BUT THE EEL IS NEITHER A DODO NOR A SEA COW. FIRSTLY, IT’S NOT isolated on some island in the Indian Ocean or the Bering Sea. Secondly, it has survived humanity for too long to come to that kind of abrupt end. And surely all the energy spent on understanding it over the centuries can’t have been for naught?
Because there are, after all, a lot of people doing their best to help the eel. Just as the life cycle of the eel has for centuries aroused the curiosity of science, many scientists working today consider its demise the most important challenge they currently face.
Some of the alarms sounded by researchers and organizations like ICES and IUCN have been taken very seriously. At least in Europe. In 2007, the European Union adopted a management plan containing a series of radical proposals to try to save the eel. Every member country committed to implement measures to ensure that at least 40 percent of all silver eels can reach the sea, by, for example, limiting fishing and building alternative passes to circumvent dams and power stations. All exports to non-European countries, such as the insatiable Japanese market, have been banned (though illegal exports are still assumed to be substantial), and anyone fishing for glass eels must set aside at least 35 percent of the catch for reintroduction into the wild. In the same year, 2007, Sweden’s National Board of Fisheries banned any form of eel fishing in Sweden, with the exception of professional eel fishermen with special permits, or in fresh water upstream from the third migration barrier.
At first, the measures seemed to be having an effect. In the years that followed, the European eel did seem to recover slightly. There was, above all, an increase in the number of glass eels arriving from the Sargasso Sea, and for the first time in a long time, the people who care about eels could allow themselves a quantum of optimism.
But since 2012, the trend has reversed and the rate of recovery has leveled off. The slight uptick seems to have been a temporary exception, and the goals set up in the EU’s management plan have remained far from achieved. On the whole, the eel’s situation is at least as dire today as it was before 2007.
We seem to be stuck in a “utopian deadlock,” as Willem Dekker, an eel expert at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala, wrote in a summary of the situation in 2016. The hopefulness we had been feeling for some time turned out to rest on unrealistic expectations. The measures put in place to save the eel, Dekker claimed, are not only insufficient, they also risk becoming a placating form of misdirection. As long as we cling to what we think we know, what we believe to be right, the eel’s situation will never improve, but instead worsen.
And while the problem continues to be debated, time passes.
In the autumn of 2017, the EU’s agriculture and fisheries ministers were due to set new fishing quotas, and the European Commission’s surprisingly radical proposal was to ban all eel fishing in the Baltic Sea. Sweden supported a blanket ban at first, but when no other country joined the cause, it chose to abandon it. It’s important to be open to negotiation, the Swedish minister for rural affairs, Sven-Erik Bucht, stressed; he, like so many others, apparently had fonder feelings for fish other than the eel. If we choose to stand up for the eel, we give up our chance to protect other species, he argued. “No one is going to be able to take the salmon’s side.” Once the decision had been made, there were, consequently, reductions in the quotas for salmon, cod, herring, and plaice, while the eel could continue to be fished much as before.
It took another year, until December 2018, before the EU decided to implement a union-wide ban on eel fishing, including in the Mediterranean and along the Atlantic coast. But the ban covers only three months of the year, and the glass eel is not yet included in it.
And thus, the eel populations continue to decline, while decisions about what to do to help it are punted down the road. Until we know more. Or until there’s nothing left to know.
IS IT POSSIBLE TO IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT EELS? IS IT POSSIBLE to erase a creature that has existed for at least forty million years, that has survived ice ages and seen continents drift apart, that when humans found their place on this planet had already been waiting for us for millions of years, that has been the subject of so many traditions and celebrations and myths and stories?
No, is the instinctive answer, that’s not how the world works. What exists, exists, and what doesn’t exist is always in some ways unimaginable. Imagining a world without eels would be like imagining a world without mountains or oceans, air or soil, bats or willow trees.
