Dirty Trick #14 -- Tall Tales

In one of my jobs, members of the team used to gather around a table at lunch time and chat. A short time after joining, the topic turned to hiking and I mentioned that I had summited Long's Peak in 4 hours. The team lead then mentioned a former girlfriend who was a pathological liar who claimed to have summited Mt. Rainier.

It seemed a bit of a non-sequitur. One understands that Mt. Rainier is a technical climb -- often used as preliminary training for Mount Everest expeditions. Sure, anyone who claims to have gone up Mount Rainier deserves genuine admiration or genuine skepticism. In contrast, in late summer it is possible to just walk up to the top of any one of Colorado's 14,000 ft peaks -- assuming, of course, that you are in very good physical condition.

Shortly after that, when the talk turn to cars and driving, I claimed that the first car I ever drove was a Porsche 911-S. In response, the same girlfriend was mentioned again -- in which her supposedly equivalent exploit was having flown an F-18. 

At this point, I caught on to the fact that my veracity was being questioned. Without skipping a beat, I said that I had only ever flown an F-15, slyly omitting the fact that it was in a simulator. "It's really not that hard: It handles like a rocket with control surfaces." From that time on, I made a game of relating stories about myself that were 100% true, but leaving out certain details that might tend to make them more credible. The pathological liar girlfriend was a recurring theme: I pretended to be completely obtuse -- never connecting the mention of her to anything I had said.

I claimed to have cut down 100 trees in a single day. I claimed that while building a deck for a friend, I had driven 900 nails in 6 hours. I talked about how I had fixed any number of stalled vehicles using only a pocket knife, and how I had extinguished a car fire using two cans of beer (which I just happened to have handy) and my mighty breath.

On the subject of photography, I put in that I had once waded out into the middle of the Delaware River, to get the best view of John Roebling's suspension bridge at Lackawaxen PA. On the subject of canine misadventures, I claimed that I had pulled a tree out of the ground and used it to defeat two guard dogs. I was able to claim with a straight face, that I had overpowered and escaped from 5 guys who were trying to beat me up.

I particularly enjoyed relating my past athletic exploits, such as: Riding my bike to the top of Flagstaff Mountain in 23 minutes; riding from Longmont to Boulder (a distance of 17 miles) in 34 minutes; riding from Trentino Alto Adige in Italy to Munich, Germany (a distance of 480 km) in less than two days. I once ran from my apartment in Boulder to the IBM plant in Gunbarrel (a distance of 10 miles) in an hour and 20 minutes. And one fine evening, I ran from the Carolina Circle Mall to 1109 Pebble Drive (8 miles) in 59 minutes. 

Every one of these claims is quite true, but to feed skepticism I would sometimes correct myself on the numbers involved. "Wow! 17 miles in 34 minutes? That would be, um, 30mph. Maybe it was 43 minutes instead...."

The story of summiting Long's Peak in 4 hours is still an admirable feat, and I know someone who can corroborate the story. In September of 1976, Paul Beatty and I agreed to hike up Long's Peak together. He wanted a hiking companion and I felt equal to the challenge. We met at his house and he drove us to the Long's Peak Trailhead. We hit the trail just after 9 am, and had crossed the Boulder Field by noon. Just below the Keyhole, I stopped in the hiker's shelter to catch my breath while he went on ahead. Passing through the Keyhole, I found it was only a short hike to the summit. I came up a few minutes later, reaching the top close to 1pm.

The story of the Porsche is also quite true. I baby-sat for the Sansons before and after they had moved to the condos on Bear Mountain Drive. In December of 1974, when I was 15 1/2, the parents came back well after midnight from a party in Denver. It's hard to fathom the logic behind it (since he'd just driven 25 miles), but Fred considered himself too drunk to drive me the mile and a half home. So he gave me the keys to the Porsche and settled himself in the passenger seat.

Growing up, I had watched my dad intently as he drove our VW van, so I understood the basic theory of driving a stick shift. I started up the Porsche and we went jerkily out of the parking lot. The powerful engine made up for my lack of skill in working the clutch: I only stalled the engine once while crossing the opposing lane of Table Mesa Drive at Gillaspie Drive. I even managed to get up to 3rd gear while driving up Stanford Drive. I pulled in to the top of our driveway on Kohler Drive and left the engine running. Perhaps the adrenaline helped Fred drive himself home safely.

When I worked at GE in Binghamton NY, they had an F-15 simulator set up in the lab two doors down. I was allowed to go in and use the simulator during my lunch hour. I got to get the feel of flying the aircraft with very little risk on both sides: I lost about half a dozen lives and as many aircraft before I could handle it well enough to stay airborne. (One queued up the next life by hitting the red reset button on the side of the cockpit.)

The twist in the claim of cutting down 100 trees in a day is that all of those trees were maple seedlings. I literally mowed them down (with a push mower). The number of trees thus dispatched was actually in the 1000s, but claiming to have felled 100 trees in a day seemed outrageous enough.

