameras they can’t control being aimed in their direction. An example of this occurs on August 17 at the Valdez Airport.

Sarah and Todd have arrived with Greta Van Susteren and her Fox News production team for a flight to Anchorage. A local small businessman named Hawk Pierce (the very sort of person whose interests Sarah so often claims to have at heart) has brought his wife to the airport for the same flight.

He sees Sarah at the airport entrance talking to the interim mayor of Valdez, Dave Cobb. Keeping his distance, Pierce starts to take a video. As soon as Sarah notices him, she breaks off her conversation and turns to him:

Sarah approaches him.

At this point, Todd steps to the side and begins to take pictures of Pierce.

Sarah takes a picture of Pierce.

Pierce pans his camera to show Todd.

At that point, Todd and Sarah walk into the airport. No harm, no foul. It seems slightly odd that both Sarah and Todd would take pictures of the owner of a Valdez skateboard shop, but then, taking pictures of presumed critics and then disseminating them is a tactic commonly employed by Scientologists. It’s not unreasonable to assume that Van Susteren, a Scientologist, has suggested that Todd and Sarah try this approach as a way of discouraging unwanted cell-phone videographers. No matter. Pierce takes their picture, they take his, pleasantries are exchanged, they move on.

Then things start to get weird. Inside the airport, Sarah poses for photographs with airline employees. From a distance, Pierce starts taking more video. Suddenly, Todd steps in front of him.

Pierce is clearly unsettled by Todd’s aggressiveness.

Moving toward Pierce, Todd takes more photographs of him, as Pierce backs away.

Todd takes more pictures of Pierce, then turns away and returns to Sarah at the other end of the terminal. Ten minutes later, Pierce is seated, his camera off, when Todd suddenly springs up from behind him.

Pierce stands and starts to back away. With his camera phone held in front of him and aimed at Pierce, Todd advances. Pierce retreats.

“Do you have a problem with me being here with a camera?” he says.

Todd glares at him. Then one of Van Susteren’s production assistants jumps in and says, “No, there’s no problem. There’s just nothing to see here,” and starts hitting Pierce’s camera with papers she’s holding in her hand.

Then the flight is called and those who are going to Anchorage, including Sarah and Todd and Van Susteren and her crew and Pierce’s wife, board the plane. Pierce goes home.

Clearly, being reduced to the role of Chihuahua carried around in a rich lady’s purse is proving stressful for Todd.

ALL SUMMER, I’VE been wanting to get to Homer. It was one of my favorite places in Alaska in the seventies and I’ve wondered how it’s fared over the thirty-five intervening years, during which its population
has more than doubled. Sarah’s tête-à-tête with Kathleen Gustafson gives me all the excuse I need to accompany Shannyn Moore and her partner, Kelly Walters, on a visit to Shannyn’s hometown on Saturday, August 21.

The town was named for Homer Pennock, a gold-mining entrepreneur who arrived in 1896 to find lots of fish but no gold. When I first went there in 1975 the mayor put me up in his house. Because other guests were occupying the guest room, he put me in his own bedroom and went to sleep elsewhere that night. Nothing out of the ordinary in Alaska.

On this trip, we’re planning to stay with Shannyn’s parents. They moved to Alaska from Tennessee in the late 1960s to teach orphaned Native children at Cookson Hills Christian Home, at the head of Kachemak Bay. Like so many from Outside who have made Alaska their home, they planned to stay for only a year. Shannyn’s father wound up teaching in a Russian Orthodox settlement featured in a
National Geographic
article in 1972 and later became a commercial fisherman. He and his wife are still here, Alaskan to the core.

Whenever she’s in Homer, Shannyn touches base with special friends, one of whom, Clem Tillion, I wrote about in
Going to Extremes
. Clem, a native of Long Island, came to Alaska after World War II, almost straight from Guadalcanal, where he fought as a member of the U.S. Marine Corps. He literally walked into Homer in 1947 “with long hair and a beard and not a penny to my name. I was the first hippie in town.”

He and his wife, Diana, an artist known particularly for her work in octopus ink, lived in Halibut Cove, on the south shore of Kachemak Bay, six miles from Homer by water. Clem became one of the most powerful Republican politicians in Alaska, serving many years in the legislature, winding up as state senate president, and becoming one of Alaska’s legendary figures.

One of his accomplishments in Juneau was seeing that the four hundred thousand acres that surrounded his home in Halibut Cove
became Kachemak Bay State Park, ensuring that the only development the cove would ever see would be whatever Clem himself decided to do. The population of Halibut Cove is now about twenty-five, almost all of them descended from Clem and Diana.

