by James Prosek
“About sixty years,” she said.
It made me feel bad. Knowing it must have been old was one reason I hadn’t wanted to kill it—that, and my intense and unmentionable superstition. DJ patted me on the back.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s food, James. I’m going to give it to the old people, who are too old to set their own hinaki.”
I looked at the eel hanging there, and with a piece of newspaper pulled the slime and ash from it. I had never killed anything that was older than I was. But, having done it, I felt unofficially part of the Maori awareness. And I swear, as I looked at the eel I felt a certain clarity—my vision became clearer. I don’t know how else to describe it except that I felt enlightened.
Yet, simultaneously, my body flushed with regret. I couldn’t help but feel that somehow DJ had tricked me into acting out the parable of the British treatment of the Maori culture, even as he’d asked me to do so in order to be inducted into his culture. It was complicated and weird, but in the end it didn’t all need to be explained.
DJ cut the eel’s tail to bleed it out. Blood dripped into the pit he’d dug around his house, a kind of moat. DJ said he intended to divert water from a nearby spring to fill it up, so that it would be like a pool in a creek you might see in the bush, with ferns overhanging it. He’d gotten the idea when he was building the house, he said—a vision. As he dug the pit, he thought of the trout he’d put in the pool, and then he’d drop in a big eel “that would stalk and eventually kill the trout.”
“When the Europeans came, they introduced the trout,” said DJ. “Then what happened is, the trout ate all the small native fish, the kokopu and the bullies. They thought to themselves: ‘Right, we own it now, we’re kings of the pool.’ And then, from out of the depths, from the darkness, came the cultural factor, the old tuna—the giant eel. He’s an old fish, and he’s absolutely relentless, and he relentlessly stalks the trout.” DJ paused. “The eel is morehu, the survivor. I think they’ll be there till dot. Till the end of the world as we know it.”
At the end of my trip to New Zealand with Stella, I felt as though I’d been immersed in a place where not knowing is something quite different from ignorance—where the unknown is tangible and sacred, whether it be the force of a water guardian or the spawning place of the longfin eel. The nameless, the unclassified, the interstices between visible objects—all these existed in their own dimension some distance apart from concrete evidence (which by the nature of its conclusiveness seemed false and simplistic). If there was anyplace left in the world where mystery was palpable, where unknowingness was implicit, it was New Zealand. From the day I left I looked forward to going back.
* According to the German ichthyologist Friedrich Tesch, eels “can meet virtually all their oxygen needs cutaneously,” meaning that if they must, they can survive breathing exclusively through their skin. They can only do so, however, if the skin is wet-covering them with dry powder will certainly kill them.
* Cold smoking is done at a lower temperature and relies on the smoke to cure the meat, as opposed to hot smoking, which in effect cooks the meat. Cold smoking preserves meat for longer periods of time but can take hours or days.
chapter five
THE FIRST TASTE OF Frashwater
In late winter, about mid-March, when plates of ice still line the muddy banks of tidal creeks, baby eels are just making their way from the sea into freshwater streams of southern New England.* From Little Compton, Rhode Island, to Manhattan Island, tiny fish, small as matchsticks and clear as glass, ascend the estuaries and lagoons invisibly, moving from salt to fresh.
A year or so before, between February and April, these fish were hatched from eggs in the Sargasso Sea. They drifted and fed and grew in the rich seawater, sheltered in their early days in thick mats of sargassum weed and by their transparency.** Riding currents flowing to the west, the first eels entered estuaries and freshwater rivers of the Caribbean Islands about November. By January larvae were making their way into the Gulf of Mexico and toward the east coast of Florida. Subsequently, they reached estuaries and bays of the Carolinas and Virginia and Maryland. By March, April, and May the rivers of southern New England, Maine, and Canada were receiving their manna, including the stream that connects the sea to the pond across the street from my home in Connecticut.
The ocean spawning location is strategic—at the head of a particular current, a river in the sea, which ensures that the hatchlings will be carried back toward the coast. How the young eels know to move west out of the ocean river to enter the freshwater rivers of North America is a mystery—if they didn’t, they would continue riding the North Atlantic Drift, like corks in a river. And how some eels enter a given river and others move on to populate different rivers, distributing themselves more or less evenly throughout the range, is also a mystery.
