The Book of Eels

by Patrik Svensson

  And thus, the eel became embroiled in the violent Northern Irish conflict, which has always had as much to do with class, power, ownership, wealth, and poverty as it has with religion. Today, fishing on Lough Neagh is 100 percent controlled by the Lough Neagh Fishermen’s Cooperative Society, and those who still fish for eel are not about to forget where they came from. Stubborn pride drives them to keep baiting their hooks and setting their spillers. Because that’s what’s always been done and how it should be.

  AND NOW ALL THIS WILL DISAPPEAR. THE CULTURAL HERITAGE AND the traditions. The regional dishes and landmarks. The eel sheds, boats, and fishing tools. The knowledge that has been passed down the generations. And eventually, the memory itself of all those things.

  At least that’s the fear, on the shores of Lough Neagh and in Basque Aguinaga, and on the Swedish eel coast. Because as the eel population shrinks, the calls to protect grow stronger. Fishing for glass eels is already banned in many parts of the continent. Scientists and politicians are working toward a complete ban across Europe.

  So be it, the fishermen say, but remember that you’re not just robbing us of our livelihoods. Traditions, knowledge, and a valuable, old cultural heritage will also inevitably be lost. More than that, they claim, humanity’s relationship with the eel is at stake. If people can no longer fish for eel—catch it, kill it, and eat it—they will lose interest in it. And if people have no interest in the eel, it’s lost anyway.

  That’s why the Lough Neagh Fishermen’s Cooperative Society is now working as hard to save the eel as to catch it. Among other things, it runs an extensive and costly project to buy and release glass eels into the lake. The eel fishermen on the Swedish eel coast have organized and are working to increase awareness of the plight of the eel as well. They have founded something called the Eel Foundation, which, much like the fishermen at the Lough Neagh society, works to release eels in order to bolster stocks. In 2012, the Cultural Heritage Association of the Eel Coast was established, with the aim of getting eel fishing and its traditions in Sweden declared an intangible cultural heritage. On its website, the association writes: “A total ban on eel fishing means a living culture, a local craft, and a unique culinary heritage becomes history. The eel sheds along the coast will be turned into summer homes for the wealthy. The stories will fall silent. The interest in the eel, and thus the eel itself, will be lost.”

  This is the great paradox, which has also become part of the eel question of our time: in order to understand the eel, we have to have an interest in it, and to have an interest in it, we have to continue to hunt, kill, and eat it (at least according to some of the people who, after all, are closer than most to the eel). An eel is never allowed to simply be an eel. It’s never allowed to just be. Thus, it has also become a symbol of our complex relationship with all the other forms of life on this planet.

  10

  Outwitting the Eel

  One summer, we tried to klumma. It’s an old fishing method used in streams in rural Skåne, in southern Sweden. By all accounts, it’s an activity that belongs to a different world, since the method itself is so insane it’s hard to imagine how anyone would be capable of inventing it today. But somewhere, at some point, someone did, and also discovered, against all odds, that it not only worked but was highly effective. Somehow, this knowledge then spread, in patterns that are both undiscernible and inexplicable, to finally arrive at my dad, who in turn passed it on to me, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

  Which it is not. When you klumma for eel, you thread a needle with a long piece of extra-strong sewing thread and hold it in one hand while you hold a worm in the other. You stick the needle through the worm, pull the thread all the way through and repeat until you have several feet of worms, which you roll into a quivering, stinking ball of slime and secretions and writhing bodies. You then attach a sinker and a line to the ball, but no hook.

  You fish at night, preferably from a boat. The ball of worms is thrown into the water and left to settle on the bottom, while you hold the taut line gently. When the eel finds the ball and bites into it, you respond with an immediate tug. If you’re skilled enough, and since the eel’s tiny but slightly curved teeth make it cling to the thread in a slightly hangdog way, you can pull the eel into your boat in one quick, smooth motion. At least in theory.

