Dad laughed and pointed from the other side.
“You get one more chance. Since you have to come back, too.”
“Can’t you come get me with the boat?” I yelled.
“Oh, no. Come on. Straight across.”
I walked over to the rock, shook the lactic acid out of my muscles and stepped back into the water. This time, I aimed upstream from the outset, launching myself out; the momentum helped me swim diagonally against the current for a brief moment. For those few seconds, I was also on the right side of the willow tree on the other side, but then the water caught on to what was happening and wrestled me violently downstream. I managed to steer my way to shore, grab a branch, and pull myself up onto dry land, three feet or so from the willow tree.
“That’s close, who would’ve thought?” Dad said and turned around to go get our fishing gear.
I stayed where I was, letting the last rays of the setting sun dry me. When he came back, I got dressed and we walked silently along the stream, out onto a narrow spit of land where we fished while we waited for it to be time to set up our spillers. I caught a small perch, which had swallowed the hook so badly we had to break its neck; Dad said we could try using it for bait. As the sun winked out below the horizon, a bat flew quickly and silently over our heads.
“I guess it’s time,” Dad said. I never did get that tenner, of course.
9
The People Who Fish for Eel
Hanö Bay on the east coast of Skåne in Sweden is home to a unique beachfront that stretches for about thirty miles, between Stenshuvud in the south to Åhus in the north. This is what’s often called Sweden’s eel coast.
It’s a pretty landscape, but not in a pastoral or exaggerated way. There is natural beauty there, if of the somewhat inaccessible kind. Hanö Bay’s coast is gently rounded, wreathed by a sparse, windswept pine forest. A long, narrow, almost white beach, often visible from the road, lines the edge of the forest on the seaward side. It looks like a discarded, sun-bleached strip of fabric running the length of the bay. The sea is shallow and the water a deep shade of blue.
Big, thick wooden posts rise out of the sand at regular intervals, seven or eight in each small cluster. They look like telephone poles, but without wires, erected seemingly at random. These poles were used to hang up fishing equipment and nets, to dry and mend them, and wherever you see a cluster of poles sticking up at the horizon, you can be almost sure you will also find a small house. Usually an old brick or stone building, often with a thatched roof, sometimes half-buried in the dunes, almost always facing the sea. These houses are called eel sheds.
The oldest eel sheds are from the eighteenth century. There were at least a hundred along this thirty-mile stretch of coast once, and fifty or so are still standing. They are typically named after the fishermen who used them or the myths and legends said to have taken place in them. They’re called things like the Brothers’ Shed, Jeppa’s Shed, Nils’ Shed, the Hansa Shed, the Twin Shed, the King’s Shed, the Smuggler’s Shed, the Tail Shed, the Cuckoo Shed, and the Perjurer’s Shed. Some of the sheds are derelict, some have been converted into seaside summer cottages, but a handful are still used for their original purpose. It’s in these sheds you find a second category of people, quite distinct from the natural scientists, who have historically had a close relationship with the eel: eel fishermen.
Here, on the Swedish eel coast, only a few remain, and it’s a shrinking brotherhood, but their presence and profession have shaped life in this part of the world for a very long time. For centuries, eel fishing has been central to the area’s culture, traditions, and language. Here, almost everyone knows the old eel fishermen by name. Here, most have at one time or another attended an eel feast, the special late-summer or early-autumn celebrations dedicated to the eel. Here, the eel, the traditions built around it, and the knowledge about it, have become an intrinsic part of the local identity.