By the time the eels first enter freshwater from the sea they have slimmed from their leaf-shaped larval stage, though they are still totally transparent except for two black dots for eyes. The glass eels move up the estuaries at night on the incoming tide, largely unnoticed by humans as they swim past, under, and around our businesses, homes, dams, and bridges. Days after entering freshwater, the clear fish become pigmented, like thin black shoelaces, at which point they are called elvers.*
The juveniles feed and grow and become resident eels in an estuary, river, or lake, occupying a particular place for ten to one hundred years, depending on the species. At this stage they are sometimes referred to as yellow eels because they are usually yellow-brown to olivaceous in color. When they are of age to migrate and spawn they undergo physiological changes that prepare them for their long sea journeys—their eyes get bigger and take on a bluish cast, their skin becomes thicker, and their pectoral fins elongate. Steel-colored, with black backs like many ocean fishes, these migrating eels, fat and strong, are referred to by biologists and fishermen alike as silver eels.**
Eels once traveled up the Mississippi and tributaries as far as Iowa, Ohio, Minnesota, and Illinois, in numbers significant enough to support commercial fisheries. In New England old-timers talk of “slicks” or “rafts” of glass eels moving up tidal creeks in spring, so thick they formed mats on top of the water. To overcome obstacles such as vertical walls or waterfalls, they would form braids with their bodies, a phenomenon known by old Mainers as “roping up.” These days an eel caught in the Midwest is an aberration, and many say that such huge runs of glass eels don’t happen anymore. The range of the American eel is shrinking, the total population declining, and while some attribute it to habitat loss and pollution, others blame a commercial export fishery for glass eels to Asia that developed in the late 1970s but did not hit its peak until the mid-1990s—an event that fishermen and conservation officers alike refer to as the eel gold rush.
The international trade in eels, a multibillion-dollar industry, is driven largely by Japan’s appetite for the rich, fatty flesh.* The eel trade remains dependent on the capture of wild fish, because no one has figured out how to reproduce eels in captivity in an economically viable way. In the early 1990s the population of native eels in Japan, Anguilla japónica, began to nosedive, and prices for eel became prohibitively high. Asian dealers started to look elsewhere to meet the demand and soon found that similar freshwater eel species lived in Europe and North America. Europe had existing fisheries for eels, mostly for the adults, with several historical eel-fishing centers—the Skåne region of southern Sweden, the Basque regions of France and Spain, Comacchio, Italy, and Lough Neagh, Ireland, to name a few.* Once cherished by Native Americans and early white settlers (one of the first things Squanto taught the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony was to fish for eels), the eel had been largely ignored as a food fish in modern America.** This made North America, even more than Europe, a perfect target for export to Asia—eels were plentiful and there were no limits on how many could be taken.
One issue that had to be overcome was getting the eels from North America or Europe to Jap
anese markets alive, since very often they are killed, dressed, and prepared all at once in eel-only restaurants. Instead of shipping adult eels, which was costly (because of the shipping weight), dealers focused on the capture of glass eels, which could be shipped by the millions to warehouse-style farms in China and Taiwan where they are fattened.* Another advantage of farming eels from the juvenile stage is that the fish can be raised to the preferred size, about eighteen inches, so that a single eel, halved, splayed, grilled, and served over a bed of rice, will fit into a black lacquered box with a red interior—a dish called kabayaki unagi.**
Initially, the price paid to American fishermen on the docks and riverbanks for glass eels was about $30-$45 a pound. In 1997, record-low catches in Japan sent prices to a high that has not been surpassed since. All of a sudden fishermen were getting paid upward of $250 a pound. Enterprising Asian dealers and American seafood wholesalers began training oystermen, lobstermen, cod fishers, Chesapeake watermen, carpenters, insurance salesmen, and hairdressers to dip or set nets for glass eels. These provisional fishermen were happy to work long nights during the glass eel run to put a few extra hundred (or thousand) dollars in their pockets.
