Arms Race by John C. Street 

The truth, regardless of what I may have implied in the past, is that there are lots of people who can out fish me.  I, however, can tell a better fishing story than 99% of those people.  There is that remaining 1%, though, and I know they’re out there because I met one of them.  I even had home field advantage when it happened.

A long time ago I used to get invited to some pretty snazzy dinner meetings, typically when some local big shot was entertaining a notable ‘mupear’ who said he liked to fish.  I quickly caught on to the fact that my sole function at these soirees was to talk the - outdoor - talk and keep the visiting dignitaries entertained but the food was always good so I didn’t mind. 

One summer, a big shot from the local college was hosting two of Russia’s top scientists and I got invited to have supper with them at a fancy restaurant. Through the formal introduction of the interpreters who were there that evening, I learned that one of these guys was the head of their aeronautics program and the other was their top domo in advanced mathematics.  Given the obvious language barrier, to say nothing of the disparity in our IQs, I wasn’t at all sure I’d be able to fulfill the implied terms of my invitation.   The toast I offered with our first drinks, “Nastrovia,” the only Russian word I knew, pretty well exhausted my conversational repertoire.  

For the next hour or so the talk was stiflingly formal, mostly math and science, neither of which make for easy chit-chat.  However, after the visitors relaxed a bit (I,e,, quaffed down a half dozen vodkas), I inquired about their interest in fishing and watched their faces closely as the interpreter posed my question to them.  Their expressions answered in the affirmative. 

I figured I’d been invited to this confab because one of these guys fished so I had taken a chance and tied up a bunch of my favorite trout flies and put them in two classy looking boxes.  With what the big shot from the college was going to pay for my meal at this ritzy restaurant, I thought it was the least I could do. 

As the interpreter was relating their answer, which I already knew, I dug those fly boxes out of my coat pocket and slid them across the table, one to each of them.  Their faces lit up when they opened the boxes and I knew, language barrier notwithstanding, the remainder of the evening was going to be much more interesting.  

A funny thing happens whenever a couple fishermen get together.  I’m pretty sure it’s a guy thing because the end result is an escalating case of one-upmanship that generally ends just politely short of fisticuffs.  Inevitably, someone will tell about a big fish they caught and the other, not to be outdone, comes back with an even bigger fish story. 

As I’m sure you will appreciate under these circumstances, I wasn’t about to drop the ball for the good old U S of A and to be certain the scientists understood, I was using the universal sign language for demonstrating the size of the fish I had caught.  As the evening progressed, however, and the fish from both countries got bigger and bigger, I began to fear that a new ‘arms race’ was getting started; both the Russians and I were stretching our arms quite a bit to describe our fish.

At some point (I think it might have been between their eighth and ninth heavers of vodka and my second beer) it became obvious that this arm stretching contest was on the brink of escalating out of control so I attempted to diffuse the situation by telling them the old saw  about the one-armed fisherman.  In case you haven’t heard it, it’s the one where the guy tucks his fish pole under the stub of his left arm, stretches his right arm out to full length and exclaims, “it was this big!”

I’d timed it so the interpreter was just relating the “this big” part when I was stretching out my right arm and those two scientists burst out laughing like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.

I should have known, however, that once the competitive fire had been lit, it would be hard to extinguish.  And Mr. Rocket Science, obviously the more ardent fisherman of the two, wasn’t about to let old Mother Russia down.  Before the laughter from my hackneyed joke had died, he was holding up his finger for attention and a knowing smile creased his face.

Through the interpreter he told us how his son and two buddies had driven to one of their favorite streams for a day of fishing.  No fish, they decided, were to be kept until near quitting time and then only if large enough to be worth taking home.  

As luck would have it, the morning fishing was very good but it tapered off as the day progressed and by the time they were ready to leave, there was nothing to bring home.  Nothing, that is, except the argument about who had caught the biggest fish.  The scientist’s son was adamantly claiming that honor.  And like every good angler, his fish got bigger and bigger the closer they got to home. 

Finally, his friends couldn’t stand it anymore.  They pulled the car over to the side of the road, ganged up on him and tied his hands together.   And that was the way the scientist found him when he walked out to help unload his son’s gear. 

When the three young men got out of the car, the scientist asked how they had done and his boy launched into his story, describing the initial strike and the terrific fight while his friends nodded in agreement.  They even agreed when he explained how close he had come to loosing it when it went upstream through a set of riffles where he couldn’t follow.  Finally, the scientist asked how big it was and his son, with his hands still tied, formed his fingers as thought holding a baseball in each hand. 

And I knew I had just met one of those rare people who could beat me at telling fish stories when the scientist mimed the actions of his son’s hands just as the interpreter related, “he was so big, his eyes were this far apart.”