by James Prosek
* In November 2006, researchers released twenty-two adult eels outfitted with tags from the west coast of Ireland. The tags were timed to pop off the eels in April 2007, float to the surface, and transmit data on the eels’ travels via satellite to a computer. But in the five months the researchers predicted it would take the eels to get to the Sargasso Sea, they had covered only 800 miles of the 3,000-mile- long journey (the results were published in the September 2009 issue of Science). Twenty-nine more eels were released from western Ireland in the autumn of 2008, with tags timed to release in the spring of 2010.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was many years in the making—about eleven, by my count. (I think it took so long because I’ve been so fascinated by this fish that I didn’t want the investigation to ever end.) I’m hard pressed to remember how exactly it started, but I think it was in conversation with my editor, Larry Ashmead, in Tuscany, Christmas Eve 1998 (as described in the introduction).
Around that time I’d started collecting hand-forged iron eel spears (pictured in the etching on page xi) and was bidding on a Swedish spear on eBay one night when I got an e-mail from a man in France telling me that I was paying too much—that he had a hundred of the same style and could sell me any one of them for less. I told him that I was thinking of writing a book about eels. He said that he was “the eel man in Europe” and that if I was writing about eels I should come to the Basque region of France to see him. That man was Thomas Nielsen, a Dane living in southern France, who is one of the biggest exporters of glass eels from Europe to farms in China. He invited me to spend time with him during the eel season—between December and March—and I flew to Biarritz to do just that. He happened to have one of the finest collections of eel spears in the world, most of them Danish, bought in coastal antique stores on summer jaunts to Denmark with his French wife.
The trip was illuminating for me about the international trade in eels. We drove a shipment of more than two thousand pounds of live glass eels in a tank truck from the village of Charon to a farm in Holland (at $225 a pound, that’s nearly half a million dollars’ worth of fish). I observed the anxieties of the operation when the load of eels headed for China got sick, and I helped pack another shipment of healthy eels bound for Hong Kong. Later in the trip we went out with glass eel fishermen in the mouth of the Sèvre Niortaise River at night. The boats were fishing the river with no lights (poaching an area of the river that was actually closed), and we had a few close calls and a near collision as the boats dragged fine-mesh nets in the shape of socks on each side of the boat.
After the trip to see Thomas, I officially proposed the book to Larry. Originally, I had envisioned this book as one full of recipes—ways eels were prepared around the world—and of course as a chronicle of the attempts of naturalists and scientists to figure out the elusive life history of eels through the ages.
I spent two weeks with an eel fisherman named Hansa Olofsson on the Ålakust, or Eel Coast, in a region of southern Sweden called Skåne (also known for its apple and wheat production and for Absolut vodka, made in a factory in the town of Åhus, midway up the Ålakust). The drinking of vodka and aquavit was part of the tradition of fall eel dinners, called alagille, where eel is served nine to twelve different ways in candlelit fishing shacks on the Baltic Sea. The dinners go late into the night and there is a lot of drinking—it is said that a successful eel dinner is one where the participants don’t remember anything the next day. The first person at a dinner to eat enough eel to line the perimeter of the plate, and then make a cross, with eel vertebrae is crowned the eel king.
I also traveled to the town of Comacchio, Italy, where catching and eating eel has been an industry for hundreds of years. The lagoon of Comacchio has been modified at the place where it joins salt water to let young eels in from the Adriatic Sea during spring and let the migrating eels out in the fall. It is very near Venice, in the delta of the Po River. Comacchio is renowned throughout Europe for its eel. A 1954 film, La Donna del Fiume, stars Sophia Loren as a woman working in an eel-canning factory.*
But as I did the research, all this wonderful information about the life history of the eel, the culinary aspects of the story (which are cataloged well in a handful of other books about eels), the myriad false guesses about how eels reproduced, and the life and times of Johannes Schmidt began to cave under my interest in the fish as a symbol of mystery for cultures in the Pacific—what the eel means to humans, and to myself. When I started the book I didn’t know that eels played any kind of role in the spiritual systems of Pacific peoples, or even that they existed on the islands. Away from the food and natural history and science, the eels led me to an inquiry in my writing and painting about myth, about the space between things, and to further investigate our compulsion to control nature through language—how we name and why we name.
My interests in the beauty and diversity of eel spears led me to Martha’s Vineyard, where I met the premier American eel spear collector, Sherman Goldstein. Sherm, of Vineyard Haven, began amassing eel spears in part through his love of the island’s history and his passion for striped bass fishing—using live eels for bait, casting them into the surf at night. I enjoyed many a beautiful late fall evening with Sherm, fishing for bass with live eels. I researched the history of and techniques for using eels to catch striped bass, including pickling eel skins and stretching them over wooden lures, a popular fishing method in the chain of islands off the elbow of Cape Cod called the Elizabeths (the most famous for striper fishing being Cuttyhunk Island). I spent time with the other great eel spear collector in the United States, Marcel Salive, who wrote the book on ice-fishing spears. And I learned enough about tools made by coastal blacksmiths on Cape Cod and Long Island, as well as eel spear makers in Denmark and France, to write a small book, or at least a long article, about that.
As anyone who has spent time with me lately knows, I could go on talking about eels forever. So I’ll stop now and acknowledge some more people who shared their enthusiasm about eels with me. In my home state of Connecticut, Jimmy Orifice, owner of Jimmy O’s tackle shop in Bridgeport, instructed me in fishing for striped bass with eels, as did John Posh and other local fishermen, including Joe Haines (a retired game warden about whom I wrote my second book), who was my first introduction to eating eels. Taylor Hoyt and I have enjoyed many nights casting off the beach in Southport and elsewhere with live eels.
It is David Seidler, a fly-fishing buddy in Santa Monica, who first told me about the importance of eels in Maori culture— and for the introduction to that world I am most grateful.
While I was working on this book, several people who contributed their stories and ideas have passed: Bill Akonga and Kelly Davis, prominent Maori elders or kaumatua, as well as Andrew Farmer and Raymond Kitt.
I would like to thank Ray Turner for sharing days at the weir with me, and Don O’Hagan for giving me a key to his cabin across the river from Ray’s at Peas Eddy, where I usually stayed on visits there. As with many people I’ve written about over the years, Ray has become a close friend, and I thank him for his friendship. Stephen Sloan, who has passed, was a great angler and conservationist; he shared with me many an eel conversation, rapt with the wonder and enthusiasm of a child by the mystery of all fishes. Jennifer Reek and Oliver Payne at National Geographic helped push my proposal for an article on eels through after two years of pitching (and in editing the story, Ollie helped create the structure this book is built around). The National Geographic Society itself helped mightily with travel, especially to New Zealand and Japan. I thank David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes for their pleasant company and stories on eel trips, Annie Proulx for erotic eel lore and other obscure tales, John Cook for nights fishing for striped bass at Little Compton and for making the three-legged desk of tupelo and black walnut on which this book was primarily written, and Duncan Galloway for helping build the little shed in my woods where the eel desk sits.
My gratitude to Johannes Schöffmann for taking det
ours on trout-collecting trips to look for eels in Comacchio, Italy, and in Montenegro; to Joe Dochtermann for bringing me to see the crazy eel sellers at the dawn fish market in Hamburg, Germany; to Jonathan Yang for being candid about how the eel trade works; to Kunio Kadowaki for toting us around Japan and bridging a culture gap; to Stella August for opening my eyes to eels in Maori culture and setting up an itinerary with people who changed the way I look at the world (among them Bill Kerrison, Matt Paku, Hadley Paku, Daniel Joe, and Don Jellyman); to Michael Hopper for sharing his personal history of commercial eel spearing on Cape Cod; to Mike Miller for checking all my science details and suggesting ways to explain things to my readers; to Hal Clifford at Orion magazine for helping shape and manage the text and for his encouragement; to Tony Kirk for his assistance at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, Connecticut, where I produced the etchings for this book; and to Tim Collins for sharing his Adirondack home and providing a quiet place to read and watch the snow fall. Others who read the manuscript and offered comments, or just engaged in helpful discussions with me about eels or rivers or the named and nameless, include Peer Doering, Fred Kircheis, Bill Raynor, Pierre Affre, Barry O’Connor, Terry Holbrook, Susannah Carson, Mei Chin, Annping Chin, Jonathan Spence, James Scott, Harold Bloom, David Skelly, and Elaine Bleakney. Thank you, Hugh Van Dusen and Rob Crawford at HarperCollins, and Elaine Markson, my agent.
I cannot thank enough my friend Hampton Carey, who read and reread this book with a crucial eye, that of an artist and a historian/scientist, and helped me especially when the book was taking a conceptual turn. And finally, Lauren Hauser has endured more eel talk and eel conversation than anyone imaginable, possibly in the history of humankind, and for that she deserves the greatest helping of eel pie.
* In Sophia Loren’s memoir Living and Loving, she tells the story of the first time she ate eel, while working on the movie, which was shot at the Po.”We were served seven different eel dishes that night, each one more delicious than the one before, and if I had not been told I would never have guessed I was eating eel.”
ALSO BY JAMES PROSEK
Trout: An Illustrated History
Joe and Me: An Education in Fishing and Friendship
The Complete Angler: A Connecticut Yankee Follows in the Footsteps of Walton
Early Love and Brook Trout
Fly-Fishing the 41st: Around the World on the 41st Parallel
Trout of the World
A Good Day’s Fishing
The Day My Mother Left
Bird, Butterfly, Eel
Copyright
EELS. Copyright © 2010 by James Prosek.
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EPub Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-00881-7
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