And it has been thus since at least the Middle Ages. Fishing along the eel coast is organized through the distribution of a special kind of fishing rights, called åldrätter. The word drätt comes from the Swedish verb for “pull” and refers to the fishing technique normally used here. It’s an ancient system, one with roots in a feudal, predemocratic time, and the only place where it survives is here, on the Swedish eel coast. The system stems from a time when Skåne was still part of Denmark; the oldest extant documentation about it dates from 1511 and tells us that a certain Jens Holgersen Ulfstand of Glimmingehus purchased two åldrätter from the archbishop. The rights were sought after, because eels were a plentiful and popular food. When Skåne became Swedish in 1658, the Swedish king appropriated the local fishing rights and redistributed them in accordance with his authoritarian Swedification policy to members of the clergy and nobility in exchange for loyalty. The owners of åldrätter could, in turn, make lucrative deals leasing those rights to fishermen and farmers. And thus, the eel has also been a tool for exercising power.
The eel feast is a leftover from those days. The Swedish word for it, gille, comes from the word gäld, meaning “debt” or “payment,” and refers to the fee a fisherman would have to pay for his fishing rights. The payment would usually be due at the end of the eel season and was made in actual eels. And thus, the eel also served as a kind of currency.
A traditional eel feast typically requires at least four different eel dishes; there are many local specialties. Fried eel, boiled eel, and eel soup. Smoked eel cleaned and soaked in brine overnight before being scalded and smoked over alder wood. So-called luad eel, which is lightly salted, put on a spit, and then baked in a hot oven, making it smoked and roasted at the same time. Halmad eel, which is a large eel cut into portion-sized pieces and fried in a hot oven in a pan filled with rye straw. Pinna eel, smaller eels salted and fried with alder sticks and juniper brush. Sailor’s eel, which is smoked eel braised in dark beer and fried in butter. Fläk eel, cleaned, deboned, oven-baked eel stuffed with dill and salt. And in this way, the eel has become the focus of a unique food culture.
The eel coast is divided into a total of 140 åldrätter. They range from five hundred to one thousand feet in width and extend a few hundred feet into the sea. Only the owner or leaser of an åldrätt can fish for eels in that particular location. The eel sheds were built adjacent to the designated åldrätt areas. They were small, simple houses, with a storage room and a small living space with a table and a few cots for sleeping. During the fishing season, the fishermen typically lived in them in order to guard the corves where the caught eels were kept, or to ensure they would be ready to head out and salvage their equipment in case of a storm. Before the sheds were built, fishermen would simply turn their wooden boats over on the beach and sleep under them on simple beds of straw.
The season traditionally lasts only three months, the length of the so-called eel darkness, when the eels move out into the ocean, passing along the coast on their way to the Sargasso Sea. These eels—the largest, fattest ones, which have adapted their bodies to the long journey across the Atlantic—are the ones the fishermen are after. Usually at the end of July, the fishermen place the traps they will then inspect every day at dawn until the start of November, when they are removed. That’s the end of the season. No more eel darkness.
Eel fishing has always been a cottage industry. Neither the location nor the eel itself has permitted scaling up. The fishing is primarily done using a so-called homma, a special kind of trap equipped with a grapnel and floaters, which has long mesh wings leading into a tapering bag in which the caught eels are collected. The boats used are small and flat-bottomed to aid navigation in shallow water and to facilitate their being pulled up onto the beach. Both hommor and boats are traditionally crafted by the fishermen themselves.
Things do change, of course, but only in minor ways. The boats, which used to be made of tarred oak, are now plastic. Where oars were once used, people now prefer outboard motors. Fishing rights are no longer paid for in eels and no longer passed down fro
m father to son. These days, women are allowed in both eel sheds and at eel feasts. But other than that, things are done the way they’ve always been done. Partly because the eel demands it and partly because that’s how the fishermen want it, but also because on the eel coast people agree that there’s value to keeping traditions and knowledge alive. And thus, the eel has, in time, become a cultural heritage.