The Tillions had been married for fifty-nine years at the time of Diana’s death in February 2010. At a memorial service at her grave site in June, Clem explained the success of the marriage by saying, “You can’t talk a woman out of anything, but if you kiss her enough, she’ll follow you to the end of the world.” A few mourners commented that Clem apparently never figured out that in her own quiet manner it was Diana who’d led every step of the way.

Shannyn calls Clem to tell him that we’re coming to Halibut Cove tonight, to have dinner at The Saltry, the cove’s one and only restaurant, owned and operated, not surprisingly, by Clem’s daughter Marian. He invites us to come to his house afterward and spend the night. Shannyn’s father takes us across the bay in his boat.

Marian tells us that Sarah and her crew wanted to book The Saltry for dinner after their day of filming on Kachemak Bay for
Sarah Palin’s Alaska
. Marian informed them that the restaurant’s ethics committee disapproved. A TLC producer asked if he could speak to a member of the committee. “You are,” Marian said. “It’s a committee of one. Me. I’m not serving dinner to Sarah Palin.”

Clem’s house is a ten-minute walk, by boardwalk, from The Saltry. Though still grieving the loss of Diana, he’s as gracious a host to us as he was to me thirty-four years earlier. He tells us stories by the fire as we sip a fine brandy from his wine cellar, which is as extensive as any I’ve ever seen in a private home. Being an Alaska fisherman all his life has done nothing to dull Clem’s appreciation of Grand Crus (not to be confused with Sarah’s marketing company, Rouge Cou). At the age of eighty-eight, he feels he has the right to tell anyone who asks that he believes Sarah to be a nitwit.

The next morning, after he cooks us pancakes and takes us to Diana’s grave, we ride a Tillion-operated ferry back to Homer. We go
to Billy Sullivan’s halibut shack, where Billy re-creates the Gustafson-Palin confrontation for us, then to meet Kathleen Gustafson herself at the Salty Dawg Saloon.

Inside the Salty Dawg are hundreds, probably thousands of dollar bills tacked to the walls and ceiling. This is a tradition started many years ago by a regular customer who tacked a bill to the wall as he left so the friend who was supposed to meet him there would find his first drink paid for when he arrived.

Billy Sullivan’s video has been viewed more than a million times on YouTube. But it captured only about two minutes of the eight- to ten-minute exchange. Gustafson tells us that before Sullivan turned on his camera, Sarah approached her and winked.

“I said, ‘Don’t flirt with me,’ ” Gustafson says. “So I think that kind of set the tone. I tried really hard not to be a bitch, but when somebody’s throwing that at you, it’s hard. When I made that banner I specifically chose a criticism that was true no matter what your politics are. She quit.”

At another point, Gustafson says, “She was talking about being a leader and using her influence to help Americans, and I said, ‘You’re out there for yourself. You’re not a leader, you’re a climber.’ ”

“Obviously we’re not welcome here,” Sarah replied.

“I haven’t asked you to leave and I haven’t told you you’re unwelcome. Have a seat at the picnic table. We’ll talk all day.”

It wasn’t to be. Willow, apparently thinking that the word
governor
should have been spelled with an
-er
not
-or
at the end, interjected one more comment: “You’re a teacher; you should learn how to spell.” Then the whole TLC crew moved on, ending a wholly unnecessary incident caused by Sarah’s inability to ignore a sight that displeased her.

I ask Gustafson if she’s received any hostile reactions from Sarah’s supporters. “I haven’t heard a single thing,” she says. “Nothing but love from Alaskans. And I came home one day and my husband had put up a banner that said ‘Best Wife Ever.’ ”

AUGUST 24 IS primary day. Tea Party candidate Joe Miller, a lawyer from Fairbanks, is challenging incumbent Lisa Murkowski in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate. Sarah has been seething about Murkowski ever since her father chose her over Sarah to fill his unexpired term in 2002. But Miller is loony enough on his own to appeal to Sarah and Todd.

Marching alongside children in an Eagle River community parade on the Fourth of July, Miller supporters carried assault rifles. Later in the year, members of a private militia force that Miller employed as security guards handcuffed Tony Hopfinger of the
Alaska Dispatch
as he attempted to ask Miller a question. Miller himself declared that the way to stop illegal immigration was to “build a wall. If the East Germans can do it, so can we.”

He is unmistakably Sarah’s kind of candidate for a U.S. Senate seat, and her pro-Miller Twitter barrage has been relentless: