Eels

by James Prosek

  Kroumeir was fond of the big eel and asked her if she’d come with them to the feast. She told him to keep going, that she wasn’t feeling well. But Kroumeir didn’t want to leave, so he told his people to go ahead, that he had another engagement, and to come back for him later.

  When the people came back to get Kroumeir after delivering the gifts to the saudeleur, Kroumeir told the big kemisik that he wanted her to come back with him to his village, and asked her to get in the cart so that she could be carried there. Kroumeir’s people protested.

  “Why do we have to carry this ugly, slimy thing, this disgusting animal?” they said angrily. They were afraid of the eel. The word for eel, kemisik, comes from the old word for fear, kamasak. The people didn’t know that Kroumeir himself could become an eel.

  Kroumeir placed a lei, a ring of flowers, on the eel’s head, but her head was flat and he had trouble getting it to stay. Finally he managed to get it to sit on top. That’s why the Lasialap people, the Eel Clan, can wear a lei on their forehead and it stays, while most people wear it on the top of the head. The people continued on, carrying the eel (reluctantly) and Kroumeir. Kroumeir was thinking that the eel would be his wife.

  When they all returned to the village the people produced a big feast for Kroumeir. During the preparation for the feast and the feast itself, the people complained that Kroumeir had invited this disgusting animal. The eel overheard the people talking about her and told Kroumeir that she felt bad.

  “I’m going away for a while,” she said, and left the village.

  She swam up the Nanpil River, over the mountain, and down the Rohn Kitti River to the other side of the island. The headwaters of these two rivers of Pohnpei are very close, and it is possible even today that an eel could swim up and over the mountain from one side of the island to another. The eel continued out the Rohn Kitti to the ocean, where she saw some people fishing on the reef.

  It was in March, during the season when many fishes were congregating off the reefs to spawn. Two boys were fishing at the edge of a big school of snappers. The eel asked the boys if she could fish with them. So they let her fish.

  The big eel opened up her mouth, sucking in one school of fish, swallowing it whole. Then she swallowed a big wave that was crashing on the reef to wash the fish down. The eel then opened her mouth again and swallowed a second school of fish, and then another wave. Then she swallowed a third school of fish, and another wave—then a fourth school of fish, but not a fourth wave. She swallowed four schools of fish in all, and three waves, and thanked the two boys and left the reef.

  She swam back to land and up the Rohn Kitti River. On her way upstream, she ran into an eel god named Kroumand, who was hunting for birds in the jungle in the form of a man. Kroumand had killed so many birds that he had them hanging from his ears and a belt of birds around his waist. The eel got scared of Kroumand and hid from him. Not knowing she was there, Kroumand stepped on her. She was pregnant at that time with Kroumeir’s child, and when Kroumand stepped on her she gave birth to the first Lasialap. The place where she gave birth, they call that place Lipwentiak—lipwen means “print,” and tiak “foot,” so Lipwentiak is the place of the footprint. Further upstream the eel gave birth again, but that baby did not make it. The unborn baby became a tree—lasi o dong. Lasi o dong is a large endemic tree that grows in the mountains and has a fruit called lasi kotopw. [Mauricio, the island historian, had said that Lasi O Dong and Lasi Kotopw were subclans of the Eel Clan.]

  The eel continued up over the mountain and down the Nanpil River to the village again. Kroumeir could sense that she was coming and said to his people, “Make a feast! My wife is returning from fishing.” The villagers complained. They were especially annoyed when the eel arrived, because Kroumeir said she had just come from fishing, yet she did not carry anything to contribute to the feast.

  The eel asked Kroumeir to tell his people to bring banana leaves and spread them out around the nahs, the traditional meeting place. The people followed Kroumeir’s command and brought bundles of broad and shiny banana leaves. The eel said to bring more. The villagers brought more banana leaves. The eel said to bring more still, and then to bring more again. When they had laid out the fourth area of banana leaves she said, “That’s enough.” That’s why, today, when there is a party at a nahs, before you spread out a feast you start with four banana or palm leaves.