Naturally, competition for the best eeling spots in river mouths and estuaries increased. Fishermen began to stake out their territories and defend them with their fists and by packing guns. Dealers were toting tens of thousands of dollars cash to pay fishermen and driving tank trucks full of very valuable live glass eels to airports in Boston and New York to be shipped to Asia. There were incidents of fishermen sabotaging each other’s nets, pouring bleach in competitors’ tanks, firing warning shots, and getting into nasty fights. A fish that hitherto had been just about worthless now was the most valuable food fish on the coast. With the money came trouble; the eel gold rush was in full force.
At that point, nothing was illegal about the fishery. No one seemed to care about eels in any life stage; no regulations existed to protect them. Glass eels had swum invisibly by everyone for centuries, but all of a sudden they were being exported in staggering numbers, thousands of metric tons, enough to potentially cripple the population. State biologists and conservation officers finally woke up to the mass exploitation of the resource—this kind of fishing pressure was not sustainable. Within a few years the coastal fishery for glass eels and related export businesses was shut down. Today, outside of a limited fishery in South Carolina, Maine is the only state in the United States that allows the export of baby eels.
Wishing to learn more about the glass eel fishery in Maine, and the international trade of glass eels in general, I contacted a state biologist named Skip Zink, who designed and built ramps and ladders to facilitate the upstream migration of glass eels over Maine’s many impoundments. Skip suggested I contact Pat Bryant, who set her nets in the mouth of the Pemaquid River, on Maine’s breathtakingly beautiful and rugged granite coastline.
I called Pat at her home in Nobleboro one May day, during midseason for the glass eel run, and asked if I could come up and learn more about the fishery. She said she was very busy, but I was welcome to come by and see her tanks of glass eels and export operation. I had a lot of questions. Did she sell to Asian dealers directly? Did she know of any eel dealers that I might be able to meet and talk to?
“Asian dealers?” Pat laughed in her raspy voice. “Hell, there’s one asleep on my couch right now.”
When I arrived at Pat’s home and business, about five hours’ drive from my home, she was just leaving for Portland to meet with her urchin dealer from Japan (eels were her primary but not exclusive export). As promised, there was an Asian man on her couch, a buyer from China with whom she worked closely.
“Jonathan can answer some of your questions,” Pat said.
Jonathan Yang spent four or five hours a day “babysitting” the thousands of pounds of glass eels being kept alive in aerated holding tanks in Pat’s barn. He guarded them from theft, checked periodically to make sure they were looking healthy, and was simply present in the event that there was a power outage so he could start the generator and keep the aerators going. But mostly he sat on the couch smoking cigarettes.
I sat in a chair opposite Jonathan on the couch. He had a big mop of straw-like black hair, a broad nose, and wide eyes. He wore a black jacket, black pants, and black shoes, and continually scratched his scalp, complaining of blackfly bites.
“You’re from China?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “I Taiwanese.”
“Do you stay here with Pat?”
“No,” he said, “I stay in Portland.” With his accent it sounded like he said “Poland.” He spoke good English but in a choppy and almost comically stereotypical Chinese way, squinting through the haze of cigarette smoke.
I carried in my bag some photos from my recent trip to New Zealand and showed them to Jonathan as a way of demonstrating my interest and travels concerning eels. One in particular caught his interest in an almost devotional way. It was a picture of Stella kneeling on the bank of the small spring-fed creek in Kawhia. Eels were coming out of the water to take dog food off the grass and she was petting them on the head. The eels were very close to Stella’s bare feet.
“I know this eel,” he said with intensity, “but where, what island? Ah, New Zealand,” he said, ashing his cigarette and nodding slowly. He examined the photo even more closely, closing one eye and pointing to the large eels in the photo with an unusually long pinky fingernail. “In Taiwan we call this eel lo moa. See how it feeds out of water? It has to be strong to move like this. Our native lo moa in Taiwan is almost same, but has spots.* Only lo moa can climb up on land to eat. When heavy rains, they come up onto the land. They even climb mountain. But in Taiwan now this eel is very few,” he said. “We eat them all.”