  Dad had never tried it before. He hadn’t even seen anyone do it. But we both realized it would take, first and foremost, a very large number of worms. Dad had an idea about how to find them. He told me to water the lawn while he grabbed a pitchfork, cut off a piece of electrical cord, attached one of the exposed wires to the prongs, and shoved the fork into the ground.

  “You’d better stand back now,” he said. “And put your wellies on.”

  I stood on the front steps in my boots, pulse racing, watching as he plugged the cord in and two hundred and twenty volts jolted through it, into the pitchfork, and down into the damp soil. At first, nothing happened, not a sound, not a movement. Then the worms started appearing out of the ground, hundreds of them, covered in dirt, wriggling in distress. The whole lawn looked like one big living organism.

  Once dad had turned the power off, we walked around, picking up our bait. It took just ten minutes to fill a big jar.

  WHEN NIGHT FELL, WE WERE IN OUR WOODEN BOAT, HOLDING THE line with the revolting ball of worms dangling in the water beneath us, and I wondered what the point was. What was the point of this fishing method? Of course, one person may find meaning where another can’t even discern sense, but doesn’t meaning have to be part of a context? And doesn’t this context have to at least be perceived as bigger than oneself? After all, people have a need to be part of something lasting, to feel that they are part of a line that started before them and will continue after they’re gone. They need to be part of something bigger.

  Knowledge can, of course, be the bigger context. All kinds of knowledge, about crafts or work or ancient insane fishing methods. Knowledge can, in and of itself, constitute a context, and once you become a link in the chain of transmission, from one person to another, from one time to another, knowledge becomes meaningful in itself, quite apart from considerations of utility or profit. It’s at the heart of everything. When you talk about human experience, you’re not talking about individual experience, you’re talking about our communal experience, which is passed on, retold, and reexperienced.

  But this particular knowledge—how to string worms up on thread in order to try to trick an eel—was there any meaning to that anymore? And this particular experience—sitting silently in a boat at night, with a ball of slowly dying worms on a line beneath you—was there any humanity left in that?

  Before long, it was completely dark and we were sitting dead still. The only sound was the gentle rushing of the water around us; from time to time, we’d raise our hands, lifting the ball of worms up off the bottom with a soft tug. As if to let whatever was moving down there know we were there.

  And it soon returned the favor. A short, distinctive yank that felt like a sudden slap in my hand.

  I instinctively raised my hand straight up in the air and saw the ball of worms rising toward the surface and in its wake, a large eel, slithering eagerly this way and that as though frantically swimming toward me instead of trying to escape. I pulled it out of the water and over the railing and then there it was, lying by our feet, whipping its head from side to side, a sudden reminder of the consequences of my action.

  It was over in seconds, and then it started again. We caught twelve eels that night. Another night a few days later, we caught fifteen. They kept biting and we kept pulling them into the boat, like pulling carrots out of a vegetable patch. It was as though there were an endless source of eels that had suddenly opened just for us; it was, if not meaningful, at least comprehensible; the method, the knowledge, was functional and apparently even effective. We had found a way to outwit the eels that was in a different league from any other method we’d ever tried.

/>   And yet, we never klummade again after those two nights. I think it had to do with the images it evoked. The yellowish-brown, shiny eel, slithering through the sediment in the dark, biting into a quivering mass of dying worms, letting itself get hauled out of the water, with neither hook nor struggle, as though it had given up; as though it were trying to escape something in the depths. It didn’t tally with what we wanted the eel to be. The eel didn’t behave as we expected it to. Maybe we had gotten too close to it.

  11

  The Uncanny Eel

  On November 11, 1620, the Mayflower dropped anchor off Cape Cod in the southeast part of present-day Massachusetts. Just more than two months earlier, the ship had left England with 102 passengers and about thirty crew. The passengers were mostly Puritans, members of a strict Protestant church that preached an orthodox, ascetic form of Christianity. They had left England as a result of both poverty and religious persecution, first for temporary exile in the Netherlands, then to the west to start over in the New World. They left not only because they hoped to find freedom and prosperity in this new land, but also because they believed it was God’s will. Rather than refugees, they thought of themselves as chosen. Chosen by God to be saved, chosen to spread the one true doctrine across the world in His name.

