ALCOHOL WAS A FACTOR: Weekly Newspapering in Rural Alaska

THE FELTIST

Work at the weekly had begun to take on a factory-like routine: I was in the office long before the sun rose just before 9 a.m., and many hours after sundown came just at 3 p.m.

I needed a muse in this dark and sullen place.

Up until that point, I had only heard about the character known as the Feltist.

He was sort of a legend; like Bigfoot, or Loch Ness, but up until then the beast had not been spotted.

Still, he was much-discussed. Morphet and others told stories about Joe Parnell. I did know this: Joe was the owner of the paper’s poor excuse for a staff car, which he had loaned to Morphet in some shady backroom deal for free newspapers or Wifi.

People laughed when they talked about Parnell; apparently, they couldn’t help themselves.

Parnell had made national news with a stunt the previous summer; something about dressing up as a bear at the local river site where the grizzlies congregate feed on fish each summer.

Somebody gave me the story:

HEADLINE: “Man in bear costume harasses bears near Haines.”

Authorities want to talk to a man who donned a fairly realistic bear costume — head and all — and wore it when harassing a sow and two cubs trying to feed on pink salmon in an Alaska river.

The incident happened Monday on the Chilkoot River near Haines, said Alaska Fish and Game Assistant Area Management Biologist Mark Sogge.

It wasn’t immediately known what the man was trying to accomplish.

A crowd had gathered at a weir, used to count fish, because the sow and two cubs have frequently been showing up there to feed during the salmon run.

The crowd, which is kept at a safe distance from the weir, became startled when a man decked out in a bear outfit ran through the area Monday evening.

The man began to jump up and down, and then got close to the cubs, within five to 10 feet, Sogge said.

Alaska Fish and Game technician Lou Cenicola moved the sow out the way for the man’s safety and then tried to talk to the man, which Sogge said is a little outside Cenicola’s normal duties.

“Our job is to count fish,” Sogge said.

The man refused to identify himself, Cenicola said.

Sogge reported the man told the technician: “You have the license plate number. You figure it out.”

The man then drove off without ever removing the costume head and revealing his face.”

Perhaps worse than this, people here already said I looked like Parnell.

Then one day, he blew into the newsroom. A strapping 6-foot-four-inch lug with a big granite block head and large-framed glasses, Parnell would have undoubtedly made the widest and ugliest snow angel in all of Alaska.

I liked him right away.

It wasn’t long before he gave me a ball cap hat adorned with his art made of felt.

The hat featured a cartoon bear that looked somewhat like Joe: big, lovable and goofy in his own way.

So let me tell you a little bit more about Joe Parnell.

Before he became the Feltist, he was known to locals here as Pizza to go by Joe. He took orders from his pedicab. His main competition was a place here called Grizzly Greggs, the only place in town that had arcade machines upstairs.

Most of the high school kids in town had their birthday parties there.
Joe also delivered his pizzas by pedicab, another Parnell come-on.

But Joe being Joe, problems arose.

I have heard this second and even-third-hand, but getting to know Joe, I believe it to be true: Whenever pretty girls jumped off the visiting cruise ships in the summer, Joe would flirt them up, offering rides around town in his pizza pedicab.

Of course, Joe closed up shop during these excursions, reportedly leaving no one to mind the pizzas.

Joe has his hats on display in one of the windows outside the IGA on Main Street. His artist card says Joe discovered his “calling” with felt while wandering aimlessly through a Jo-Ann Fabric store in 2007.

Captivated by the variety and intensity of colors, (and I’m writing this verbatim now,) “Parnell grabbed several sheets of felt, went home, and started cutting out figures.”

When someone paid for one of his creations, the soon-to-be Feltist said, “it was like letting a beast out of its cage,”

The flier reads that “you can usually find Parnell at the coffee shop, bar, newspaper office or library with his duffel bag of felt, working on his latest masterpiece.”

I love this last line. The names of these places aren’t necessary.

In Haines, everybody knows.

Like I say, Joe is the kind of guy who would give someone the shirt off his back, or in my case, the hat off his head.

One afternoon, I was working on a story in the newsroom when Joe stormed in, like he always did, like Kramer in Seinfeld, He used the computers here to research his latest free-speech request against the local government.

I saw his hat, a black one with the bear insignia.

I wanted it.

“Give me that hat,” I told Joe.

And he gave it to me.

Just like that.

Not long afterwards, Joe stormed back into the office with a new hat.

He felt bad giving me an old used hat, “with the grease and everything” so he sat at a desk in the office and made me this hat, ripping the bear off the old for the new.

Joe used to write a regular column for the Chilkat Valley News, but sort of lost his steam facing a constant deadline.

I think he should return and focus on blowing the lid off this town.

Right now though, the Feltist is busy with his felt.