Eels

by James Prosek

  The following morning Bill arranged for me to meet Adelino Lorens, who besides being the minister of agriculture was a high chief of the Eel Clan (with the customary high title, soulik en dianso) and a deacon in the Catholic Church.

  Bill had worked closely with Adelino on the identification and protection of Pohnpei’s indigenous plants and on the Island Food Community Project, which promoted the benefits of eating native fruits and vegetables. Bill and Adelino had identified more than forty native varieties of banana, some of which were endangered, and had posters produced that helped people identify the ones that were the most healthful to eat.

  Adelino’s office was in the Ag Station just beyond the Visitors’ Bureau. He greeted me there, a handsome, soft-spoken man in his late fifties with short-cropped white hair and a gracious smile. We sat down in chairs at a long table as a brief torrential rain drummed loudly on the roof.

  “I’ve been in touch with Sahngoro, the high chief of U and the Eel Clan,” Adelino said. “But Sahngoro deferred to Resio Moses, the tauk, or third chief, of the Lasialap. Resio is a senator in the Micronesian Congress, a very busy man. He said he won’t be able to meet with you during your stay, but suggested you meet with an elderly woman named Ester Alex.”

  There was a long pause. A warm breeze blew through the room where we sat. Steam rose from the wetness on the ground under a suddenly hot sun.

  “Is it that they are busy,” I asked Adelino directly, “or do they just not want to meet with me?”

  Adelino turned his head to one side, considering my question.

  “I think maybe some individuals believe that another person may know the stories better, so they defer to them,” Adelino said gently. “But also, you know, in Pohnpei, people are reluctant to share traditional knowledge. You can pass all that information to any member of your family when you are ready—and you are ready when you are near to dying.”

  Adelino told me Pohnpeians believe that if they tell a complete story from beginning to end, they will die. Knowledge is a kind of energy that flows out of the body, and if you share it all, you become weak. That is why people usually share all their knowledge only when they know they are about to die.

  “But you should have no trouble getting pieces of the stories about eels,” Adelino said on a more encouraging note. “And then maybe you can put those pieces together.”

  I realized my approach had been somewhat presumptuous. Walking into a village and asking someone to share a traditional story was like walking into a workshop and asking a master carpenter to share all his or her trade secrets. But that did not diminish my enthusiasm or intent.

  I asked Adelino, in his role as a deacon, how the arrival of Christianity in Pohnpei might have altered or weakened the indigenous faith.

  “The church uses a lot of traditional knowledge,” Adelino said. “They have to in order to break through to the people. For example, we use sakau two times a year in the Catholic Church: before Christmas and after Easter. But there is more. The beliefs exist together inside and outside of the Church. The Lasialap, though Christian, still consider the eel to be a human ancestor.”

  The last person to practice pure Pohnpeian religion died in the 1950s, but according to Bill and Adelino, the people still make the old religion fit. Plant magic is still practiced. One of the CSP employees, Valentin, is a deacon in the church in Madolenihmw but also an expert in the use of plants, specifically children’s medicine. In the Pohnpeian language every plant has both a common name and another that could be described as its spiritual name. The spiritual name is known to only a few people and gives them influence over the healing powers of that plant.

  That afternoon, Serlene, the office manager at the Nature Conservancy, took me in her car to Palikir to see Dr. Rufino Mauricio, the island archeologist and historian. Serlene was lithe and pretty with olive-brown skin like a Gauguin woman. As she drove, she talked about her aunt’s farm and all the animals they had, and the delicious smoked bacon she made from their big, healthy pigs.

  “I like the taste of dog most of all,” she said, raising and then lowering her eyebrows in succession—the Pohnpeian manner of indicating the affirmative (as opposed to nodding the head).”More than pigs,” she added gleefully. “They are really good. We raise dogs as pets, but we usually don’t eat our own dogs. We eat our neighbors’ dogs.” She laughed again. “If a dog ever bites someone or hurts someone, we eat it.”

  “Would you ever eat eel?” I asked.

