Going Rogue: An American Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

in our legislatute. For nearly four decades our two families’ lives intettwined like flourishing vines, so much so that Curtis Jr. even grew up to be my firstborn’s godfather.
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    Going Rogue
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    In the Heath home, vety little time was spent watching the “boob tube;’ as my folks called it. Even in the ‘70s, television shows were still tape-delayed in Alaska by as much as a week, and a lot of news was old news by the time it filtered up north. It was sometimes easy to fall Out of the news loop, but still, in 1974, I noticed that the newspapets kept running front-page stoties on what they wete calling Watetgate. News broadcasts kept tepeating the same theme: President Richard Nixon was in ttouble.
    That year, when I was ten, we traveled back down to Skagway for a visit. Chuck, Heathet, Molly, and I stayed with the Mootes, the big
    whose house I had
    on my way to the day I
    tried to fly. Duting out visit, Mom and Dad took some ftiends mountain-goat hunting and trekking. Sometimes Dad guided in the summets and would take groups of travelers on the Chilkoot Trail, the same route used during the Klondike Gold Rush. One summer it was a Flotida businessman named Tad Duke and a group of his friends. (Many of those people started out as toutists and wound up as lifelong Heath family friends; Tad Duke was one who ended up helping me thirty years later on the campaign trail.) Our
    loved that rugged Chilkoot hike, and Dad was
    happy to be out on the trail again that summer. I distinctly remember my folks returning after a week away and walking into the Moores’ big kitchen. They hadn’t had access to television or newspapers for days.
    “Well, who’s our president?” Dad asked.
    Omigosh, that’s right, I thought. He doesn’t even know that Richard Nixon resigned.
    has a new president!
    I had been keeping track and was fascinated with the civics 25 .

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    SARAH PALIN
    lesson that unfolded across Ametica that summet. It amazed me that the whole countty seemed riveted, unified by watching the events unfuld. It was the fitst time since the moon landing that r d seen that, so I knew this Watetgate thing had ro be big. When Gerald Ford took ovet, I knew who he was because I temembered teading about him and seeing a pictute in a scholastic magazine. He’d been Ametica’s vice ptesident then, sitting parade-style atop the backseat of a convertible, waving at the ctowd. Now he was our president!
    Looking back, it seemS significant that many of my clearest childhood memoties involve politics and current events. I don’t remember my ten-year-old friends being especially interested in who the president was, but to me it was a pretty big deal. We finally got a TV at home, but Dad was clever with his limitations on it. He and his Idaho buddy Ray Carter, by then a fellow Wasilla teacher, built an unheated, gravel-floored garage attached to our house. On top of the sttuctute they built what they called a family room, uninsuIated and unfurnished, with only a woodstove to heat it. It was rarely wotth chopping and hauling extra fitewood, stoking the flames, and waiting hours for the ftozen room to heat up enough to enjoy watching anything-a dynamic that Dad was well aware of when he put the TV out there. But on Friday nights we sometimes braved thirty-below temperatures to watch The Brady Bunch, huddling together in down sleeping bags, so cold that when Greg, Marcia, and the gang finally solved the family problem of the week, we foughr over who would have to venture out to change the channel. On Sundays, it was The Law— rence We!k Show, 60 Minutes, and The Wonderful of Disney.
    In our teen years, if we stayed awake long enough, we’d sneak upstairs and watch Saturday Night Live. Having grown up in a house where “butt” was a bad wotd and we had to say
    “bottom;’ we assumed we had to sneak. It wasn’t until years
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    Going Rogue
    latet that we learned out parents got a kick out of political
    humor, too.
    My