Alan Liere: Ask Me No Questions …

During the never-ending summer of my eighth year, my family took a long vacation to Missouri to visit relatives. I vaguely remember motel swimming pools, fried restaurant catfish, and miles of hardwood forests, but a cheap wooden plaque with an inscribed poem in South Dakota’s famed Wall Drug Store is what I remember most:

I ask a simple question

The truth I only wish

Are all fishermen liars?

Or do only liars fish?

I have contemplated this poem for many years. Most fishermen, I’ve discovered, are decent sorts. But a few have come to equate the perception others have of their fishing prowess as an indicator of their overall goodness, intelligence and masculinity; therefore they tell lies to maintain their image. That is not to say members of the female species are above stretching a fish length by a few inches or developing convenient forgetfulness when describing a particularly successful angling technique, but I’ve found women to be generally more candid.

Personally, I have never deviated from “the truth and nothing but the truth” in my fishing revelations. Oh, perhaps I overestimated the length of that big Moses Lake perch or conveniently left out some important details about the lure on which I caught so many trout. Perhaps I even told my friends I caught “my limit,” neglecting to tell them my personal limit is often less than the legal limited as stated in the WDFW fishing regulations. But never, NEVER have I looked a fellow angler in the eye and given him false information … until just recently when peer pressure on a fishing trip to Devils Lake, North Dakota, caused me to lie.

Four friends and I had hit some terrible weather. It was raining and the wind was howling. It was much too miserable to fish from our boat, but rather than sit in our motel, we found some sheltered water underneath a bridge and fished from shore with big jigs tipped with nightcrawlers. Glory be – we caught big walleye and northern pike as quickly as we got our lines in the water!

“We need to come back here tomorrow,” one of my friends said. “So don’t tell anyone at the cleaning station back at the motel where we were fishing or what we were using.” With our honey hole’s close proximity to the highway, he was afraid it would be overrun with less worthy anglers the next day.

Back at the motel, I lugged our bulging cooler into the cleaning station and put it on the floor. Four fishermen from Ontario, Canada were already there filleting an anemic batch of walleye.

“Where in the world did you get those beauties?” one asked when I raised the cooler lid.

“Pelican Bay,” I lied quickly. “On leeches over rocky bottoms.”

The next morning, our honey hole was not producing. Our catch for the entire day was four small walleye and two small pike. With no little embarrassment, I entered the cleaning station back at the motel and there was my Ontario friend. This time, he and his group were working on a prodigious pile of walleye, all over two pounds.

“Nice fish,” I said, trying to show less envy than I was feeling. “Where’d you find ‘em?”

“Right where you told us!” he enthused. “Pelican Bay. Leeches. We sure appreciate the advice!”