  Salvation, as it so often happens in Christian stories, would, naturally, come only after a series of trials. And when it finally came, it did so in an unexpected form.

  It was already winter when the Mayflower reached the coast of North America. The land was cold and desolate; most of the passengers were forced to remain on the ship for months before they could leave. The smaller expedition that rowed ashore on the first day to do reconnaissance had a bad time of it. Several of them froze to death as they camped overnight on the snowy beach. The survivors were cheered to discover a cemetery and some seemingly abandoned winter stores of corn and beans, but after sacking the stores, they found themselves hunted by the natives whose food they’d stolen. One night, they were attacked by warriors with bows and arrows and narrowly escaped.

  Tuberculosis, pneumonia, and scurvy soon broke out aboard the ship. Food was scarce and the water dirty. When spring finally arrived, only 53 of the 102 passengers were still alive. Half the crew had perished as well.

  It was March before the surviving colonizers were able to leave the ship at last, still determined to follow through on their plan and fulfill the will of God. They were famished and frozen and had in the way of possessions not much, other than their conviction that God was on their side. They didn’t know where they should start building their colony or how they could make peace with the natives. Nor did they know where to hunt, which plants were edible, or how to find potable water. The promised land could perhaps be welcoming, but clearly only to those who understood it.

  That’s when they came across Tisquantum. A member of the Patuxet tribe, he had been captured by the English years earlier, taken to Spain, and sold as a slave, before managing to escape to England, where he learned the language. Eventually, he boarded a ship back to North America, only to find that his entire tribe had been wiped out by an epidemic probably brought by the English.

  There was no apparent logic to his actions, and a person’s motives cannot always be explained by his backstory, but by all appearances, Tisquantum saved the imperiled English colonizers. One of the first things he did was gift them an armful of eels. After their very first meeting, Tisquantum went down to the river, and “at night, he came home with as many eels as he could well lift in one hand, which our people were glad of,” noted one of the pilgrims in a diary later sent back to England. “They were fat & sweet, he trod them out with his feete, and so caught them with his hands without any other Instrument.” It was a gift from God in their hour of need, the salvation they had never stopped praying for.

  Before long, Tisquantum had taught the pilgrims how to catch eels and where to find them. He also gave them corn and taught them how to cultivate it; he showed them where they could find wild vegetables and fruits and advised them on how and where to hunt. Not least, he helped them communicate with the local natives and was key to negotiating the peace agreement that was pivotal to the lost Englishmen’s future in America.

  And thus, the pilgrims survived, becoming, in time, legends in the American creation myth. The Mayflower’s arrival has been a symbolic and epoch-making event in American history ever since, mythologized and romanticized in countless patriotic contexts.

  In November 1621, a year after their arrival and around the date that has ever since, and because of the pilgrims’ survival, been called Thanksgiving, they wrote in their diaries about the amazing land they had found. They wrote about the grace that had, after all their tribulations, been extended to them and thanked the Lord for all the trees and plants and fruits surrounding them, for the animals and fish and fertile soil and, of course, for the eels they “effortlessly” fished out of the river in great quantities every night.

  It would have made complete sense for the eel to have become an important figure in American mythology, a fat, shiny symbol of the promised land, the gift that sealed what was preordained. But that didn’t happen. Perhaps because the eel’s nature doesn’t lend itself well to solemn symbolism. Perhaps because it soon became associated with the simple eating habits of the poor rather than with feast days. Perhaps also because the gift had come from a native man.

