Eels

by James Prosek

  After my meal with Kunio, I said goodbye and made my way alone through the Gion, imagining that it was spring and the streets were pink with cherry blossoms and peopled by geishas dressed in their kimonos with eel-like trains. I felt a little energetic lift despite the heat; was it the eel I had eaten, or just the elation of being anonymous in a beautiful city?

  * In a way he was right. Many historians believe that wild turkey was not even on the table at the first Thanksgiving dinner in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The meal consisted mostly of seafood, including eel, which is to be expected of a coastal town.

  ** In Ireland, eel fat has been said to be a cure for rheumatism. In rural Illinois, wearing an eel skin around your waist was known to be a cure for lumbago. The astronomer Montanari believed that an eel’s liver facilitated delivery in childbirth.

  * The entry for eel in the famous French food encyclopedia Larousse Gastronomique begins with instructions on how to kill an eel: “Stun it by banging its head against a stone.”

  ** See Leon Bertin’s book, Eels: A Biological Study.

  * Some of the native eels eaten in Tokyo restaurants were not raised from glass eels but actually caught as adults in the greater Tokyo area. We spent part of a day on the Edo River with an old eel fisherman who fished with traditional bamboo traps-three sections of timber bamboo with the nodes drilled out, bound together with twine. There was no bait involved, no snare; the traps simply worked on the eels’ predilection for dark tubular places.

  * The traditional way to catch ayu is with cormorants. The trained bird dives and catches the fish, storing it in its crop until it is brought to the fisherman.

  * Anguilla japonica females were induced into sexual maturity by injections of salmon pituitary hormone, males by injections of human chorionic gonado- tropin.

  * Three segments of PVC tube lashed together in a pyramid shape, not unlike the bamboo eel traps we’d seen.

  * Some years later I visited a lab in New Zealand (the Mahurangi Technical Institute) where attempts are being made to hatch and raise eels in captivity. I spent a day with the chief scientist, an Iraqi woman named Tagried Kurwie.”We’re hatching them by the millions,” Tagried said. She wouldn’t tell me if they had been able to get the eel larvae to feed, saying coyly, “We believe in a few things that you can get off the shelf.” When I mentioned the deformities I’d seen in the larvae in the Japanese lab, a big, knowing smile spread across her face.”We knew there must be flaws in their techniques,” she said.”They’re doing multiple injections of hormones. We believe the injections are bad for the eels and are producing malformed larvae. If you overdose them on hormone, they will definitely have deformities. One of our breakthroughs is reducing the number of injections from twenty to two.”

  ** How an eel becomes either male or female is a mystery, though it may have something to do with water temperature, salinity, food type, food availability, and/or density of the glass eel population in a particular estuary, lake, or river system. Generally in the wild, the eels living upstream in a river system are females, and those occupying the lower reaches and estuaries are males.

  * Scientists in the field and in the lab agreed that the current exploitation of wild fish resources cannot be sustained. In the future, if people want to eat fish, they will probably have to make them.

  * There was one significant difference between the way the eels were cleaned here in Kyoto and the way I’d seen them prepared in the slaughterhouse in Tokyo. In Osaka and Kyoto the eel is cleaned from the ventral side (belly), while in Tokyo the eel is splayed from the dorsal side (back) to avoid mimicking the ritual suicide of the samurai-knife in the belly. Kunio explained that Tokyo was the main city of the samurai and “was more honor-based.”