“You eat big eels in Taiwan?” I asked.
“Yes, only Taiwan people eat this eel. In China no eat. Wives make soup in wintertime from lo moa. Make husband strong, make her happy. But it’s very expensive. A family or a few wives go to market together, buy one eel, and split in pieces. They cook very slowly for few hours, until it make broth, add ginger root.”
The name lo moa, Jonathan said, means “like mafia, strong and discreet.” This term described the characteristics of this particular eel, qualities that wives hoped their husbands would possess once they ate it. Taiwanese men will drink the soup three times a day for two weeks. According to Jonathan, the effect can last up one year. “You can make love every day you feel.”**
Jonathan looked at the photo of Stella and the eels with keen commercial interest, but also with a genuine fascination for their size, their age, and their ability to feed out of water.
“The largest lo moa I ever see was in market in Taiwan,” Jonathan said. “Seventy pound. But I hear about one, more than one hundred. They ship big eel each in own plastic bag with a single ice block. The skin must stay wet and fish must make it to market alive—otherwise worth nothing.” Jonathan said that he had dealt in lo moa in the past, but tightening export regulations in New Zealand and their protected status in Taiwan made it difficult to get them.
Some years ago, however, a friend of Jonathan’s told him about a unique island he’d visited in Micronesia. On this island there were many freshwater rivers, more than any other island in the region. It rained almost every day, two hours in the afternoon, and then it was sunny and very hot. It was lush and green and beautiful and the people were very nice. And there, Jonathan said, “he find many big eels, just like our Taiwan lo moa.”*
This place was called Pohnpei (Jonathan pronounced it “Pon-a-pey”), a pristine rain forest paradise—a tiny volcanic island a little more than twelve miles across. It was easy to get there from Taiwan, with a brief layover in Guam. “Make very easy to ship lo moa.”
“Have you been there?” I asked Jonathan.
“Yes, few times. When I go there, I fish for lo moa. The people see me, they go away. I say, ‘Why you scared? Just eel.’ ”
It was n
ot only the numerous freshwater streams that were responsible for the abundance of eels, but the fact that the indigenous Pohnpeians considered the eels sacred and therefore didn’t eat them.
“If you make book about eels,” Jonathan said, “you must go Pohnpei. Every village, they have different story about lo moa. One story, virgin, she washing clothes in the river. Lo moa swim up inside her.” He laughed. He said the island was so small you could drive the whole road around its periphery in two hours. There were many pools, too, where the people kept eels and fed them.
Jonathan had once exported eels from Pohnpei. He said that the glass eel business was “much better” and that’s why he was focusing on that and nothing else. But then he told me the story of what happened to Mr. Chen, the friend who had first introduced him to Pohnpei, and conceded that this was the real reason he’d stopped dealing in giant eels.
Chen liked Pohnpei so much he lived there for a time arranging several shipments of big eels to Taiwan. One shipment, however, was ill-fated.
Chen had collected about two thousand pounds of eels and prepared them for transport. As usual, he kept them in an open tub of water, a circular tank, outside his bedroom window. The night before the eels’ departure to Taipei, one of the fish, the largest, which Jonathan had described as being around ninety pounds, kept Chen awake all night, lifting its head out of the water and crying like a human baby. Chen got a bad feeling and slept little that night, but the next day he went ahead with the shipment anyway.
When the plane stopped in Guam to refuel, Chen discovered to his horror that the eels had been loaded in a cargo hold of the plane that was so cold they had frozen and died. Since the eels were only valuable in markets alive, this was a huge loss.
“Oh no!” I exclaimed, sad at this twist.
“When he got back to Taiwan, Mr. Chen had bad dreams,” Jonathan told me, lighting another cigarette. “Every night he dream about eel. An army of eels flying out of the sky, hundreds of eels, hitting him in the chest.” Jonathan used both hands to mimic the action of the flying eels coming toward him, and tapped with his fingers on his own chest. “He afraid. He tell me, ‘Jonathan, I quit the business.’ I say to him, ‘Don’t tell me those stories. You make me scared.’ ”