ALCOHOL WAS A FACTOR: Weekly Newspapering in Rural Alaska

The Feltist Drives a Tour Bus. And Cracks Jokes. And Gets into Trouble.

A few years ago, Joe Parnell of Haines, Alaska got fired from his job driving a tour bus in the summer.

Joe has been fired from many positions. Many times, it was Joe’s fault.

Not this time.

Joe wrote this column for the Chilkat Valley News about his brush with free speech.

I thought I’d share.

BY JOE PARNELL

I am driving a tour bus this summer to Kroschel’s Wildlife Park, Refuge, Sanctuary, Film Studios, thing on Mosquito Lake Road which is 27 miles from the terminal (cruise ship dock).

I have to talk the whole way there and some of the way back.

That’s 45 minutes each way.

Talking for 45 minutes is like two sermons if you are Methodist or Presbyterian, one half a sermon if you go to the Covenant Life Center.

Anyhow, when tour guides talk, it’s called a spiel. The talker is the spieler.

I always get bored on tours I go on when the spieler talks about the trees and fish and how everyone is nice. I’ve heard that 50 times.

So I try to be different, interesting and funny.

My first day this year, I got $150. in tips (three tours).

I thought I was the spieling king. Then I got $100. Then I got $80 for one tour.

I’ve done my own comedy and storytelling shows. I know how to spiel. Give me a cup and one half of coffee and I am a spieler on steroids.

Well, a week and a half ago, the sky fell down on my bus.

Someone complained.

Complaints in the cruise ship tour industry are like a cut off finger in the chili at Wendy’s. If your tour gets complaints then the people who sell the tour on the cruise ship will sell tours where people don’t complain and the tour that gets complained about ends up like New Coke.

DOA.

My boss called me into her office and said she got an e-mail from the cruise ship from the complainer that said I said, marriage was messed up and the only thing women were good for was ironing shirts.

That is not what I said.

I have this one joke that I do sometimes that goes, “my take on the relationship thing is that keeping a woman happy is like keeping white shirts clean.”

I know exactly what I said and it is a joke. It is true but it is a joke.

My boss said I had to be careful because, “women are hyper sensitive these days.”

You mean that is a new thing

My joke about marriage was that, “getting married is like going to college. You get lots of homework. You think it is going to be all frat parties but you have lots of homework to do.”

I also do this one I stole from the internet.

“You know how it is said women marry a man like their dad, that is why you see moms crying at weddings a lot.”

I do joke mining, if I find or hear something funny I might take it and put it in my show. I know you hear mining and think POLLUTION

But I self-regulate. Which never works but that is what I do.

I don’t like being told what I can and cannot say. It is un-American. It is Russian.

It is unhealthy for our brains. We were meant to banter.

I have done thousands of tours and gotten lots of compliments and tips but one person out of 5,000 complains and I have to quit telling jokes because the cruise ship industry will pull out of Haines and go to Skagway, where the tour guides are dutifully boring but no one complains and the great cruise ship tour money machine can continue unabated.

It’s a horror movie.

I talked to a guide at the dock who has lots of experience and is pretty smart.

He said, “Use the Irish drinking rules, no politics and no religion.”

Although I find it hard to believe drunk Irishmen don’t talk politics, it made sense.

He told me, “When I train new people, I tell them to point at what you are looking at and say what it is, for instance, ‘Those are boulders in the river and the river water hits them from behind and then goes around them,’ or, ‘That is the prettiest waterfall I have ever seen.’ The customers will then look at each other and go ‘What an awesome waterfall.”

He said, it’s a pretty good job we have so don’t mess it up.

So I started doing what he said.

I said, “There’s a really pretty meadow, it is one of the prettiest meadows I have ever seen,” and, “That is a cottonwood tree, and those are dead trees. We have five salmon. I also started spelling things. That is the Chilkat C-H-I-L-K-A-T River.

Tips are down.

Way down.”