  “Never!” she said, shocked at the mere suggestion, laughing at me.

  Palikir, the capital of the Federated States of Micronesia, is not a city at all or even a town; it’s a campus of government buildings ringed by cement columns molded and painted to look like the basalt logs of Nan Madol, one of the only outstanding stone ruins in the Pacific.

  Mauricio met us in the Department of Archives and History and took us upstairs into a small library, where we sat across a table from him. He was gracious with his time and did not seem hurried.

  “The eel came to Pohnpei in the seed of a plant that ended up in the ocean, in the reefs off the island, and it traveled in the water up the river, in through the mountains,” Mauricio began, a bit ambiguously. “As it traveled, it charted the lineages of the Lasialap clan, giving birth to different subclans.”

  Mauricio said that it is typical for the history of a clan to be spun around the life history of an animal. He did not want to speculate as to how this fish had come to be important to the people, but somewhere along the way members of this clan became quite close to the freshwater eels. “And I think they actually take care of them,” Mauricio said, “if I’m not mistaken. They consider the eel, you could say, their totem.”

  Though Pohnpei had no book with traditional stories about eels, Mauricio assured me that such tales existed. Even for him these stories were difficult to collect—not only because they were closely guarded, but also because they were disappearing. The younger generation was distracted by media other than oral storytelling—television, radio, and the Internet.

  “It’s a challenge our office is concerned about,” Mauricio said. “Like the rest of Micronesia now, we on Pohnpei are experiencing rapid change—thought-wise and in attitude.” One bright spot was the advent of CSP and the young Pohnpeian staff who cared about preserving the island’s wilderness as well as the traditional knowledge of native plants and animals.

  Mauricio felt that Pohnpeians had always been careful stewards of the land. He believed that one reason they built Nan Madol on the reef and not on the island proper was because the land to them was sacred and not to be disturbed. That was also the reason he gave for the people eating sea fish but not freshwater eels. “I think for the most part in Pohnpei we don’t bother the eels too much,” he said. “We just let them live. They always say, for a stream to flow year-round it must have eels.”

  Before Serlene and I left, Mauricio offered another tidbit of an eel tale.

  “I know in one of the stories,” he said, “a large eel had a place in a tidal channel, and when villagers went out in their canoes to go fishing, she would appear and ask, ‘How many people are in this canoe? ‘ So they would say how many, and she would ask them to drop one as a kind of fee so they could pass. This kind of story is from Madolenihmw.”

  “Do you know any other stories like that?” I asked.

  “One other thing that I’ve seen,” Mauricio said. “Sometimes when it rains, the heavy rains, you’ll be walking along the trails and you’ll run into small freshwater eels. So people would believe that maybe these guys fell down from the sky. I think maybe the water level of the river rises up and the eels get stranded. I’ve seen them far from the river, in the roots of trees.

  “You know,” he continued, “some years ago there was one young woman, their house was right on a stream. People knew that she had cancer and was dying. People would spread rumors like, ‘In the morning we found a freshwater eel with the girl, dead.’ I don’t know what the point of t
hat is. But every once in a while you have a story like this.”

  The next day, I stopped by the offices of the CSP to say hi to Nixon and Marciano. They were out, but a staff member named Leinson introduced himself, and volunteered to take me to see one of the island’s tallest waterfalls, called Sahwartik, on the Lehn Mesi River. Then we could have sakau in his village, Enpein, in Kitti and try to find people willing to tell us eel stories.

  “I think it is interesting, what you are trying to do,” he said. “Maybe I can help you.”

  Sahwartik Falls was on the west side of the island near Leinson’s village. To get there we had to take a small dirt track that climbed the mountain from the coast and the main ring road. The road got smaller and smaller the higher we went, and the jungle denser. It felt worlds away, even from little Kolonia.

  We parked the car and hiked down a steep hill, holding on to branches of trees and vines as we went. The Lehn Mesi River, Leinson said, had been carved out of the ground by the body of a giant eel. We could hear the currents tumbling over stones at the bottom of the valley.

