As Alaska governor Sarah Palin has captivated America in the past week, I’ve been delightfully curious about her other half. Do you think Todd, her rough-and-tumble husband, ever figured on all this when the two started dating after a basketball game in a tiny Alaska town?

Sarah you know about. As the vice presidential choice on “the maverick ticket,” she’s measured up in a way that screams of middle America as compared to some of our senators who wear those silk socks in Washington. But – believe this - ole Todd had much rather work on a four-stroke snowmobile engine than sit through the barbs at Washington’s annual Gridiron Club Dinner.

If candidates Barrack Obama and John McCain are both spouting change, imagine what’s going through Todd’s head right now. I mean, here’s a blue-collar guy who works two weeks out of every four on the rugged Alaskan North Slope, who probably has heard a lot more country music than you have and whose ancestors – not in a bad way – once lived in igloos.

Around tiny Wasilla, Alaska, the population is less than 10,000 so everybody knows Todd loves to race snowmobiles. One of the nation’s greatest tests of man and machine, this being of any kind and certainly including NASCAR, is called the Tesoro Iron Dog, a 2,000-mile race on a snarling machine. Look it up on Google. You want no part of it.

Its route is from Wasilla to Nome to Fairbanks at the coldest time of the year. The tall windshields on the snowmobiles don’t exactly help that much when the temperature through the Alaskan wilderness ranges from minus-20 to minus-50 throughout the whole ordeal. Some drivers actually duct-tape their faces to protect against frostbite (and you think shaving leaves a rash).

Todd Palin, mind you, has won the race four times, but, what is far more impressive, is that in 2007 he hit a ice-covered barrel going over 60 miles an hour. In the crash he broke his arm. This was 600 miles from the finish line. So he probably cussed for a minute, taped the dangling thing to his chest as climbed back on his scooter, and finished fourth. Hospitals? They ain’t even got cell phones or electricity where he was at time. Again, he finished fourth.

So what's going to happen when he’s sitting off to the side in some swank Georgetown restaurant and one of these real liberal reporters starts in on his Sarah, some guy who uses more face emollients every morning than Todd has blue jeans? And let’s say this guy has a “life partner” and the only “caribou” he knows about is a late-night club in south Salisbury. If I don’t miss my bet, I’m talking about “rat-a-tat-tat!”

Yes sir, as we in the South are known to say, “This boy’s life is fixing to change.”

Can’t you see him waking up one spring morning in the White House, pacing about as dawn streaks across the dogwood blossoms, and when Sarah finally stirs he says quietly, “The salmon are running in Bristol Bay. What say I go home, take the boat out with a couple of the kids, while you go to those gender-equity hearings?”

Oh, I’m not hung up on gays this morning, but the attack-of-the-day in all the big Sunday newspapers seems to be that Sarah Palin’s little church back in Alaska (and Todd’s too) is trying to convert homosexuals. To me it is no more than mindless political blather, but I’ll note that Todd probably hasn’t been around much of that.

What I’m saying in that when he and his buddies go roaring through towns like Shaktoo, Unalakled, Kaltag and Nenana, on their northern versions of souped-up Harleys, they aren’t many in the crowd who wear the color pink. Todd’s landscape is fixing to change.

To be fair and honest, once this part Yupik Eskimo sees more of America – straights and gays, blacks and whites, Democrats and Republicans, men and women – he’s going to absolutely adore it and, if he’ll focus on making the next two months a fun thing with the Palin kids along to supply the oohs-and-ahs of wonderment, he’ll find the ride is far better, and a whole lot warmer, than that Iron Dog thing.

royexum@aol.com