Two pieces on the art of the tall tale. "Truth Stretchers" opens as a gallery of the finest liars John crossed paths with in the mines — the mill's reigning champion storyteller, Buck, and a young miner whose own whoppers kept pace with him — then pivots, in its closing paragraphs, to a very different kind of story: a true account of the friendships he made among German prisoners of war during the 1946 occupation, and a stowaway teenager on the troopship home. It's followed by the poem "A Sailor Never to Be," on John's own seasick 1946 crossing.
Truth Stretchers
I don't believe a person who states, "I have never told a lie." We are born truthful and we remain truthful until we learn the benefits of a well-conceived lie. It can grease the skids for financial gain, a political career, stardom, or all three. A fibber is humorous, he lies to be entertaining and he knows that his audience knows he is lying, but a consummate liar believes his own lies and he thinks everyone is gullible enough to believe them. My wife was a human lie detector and no matter how well I polished a story she would look me right in the eye and reduce me to a babbling idiot.
I hauled concentrates from the same mill I hauled ore to and sometimes ate lunch with the lab crew where Slim Blackford's boneheaded characters had a special bench. Brian, the assayer, liked to get a float cell operator wound up in a long story then pop in a few questions so he rarely got to finish one. A story he was able to wind up concerned a sawmill in Wyoming that hired him to supply meat for the workers. The owner had heard of Buck's reputation as a hunter and tracked him down, paid him more than his best millmen, and gave him free rein to hunt. He used a .30.30 Carbine and the loggers made fun of his popgun. One even offered to let Buck use his .30.06 but what they didn't know was that he had shot Grizzly bear and bull moose with that carbine when he was working in Alaska. He had hunted in Wyoming before and he knew of an elk crossing in a clearing at the top of a ridge. He found his stand in the dark, a high cut stump where he had command of the entire clearing. He had to push his trusty carbine up on the stump then crawl up the back side using knots for footholds. Come daylight the elk began threading through the trees and into the clearing with Buck waiting patiently and estimating the yardage. He waited until they were halfway across then he commenced firing. "I'll tell you," and he looked Brian square in the eye, "when I quit shooting there were elk piled up all over that clearing, enough meat for the whole winter and I just slid off that stump on the empty shell casings." "Bullshit," Brian scoffed, "how in hell could you pack that many boxes of shells?" "Well sir," Buck replied, "I was a lot bigger then than I am now."
It took two lunch sessions for Buck to finish his tale of erecting an absolutely level tramline over a muskeg swamp in Alaska where a mining company had discovered a rich gold vein but had no way to get the ore over the swamp. Once again Buck's reputation had preceded him and the mine owners located him in Canada and paid all his expenses to come solve the dilemma for them, promising a bonus he couldn't turn down. "Well, sir," he approached the end of the story, "I put that tramline in so level that all we had to do was to have two jacks, one at each end, to run it back and forth. We'd jack up one end a foot and lower the other one to get the buckets across then reverse the procedure to run them back." Brian knew he had him here. "Okay, Buck, let's hear how you got the cables across in the first place?" Buck didn't bat an eye, "That was just about the easiest part of the whole job. I got a cannon and harpoon and shot the cable across just like I used to do when I was on a whaling ship." Brian looked at me and shook his head. He had met some real story tellers in his time but we were sitting right by the champion.
Jack Nelson and I were repairing equipment at a mine when a new, young, employee began regaling us with a story of being caught with another man's wife when he was working at Fairplay. There was no urging by either of us for him to continue but, apparently, he wanted to impress us since he was a newcomer and we were two of the oldest hands. "I'll tell you, he was one mad hombre when he come busting through that bedroom door with a knife in one hand and a six-shooter in the other. He took two shots at me as I was rolling off the bed and another as I was smashing the light with a shoe and before I could get to the kitchen door he zinged three more shots right by my head. I'll tell you, I was scared when I went to open the gate and he hit a picket by my hand and splinters hit me in the face." "Wait a minute, wait a minute," Jack butted in, "you said that was a six-shooter but I've counted well over six shots." "That's right," he went on, "that bastard could load a pistol the fastest of anybody I've ever seen." It had been well over 30 years since I had listened to Buck's tales and I wondered if he and this young fellow might be related.