  Turning leaves with his feet and exposing rich dark soil, Leinson showed me how, imperceptibly, we were walking in a “farm.” Crops—sakau, yam, and taro—were embedded in small clearings in the forest. What the untrained eye would never recognize as cultivation is what Bill had described to me as agroforestry.

  Further up the trail we could hear the crashing sound of Sahwartik Falls, and as we drew closer we could feel the cool mist breaking the humid forest air and then see the tall stream of water falling. Leinson took off his shirt and jumped into the deep pool at the base of the hundred-foot falls. I followed, and after a swim we sat on the rocks near the pool in the cool spray and watched a black tern-like seabird called a noddy circle the pool in broad turns. It felt strange to see an oceangoing bird on a freshwater stream, but the sea, I was reminded, was never far away.

  It was getting on toward four o’clock and Leinson was itching to get to the sakau bar. We left the falls and headed back up the trail to the car.

  As we walked, Leinson reiterated the importance of sakau in the culture of Pohnpei.

  “If there is a tragedy—for instance, you hit someone’s child on the road with your car and kill them—you meet with the family and drink sakau. It is the only way to get forgiveness. If you meet someone you want to marry, you ask the entire family permission over sakau. If you’re sharing an important story, it is done while drinking sakau.”

  Along the road back down to the sea we stopped at a sakau bar in Enpein. Being from that village, Leinson knew all the men and women gathered under the shelter of a thatched roof near the peitehl. He introduced me to the village chief, Herbert Mikel, a former Micronesian senator. Leinson told Mikel why I’d come to Pohnpei and that I’d come from the States. Mikel asked where; I said Connecticut. Mikel nodded. He rubbed his chin, taking it all in. He told Leinson, in Pohnpeian, to tell me that he had a brother who taught at Eastern Connecticut State University. All the women were laughing. Mikel spoke perfect English but wanted Leinson to get used to translating for me—if he was to take me around to meet the old people who would tell us stories about eels, he would have to sharpen his skills. Mikel gave Leinson a tidbit of a story, about the river called Lipwentiak.

  “The eel went up the river, and saw a man-eel with a belt full of birds, and she got scared and turned around and carved a circular hole in the river.”

  That was it. Everyone was laughing and passing around the coconut shell full of sakau. Two men behind the peitehl were stripping hibiscus bark. Two more men at the peitehl were pounding sakau. Mikel offered me a drink. The sakau in Enpein was extra gelatinous, Leinson explained, because they used more hibiscus bark to render the drink. People seemed to be getting pretty stoned, the women and the men laughing, laughing. I had drunk only enough to get a mild effect. I had not yet drunk the amount required to make my forehead and spine go numb, as was described in the literature.

  Some corner of my mind heard a parrot cackling. When I turned around there was a beautiful young girl standing there, a deep mauve bird with a bright yellow beak perched on her hand. It spoke in her ear. If you were an avid birder and were dropped unaware into this scene, you would know this was the island of Pohnpei, because the Pohnpei lorikeet lives here and nowhere else. There was something magical in that, something so specific to place, very much like the stories we would hear in the coming days.

  Eventually Leinson and I said goodbye to the chief. I had promised Bill that I would join him for dinner and sakau that evening in Kolonia. Sunday, in the early afternoon, I would meet Leinson back in Enpein.

  “I will ask some people about stories,” he said.

  “How will I find you?” I asked, as he didn’t have a computer or cell phone, or even a land line. He waved his hands in the air. “It’s a small village. Everyone knows everyone. Just drive up and ask for Leinson Neth.”

  He walked into the forest, and I drove back to Kolonia.

  I was late getting back into town. I stopped to get Bill at the Nature Conservancy offices. He said that if we were going to the sakau bar we wouldn’t have time to sit down for dinner, so we picked up some fried chicken on the way. There was some urgency getting to the sakau bar, he said, because the first squeeze was the most potent. As the evening wore on and the root was repeatedly mashed and squeezed, and water added slowly, the drink became thinner and weaker.

