Eels

by James Prosek

  “The best explanation I’ve heard,” Bill said, stopping on the path in the mangroves, “is that there was a lot more magic here back then.”

  Bill had kept up a running commentary about Nan Madol history as we traipsed along the path through the jungle, but once among the ruins, now overgrown with palm trees, vines, and mangroves, we walked in silence.

  It was a warm day, and it was refreshing to wade around the ruins in the shallow lime-colored water. The palace buildings were extraordinary, the texture and patina on the basalt “logs” making them seem almost like a dark steel sculpture. For a while I lost track of Bill, and I was alone among the breadfruit trees and palms and the bright red cardinal honeyeaters.

  Just after noon on that clear bright Sunday, I left Bill’s home and drove around the south side of the island to Kitti to meet with Leinson Neth. Among the CSP employees, he was the only one who seemed genuinely keen and determined to help me. I think that was partially due to his own curiosity about eels and their deep and old relationship with his people.

  I drove into Enpein as Leinson had instructed and asked a group of boys in the street where I might find him. Within minutes Leinson came walking down the street toward me. He had a plan: we were going to see his uncle.

  We drove to the church grounds, where people were getting out of midday services. At the deacon’s house we found Leinson’s uncle, Lorenso Gilmete. He was seated on the ground, in the shade of the front porch, legs folded, picking at calluses on his feet and grumbling in a low, gravelly voice. He appeared to be drunk, periodically licking his lips. This did not look promising.

  Leinson, good-natured and kind, motioned for me to sit near his uncle. He mentioned in English and then Pohnpeian why I had come to Pohnpei.

  “Hmmm,” his uncle grumbled, then laughed. He said a few more words in Pohnpeian, and laughed again. I got the feeling he was mocking me. He said something to his wife, Leinson’s aunt, standing nearby, and she laughed, too. Leinson kept a stone face. I asked him what his uncle was saying. Leinson was probably too polite to say exactly.

  Lorenso motioned for a young boy to bring some food. The boy made a plate for me of boiled yam. It was white and semisweet, mashed with coconut milk. The old man laughed once more and asked me if, in my travels, people had been reluctant to share their stories. I told him yes, that some had. I respected that he might not want to share, though inwardly I would be deeply disappointed.

  The old man leaned back against a wooden railing and asked if we could talk about eels the next morning. Leinson looked at me and shrugged. I put on my most disheartened look. Leinson threw a pebble into the dirt. The uncle changed his tone.

  “Do you like music?” he asked me in English.

  “Yes,” I said. I thought he was going to play his radio, but instead he started rocking forward and back on his haunches and broke out in song. In a lilting cadence, an earthy bass, he sang in Pohnpeian for about a minute and then stopped.

  When his uncle had finished singing, Leinson smiled. He said the song was about kemisik, the eel. “It is a reminder of how eels first came to Pohnpei,” he said.

  The song was the prelude to a story; the song and the story fit together like a puzzle, one part being insufficient without the other. “The song refers to what is to come,” Leinson said, adding that it was very hard for him to understand some words because the song was in local dialect.

  Leinson’s uncle followed the song with a few words to his nephew.

  “He wants us to give him a ride to the sakau bar,” Leinson said. “And then we will take him to his house.”

  “Did he say if he was willing to share a story?”

  “No, but I think we should do as he says.”

  We drove Leinson’s uncle and aunt to the sakau bar. He said to come back in a few hours, right before dark. While he was drinking, Leinson and I would go up a small road into the forest to visit an old woman who, he’d heard, lived by a stream with a monster eel.

  We left the car on the roadside and walked through the jungle up a narrow path that skirted a small stream. The pools in the stream were dark and shaded, the water cool and crystal clear. After about ten minutes we came to a clearing and a small thatched-roof home. An old woman, thin and frail, stepped out of the home to greet Leinson and me. She’d been expecting us.

  She was very hospitable, offering us a seat and signaling to her granddaughter to make us tea. She herself sat on the ground, and so Leinson and I did, too. She told us that there was an eel in the small creek near her house that had become too big, and she feared that it might hurt her granddaughter. Her granddaughter, a young and beautiful girl, washed their clothes in the pool where it lived. The old woman said that eels were people.

  “You see me, you see the eel,” she said. “They are the same thing.”

  She told us that she had recently thought about trying to move the eel or even kill it. Her parents knew magic to move such an eel, but she didn’t have the full knowledge—her parents, she said, had hidden part of the knowledge from her. She really loved the eel, but she was scared because she didn’t have a full understanding of how to treat this creature, and feared one day she’d offend it and something bad would happen.

  “My parents, they used to be able to talk to the eels,” she said. “My mother could tell it to go away.”

  Leinson suggested that we go to the pool where they did their wash, to see the eel she was talking about.

  When we got to the edge of the deep, narrow pool in the jungle, Leinson knelt on the bank and opened the top of a small can of mackerel, drizzling fish juice in the water. It was not long before a huge eel came out from under the roots of a tree. I had never felt very afraid of an eel before, but this one seemed erratic and unpredictable in its behavior. It took the food near the bank slowly and cautiously, then jerked its body backward into the dark depths. Another eel, about a third the size of the one we’d been watching, came up behind the big eel, vying for a flake of the white-fleshed mackerel. The giant eel turned suddenly and grabbed on to the smaller eel’s side, twisting around, wrestling it, their bodies intertwining and frothing the water in the pool. Leinson stepped back and so did I.