Yet at the same time, all life is changeable, and we will all change one day, and it was probably, at some point, at least for a few people, just as difficult to imagine a world without the dodo or without Steller’s sea cow. Just as I couldn’t, once, imagine a world without Nana or Dad.
And yet they’re both gone now. And the world is still here.
18
In the Sargasso Sea
I don’t remember the last time we went eel fishing, but as time passed, it happened less and less frequently. Not because the eel lost any of its mystery, but perhaps because other mysteries became more important. Our closed little world down by the river found it increasingly difficult to compete with all the other worlds that gradually opened up. This was, of course, a predictable development. People grow up, change, leave, transform, stop fishing for eel. With all the symbolic metamorphoses we go through, some things are inevitably lost.
As a teenager, I sometimes took friends down to the stream. Dad stayed home. We brought beer and an air gun, and when we caught an eel, we tried to shoot it in the head. We took turns, shooting and missing and shooting again. I brought the eels home to Dad, who was furious when he almost broke his teeth on diabolo pellets. I think he felt we were being disrespectful, to him but maybe even more so to the eel.
Dad went down to fish by himself sometimes, but not as often. I finished school and started working. I went out on the weekends. We grew apart, not because of conflict or rejection but simply because everything changed of its own accord. The current that had once swept Dad with it to a new place now seemed to be carrying me away from him. When I was twenty, I moved away and ended up at what the current seemed to consider my final destination: university.
If the eel was our shared experience, university was the opposite, a manifestation of all the things we didn’t share. A strange place, very different from everything I was used to. A place where memories manifested as large buildings and people spoke in abstractions, in a language I didn’t understand, where no one seemed to work and everyone was busy self-actualizing. And I was fascinated by it, if slightly reluctantly. I let myself absorb the environment and the culture and learned how to mimic all the exotic social codes. I carried my books around as though they were identity papers and I learned to answer succinctly and defensively whenever anyone asked where I was from. I suppose I figured the smell of asphalt would expose me as a stranger in the academic corridors.
But at some point every summer, I would go back home and we’d head down to the stream to fish for eel. We’d abandoned the spillers and the trap by then and instead switched to a more modern form of bottom fishing. We used regular hazel rods with tackle consisting of a large single hook and a heavy sinker. We baited our hooks with worms and let them sink to the streambed. Dad had made rod holders out of heavy metal pipes, which we pushed into the ground so the rods stood erect like masts against the night sky. We brought foldable camping chairs and put bells at the tip of the rods that would jingle when we had a bite. Then we sat there, well into the night, listening to the monotonous sound of the rapids, watching the shadow of the willow tree lengthen and the bats swerve nimbly around our rods as they flitted past. We drank coffee and talked about eels we’d caught and eels we’d lost and not much else. Despite everything, I never grew tired of it.
Eventually, my parents bought a cabin. It was a red wooden cabin, small and not particularly pretty, with no indoor plumbing and a well full of dirty water. But it was built next to a small lake, surrounded by for
est on every side, with big stands of reeds in which mute swans and great crested grebes nested. Almost every day, herons and ospreys would fly over the lake, and in the evenings, the sun would set like a big ball of fire behind the spruce trees on the other side. Mum and Dad loved that place and spent as much time there as they could.
There was a small plastic boat that belonged to the cabin, and on my visits, we would fish on the lake. Mostly pike and perch. We rowed around, exploring the lake, which was larger than it initially appeared. The cabin was located on the east side, and at the southern end was a large, shallow patch of reeds, where you could hear pike splashing about at dusk. A small stream emptied into the lake at its northern end; the perch hunted there around the clock. In the west, the lake stretched into a long, narrow arm chock-full of reeds, water lilies, and small, grassy islets. We figured that was where the biggest pike lived.