WHAT KIND OF PERSON CHOOSES TO BECOME AN EEL FISHERMAN? What does the eel provide such a person with? A profession and an income is the simple answer. But that’s not the whole story. True, the eel has been an important source of food in large parts of Europe throughout history, but it has always been tricky. Difficult to catch, difficult to understand, enigmatic, and to many people simply unpleasant. It has forced fishermen to develop special methods and tools; its peculiar behavior has kept the fishing industry small scale even though demand has been high. It can’t be farmed like salmon, for instance; in fact, it won’t breed in captivity at all. As a source of nourishment, the eel has been crucial for a lot of people, but it has rarely been particularly cooperative. And today, when fewer and fewer people eat eel and catches are shrinking, why become an eel fisherman at all?
If you were to ask the people on Sweden’s eel coast, many would probably tell you it’s rarely a choice. You’re born into it; you have been groomed for it over the course of generations. It goes without saying there are no university courses or professional training programs for eel fishermen. The special knowledge an eel fisherman possesses isn’t gained in the classroom or a laboratory. It has been passed down through centuries, like an ancient story that no one has ever bothered to write down. How to craft a homma or how to flay an eel, how to read the sea and the weather and how to interpret the eel’s movements under the surface: this specific and particular knowledge has been transmitted through practical work, as a shared experience transcending the ages. And thus, fishing for eel has often been a profession that runs in families, handed down from one generation to the next. No one becomes an eel fisherman who doesn’t have it in his or her blood. And no one becomes an eel fisherman who doesn’t also view the work as a way of protecting and preserving something bigger than fishing per se: a cultural heritage, a tradition, and knowledge.
The parts of Europe where eel fishing has been most important have rarely included big, well-known cities. The metropolises of the eel are not those of humankind. Instead, they have been peculiar places, populated by peculiar people. Stubborn and proud people who, like those on the Swedish eel coast, have often inherited their profession from their fathers and been shaped by hard labor and simple circumstances. Who have let their work become their identity and who have as a consequence, much like Johannes Schmidt, kept plying the waters in their boat, hunting for eels even when common sense told them not to. Oftentimes, these people have nurtured a kind of outsider status and a suspicious attitude toward the powers that be. The eel fisherman has, in more places than the Swedish eel coast, been a creature apart.
GLASS EELS ARE FISHED IN THE RIVER ORIA IN THE SPANISH BASQUE Country in winter and early spring. The river, which empties into the Bay of Biscay, meanders through the mountainous Basque landscape and is a popular thoroughfare for the transparent glass eels, which after a couple of years of drifting across the Atlantic, swim up waterways to find a home for the next ten, twenty, or thirty years. Many of them don’t make it very far. Near the estuary by the coast, fisherman spend cold, rainy nights in wooden boats, sieving the fragile eels out of the water.
The small village of Aguinaga, located on the river a few miles inland, has only six hundred residents but no fewer than five companies that catch and sell glass eels. Here, too, professional knowledge is ancient and inherited. The glass eels come in on the tide on cold nights, under a full or crescent moon and preferably when the sky is slightly overcast. They float near the surface in massive shoals, like enormous, silvery tangles of seaweed; the fishermen glide slowly back and forth in their boats; the light from the lanterns at their prows is reflected in the living blanket of fish. They lift the glass eels out by hand, with round nets attached to long rods.
The glass eel is considered a delicacy in the Basque Country, and only there these days. The tradition of consuming the eel in this frail, transparent state has, however, historically been widespread. In the United Kingdom, glass eels were once caught in the Severn. They were fried whole while still alive together with a bit of bacon, or with a beaten egg in a kind of omelet, a so-called elver cake. In Italy, glass eels used to be caught in the Arno River in the west and around Comacchio in the east. There the preferred way of serving them was boiled in tomato sauce with a sprinkle of parmesan. Eating glass eels was also popular in some parts of France. These days, however, it’s a dying tradition. As the number of glass eels wandering up Europe’s rivers has plummeted, the fishing industry built around them has also ceased to exist. It’s really only the Basques who stubbornly refuse to give up.