  The big eel told everyone to stand back. She started to gag, like she was coughing, and threw up a school of fish all over the banana leaves laid out in the nahs, and then she threw up a wave of water to clean it. Then she threw up a second school of fish and another wave to rinse those fish—then a third school of fish and a third wave. Then the fourth school of fish came but no wave of water followed. That’s because, if you remember, she only swallowed three waves of water. And that is why, to this day, parrotfish (the fourth type of fish) are so slimy behind the gills, because they came from the slimy eel and were not washed off with a wave of water. This is the species of parrotfish that the locals call mahu, which is especially slimy, the very blue one.

  Once the eel had delivered her gift, she left the party and swam up the Nanpil River and over the mountain to Lehdau, in Madolenihmw. She stayed in the village of Sapalap for quite a while, living in a tidal channel called Dau Sokele. Every time a canoe went out across the channel, the giant eel asked for one fisherman to be dropped off the boat. And so she ate the fishermen in Sapalap one at a time as they went out of the channel to go fishing on the reef. And very soon those people realized that if this continued, none of them would be left. So they came up with an idea to trick the eel.

  They filled a canoe with coconuts, palm fronds, and even big shells that would make noise as the wind blew through them. It was like a party on the boat. And they put a sail on the canoe and pushed it out of Dau Sokele channel toward the island of Kosrae. The canoe sailed outside of Tomwhak pass and beyond the reef to the sea.

  When the eel was very close to Pingelap, she realized something was wrong. “Who are these disrespectful people, not dropping off a fisherman for me?” she asked. She continued following the canoe all the way to Kosrae, until finally she overturned the canoe and discovered the trick. “There’s no people in this canoe. It’s full of coconuts!” So she ate all the coconuts and the canoe and turned back to Pohnpei.

  Unfortunately for the eel, as she was returning she was attacked by a shark. So when she finally reached Pohnpei and entered the Nett pass, there was only half of her left. She died on a piece of the shoreline. And that whole piece of land that is left over in Nett is her body.

  And that is the end of the story. Ahi soai pwoat torohr wei likin imwen. Pass it on—from this house to people outside of your house.

  The day before I left Pohnpei, I met with others who told pieces of the story that fit into the one related to me by Lorenso Gilmete. It seemed that unless I was the object of an island-wide ruse, the basic skeleton of the story was consistent.

  I met with Paul Gallen, a high-titled Protestant minister and the uncle of the night watchman at Yvonne’s. He had the most detailed version of the part of the story where the villagers trick the eel with a boat full of coconuts.

  And then I met with another man near Awak, a high-titled Lasialap named Mikel Marquez. This opportunity came about because his son, Roseo, worked for CSP. In order to sit with Mikel Marquez we had to have a sakau ceremony. Mikel had been in poor health and suffered a series of minor strokes; he said politely that he had once known the story but could not remember it now.

  “You should have come two or three years ago,” Roseo said to me openly, in front of his father. Roseo went off to clean the sakau root, and I was left alone with his father.

  We were seated in the nahs surrounded by a lush and verdant garden, and Mikel said, “There is an eel in the stream. Do you want to see him?” Mikel got up and walked slowly to a tiny creek that trickled through his garden. Mostly concealed by a massive stone slab was a large eel, but the water
was barely deep enough to cover the eel’s body. A boy came down to the creek, seemingly from nowhere. Mikel had a word with him in Pohnpeian, and the boy touched the eel’s head. All of a sudden the eel came out of its hole under the rock slab, completely exposing its body as if it wished to be petted.

  The boy slipped his hands under the eel and lifted it up out of the water, with no protest from the fish—it actually appeared the eel liked being held by the boy. Mikel told me that this was the fifth eel that had lived here in his lifetime. “When one gets old it moves away, and a smaller one comes in to take its place,” he said. “One day my grandson was poking the eel with a stick, and the eel chased him all the way back to the nahs, nearly fifty feet. Luckily I was there to see it. I scolded the eel, and it went back to its place.”

