These Pants Saved My Life (Cont.)

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These Pants Saved My Life (Cont.)


	William Parriseau's friends at the VFW bar (Chris McPherson)

THE CARHARTT BALL takes place on my last night in Talkeetna. And, with all due respect to John Ferrell and his pants, there are a lot of poster boys in attendance. Not to mention poster girls. Emcee Doug Tweedie makes a halfhearted attempt to be heard over the raucous crowd standing three deep at the Fairview Inn bar as he introduces the handful of contenders for the survival-story contest, while in typical anarchic Alaska fashion, the majority of survivors are loudly swapping their bios offstage. Up at the microphone, nurse Colleen Hogan describes the time she saved a car-crash victim by covering him with a warm jacket. Offering a business survival story, jam and jelly maker Laura MacDonald recounts how she once lugged 50 gallons of blueberries home in a spare jumpsuit.

The contestants are so few that all of them take home Carhartt prizes of hats and T-shirts, and their anticlimactic tales turn out to be so downright mild that I wade into the Fairview's back room, where real cliffhangers are being traded under a mounted bull buffalo. I hear some archetypal stories of Alaskan ingenuity—like the one about Donnie Elbert, the mechanic who used his overalls as a frostproof tent one night after his plane crashed in the tundra; and then there's Carl Ober, the quick-thinking river guide who saved his own life, after flipping out of his 35-horsepower boat, by tying his waxed Carhartt pants into a knot and inflating them into an emergency life vest, all while careening down the Talkeetna River.

I head across the room, where teamster Randy Brooks hoists his right leg up on a table and rolls up his pants. He has an ugly eight-inch scar on his right shin. This happened when a birch tree he was cutting for firewood fell, pinning him beneath it and bending his leg at a right angle until the fibula was shattered and the tibia broke through his flesh. Brooks says the reason he's still walking is that the thick insulation of his Carhartts kept him warm, which stopped him from going into shock during the two hours it took his two sons to dig him out from beneath the tree, call for help on a nearby radio phone, and put him in an ambulance.

"This is a true story, backed up by bills and hospital records," Brooks says, as his wife, Edie, nods. "I would have been carving a peg leg for myself out of that birch tree had I not had my Carhartts on. And I still got them. I wear them all the time."

As Brooks rhapsodizes about how his pants saved his leg, I realize that whatever permutation of Carhartt yarn you hear, it represents more than an I-lived-through-this epic or a psychological coping mechanism. It's an initiation rite, an application for citizenship. If you haven't lived through such a tale, it means either you just arrived in Alaska or you have no business being here in the first place.

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