  * I had to admit, I liked the taste of eel. I’d eaten Ray Turner’s smoked eel, eel fried in New Zealand, eel grilled and then pickled in vinegar in Italy, eel steamed and grilled in Serbia/Montenegro, eel stewed in Sweden. On a spring visit to Maine to see Jonathan Yang, I bought two ounces of glass eels for $60 and brought them home to a Spanish restaurant near my home to be prepared in the traditional Basque way-shocked in boiling water, then sautéed in olive oil with lots of garlic. The baby eels (the Basque call them angulas) were served in a ceramic tureen in bubbling hot extra-virgin olive oil, white eels with gray backs simmering with slices of garlic. They are customarily eaten with a wooden fork (to prevent burning your tongue on a metal one). The taste was rich and delicious; the texture was smooth, with a hint of fish flavor. I didn’t know what the fuss was about until I tried them. The crash in eel populations worldwide, especially in Europe, is threatening the future of many traditional eel dishes.

  chapter eight

  EEL

  Weir Hollow

  Ray at the weir

  Summer is a beautiful time at Green Flats and Eel Weir Hollow. The river is low and clear and good for swimming, and the weir is taking shape again after the winter ice and spring floods pulled it down.

  At this time of year, Ray’s home is cheerful, with a garden of carefully cultivated wildflowers and bushes—black-eyed Susans, witch hazel, spicebush, hostas, irises, roses, jewelweed, milkweed, jack-in-the-pulpit, and ferns. Stone shelves jutting out from the walls of his house support small pots with herbs. The depleted piles of split wood that heated his home and fueled his smokehouse the previous winter are growing again, the yard is clear of debris from the floods, and the cold storage is filled with smoked eel.

  In the warm weather Ray is most often found in his summer uniform, a white T-shirt and cutoff jeans. When the river is low enough he starts to rebuild the stone walls of the weir. Although he builds the walls mostly by himself, he sometimes gets help, especially during a festival he hosts in late July when his friends come down to the river and camp on his property, eat, drink, share stories, and have contests with ancient spearthrowing devices called atlatl. Ray figures it takes about 450 man-hours to build the weir every year; out of those, 30 will be contributed by others. At the rate of 8 hours a day, that’s roughly 56 days of lifting stones, pushing gravel, and rolling small boulders.

  As the stones are being put back into place on the walls, Ray begins to build the wooden trap or rack at the vortex. Initially he needs the assistance of a friend because the studs are long and unruly and setting up the footings in the river requires skillful carpentry (Ray prides himself in his ability to drive a nail underwater). The pieces of the trap or rack—the studs and siding, and the latticework for the floor of the structure—are taken out of storage in Ray’s basement and floated up to the site on an improvised catamaran that Ray makes by lashing two canoes together. Upstream of where the trap will be constructed, Ray makes a big pile of rocks, which acts as a cofferdam to divert the flow of the river around his work area. The first pieces of the rack to go in are the six overlapping ramps of wood with one-inch spaces between to let the water through. These latticed ramps start low in the water on the upstream side, building up higher and higher, each overlapping the next by about a foot, forming a long right triangle (as viewed from the side) inclining toward the back or downstream side. The latticed floor is supported by a wall on each side (also partially latticed to let water through) supported at the foundation with more rocks. The finished structure is roughly the size of a small bus—about six feet wide by twenty feet long. It is designed so that in a flood the trap will not be taken downstream, but the high water will flow over the last and highest ramp (to reiterate a Ray maxim, “We’re not here to stop the river; we’re here to catch eels”). If a flood of this magnitude happens during the run of eels, the eels go right over the top of the trap. Usually during the run, though, the water is flowing over the second or third ramp, leaving the last three or four dry, and the eels are trapped under the overhanging latticework with no way to get out.

  Long before Europeans arrived, a stone weir like this one would have been built not by one man but by an entire Indian village, or several, that had set up temporary camps on the river in ant
icipation of the fall eel migration. In the weeks or months before the run, members of the tribe would be busy repairing the weir, digging out pits where the eels would be held (and sometimes salted), erecting drying racks, and building traps (different from Ray’s, more like fish pots) that were designed to fit over the mouth of the weir at its vortex.*

  In late summer I started calling Ray to see if he had an inkling as to when the run of eels might happen. I lived three hours from Hancock, so if it appeared the conditions might precipitate a run, I figured I would just jump in my car and hit the road, arriving in time to see the migrating eels fill up Ray’s trap. As it turns out, it was not that easy.