  When Roseo and his friend Kesdy started pounding the sakau, they invited me to participate. I followed suit and took off my shirt, selecting a rounded stone from a box full of pounding stones near one of the posts of the nahs. It was satisfying to smash the sakau with the stone and create the hollow metallic sound that I’d first heard in the jungle. When we had sufficiently mashed the sakau, two younger men came by to squeeze it and present the drink. They were official sakau servers, designated to prepare the drink for high chiefs.

  The first cup was handed to Mikel. The second squeeze went to the person of second-highest rank, his son, Roseo. The third cup was offered to Mikel’s wife, and the fourth cup was handed back to the chief, who passed it to me, which, Roseo explained, “means that he feels you are a person of importance.” Humbled, I drank the slimy liquid.

  The sky grew darker and the sakau began to take effect. We stopped speaking, and the big eel in the stream started to splash loudly. No one acknowledged verbally that the eel was splashing in concert with our silence, but everyone seemed to be focusing on the sound of the splashing. Roseo was the first to break the silence. “Up to this day,” he said, “for the Lasialap, the eel is their totem. They protect and worship the eel, they look after the eel.”

  We sat silently for some time again, and the eel resumed its splashing in the creek.

  “I used to believe I was born from eels,” Mikel said, “but now not as much.”

  I asked why.

  “I think it’s the religion,” he said, meaning the introduction of Christianity. “Have you ever heard the eels?” I shook my head. “They make a sneeze, or a whistle—a melody just like a bird. I’ve seen, with my own eyes, eels walking on their tails on land. Not too fast, not too slow, just standing on their tails. They climb trees to get birds.” He lifted his hand to demonstrate. “I saw an eel going after a fairy tern in a tree ten feet off the ground. That used to happen, but no more. That eel is no more.”

  As the night wore on and we drank more sakau, Mikel asked if maybe I could tell the story of the kemisik as I’d heard it so far on my trip. So I did, with my own little flourishes, as best I could remember.

  “On the island of Yap,” I began, “there lived a couple who had a daughter, and in the stream near their home lived an eel. The couple fed the eel and one day it got too big and they decided to kill the eel. The eel overheard the couple and told the girl, ‘When your parents cut off my head, put it over the door to your home facing out, and then bury it in the ground.’ She was fond of the eel, and did so, and from the head of the eel grew breadfruit and two kinds of banana.”

  I continued, telling how the starling saw the glimmering light in the sea and flew for it and ate the seed of the banana, and brought the seed back to Pohnpei, which became the eel, and how that eel ate the couple that had raised it, and then met the god Kroumeir and had various children that became the first Lasialap people. And the whole time I was speaking, I saw that Mikel was nodding and smiling. I was surprised how much I remembered.

  I paused in the middle and looked at Roseo. “My father is nodding,” Roseo said, “because you are right. You are helping him remember the story.”

  Everyone was quiet now from the sakau.

  As I went on, Mikel continued his slow nodding. A few times he even stopped to correct me or to help me to pronounce a name. He seemed now to remember quite a bit, as if the story had been blocked and was released by a little priming.

  Mikel added one final note. “When the eel was bitten by the shark,” he said, “she was near Pingelap, and the eel took sand from Pingelap to cover her wound. And when the eel, tired and nearly dead, arrived back in Pohnpei, she put the sand from her wound on the ground beneath her body. That’s why the shore there is called Pingelap. The shark’s name was Nahn Sou Set.”

  I did not know if it had been intentional, but when I finished the story, I realized that the roles had been reversed—that Mikel had turned me into the storyteller when it was I who had been seeking the stories in the first place.

  * The replacement of indigenous foods with those from the West (soda, processed meats, white sugar, white flour, white rice), the poster said, had created a public health disaster on the island: vitamin A deficiencies, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

  * As Bill Raynor wrote in a paper in the Journal of Micronesian Studies,” The upland forest serves several important ecological functions. Perhaps most important is that the extensive root system and the litter layer of forest vegetation serve to capture rainfall, retard surface runoff, and improve the infiltration of the water into the soil where it is then filtered and slowly released into the streams and rivers that eventually make their way to the coastal mangroves and the lagoons.”

