Brian Williams' Critics Probably Are Not Anglers

My cousin Jeff called me not long after the news broke about Brian Williams' inaccurate recollections of his now-famous helicopter flight. His question: Who is Brian Williams, and why is everyone on his case?

I gave Jeff the facts as I understood them, along with my impression of Mr. Williams, which admittedly was formed primarily through his appearances on The Daily Show With John Stewart. Then I shifted from my opinion of the newsman to my opinion about whether a guy could misremember such a thing.

I speculated about what the fog of a war zone and the effects of fear might do to total recall. Then I veered into an area where I have greater expertise: As a fisherman, I have a unique perspective on the accurate retelling of tales. 

We all know guys who are clearly lying about their fishing escapades. They're about as convincing as brother Neal in A River Runs Through It. ("Ronald Coleman!?") But most of us likely fit with the description John Gierach offers in his book Dances With Trout. "The memory of a fisherman is more like fiction than journalism," he writes. "It doesn’t ignore the facts, but it's not entirely bound by them, either."

There was a time I thought that was just a good one-liner. But I caught myself this last year in an act of what we'll now unfortunately always think of as "misremembering." (Likely also always placed in air quotes.) We were sitting around a campfire -- probably drinking coffee and smoking big cigars -- and retelling tales we've told dozens of times before but that somehow still make us laugh. During one such recollection, I pictured myself as being present for something that on further reflection more than likely was not the case. I started to chime in, and in a surprise flash of insight, realized I'd become part of the story only through its frequent retelling.

Just to make sure I wasn't "misremembering" my misremembering, I went back to something I'd written a little closer to "the incident." And sure enough, I was accurately recalling catching myself in an inaccurate recollection.

That may not be a parallel experience to Mr. Williams' recent incident. And I'm not even sure it relates. But at the very least, it does make me a little less likely to suggest someone's pants are on fire and assume the worst.

I wrapped up the soliloquy Jeff had unknowingly stepped into with what I'm certain were astute insights on how memory perhaps can't really be trusted and a comment about how I've personally remembered things that probably didn't fully line up with reality.

"Like that time you caught a big one," Jeff quipped. He didn't even hesitate. What hurt more than the sting of that comment was the speed with which he beat me to the joke. It wasn't even close. 

Of course, that may or may not be how I tell the tale in the years to come.  

Misty Trout Stream-Colored Memories … aka, The Way We Was

Certain experiences get etched in your memory. Like the time on a camping trip that a friend said he knew how to ride a dirt bike and then did his best Superman impression when he let out the clutch and the bike sped off leaving him suspended briefly in the air, arms outstretched. Or the time your tippet formed the world's worst rat's nest at precisely 9:59 a.m., back when Minnesota's trout season kicked off at 10 a.m. sharp on a Saturday in mid-April. Or the time a friend caught his first trout, on his first trout outing, while his fly line dragged in the river behind him while you were rambling on about the need for stealth and accurate casting. Or that time you and your buddy camped (for the first and last time) with two acquaintances who apparently liked to spend their downtime wrestling.

For some reason, my memory of my first trout-fishing trip remains a bit cloudy. Or, I should say, there are certain clear memories that don’t quite fit together as puzzle pieces.

There's the Trout Classic Pancake Breakfast in Chatfield, Minnesota, with trout anglers itching for the season to begin, passable pancakes and lukewarm breakfast links you sincerely hoped were of the fully cooked variety. And the muddy Root River blowing by at a rate that made it look nothing like the waters in "The Orvis Guide to Reading a Trout Stream." And that treacherous hill you scaled to get to Trout Run Creek that, it turns out, was just upstream from easy access at the Bide-a-Wee bridge and just downstream from the recess in the trees what would provide easy access for years to come. 

On my own, I couldn’t quite put the pieces together. So on a trip this past summer with my accomplices, Jeff Finnamore and Eric Hjelmberg, I brought it up to see if we could recreate the event by putting our graying heads together. That trip was the first Minnesota trout opener for all of us. Eric had gotten the fly fishing bug during the previous winter, and it turned contagious. So we all bought the best cheap fly fishing gear we could find, did a bit of research, and went out to try our hands. It was April 1993.

As we reconstructed the trip, it became clear that there was, in fact, a Root River component. Jeff recalls walking the riverbank and muttering that it looked nothing like the trout streams his grandfather had taken him to as a lad. And a feeder creek, in which he finally caught a few trout and put them "on ice" using snow he found still sticking to a nearby hillside. And there was a Trout Run wrinkle. That hill. The long walk downstream past bait fisherman, easy access points, and water that looked a little flat and unforgiving for novices. I also recall nearly losing hope, while Jeff, the only real fisherman among us at that time, found a way to connect with a few willing browns. His fish sense clearly outperformed my book learning on that and many trips to follow.

As we talked about that trip and came up with a chain of events we could agree was at least generally accurate, we naturally drifted out of that current and into more ridiculous recollections from our collective past. There was the Jeep / dirt-bike race on a gravel road that ended with a flaming cycle and subsequent crash, followed by Jeff driving his Jeep off the opposite shoulder and into a lake. The time we were driving down a country road and the hood of that Jeep flew open. (Words may or may not have been said that shouldn't be repeated here.) And the time Jeff threw a camp table onto the fire when our supply of firewood got too low. (To the tune of Margaritaville, if memory serves.)

In the retelling of our tall but generally true tales, it became clear that some of these stories not only got better with age, but over time, I'd somehow come to feel I was an integral part of certain stories I'm not entirely sure I was there to experience firsthand. I guess over time, the retelling of the stories becomes as important as, or maybe even more important than, the experiences themselves.

I think it's time for an off-season bonfire and revisiting that conversation. Particularly because my memory of how the puzzle pieces fit together has already faded a bit since we last assembled them.