A discussion of the hardships Todd Palin has endured in his adult life, from a long-overdue profile in the upcoming issue of Esquire:
The mention of snowmobilers turns the conversation from trapping to … some of the situations Todd’s been in on his sleds. Skipping like a rock across an unexpected patch of open water in — 40 degrees. Or getting lost in a snowstorm hundreds of miles from anywhere. Or flipping over and landing with his arm literally inside the spinning gears of his sled’s tread, where an inch’s movement one way or another would have ripped it right off at the shoulder. And of course there’s that thing that happened last year.
At this point, we were sure the writer was going to discuss Sarah Palin’s failed bid for the vice-presidency. But no:
[Todd’s dad] gets up and plucks a photo album from a bookshelf, flips through it till he finds what he’s looking for. It’s a close-up of two pale legs, both horribly mottled with blood and bruises. It could be a crime-scene photo, something a forensics investigator might mull over for clues. The legs are Todd’s. The injuries are some of the ones he got last year, when an old snow-covered oil drum near an abandoned Air Force base along a remote stretch of the Yukon River bucked him off his snowmachine and sent him flying seventy feet. The landing broke his left arm and banged up the rest of him. At the time of the accident, Todd had been nearing the end of the Iron Dog. He ended up being towed across the finish line by his partner, Scott. The broken arm made the headlines, but Chuck thinks this picture tells more of the story. Riding with a broken arm is one thing. You can ride with a broken arm. But riding with legs like that, where every jolt of the snowmachine is a punch to a bruise, would be something else. He figures nobody really understands how much pain Todd was in. And he figures Todd would never talk about it himself.
Turns out running to be the Second Husband (or whatever he would have been had Sarah Palin and John McCain won) wasn’t the most painful thing Todd Palin went through in 2008. But we’re betting it was a close second.
Todd Palin Is the Man for America Now [Esquire]
