Whooom! Whooom! Todd Palin is trying to scare me. That’s what I’m thinking, alone on a borrowed snowmobile in the fading Alaskan light, cold as hell by a frozen lake. I can barely see Palin and his racing buddy Scott Davis a quarter mile off, near a few stumpy trees. But I can hear them loud and clear, revving their two-stroke engines, circling in their Arctic Cat F6 snowmobiles, punishing the winter sky with an ear-splitting whine familiar to nature lovers everywhere. “Ride over to that point of land!” Palin had screamed at me over the engine roar a moment earlier, struggling to be heard. “Then turn around! We’ll do a speed run past you, let you feel how fast we go!” Little more than black specks now, obscured by their powerful headlights, the men turn toward me and charge. The wail gets louder and the headlights grow. Fifty mph, 60, 70, now less than a hundred yards away. Eighty mph, 90, on a bullet path right to where I’m sitting. He’s going to mess up and kill me.Whooom!
Palin bombs on by, and the air cushion pushes my face.
Whooom!
Davis now — a black lightning bolt.
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