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Storytellers . . .

By Steven J. Meyers

Found in: | Outside | Fishing | Fly Fishing |

I'm never sure whom this old saying was first written to describe, but it doesn't matter. In both cases it's true: You can always tell when a politician or fisherman is lying - his lips are moving. Not the best image for a person who is either to have, but there it is. It's conventional wisdom. That makes it true, right?

Politics is something I've studiously avoided in this column. Fishing is one of the places where we escape it, or try to. When some bureaucrat-engineer at the BLM looks at a quad sheet and sees the perfect place to build a dam (whether needed or not) and some politician decides he'll stake his career on getting it built so he can leave behind a stagnant impoundment with his name on it, when that impoundment takes its water from one of your favorite trout rivers making it so thin it looks like an intermittent creek instead of a real river, well, it's sometimes hard to avoid politics. But let's get back to that unique brand of storytellers - fishermen.

It's a well-known fact that fish grow. I'm not talking about the weight they put on sucking in worms, smaller fish, insects and as the biologists are wont to say, other macro-invertebrates (we outdoor author storytellers, love to enhance our credibility with bio-scientific mumbo-jumbo). No, I'm talking about the length and weight they put on as the distance of the angler from the river where the fish was caught grows. The two (distance and size) seem to grow in direct proportion to each other. The one-pound trout wrestled from the Animas by a visiting angler will no doubt weigh two or three pounds by the time the fisherman makes it back to his favorite watering hole in Phoenix . This is a well-observed and easily confirmed phenomenon. Well, it would be if fishermen bothered to use tape measures and scales to record the size of their catch, but they don't. Instead, they rely on memory. Which is why you can't call this lying, exactly. Let's just call it the magnifying influence of afterglow - and Scotch.

Recently, I've been engaged in a rather spirited correspondence on the subject of gun writers. I believe the conversation is germane to the topic at hand. Two great old gun writers, Elmer Keith and Jack O'Conner, wrote voluminously about their hunting experiences. Half the reading public seems to think that one of them is a big, fat liar while the other is believed to have written gun gospel. Trouble is, half the readers are dead sure their guy is truthful while the other writes a sack full of cow pies-and each half believes a different author.

How do you know when an outdoor writer or fisherman is telling the truth? (We'll forget about politicians, they never tell the truth.)

Me, I trust the example of my father.

My father was military, Airborne Ranger, retired by the time I came along. It's a long story - but it boils down to the fact that he was already pretty old by the time I appeared. He'd lived more than any ten men I've known since. Guess he figured it would be mighty inconvenient to have a child while there was a World War raging, and he really had no choice but to wait since he spent the war years in the jungles of the south Pacific. By the time the war was over, he'd had enough of jumping out of airplanes, and he'd waited a long time to get back to hunting and fishing, so that's exactly what he did. Both - get back to the woods in a place where nobody was shooting at him, then have kids.

He was a wonderful storyteller. Oddly, even though he'd been all over the Pacific, I never once heard him tell a story about the war. The stories he told instead were full of the land he fished and hunted and the creatures who inhabited it. Stories from before the war, and then, about the trips he was making with his good friend, fishing and hunting partner, Jack. As a little boy, I'd often curl up on the floor in Jack's den, a place that smelled of gun oil, knotty pine, and as often as not, wet dog. Resting my head on Jack's old beagle, Betsy, I'd listen as their stories filled the air. Not once did I hear a story about how wonderful they were, about how many they'd killed or how big. Instead, I heard about their wonder. About the places they went, magical places where creatures - far better adapted to those magical places than we could ever be - lived. And I believed every word. Still do, because the men who told them were not trying to make themselves look good. They knew better than to try because anyone who actually lives it knows those places are always, and should be, humbling.

So. There you are in the bar, or someone's den. It's a fisherman and their lips are moving. A storyteller. Can you believe what he or she is saying? Here's my rule of thumb: If the story makes the storyteller look good, take it with a grain of salt. If the story makes the storyteller seem small compared with the beauty of the place, the wisdom of the woods or river, the savvy of the creatures - if it fills you with wonder so large and unfathomable it makes the storyteller disappear, savor it. Trust it. Believe it. This is the nature of truth.

And if you are unlucky enough to find yourself alone with a politician, buy the poor son of a gun a drink. I wouldn't want to have to carry around their sack of cow pies for all the tea in China .