  Around the middle of September, the remnants of Hurricane Isabel (that hit the Carolina coast with force) brought wind and rain to the Catskills—though not enough to encourage the eels. A subsequent low-pressure system from the west looked like it might drop enough rain to summon the migration, but the rain fell too hard and too fast and before long the East Branch of the Delaware was in flood stage.

  “There’s too much water,” Ray told me over the phone. “I have to wait for the water to come down before I can even get out to the rack and reconnoiter.” All he could do was wait and hope that the river didn’t rise to the point where it would blow out and over the back of his trap, allowing all the eels to go through.

  The next morning I drove to Ray’s. The rain had stopped, but overnight the river had crested and was high enough that it was nearly covering the whole structure. By afternoon the next day, the river had come down enough that we could paddle up to the weir and inspect it for damage. Despite all the water, the well-engineered rack was in good shape, but in the twenty years Ray had operated the weir, this was the first time he had failed to harvest any eels during the run itself (he had caught a few in the days before the rain). It was a victory for the eels. Ray might catch a few more in the weeks before he removed the rack for the winter, but the majority had gone by.

  A year later, in early September I called Ray in advance of a storm.

  “Is this the week?” I asked Ray.

  “Maybe.”

  “Will the rain bring the eels down?”

  “Maybe.”

  By the time I was able to get up to see Ray, he was bailing six inches of rainwater out of his basement.

  A few nights before, the voluminous moisture from Hurricane Ivan reached the Catskills, dropping eight inches of rain. Flooding was as bad as anyone alive had seen it, forcing the highway department to close Route 17 from Roscoe to Hancock.

  “Are you going to check the trap?” I asked Ray. It was Saturday morning, the eighteenth of September. The storm had blown through and the sky was clear, but the river had not yet crested. “The river’s going by at thirty miles per hour,” Ray said. “No one should be out there.”

  This was the second time in thirty years that Ray had had water in his basement. “The first time was the hundred-year flood in 1996,” Ray said, “and this is worse. I was looking out the window all morning. It was raining so hard, the surface of the river was frosted from the drops. There were trees, picnic benches, refrigerators—all form of human garbage going by. But we were able to save the canoes before it really came up.”

  Chris Pappas, a slim man with a scruffy beard who grew up with Ray, told me that it was the worst flood he’d seen since 1972, when an ice dam formed above the village and caused the river to back up.

  Ray said he was out at the trap until eleven-thirty the night the storm arrived. “I only saw one eel,” he said. “The lightning kept them down.”

  “They don’t like lightning?”

  “From my experience, no.”

  If you’d been betting on the eels, you would have won two years in a row. A flood was the eels’ best and safest way to salt water. The greater the volume of water, the more efficient it was for migrating fish to overcome obstacles and the more energy they could reserve for their journey to the spawning grounds.

  In the two weeks before the river flooded, Ray had caught 650 fish, at least enough to keep him cleaning and smoking for a while.

  In early April of the following year, I drove up to the Catskills to see how Ray had fared over the winter. He was waiting at the end of his muddy and icy driveway for his blue-eyed, pony-tailed, flint-knapping buddy, Chris Pappas, to pick him up and bring him into town to retrieve his truck.

  “Drive shaft blew,” Ray said. “Very expensive.”

  Ray seemed happy to see me and gave me a tour of the deck and screened-in porch he’d just added on to the back of his house, furnished with discards from a local nursing home. “Put me in the hole,” Ray said, pushing at some exposed insulation. He pulled a wad of dollar bills out of his pocket. “This is all I have left.”

  Ray offered me a cup of hot chocolate. We sat down at a table next to the stove in his kitchen. His speech was short and clipped; I wondered if it was because he hadn’t talked to many people during the long cold months.

  “Tough winter,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “Dog died. That was hard.”

  After a moment I asked, “You gonna get a puppy?”

  “Naw. Can’t do it yet. Come out this summer,” Ray said. “June through September I’ll be building the rack and the weir.”

