These Pants Saved My Life (Cont.)

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These Pants Saved My Life (Cont.)


	Strutting the VFW catwalk (Chris McPherson)

AS AN INFAMOUS PLAQUE, no longer on display, put it, the winter population of Talkeetna was once "378 people and one grouch." These days it's pushing 800. If you count the tourists, the spring-summer population runs into the tens of thousands, with climbers, campers, and sightseers passing through en route to Denali National Park and Preserve. Carhartts are so prevalent here, and the villagers so vociferously loyal to them, that visitors sometimes catch Carhartt fever.

"I've had Californians and Japanese tourists, total strangers, try to buy my Carhartts right off me. Yuppies!" scoffs Ted Kundtz, a Talkeetna jack-of-all-trades, when I meet him one morning before the ball for breakfast at the town's Latitude 62° Lodge. "They called the years of wear and tear I put in them 'authentic character.'" What seems to irritate him is not that the interlopers hoped to wheedle him out of his sorry-ass jacket, but that they wanted to appropriate the adventures that came with it.

Kundtz, a no-nonsense 60-year-old with a stubbly gray beard, sits over his eggs and reindeer sausage



	Artist Trigger Twigg (Chris McPherson)

in padded black Carhartt bibs stained with yesterday's cheeseburger juice, last night's spaghetti sauce, aviation gas, engine grease, moose turds, moose innards, and moose blood. He has just pulled an all-nighter at mile 110 of the nearby Parks Highway, helping adult students learn to carve up abandoned game for a community-ed course called Roadkill 101.

"The difference between formal and informal in Talkeetna is clean Carhartts and dirty ones," he says. "The washed ones, you wear to church. Ones as cruddy as these"—he points at various blotches on his chest and pant legs—"you clean. Preferably in someone else's washing machine."

In his varied career, Kundtz tells me, he has been a pilot, a tester of Berkley fly rods, a ski instructor, a forensic photographer, and a Green Beret. A life such as his is full of Carhartt flashbacks. On one particularly memorable night several years ago, as he drove home from Talkeetna, with the mercury hovering at minus 25 degrees, Kundtz's 700-pound snowmobile skidded off a trail by the side of the road, tumbled down a slope, and flipped on top of him. He credits



	Icy digs (Chris McPherson)

the thick insulation of his jumpsuit for keeping him alive and warm during the slow, cumbersome process of digging a snow-tunnel escape route. Kundtz's story exhibits typical Alaskan sangfroid and quick-wittedness in an emergency, as well as frugality; he still has the clothes he wore that night.

"I just heard about some new high-tech, battery-operated parka," he says. "But for me, out in the remote after the batteries ran out, where would I plug it in to recharge it? A birch tree? If you live here, Carhartts are bound to save your life one time or another. Once they do save your life, you're obviously not going to throw them away. That would be like scattering diamonds on the floor."

As we head out to the restaurant parking lot, Kundtz points to his truck. In the bed is his dead Australian shepherd, Jillaroo, wrapped in...a beloved Carhartt. "I'm about to bury the dog in my oldest Carhartt jacket and build a spirit house over her," he says, before driving off. Even in the afterlife, Carhartts are too precious to discard.

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