I Went to Alaska to Learn How Carhartt Pants Save Lives

This story update is part of the Outside Classics, a series highlighting the best writing we’ve ever published, along with author interviews and other exclusive bonus materials. Read “These Pants Saved My Life,” by Natasha Singer here.

She had us at “angry walrus attacks.” The vision of hardy frontier folk stepping up to the mic to regale friends and neighbors with gonzo tales of death-defying rescue by outerwear was too good to pass up. So we sent Singer back to Talkeetna to cover the annual event. (Which is still going strong, despite a COVID-19 interruption in 2020.) At the time, the ball consisted of locals modeling Carhartt’s spring line at the VFW hall, followed by a storytelling competition at a nearby bar. Not only was it sponsored by Carhartt, but the clothing manufacturer’s main man in Anchorage served as the event’s emcee (decked out in a “bespoke brown Carhartt tuxedo with black lapels,” natch). Singer’s story ran in the magazine’s 25th anniversary issue, in October 2002, under the rubric “Revelries of the Rustics.”

This wasn’t the first time Singer had traveled to a remote locale for Outside, and it wouldn’t be the last. As a roving correspondent for the magazine in the early 2000s, she documented a cockeyed attempt to return Keiko—the killer whale star of Free Willy—to the sea off the coast of Iceland, hopped a ride on a U.S. Coast Guard cutter attempting to break through the ice-choked Northwest Passage, and slogged through the jungles of Thailand in pursuit of a group of WildAid activists trying to halt an illicit trade in endangered species. (“Oh, my God,” she said, recalling that reporting trip, “did I tell you about the anti-leech socks?”) These days, she writes about technology and education for the New York Times business section. Stowe recently caught up with Singer about her globe-trotting experiences.

OUTSIDE: Maybe I shouldn’t say this, since I wrote it, but your story ran under my favorite headline: “These Pants Saved My Life.” It’s straight to the point, prominently employs the word “pants,” and has the added value of being true. How did you discover the Carhartt Ball?
SINGER: There’s this saying about Alaska—if you’re a woman looking for a guy, the odds are good but the goods are odd. And in Talkeetna especially, the odds are better but the goods are odder. I had been sent there to do a story on the bachelor auction, and I started to hear these really interesting stories, episodes where people got into trouble and their Carhartts—miraculously, like the Shroud of Turin—seemed to have magical properties that were healing or lifesaving. People were telling real stories, like: This tree fell on me, but I was wearing my double-knee Carhartt pants, so I didn’t get hypothermia. I survived for three hours. This was normal discourse, and the pants were the common denominator.

I’ve always thought there’s a reason people go to live in Alaska, and it’s mainly to get away from the rest of us in the lower 48.
We all have tribes, and we all have things that distinguish who gets in the tribe and who doesn’t. The Carhartt epic is a way of saying, “OK, we have a shared lived experience, even if yours is, you know, dropping your lighter on your pants and flaming out the crotch.” It’s a common thread that binds people and demonstrates their Alaskanness.

Was it easy to get people talking?
One of the things I love about being a reporter is when people share their passion for the things that matter to them, whether that’s expertise about the bearded iris or how to butcher a roadkill deer. So even in standoffish places, I find that if you’re authentically interested, people will show you something, and then it will be super cool. And you’re naturally going to say, “Oh, that’s amazing.” And they’ll say: “Well, you want to see the next thing?” And then it’s three hours later, and they’ve shown you every single pair of Carhartt pants in their closet.

At one point you meet Ted Kundtz, a “jack-of-all-trades” in Talkeetna, and over eggs and reindeer sausage he scoffs at the tourists who’ve tried to buy his Carhartts right off him. He says: “They called the years of wear and tear I put in them ‘authentic character.’ ” He’s very perceptive. Like, these Alaskans know they’re being ogled just as much as the grizzlies.
Essentially, he was saying: These are real. The tourists want the veneer of reality, but they don’t want to live our lived experience. Which—it’s tough to live in Alaska, right? It’s cold. And the winters are harsh. And it’s still our frontier—that is, if you don’t live in downtown Anchorage. I got what he was saying. People want frontier cred without actually putting the years into the effort.

How did you get your start?
I studied Russian in college and wanted to go off to Russia. Even though I was not fluent, I ended up going to Moscow and staying for a decade. This was in the 1990s. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, and it was inexpensive to travel because everything was in rubles. So I was going all over. I was covering human rights for The Forward, business for USA Today, and fashion for Vogue. It was this crazy decade. You know: If it’s Monday, this must be Siberia! If it’s Tuesday, I’m doing a segment on Good Morning Kazakhstan! And then I was asked to help start Vogue Russia. I’m grateful I was able to cover those former Soviet republics, but at some point you have to either decide to stay forever or go home. Then I went back to New York and nobody wanted me to write about New York. I was Ms. Strange Places.

One of your first Outside stories was about an American billionaire’s attempt to release Keiko back into the wild. In another you hitched a ride on a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker as it busted through the Northwest Passage—a trip made possible by climate change. When you think of those pieces along with the Carhartt Ball, the range is impressive. Ridiculous, sublime, daunting—you were able to do it all.
The various stories I did with Outside had an adventure quality, but they also had a quality of observation. It’s what we now call lurking, right? Watching what’s happening and then explaining it. I felt lucky to be in that position.

We have this romantic notion of icebergs, but the Northwest Passage, it’s just miles and miles of bumpy, ugly ice. As I wrote: “Unlike freshwater icebergs, sea ice is not romantic. It is neither majestic nor soaring. It does not give off that otherworldly spectral glow of pure whiteness born of glacial snow. Its verticality does not threaten ocean liners with a predatory, awe-inspiring loom. It is not prehistoric in origin. Quite the contrary, most sea ice is younger than a decade. It is flat and flawed. It is often pockmarked, dirty with algae, and lumpy with protruding hummocks.”

I love that paragraph, and I still don’t know how I got away with writing it, or how anybody signed off on it. I’m working at the Times now, and I don’t get to write paragraphs like that very often. So the other thing I’m grateful for is that Outside pushed me to write at the top of my range.

I was very happy to sign off on that.
We still have to talk about my friend from high school who wrote a letter to the editor of Outside. She was like: I read the story by your writer Natasha Singer. I went to school with a Natasha Singer, and I’m wondering if it’s the same person. Because in high school, we didn’t think of her as an Outside girl. We thought of her as an inside girl—as in, inside the house.

I’m glad we were able to help you defy the opinions of former classmates. You’ve been able to report on a lot of amazing things that go on in the world.
It’s like when we said that those pants saved Alaskans’ lives. In a way, Outside changed my life. To be able to write those stories, report them, and meet all those people and get to do all those things—real stories, where there were people telling us real things that really mattered—it was a gift to be able to do that.