  For some reason, this gift from God to the early pilgrims has been all but erased from the grand narrative. The story of the colonization of North America is full of myths and legends, but the story of the eel isn’t one of them. On Thanksgiving, Americans eat turkey, not eel, and other animals—buffalo, eagles, horses—have been the ones to shoulder the symbolic weight of the patriotic narrative of the United States of America. True, the colonizers continued to catch and eat eels, and by the end of the nineteenth century the eel was still an important ingredient in the American kitchen. But it gradually disappeared from dinner tables. After the Second World War, the eel’s reputation lay in tatters, and by the end of the 1990s, eel fishing had more or less completely ceased along the East Coast. Today, many Americans think of the eel as a troublesome, fairly unappetizing fish they want as little to do with as possible. Sometimes, even the gifts of God are only begrudgingly accepted.

  THIS UNCERTAIN, CONTRADICTORY ATTITUDE TOWARD THE EEL WAS, of course, not unique to the arrival of the Mayflower in North America. Throughout history, the eel has aroused ambiguous feelings in the people who have encountered it. At times reverence, but also an inevitable unease. Curiosity, but also rejection.

  In ancient Egypt, the eel was considered a mighty demon, an equal of the gods and a forbidden food. A creature moving effortlessly beneath the glittering surface of the holy Nile, slithering through the sediments of existence itself. Archaeologists have found mummified eels in tiny sarcophagi, laid to their eternal rest next to bronze statuettes of the gods.

  Granted, many animals symbolized divinity in ancient Egypt. The sun god Ra was often depicted with the head of a falcon. The god of the Underworld, Anubis, had the head of a jackal. Thoth, the god of wisdom, was given the head of an ibis. The goddess of love, Bastet, had a woman’s body and a cat’s head. Every animal represented different characteristics, of course, but the blurring of the line between human and animal was also in itself a sign of divinity. Atum, who in Heliopolis was the father of all other gods and pharaohs, was also the god associated with the eel. In one depiction, Atum has a human head, a pointy beard, and a crown signifying his divine status, and behind a wide, intimidating cobra shield, his body is that of a long, slender eel, complete with realistic fins. The human head and eel’s body together symbolized a kind of wholeness, the union of positive and negative forces.

  In ancient Rome, opinion was also divided when it came to the eel. Some refused, like the Egyptians, to eat eel, not because it was holy but rather because it was considered unclean and loathsome. Perhaps because eels were often caught near sewer out
lets. Perhaps because dried eel skins were used to make a kind of belt to discipline disobedient children.

  Many Romans seem to have preferred the conger (Conger conger) or the moray eel, which is related to the eel—but whatever the species, the eel was often associated with something dark and macabre. Both Pliny the Elder and Seneca the Younger describe how the Roman military commander Vedius Pollio, a friend of Emperor Augustus, had the habit of punishing slaves by throwing them into a pool filled with eels. The bloodthirsty fish ate their fill and were then served to Vedius Pollio’s guests as a particularly fatty and luxurious delicacy.

  A FISH, BUT ALSO SOMETHING ELSE. A FISH THAT LOOKS LIKE A Snake, or a worm, or a slithering sea monster. The eel has always been special. Not least in Christian tradition, in which the fish has been, from the beginning, one of the most central symbols, the eel has been viewed as a thing apart.

  It’s said the earliest Christians, during the first century after the birth of Christ, used the fish as a secret sign. Since Christians were persecuted in many places, a level of caution was required, so when two believers met, one would draw an arced line on the ground. If the other drew a similar one from the other direction, the lines together formed a stylized fish, and the two knew they could trust each other. This symbol can be found in the catacombs of Saint Calixtus and Saint Priscilla in Rome, dating back to the very first centuries of the Common Era.

  The fish was significant for several reasons. Long before the birth of Christianity, it had been a symbol of luck in Mediterranean culture. With the coming of Jesus, the fish also became a symbol of revivalism and confession. “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men,” Jesus says to the very first apostles, Simon and Andrew, in the Gospel. Newly saved people are called “small fry,” and in the Gospel, Jesus likens entering the kingdom of heaven to fishing: “The kingdom of heaven is like a net that was let down into the lake and caught all kinds of fish. When it was full, the fishermen pulled it up on the shore. Then they sat down and collected the good fish in the baskets but threw the bad away. This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous.”