  We met up with a friend of Bill’s named Tony, someone from Bill’s former life when he first arrived on the island as a Jesuit volunteer in the 1970s. Even though they lived on the same small island and had once been best friends, they hadn’t seen each other in years. We sat at a long table with other local people, and as the sun went down, cups of sakau were passed and refilled and passed. Stories rolled out, volleyed back and forth from either side of the long table.

  Bill had been a wayward youth looking to get as far away from home as possible. From the time he was two years old, he said, he knew he was going to live somewhere else. When Bill first moved to Pohnpei from California and worked as a teacher at a local high school in Madolenihmw, the road around the island had not yet been built. To get from Kolonia to Madolenihmw you had to take a boat. Telephone numbers were only three digits. He drank a lot, slept with a lot of women, and got into trouble with his boss, the late Father Costigan. But as months and then years went by, he fell in love with the people and the place, especially the agricultural way of life. He learned that although the people lived by the sea, they were not seafarers; they ate sea fish, but primarily they were people of the land. A self-identified “aggy” who’d worked back home on artichoke and pumpkin farms, Bill became fascinated with the Pohnpeians’ gift for growing things and their knowledge of native medicinal plants. “Here was this place where the most celebrated person was the one who could grow the biggest yam,” Bill said. “That was for me.”

  He got his master’s degree at the University of Hawaii, studying open-pollinated plants native to Pohnpei. In the course of his research he walked a good part of the island, from the lowlands to the cloud forest at over two thousand feet. He slept under the trees, contracted rare diseases (including elephantiasis), went to every funeral, counted every yam, measured every tree, and identified every plant. He learned the language, married a local girl (the daughter of a high-ranking chief), and never went back to California except to visit his parents or for the Nature Conservancy.

  “He’s the guy on the island who knows the names of all the breadfruit and banana varieties, the endemic palms and cinnamons,” Tony said of his friend Bill.

  “That’s how I got my title, sou madau,” Bill said proudly, “master of thinking and planning. By growing a big yam.”

  Tony passed around a bottle of cheap whiskey to double the effect of the sakau. As the coconut shell was passed, the discourse flowed like a river—sometimes trapped in a tangled eddy, sometimes ripping in flood, but never returning to where it had been.

  �
�The virtue of the coconut shell as a cup for sakau,” Bill said, touching its rounded underside, “is that you can’t put it down until it’s all been drunk.”

  My mind turned inward and I could no longer talk. I thought about the whalers, missionaries, pirates, and tattooed Irishmen who had come here to this island—the Spanish, the Germans, the Japanese. Some thousand years before, the Pohnpeians had constructed the mysterious stone palace of Nan Madol. Those people (their genes at least) were still here, shedding waves of settlement like dead skin.

  I was a little slow the next morning, everything still moving at quarter speed. I sat on the balcony outside my room, took a deep breath of the salty humid air, and sketched a few items I had collected—a seed of the oah palm, the leaf of Barringtonia asiatica, a native banana with a rusty orange peel called karat. I ate a greasy Pohnpeian donut and drank a few cups of coffee. I was still feeling languid. I had forgotten home. I myself felt endemic.

  Bill was in pretty bad shape from the drinking the night before. He had to interview a few people for a job opening and was not looking forward to it. He said he had some good news on the eel front, though. Adelino was going to take me back to his village, Awak, that afternoon, and his son Allen would accompany me to see Ester Alex, the elderly woman who’d been mentioned to me as having an eel story. I had yet to hear a story that was more than a fragment.

  I had finally come to terms with the fact that daytime was dead for storytelling in Pohnpei. So I loitered near the markets by the water, watching the fish come in—yellowfin tuna, in whose bulbous bodies and globe-like eyes you could read the sea. The fishmongers were cleaning the tuna and throwing bits of fish heads and guts into a drain in the sidewalk. As I walked by I heard a mysterious splashing and slashing. I could not help but look down into the darkness below the steel grate. There were eels, big ones, in a small bit of moving water in the street gutter.