One night, we were sitting in the cabin, gazing out across the water. The lake had flooded and climbed several yards up the lawn, and suddenly big, powerful tail fins broke the surface, right at the edge of the grass. They swayed this way and that like dark pennants in the moonlight. They were tench, we decided eventually, and we fished for them the way we used to fish for eel: ledgering with hazel rods with bells on their tips. I caught one that weighed almost three and half pounds; it was dark and slimy and had tiny, almost invisible scales. We caught bream, too, sluggish, clumsy fish that somewhat resignedly let themselves be pulled out of the water.
But we never caught a single eel, which as time wore on seemed more and more mysterious.
“There must be eels here,” Dad would say. All the signs indicated as much. The lake was shallow and the lake bed muddy; there was plenty of vegetation and rocks to hide among, and the water was teeming with small fish. The stream that emptied into the lake would present no challenge to a migrating eel, and it was connected to the stream we had always fished for eel in, which was only about twenty miles away.
“I don’t understand why we never catch any,” Dad would say. “There just have to be eels here.”
And yet we never so much as glimpsed a single one. As if to remind us of what it had once meant to us, it hid in the shadows. Eventually, we started wondering if it existed at all.
DAD FELL ILL IN EARLY SUMMER THE YEAR HE TURNED FIFTY-SIX. THAT something was wrong had been known for a long time. He’d been in pain and had eventually gone to see a doctor, who had in turn referred him to the hospital. They had done X-rays and tests and eventually determined what the problem was: a large, aggressive tumor. Why dad was sick was explained by a doctor who told us about the clear correlation between working with asphalt and the kind of cancer he had. The warm steam from the asphalt had eventually penetrated to the depth of his very core, and there was now literally no way of ever getting it out.
He had surgery as summer turned to autumn; it was a big, complicated surgery, and we were well into winter before he could leave the hospital. For months he lay in bed attached to an IV, unable to eat or even enjoy his snus, and we would come to visit and watch in silence when the staff made him get out of bed and walk up and down the hallway, leaning over a walker. He was pale and thin under his hospital gown. It was the first time I’d seen him really weak.
It was also there, one day in the hospital cafeteria, while Dad was in his room, drowsy from the morphine he’d been given, that my mom told me what I should have understood much earlier. My grandfather, the person I had always called Grandad, wasn’t my father’s father. His biological father was someone else entirely, someone none of us knew, not even Dad. My grandmother had met that man when she was about twenty. She had become pregnant and had a child, and the man had wanted nothing to do with her or his son. That was all we knew about him, aside from his first name, which was also my father’s middle name.
Why hadn’t I realized sooner? How could I have missed that? I knew Dad had spent his first years living with Nana’s parents. I knew he’d been looked after by Nana’s sisters when she was at work at the rubber factory in town. I’d heard about when my great-grandmother died, when Dad was just a couple of years old, and when they moved from the contract worker’s cottage to their own house. For some reason, I just hadn’t put two and two together.
Nana hadn’t met the person I would eventually call Grandad until my dad was about seven. They’d been an item for only a short while when Dad had come home inconsolable after his first day of school. All the children in his new class had been asked to tell the others who their fathers were. But Dad didn’t know. He hadn’t been able to say anything, and maybe he’d realized for the first time that our origin is something that affects us, whether we want it to or not, and that a person who doesn’t know his origin will always be a little bit lost. If you don’t know where you came from, you can’t know where you’re going. The journey away from home and back to it follow the same given route.
Soon after that first day of school, my grandparents got engaged. They were married just a few weeks later, quickly and without fuss, with Nana’s sisters as the only witnesses.
Grandad, the person I would continue to call Grandad, had from the outset treated Dad like his own son, and it seems Dad made a decision then and there. His origin was a riddle he would choose the answer to. He’d spent his first seven years without a father, and now he suddenly had one. The invisible figure who had passively occupied that role until then didn’t interest him in the slightest, and the reason he’d never told us the truth was that he didn’t want us to feel any doubt about the way things were. Our grandad was the kind, decent man who, unlike the invisible man, had actually been there. At some point, Dad had simply decided that his, and consequently our, origin was there with him, on the farm by the stream, and that was the truth, in every way that mattered. Not even now, when he was sick and nothing was certain, did Dad talk about it, and we never asked him.