  * Because of this, Marciano said, “the sakau in Pohnpei has an odor, but the sakau in Kosrae does not.”

  * Red mouths, spit, and teeth produced by chewing betel nut would be a common sight to anyone traveling in parts of Southeast Asia.

  * Anguilla marmorata is native from South Africa through Indonesia and New Guinea all the way to French Polynesia and north to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and southern Japan. It is the most widely distributed freshwater eel species in the world. As with other species of freshwater eels, no one has witnessed the tropical eel spawning in the wild. Any estimates of spawning locations are based on the capture of A. marmorata larvae. There are thought to be at least five different populations of this species, each with its own spawning area-at least one in the Indian Ocean, two in the western North Pacific, and two in the western South Pacific. Recent genetic and morphological data indicate that the Micronesian eels of this species are a separate population, distinct from all others, but its small larvae have yet to be collected.

  * Although people of the Lasialap clan were from U, some Lasialap lived outside of that municipality in other parts of the island, such as in Kitti.

  * Pingelap is an atoll of Pohnpei.

  * In his Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, James MacKillop writes, “In the west of Ireland whistling eels were thought to foretell famine. Yet at other times eels might be benevolent, such as those thought to be the guardian spirits of wells and magic springs.”

  * Bill suggested to me that as island culture shifted from seafaring to terrestrial life, the freshwater eel took on greater importance than the saltwater variety.

  * Leinson said that uht en yap is a beautiful banana introduced from Yap, with a red peel and orange flesh. It is often served mashed with coconut milk and is high in beta-carotene.

  chapter ten

  Obstacle

  IN THEIR PATH

  Hydropower turbine

  In the late 1990s, John Casselman, a biologist at Queen’s University in Ontario, began to expose an alarming decline in the number of juvenile eels returning to the St. Lawrence River in Canada, at the northern edge of the range of the American eel. The population of young eels coming up the fish ladder at the Moses-Saunders hydroelectric dam had dropped from nearly a million in the 1980s to a hundred thousand in the 1990s, to less than ten thousand in the late 1990s and virtually to zero in 2000. Casselman stated that, historically, female eels once had made up 50 percent of the inshore fish biomass of Lake Ontario a
t the head of the St. Lawrence; now, almost no eels were returning there at all.

  “It is truly a crisis,” Casselman told me.

  Even more alarming is that what Casselman was observing was not unique to the rivers of eastern North America. Populations of freshwater eels the world over were in serious decline. The American Fisheries Society Journal stated in 2003: “In recent decades, juvenile abundance has declined dramatically: by 99% for the European eel, Anguilla anguilla, and by 80% for the Japanese eel, Anguilla japonica. Recruitment of the American eel, Anguilla rostrata, to Lake Ontario, near the species’ northern limit, has virtually ceased.”

  There was no way around the fact that for a migratory fish such as the eel, the existence of hydropower dams was a major issue, perhaps the major issue, contributing to the species’ decline. Construction of the Beauharnois and Moses-Saunders hydroelectric dams on the St. Lawrence in 1932 and 1958, respectively, had impeded the migrations of eels to and from what once comprised the single largest nursery in North America—the upper St. Lawrence River, Lake Ontario, and their feeders.* Even if a juvenile eel was able to make it upstream of the dams via fish ladders, the downstream gauntlet was nearly insurmountable.

  During the fall migration the accumulated mortality from the turbines of both dams was about 40 percent, Casselman told me, but that didn’t account for the fish that were wounded and weren’t in good enough physical condition to make the long journey to the Sargasso. “Unfortunately,” Casselman added, “since the dams on the St. Lawrence are run-of-the-river and use all the flow, there is little or no likelihood that the eels can get by any other way.”

  In April 2000, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) issued an extensive Interstate Fishery Management Plan for the American eel, recommending necessary steps to save the species. Despite further evidence in the report of a “very serious” decline along the eastern seaboard, the proposed plan was never put into effect. In March 2004, the ASMFC Eel Management Board issued a press release, recommending that the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) consider protection of the American eel under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The USFWS failed to respond.