There are, of course, rational reasons for this. First on the list are financial concerns. Glass eels have been fished here for a long time. It’s said they used to drift up the Oria in such great quantities that farmers would catch them from the banks by the netful and feed them to their pigs. But it’s their scarcity, the increased threat to their existence, that has ultimately made the glass eel a more sought-after and exclusive delicacy, in a twist of logic that is unique to humankind. In the Basque Country it’s eaten fried in the finest olive oil with a hint of garlic and mild chili. It’s served burning hot in a small ceramic dish; diners eat it with a special wooden fork to avoid burning their lips. In peak season, a small portion, 250 grams, can cost sixty or seventy dollars in the finer eateries in San Sebastián.
But the eel fishermen in Aguinaga and along the Oria have other reasons to continue with their trade. They simply don’t want to stop. Because they feel it’s their right. Because this was precisely what their ancestors did before them and because this particular way of fishing for eel is, aside from a way to earn a living, what makes them who they are. The region is also a stronghold of the Basque separatist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna. People here are used to being self-reliant. For forty years they were marginalized and oppressed under the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, so they remain vigilant against power grabs by bureaucrats in Madrid or Brussels. Here, the fishermen will return to the river with their nets and lanterns no matter what politicians and scientific experts have to say about it. Until the very last eel fisherman is gone. Or the very last eel.
AROUND LOUGH NEAGH IN NORTHERN IRELAND, LOCALS HAVE fished for eels for at least two thousand years; the eels caught there are often described as Europe’s finest. Lough Neagh is found at the northeast corner of Ireland. It is the largest lake in the British Isles, located west of the Mourne Mountains in a fairly barren landscape; for large parts of the year, it is characterized by a rather unforgiving climate, prone to severe storms. Yet even so, the fishing here continues much as it always has. Because that is what each successive generation has been taught to do. Because neither the location nor the eel has allowed any variation.
In Lough Neagh, the catch is primarily yellow eel, and the tool used is a spiller. Long lines with multiple hooks baited with worms are set from simple boats. Two fishermen per boat will set four spillers with four hundred hooks on each every day during peak season. Sixteen hundred hooks that need to be baited by hand and checked at the crack of dawn when the cold and fog turn fingers into stiff glass rods.
Traditionally, the catch has been shipped to London. Eel was for a long time a popular food in the capital, sold in little shops and market stands. It was eaten fried with mash, or as jellied eel, sliced rounds of eel boiled in a stock that sets into jelly. It was considered good-value-for-the-money everyday fare, and was intimately associated with the working class of the East End. The eel was fatty and rich in proteins and significantly cheaper than meat, which is why it was sought after by the poor and predictably often despised by the wealthy.
&
nbsp; But Londoners’ fondness for eel was not the only reason Lough Neagh eels ended up in London. There were political reasons as well. When the British colonized large parts of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they confiscated not only the most fertile land but also valuable natural resources. In 1605, the Irish locals around Lough Neagh were forced to give up their fishing rights, and for more than three hundred and fifty years, the fishing was controlled by the English colonizers. Wealthy Protestants decided how many eels were to be caught, what was to be done with them, and how much fishermen would be paid for them. The fishermen, often Catholic farmers forced from their land, obliged to find other ways of making a living, were poor and powerless. The eel was an emergency solution to stay alive.
For several hundred years, all fishing rights were in the possession of the Earl of Shaftesbury, but in the mid-twentieth century, they were sold to a consortium called the Ring, which consisted of a handful of wealthy eel merchants in London. The Ring still controlled all eel fishing in Lough Neagh when a group of Catholic fishermen banded together in 1965, forming the Lough Neagh Fishermen’s Cooperative Society. Together, the cooperative was able to raise the money to buy 20 percent of the lake’s fishing rights. In the years that followed, more money was set aside and the remaining 80 percent was purchased as well. That this happened at the same time the Troubles broke out was, of course, no coincidence. The members of the Ring testified to being forced to sell their shares under threat of violence; they also testified that the consortium’s ships had been attacked. It was said the eel fishermen were, to a man, members of the Irish Republican Army.
The Book of Eels Page 7