  “He’s saying, ‘This is my house,’ ” he said.

  Once the eel had chased the smaller eel downstream to the tail of the pool and through the riffle into to the next pool, it returned to the bank, staring up at us expectantly like a dog, even pushing its nose up above the water’s surface, showing its small eyes and horn-like nostrils. Though I had swum with big eels, I would not have gone into the pool with that eel; it was too strange.

  Leinson and I walked back to the clearing to say goodbye to the old woman. We sat down with her momentarily. You could tell the eel made her nervous, like having an unpredictable neighbor.

  She told us that many years ago her sister had an eel they were feeding and it got too big, so they decided to kill it. She thought the eel was becoming too dangerous for her children, and she was carrying another child. Her older brother came to kill it, and the eel chased him up the river. For days, no matter what pool of the stream he went to, even high up in the mountains, the eel was there. One day, he killed the eel. Soon after, her sister gave birth to a baby with closed eyes. When they brought the baby to the man in the village who had the knowledge of plant magic, he said it was because they’d killed the eel. Somehow he was able to open the eyes of the child. Leinson had heard that story before. The child in the story was the father of a CSP employee, Primo Abraham.

  It was coming on evening when we began walking back to the car. The air had a peculiar stillness, a suspended weight, as we drove to the sakau bar where we’d left Leinson’s uncle, Lorenso. He was sitting at a table with some other people, laughing and generally engaged with the group. When he saw us he asked if we could buy him a six-pack of beer and a few glass bottles full of sakau for the road. I did so.

  Lorenso and his wife got up and came with us, and we rode in silence to their home. The old
man instructed me to drive downhill from his home to the nahs. Like most nahs I had seen, it was a metal-roofed meeting area with tree fern columns and a U-shaped platform of cement, outfitted with a peitehl in the middle for pounding sakau. We parked the car and walked into the shelter of the structure. Lorenso made himself comfortable on the platform, seated as if on the stage of a theater, and set his six-pack of beer and bottles of sakau beside him. By this time it was dark, and Leinson turned on some lights around the nahs, one hanging precariously like a spotlight over his uncle. The jungle sounds grew louder and louder, as if someone was steadily raising the volume.

  Lorenso asked Leinson to pass him a plastic cup, and poured some sakau for himself. The old man then told me to turn on my digital recorder, that he was about to begin his story.

  He began, his eyes closed, with a chant. He sang the entire song that he had sung before, the song that preceded the story and was woven into it.

  As Lorenso Gilmete told his story, I had no way of knowing what was being said because he spoke it in Pohnpeian. When I looked at Leinson, though, I could discern from his facial expressions that he was engaged with the story and found it meaningful. There were all kinds of sounds coming from the dark forest that surrounded the nahs—frogs, birds, insects. And then toads started to assemble, almost magically, from underneath the platform where Lorenso sat—first one, then more, until there were about two dozen. They were probably attracted to the insects that were drawn to the lights, but it looked as though they’d come to listen to him. This was the theater where stories were told. This was the place where the story lived.

  I realized that a translation, no matter how thorough, could not capture it. Still, if I was going to put it down, I felt better that a relative of the teller would be translating for me. As he did, pieces of the story I’d heard previously, tidbits that people had shared, fell into place.

  When, days later, we finished the transcription in my room at Yvonne’s, Leinson thanked me for coming to Pohnpei to carry out this investigation, for otherwise he would never have heard his uncle’s story. I uploaded the digital sound files onto Leinson’s computer.

  “I will share this with my son,” he said, “and he will share it with his children.”

  As with many indigenous stories, this one is incomplete without a familiarity with the landscape and the creatures that inhabit it. Certain geological features mentioned, such as a large stone ledge at the top of the mountain, can still be seen today, although components of the story are hundreds, if not thousands, of years old. Such stories have practical reasons for existing, acting as maps, with landmarks that punctuate a journey—much like Aboriginal songlines in Australia—or as aids to teach practical knowledge, like the best time of year to fish off a certain reef.

  Though the recording of an indigenous story could be considered a failure, I feel that it is valuable to have these tales, if for no other reason than that they are rapidly becoming extinct. With that in mind, here is an approximation, a fragment, a fiction.

  Once upon a time on the island of Yap there was a married couple with a daughter, and they had a large kemisik [eel] living in the stream near their home. And one day, because the eel was getting big, the couple decided to kill the kemisik. But the kemisik overheard them, and told the girl that if her parents were to kill him and eat him, she should take his head and put it above the front door of their house, so the head was facing out, and then, after a time, to bury it in the ground.