Another day at a later time the same fellow told us of having to hook oxygen bottles to the carburetor of a compressor because the mine he and his father were working was at such an altitude there wasn't enough oxygen in the air for the pistons to fire. He was a hard and dependable worker and if he stretched the truth at times I felt I could live with it. Jack, however, wasn't as agreeable and asked him how high it was at the mine. "Oh hell, over 18,000 feet or higher." Jack snorted, "Jeezuscrist, Jim, there isn't a mountain in Colorado that high." After Jack left, Jim said, "he'd better study his geography, there's lots of mountains in Colorado higher than that." I stayed out of the argument.
The war in Europe had been over for several months and emphasis had been shifted to occupation and rebuilding. A feisty little Irishman, Lieutenant O'Neill, and I had become friends and were attached to a labor supervision company where, other than guards, we were the entire cadre. Prisoners of war were being used to renovate buildings that would become housing for dependents of the occupying forces. My duties were to keep track of the prisoners, assign the most reliable and prepare a disposition form each day. It was good duty and put me in close touch with the German fighting men who, I found, were little different from the American fighting men. They taught me enough of the language to have limited conversations. Otto Herman had been in the German Navy on boats similar to our P. T. Boats. He told me that when the end was near and they knew surrender was imminent they would pull into dock, stock up with ammunition, available food and all the liquor they could requisition, then return to the channel, get drunk and shoot at anything within range, friendly or enemy. Otto had a wife and small boy in the Wiesbaden area and wanted me to try to locate them. I found them in a small apartment of a complex that had taken a bomb hit on one end but their apartment was intact, they had heating and cooking facilities and were doing well for the conditions of the time. I took soap, toothpaste, and rations to them and made a friend for life in Otto Herman. He liked to wrestle and would challenge me if no guards were around. I had worked in the mines of Creede and logged before entering the Army and I was stronger than Otto. He never gave up and promised "next time he would win."
Two of the prisoners were highly suspect but I didn't question them. One, a boy probably 15 or 16 years of age and an old gentleman I judged to be over 60 years of age, swore they had been drafted into the German Army in the last days and captured. I highly suspected they had found uniforms that fit and filtered in with the real prisoners to have two square meals a day and a warm bunk. I learned the boy was an orphan, he had lost his family in the bombings and deserved help.
We were on our way home in December of 1946 and at sea in January of 1947. We were four days from Bremerhaven in the raging North Sea when a stowaway appeared on deck near me as I gripped the rail and emptied my stomach. The stowaway was a 14-year-old German boy who managed to sneak on board with a little food and a canteen of water. He had slipped under the canvas of a lifeboat and stayed put until his food was gone. The kid was pale as a ghost, skinny and terribly seasick. A sailor escorted him to the infirmary and the next time I saw him he was hosing down the deck and managed a smile. For the rest of the voyage he had seaman's duties to earn his keep and we gathered donations from all the personnel for a fund we hoped would enable him to stay in the United States and have a happy ending to his dream. I wish I knew the rest of the story.
A Sailor Never to Be
The rolling sea looked awesome to me
high adventure in the making
with wool clad troops in motley groups
on a wartime undertaking
The vibrating deck of a slow rusting wreck
our platform from New York's bay
to a welcoming ocean with undertow motion
directing us on our way
The foamy white brine in a straight placid line
followed the turning screws
with sea gulls thriving, soaring and diving
amid flotsam from garbage scow crews
But the calm of the bay changed the very first day
to a crashing of waves on the bow
with a rise and a roll
we were out of control
and emptied our stomachs of chow
In weightless sensation, the pride of our nation
lay prostrate and willing to die for a piece of dry land where a soldier could stand
and wave to the ships passing by
Thundermug 2002