The surgery, and the almost six months of bed rest, gave Dad four more years. Four years of slow recovery before the tumors would come back, each time more brutal. First a relapse and another autumn of surgeries, complications, pain, and several months in the hospital. Then a second relapse; by then, he was so weakened there was no point in fighting.
Dad had turned sixty by then. I was sitting with him at the house, watching TV, one early evening. He was relaxing in the black armchair and had put his feet up on a stool in front of him; he was tired but in a good mood. We didn’t know then that the tumor had come back; we didn’t know anything about what was once again lurking inside his body. At least I didn’t.
“Are the water levels still high out by the cabin?” he asked.
“No, the water’s subsiding, it only just about covers the jetty now.”
“But the jetty’s still there, right? It didn’t move?”
“No, it looks fine, we did a good job securing it. It’s going to take something big to shift it now.”
“Sure, but how many times have we said that?”
He turned his head and looked at me. “So, have you been doing any fishing?” he asked, and that’s when I realized his eyes looked different. The whites had gone yellow, had acquired a grayish-yellow tone, like an old sheet of paper that had turned dirty and matte; the yellow surrounded his black pupils like a thick fog. I looked him in the eyes for a split second, and I must have reacted somehow, because he looked away and turned back to the TV; I sat next to him in silence, staring straight ahead, without really knowing what had just happened.
We talked some more, but each time I looked at him it was as if he were trying to avoid my gaze. He turned his head away, as though hiding something from me, and I remembered a time when I was little and we were sitting around the kitchen table. It was in the middle of winter and snowy and cold outside; Dad was wearing a yellow knit hat with a blue crown on it, and when he took it off the skin of his forehead was the same shade of yellow as the hat. “I’ve got jaundice,” he said and chuckled, but I didn’t understand it was a joke. I asked Mum what jaundice wa
s and she said it was a disease of the liver and that it could be fatal and I went scared and quiet. I thought Dad was dying, and I had no words to express my fear. When he laughed and explained he was kidding and it was just the hat rubbing off on him, I didn’t dare to believe it. I had realized that if other people could fall ill and even die, then why not my dad? Why not me?
As we watched the television, darkness fell outside and Dad grew tired, but I could feel him fighting it. He wanted to stay up a while longer. He didn’t want to acknowledge the fatigue that had taken over his body, or admit something was wrong. So he sat there, listening and talking, in a low, soft voice, and suddenly, almost in the middle of a sentence, he closed his eyes and fell asleep. He sat there in his reclining chair, completely still with his eyes closed, breathing deeply and heavily, as though he’d just clocked out. I sat alone in the chair next to him; eventually, I turned back to the TV and waited, without really knowing what I was waiting for.
A short while later—ten seconds, twenty seconds—he opened his eyes again, looked at me, and tried to smile. “I must’ve drifted off,” he said.
A few weeks later, I visited him in the hospital; it was two days after midsummer, and nothing was hidden anymore. It’s back, the doctor had explained; this time, the tumor was attacking the liver. When we asked what could be done, the young, serious doctor spread his hands and shook his head.
I think Dad understood it better than I did. “I’m not going to make it this time,” he said; I tried to argue but couldn’t find the words. “I hope you’ll want to keep the cabin,” he said—at least I could promise him that. A few days later, he was transferred to hospice and sank into unconsciousness.
THE THIRD OF JULY WAS A THURSDAY. THE WEATHER WAS WARM AND stifling. We were sitting in Dad’s small room at the hospice with the patio door open onto a plot of grass. Beyond the lawn, behind some trees, there was a small pond, where a heron stood, turning its head this way and that, peering out across the still surface.
The Book of Eels Page 18