In the summer of 1983, I worked for four straight months, six
nights a week, in a rock and roll band that played the lounge of
the Sheraton Anchorage Hotel. I had gotten a kidney transplant two
years before, and I was in flourishing good health.
I was also drinking a lot, so much that I had to exert
teeth-gritting willpower not to get so drunk that I couldn’t stand
up on the bandstand in our later sets.
Then I had a great idea: I’d take a little speed to even out the
alcohol.
Something stopped me. Something made me say, “Wait a minute —
you’ve done this kind of thing before and lost your kidneys. Don’t
do it again.”
Mid-summer, I walked into an AA meeting, and I haven’t had a
drink since.
WASILLA COMES INTO PLAY because, having sobered up, I suddenly
found myself with quite a lot of money on hand, in cash. That’s one
of the cultural markers of Alaska: having a lot of money. Having a
lot of money young. And, in Alaska, just about everybody flies. So
I decided to take flying lessons, something I had always wanted to
do.
A friend of the band put me in touch with a flying instructor
named Mark. Mark told me to meet him at the Wasilla airport Sunday
at 9 a.m. — well before most of my bandmates woke up; I’d have
plenty of time to use the band’s only car. I slept maybe three
hours that Saturday night, popped out of bed clear-eyed and sober,
and fired up our old Rent-a-Wreck for the 40 mile drive northeast
along the Cook Inlet to Wasilla.
Wasilla appeared, as I recall, right on Route 3, as a single
line of modest — not to say ramshackle — stores and gas stations
on the right hand side of the road. I cruised the entire town in a
matter of minutes, seeing no airport. So I stopped at the Iditarod
Cafe, an all-American kind of diner and grill festooned with
souvenirs of the Iditarod Sled Dog Race, and asked where the
airport was.
“Right out there,” said the man behind the counter, pointing to
the back door.
I opened the back door, stepped out, and nearly got beheaded by
a roaring tail-dragger, taxiing on the gravel.
AIRPORT INDEED. ALL OVER THE BUMPY GRAVEL, I found airplanes tied
down, parked, and in use, many of them requiring a manual propeller
pull-through to get started. I hoped I wouldn’t have to do that. I
soon found Mark, who was bedding down three of his sled dogs near
his tie-down site.
Mark and I climbed into his Cessna 152, me in the left-hand
seat. Mark showed me how to taxi and directed me to the gravel
runway.
“I’m supposed to call for clearance to take off, right?” I
asked.
Mark laughed.
“There’s no tower here,” he said. “Take off!”
For the rest of that summer, I flew every Sunday, ultimately
getting about 13 hours in the air. I did things student pilots
never get to do in the lower 48. I learned stalls and spins, we
hedge-hopped over marshes, we flew into steep canyons where we saw
abandoned gold claims on impossibly sheer slopes, we flew around
Mt. McKinley.
ALASKA MAKES ITS MARK ON YOU. It changed me, in four short months.
I actually thought about staying. The singer from our band did
stay.
So what is Alaska, and how can Alaska help us understand what
Sarah Palin is all about?
It’s big, as big as the western states put together. Yet the
population is so small, you run into the same people everywhere. We
met our nightclubbing friends in Homer, at the State Fair, a
hundred miles from Anchorage. In the summer, the roads and the
parking lots are pitted and scarred with huge potholes and ruts
that no one bothers to fix. Most of the year, snow covers the
surface, and people drive on the snow.
Houses in Alaska have long front steps leading up to high
porches, to afford entrance above deep snow. At apartment houses,
every parking space has an electric outlet for a headbolt heater,
to keep your engine warm overnight. Small plane engines sometimes
quit because the oil has frozen into a lump in the middle of the
sump.
People came to Alaska young to make money, and they did. In four
or five years, making big bucks, they turned around and found
themselves married, with a boat, a plane, a house, and two or three
children — at age 27. There is a lot of divorce, a lot of
drinking, a lot of violence. During the long winter dark, locals
speak of getting “a Denali divorce” — one spouse shooting
another.
In virtually every passenger car I rode in, there was a gun in
the glove box. In my AA group, newcomers doing their Fourth Step,
their personal moral inventories, often had to confront things
like: I set fire to my restaurant in Idaho for the insurance, and
my partner died in the fire. Or, the cops had me on ten counts of
grand theft auto and I ran to Alaska instead of showing up for my
arraignment. Alaska is a long, long way away. You can get gone up
there, and many people do.
All the moose stories are true. The first time I rode in a car
with a local, she had a moose heart in the back seat for her dogs.
One of my AA buddies told a story about shooting a moose in the
woods across the Cook Inlet as dark was falling, having to fly his
float plane back before complete darkness socked him in, then
flying back the next day to dress out the moose — and not being
able to find it. Every summer an old tame moose turns into a pet in
metro Anchorage, and everybody knows it’s going to turn out badly,
because, when hunting season opens, someone will shoot it.
It’s a tough place, and Sarah Palin’s career in such a tough
environment tells us vast volumes about her toughness and her
character. Many Alaskans work two- or three-week shifts all day
long, then get a week or ten days off. They line their windows with
aluminum foil in the summer so they can sleep. P-Diddy to the
contrary, there is plenty of crime in Alaska — anywhere you find
big money, you also find organized crime. In the seventies, a
private investigator I knew helped bust up a Mafia ring that was
skimming money off the original pipeline project. I heard some of
his surreptitious recordings. They were scary, and they involved
plotted murders.
IN A WAY, THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA caricature of Sarah Palin as a kind
of Beverly Hillbilly comes close to the truth. In fact, she
represents something much nobler. In Palin, it is almost as though
a 19th-century American — Bill Cody, Bigfoot Wallace, Annie Oakley
— had stomped onto the shallow modern stage and started kicking up
dust. Americans love their big-hearted, bigger than life heroes. We
have a long tradition of snooty Easterners getting sniffy about
frontiersmen in the parlor.
Hooray for Sarah Palin. We haven’t had anyone so interesting on
the national scene in a long, long time.