  So when the girl’s parents killed the eel, she put his head over the door, then a few days later she took it down and buried it, and from the head grew three things—mein-iwe, the breadfruit tree, and two varieties of banana, uht mwot and uht en yap.*

  On the distant island of Pohnpei, on top of a mountain, two birds [native Micronesian starlings] were perched on a ledge overlooking the ocean. The two starlings were titled Mwahnlaipeip, a male bird, and Peinlaipeip, a female bird. [The fact that the birds had titles meant that at one point they were human.] From their high place in the mountains they could see something shimmering in the sea. So the male starling, Mwahnlaipeip, decided to fly out and see what it was.

  Mwahnlaipeip flew, flew, flew—but it was too far, he could not make it, and he returned to Pohnpei. So the female bird decided to try. She flew out, and flew and flew and flew, and eventually she saw land. And when she was close enough, she saw the object that had been shimmering, the fruit of the banana. [The island she had flown to was Yap, the place where our story began with the girl and the eel.]

  Peinlaipeip started eating the fruit of the banana, and while she was eating she swallowed a nut that was inside the banana. [This banana was uht en yap, or the Yap banana, which had grown from the head of the eel.] After she ate her fill, she flew back to Pohnpei. Just before she made it to land, she pooped the nut she had swallowed onto the reef known as Rohn Kitti [part of the municipality of Kitti].

  Meanwhile, two young women from a village called Kepine were walking down the hillside to take their boat out fishing on the reef. They stayed out fishing until it was high tide, then started to come in. On the way back, they saw waves crashing against something, and when they went to look, they saw a small stone. One of the ladies picked it up and was going to return it to the water, but the other woman asked if she could keep the stone. [The stone was actually the nut from the banana that the starling had pooped on the reef.] She put the stone in her basket and wrapped it in hibiscus leaves. From then on, this kind of fishing basket was known as kopwou lasi [lasi is the old Pohnpeian word for eel].

  When the two women had returned to shore, they began to make their way back up the hill to the village. Partway up the hill they stopped to rest, and opened up the basket to look at the stone. When they unwrapped the hibiscus leaves, they noticed that a crack had developed in the stone. So they named that place Nan Ihr, which means “in the crack.” They wrapped the stone up again, put it back in the basket, and continued walking.

  Further up the hill they decided to take another break. At this place, they took the stone out of the basket again and unwrapped it from the hibiscus leaves. To their surprise, the stone had broken apart, and inside they saw what looked like a small worm. They wrapped up the little worm in the hibiscus leaves and continued walking up the steep hill to Kepine.

  Eventually the two women reached a river and decided to stop for a drink. While resting by the river they opened up the basket again and unwrapped the hibiscus leaves. Immediately they saw that the little creature had grown, and what they had thought was a worm was actually a baby eel. So they took one of the big clams they had caught on the reef, scooped out the meat, and put some water from the river inside the shell for the eel. If you go to that stream now today, you can see a small pool below the bridge called Douen Lasi, or “place for the eel,” referring to the location of this event in the story. Today people call this place Pohn Kati.

  From there, the women continued their climb, and finally made it to Kepine. Back home, the woman who had been carrying the eel in her basket took the eel to a small stream beside her and her husband’s home and let it go in the water. She took care of the eel and fed it. The eel grew. After many years, the eel had grown very big and they became afraid of it.

  One night, lying in bed with her husband, the woman said, “Tomorrow we should kill the eel and cook it.”

  They planned to start chopping firewood early the next morning to cook the eel.

  But the couple didn’t know that while they were talking in bed, the kemisik was listening to them. By that time, the eel had grown so big it had outgrown the main channel of the stream and made itself a hole under the riverbank beneath their house. There it lived, and from there it could hear everything they were saying, including their plan to kill it. The couple went to sleep.

  In Pohnpei, they say, by the third crow of the rooster, the sun has risen, and it is time to get up. But this morning, when the couple woke at the third crow of the rooster, oddly, it was still dark. The husb
and got out of bed to look outside and see why the rooster was crowing in the dark. But when he tried to go through the doorway, he bumped into something wet and slimy. It was dark because the tail of the giant eel was blocking the door. As the husband looked around, he realized what was happening, and saw that the body of the eel was draped over the rafters above them, and its head was looking down on their bed at his wife.

  The husband and wife ran right through the thatched palm walls of their house and up into the forest. They ran and ran and ran up into the mountain without looking back, and hid under a large overhanging rock ledge. But the eel chased them up the mountain, and as the couple hid under the ledge the kemisik was on top of the rock, easing her head over the rim. The man and his wife didn’t see the eel and stayed for a while, until it started to rain. But what they thought was rain was actually the saliva of the kemisik dripping down over the ledge. They’d backed in as far as they could go and noticed the rain was slimy. “What kind of rain is this?” they said. Then they saw the head of the kemisik, and when they tried to run the kemisik ate them.

  The eel had eaten the woman and her husband, but she had eaten too much too quickly and couldn’t move, so she lay on top of that rock, not feeling very well. While the kemisik rested on the rock, at that moment Kroumeir, a spirit who can take the form of a human or an eel, happened by. Kroumeir was like a god and a high chief, and he was being carried by his people in a cart on their way to a feast at Nan Madol palace, guests of the ruler of Pohnpei, the saudeleur. In addition to carrying him, Kroumeir’s people were bringing food and gifts for the ruler.