When I built a deck for George Keenan in Binghamton, I drove 900 decking nails in six hours with a regular 16oz claw hammer. But I guess I forgot to mention that I did this in two 3-hour stints on consecutive days.

I also tested credulity by claiming to have gotten numerous stalled vehicles back on the road using only a pocket knife. The part that I left out was that this invariably happened when the weather was cool and damp. The damp weather would cause corrosion to form on the inside of the distributor cap, but as long as the corrosion was damp it would conduct OK and the engine would run. After the engine warmed up, it would drive the water out, making the corrosion a better insulator. Then, the car would stall out. All I had to do was to scrape the corrosion off the inside of the distributor cap and the car would start right up. It helps the impression of fiction that few people these days have experience with anything but electronically fuel-injected engines. (They have no distributor cap.)

The story of extinguishing a car fire with my breath began at my cousin John's wedding in Washington D.C. My girlfriend, Carolyn, and I had driven up from Raleigh to attend. After the reception, there was an after-party at the newlywed's hotel suite. We stopped by for a short time (and a few more drinks). Before leaving, I helped myself to two 16oz cans of beer, putting one in each pocket of my suit coat. As we were driving back to our B&B, Carolyn asked to go by the National Cathedral to look at the call board and find out when services were to be held on Sunday morning, so we did that. 

As we were driving away, we came down a hill to a stop sign. There, directly across the intersection, there was a Karmann Ghia with flames coming up underneath it. I jumped out of the Horizon and ran across the intersection. The woman in the car saw me coming and got out. Her engine had stalled, so she already knew that something was wrong. My running toward her must have convinced her that something was really very wrong. 

I sat down in the driver's seat and put out the clutch so the car could roll back away from the flaming puddle of gasoline underneath. Then I got out and asked how to undo the latch for the engine compartment. She said you just raise it, so I did that. There were flames rising around the sides of the engine. What to do next? At that moment I recalled that I had a can of beer in each pocket, so I proceeded to open one and then the other, using them to douse the flames. At last there was a little flicker near the fan pulley, which I blew out with my breath. 

The young lady turned out to be a nurse who was just returning home after a late shift. We rolled her car back and parked it against the curb, and then gave her a ride to her apartment nearby. That story doesn't need any spinning to seem improbable.

The missing detail from the story about the Bridge at Lackawaxen is that the upper Delaware is quite shallow (especially since much of the water that used to flow there is diverted into the NYC water supply). On canoe trips in late summer, I would sometimes scrape bottom -- meaning that the mighty Delaware is less than 2" deep in some places. At the famous bridge, I had to pick my way carefully to cross the deep channel next to shore without going in over my head. Out in the middle where I took my shots, though, the river was no more than knee-deep.

The story of how I used a tree to cow two dogs began as I returned home from Paul's rental house on Marine Street late one Sunday evening. My usual route took me along the levy next to the Farmer's Ditch. A construction site had sprung up and was surrounded on 3 sides by chain-link fencing. But the side next to the ditch was open, so I just walked on through. Then, I heard barking and figured that guard dogs had been posted to protect the construction site. 

I looked around and saw the trunk of a pine sapling that had been uprooted by a bulldozer. It was about 10' tall with roots still attached, and seemed to me to be a pretty good weapon. I picked it up by the crown end, and laid it across my shoulder like a baseball bat. Then, I waited for the dogs to come up. 

When the dogs were about 20 feet away I made a roundhouse sweep with the tree trunk, roots hissing through the air in front of their faces. That display brought the dogs up short. They simply turned tail and trotted back to their kennels. Evidently, exposing themselves to injury was not part of their contract. 

My elaboration, of course, was to omit the detail that the tree had already been uprooted: I merely had to pull it out of the mud. Also, "tree" to most people suggests something bigger.

The 5 guys that I "overpowered" were members of the provisional troop that I was placed in at Scout Camp. They had learned their social skills by observing (or participating in) gang behavior, and wanted to assert dominance over other members of the troop. They caught up with me as I was exploring the woods, and two guys ended up holding me by the arms. The gang leader stood facing me, and his henchman was positioned behind me. Their smallest member stood in front of the gang leader and was given the task of punching me, to "teach me a lesson".

Well, even in that situation I'd be damned if I let a scrawny pipsqueak beat me up. So I didn't. Using the guys on each arm as supports, I jumped back and brought my knees up to my chest. Then, I kicked the little guy in his chest. He fell back and knocked over the gang leader. The guys on my arms weren't prepared to hold me aloft, so they fell back and let go. The counterforce from my kick propelled me back into the henchman, who also fell over.

The moment of surprise gave me the head start that I needed. I sprinted off through the woods, and then circled back to camp to tell the troop leader what had happened. Interestingly, I had no further trouble with those five guys for the remainder of my stay at Scout Camp.

The incredible part of the story is that my attackers had arranged themselves precisely so that one kick was enough to knock them all over like tenpins. That's the way it was, believe it or not.