Never trust everything a fisherman tells you. His story may start believable enough, but always hold on to the tag-end of suspicion, just in case his tale plummets past plausibility, pulling you into the gulch of gullibility.
That’s why, as I stood in Southwestern Michigan in October, listening to the guy casting into the Black River as it flowed into Lake Michigan, I kept listing for the moment his tales started to stretch beyond believability.
But he was a pretty good fisherman, with proof right there on the ground in front of me. One was a carp that must have weighed ten pounds at least, and flopping next to it was a Great Lakes sheepshead, about half that size. But that wasn’t what he was fishing for, he said, as he kicked them back into the river. He was after walleye.
I asked him what other fish a guy might catch there, and his list included northern pike, muskies, lake trout, coho salmon — even ancient great lakes sturgeon. I nodded, because I grew up on the Chicago side of the lake, and I knew all those species swam in there. And this did look like a pretty good place they might show up.
He lifted his rod and pulled in a tiny fish, no bigger than a small cigar. “Huh,” he said. “Know what this one is?”
I did know, but I wanted to see what he would say it was. Call it a small test to see how far a fisherman is ready to stretch the truth.
“It’s a goby,” he said, and that was the truth — a small, invasive fish that came from European container ships that sucked water into their ballast tanks. On arrival in shallower American rivers, they blow their ballast to lighten the ship. Welcome to America, invasive species. “I’ve seen lamprey eels right here, too,” he said. “They got here the same way.” And that too, I knew, was true.
OK, I thought, so this guy’s a straight shooter. A rarity among fishermen.
We chatted a while longer, and in time our topics strayed to home towns, and jobs, and family all the way down to great grandkids.
I guess my attention must have wandered a bit when I realized he was telling about his car that had gotten blown up by bread dough.
“Wait…what?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “My wife was a baker, and after she made a big batch of bread dough, she realized she had misread the recipe. She had put in way too much yeast. The dough had to go. But she didn’t want to fill the garbage cans with it, so she stuffed all the dough into trash bags and put them into the trunk of my car, so I could take them to the dump.”
Somehow, though, she forgot to tell him. Or maybe he forgot, or didn’t realize just how much dough she was talking about. As I said, my attention had wandered a bit, and I was fuzzy on the facts. In any case, he drove to work and parked in the parking lot, where the sun blazed down on a hot, sunny day.
“It was an old Bonneville,” he said, “with rust holes all around the bottom of the fenders. You know what I mean?”
I nodded, because I had driven cars just like that.
“Anyway, I was up in my office and the secretary came in and said, ‘What have you done with your car? It looks strange.’”
He looked out the window and saw that she was right. It looked as if he had stuffed yellow pillows into his back window. It was the dough, which had risen and pushed up the deck behind the rear seats. Blisters of dough pushed out through every rust hole behind the rear wheels. A massive muffin top flowed out the trunk and sagged over the rear bumper.
By the time he got home, the dough was dragging on the pavement, getting toasted by the friction.
I thought: Who is this guy? Stephen King? Is this the plot of his next movie: “The Rising”?
Just then his rod bowed, and he hauled up a nice walleye, maybe five pounds.
“How did you ever get the car cleaned up?” I asked, more interested in his baking-and-Bonneville fish tale than in his fish.
He shook his head. “Sold it,” he said, not bothering to explain the unbelievable detail of how in the world a guy might find a buyer for a car that’s rapidly transforming into the Pillsbury Doughboy.
Some fishermen just expect you to accept whatever nonsense they tell you.
I snapped a picture of him holding the fish, then texted it to his cell phone so he could show his friends when he got home. That way, I thought, his fish will always be five pounds, no matter how many times he tells the tale.
But I’m sure he’ll weave a credible tale about how he jumped into the river, battling lampreys and gobies, to catch that fish in his teeth.
Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