  In late June I was in the Catskills for a friend’s wedding in the hamlet of Oliverea. After a beautiful, cool evening, the day had turned pleasantly warm. I decided to steal away from the party and drive over the mountain into Hancock.

  When I arrived at Ray’s home there was a handwritten note on the smokehouse door to anyone who might happen by. “Come out to the water’s edge and wave,” it said.

  I walked down the path beside the house to Green Flats and the riverbank, took off my shirt, and waded out into the Delaware. I let myself drop into the currents and drifted gently down before standing up on a large flat boulder (Ray called it Duck Rock, and the large eddy behind it was Duck Rock Eddy) to look upstream. The weir was broad and distant, framed by the hills of the magnificent valley. Standing in the water above the weir was a slim figure I recognized as Ray.

  Ray doesn’t wear a watch, but he has a sundial out by the weir—a nail driven upright on a level piece of the eel rack. Out on the river, though, if you ask, he’ll say it’s summertime.

  He wore a frayed white T-shirt and cutoff jeans. His face and arms were tan. It seemed he was charged directly by the sun. He showed me his fingernails, ground down to nothing from “chinking,” or taking handfuls of gravel and piling them up on the inside of the weir. Normally in summer, he said, he worked with his “secret weapon”—an eighteen-year-old named Jaime. “He’s worked like a real soldier this year,” Ray said.

  Even though Ray didn’t have the best experience in the army, he had picked up the lingo, using words such as reconnoiter, soldier, and vanguard. He often talked about his time in basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and in Panama “blowing things up”—his fights with the sergeant about overworking the men in 105°F heat without water, his being caught with contraband and being honorably discharged (typical of Ray’s Catskill humor, he hung the discharge certificate over his toilet). The engineering he learned in the army he uses in his everyday work. To him, nature is full of engineers—birds building nests, beavers building dams, caddis flies building cases of sand and silk—and he’s just another one of them.

  “I’ve been asked, ‘Why don’t you bring in a dozer?’ ” Ray said. “That totally goes against the point of the operation. Myself or my friends have touched every one of the stones that go into the wall. That’s significant.”

  Ray paused and looked up at the sun, his shirt and shoulders wet with river water.

  “I’m a little out of sorts, Jimmy,” he said. “An old friend died yesterday. I was up till six A.M. and slept an hour and I haven’t eaten lunch.”

  I followed him to his canoe, where he had some food in a cooler. He unwrapped a small piece of smoked eel from some tinfoil, tore off a piece for me, and ate a bit
himself. It was sweet like honeysuckle and made your fingers glisten with oil.

  As the summer sun warmed our shoulders, we sat on the rack and nibbled on smoked eel. I told Ray that back in April I’d attended a hearing in Old Lyme, Connecticut, organized by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) to discuss the status of the North American eel population. Ray said he’d gone to a similar ASMFC meeting in April in Narrowsburg, New York, about two hours from his home. More such meetings were taking place up and down the East Coast, Virginia to Maine, prompted by a citizens’ petition to list the freshwater eel as an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The petition to list was submitted by two brothers from Massachusetts, Doug and Tim Watts, who had grown concerned about the eels’ precipitous decline. Commercial landings for eels were the lowest on record—not just in North America but worldwide.

  Ray had more immediate concerns than a decline in the eel population, namely, maintenance on his house, cutting and splitting wood for the smokehouse, fixing his truck, his health, building the walls of the weir and the rack for the fall season, and hoping that a flood would not ruin his catch for the third year in a row. There were easier ways to make a living (I almost felt like he would continue to operate the weir whether the eels showed up or not).

  That day I helped Ray shift, tilt, and tumble some of the larger stones into place, using an iron bar as a lever. A few dead shad, summer casualties of the rack, littered the bottom like silver coins in a wishing well.* Two bald eagles sat patiently in the trees above us, waiting for the shad that they would take as soon as we cleared the area. At some point it occurred to me that I’d better return to my friends’ wedding in Oliverea.