The Book of Eels, Patrik Svensson [bill gates best books .TXT] 📗

6Illegal Fishing

At times, we fished illegally. It was above all a matter of convenience. Because while the narrow path might be the right one, sometimes the wide one is so much easier to walk. Since Nana and Grandad’s fields bordered the stream, we were allowed to fish in it, but only on our side, the farm side. Which was also the difficult side, with the tall grass and the steep, muddy banks. On the other side of the stream, everything was different; there, a flat meadow stretched all the way to the water’s edge. The fishing rights on that side were owned by the fishing club in town.

The other side of the stream was the stuff of dreams. Not only because it looked so accessible, but also because it symbolized something we perceived as unjust. On the weekends, the members of the fishing club would stand there on the flat ground in their green sport jackets with multiple pockets, their expensive fly fishing rods and ridiculous little hats, swinging their shiny, thick lines over their heads to try to catch one of the rare salmon that constituted the upper echelon of the stream’s class hierarchy.

We’d never once seen salmon in the stream. At least not live salmon. Dad found an enormous dead salmon once. It was floating belly-up; he brought it home. It was fat and bloated and weighed more than twenty pounds. It also smelled pretty bad. We buried it, after admiring it with our hands over our mouths and noses.

One summer, Dad acquired an old wooden rowboat. He saw it advertised in the paper and bought it for two hundred kronor; we sanded and painted it out on the lawn. It was moored to the willow tree just above the rapids, and one night when we reached the stream, he suggested we row across and set up our spillers on the other side instead. The thought had never even crossed my mind, but suddenly it seemed completely rational. There was, for obvious reasons, no one on the other side at that time. And besides, it was the same stream; the difference between fishing here and fishing there was entirely theoretical. Moreover, how could anyone claim to hold the rights to something as transient as flowing water?

“But if the train comes, we’ll have to hide,” Dad cautioned. The railway ran along an embankment next to the flat meadow. It came around a bend a few hundred yards from where we were and then ran parallel to the stream, with an unobstructed view of the meadow all the way down to the water’s edge. And maybe there would be a member of the fishing club on it this particular night who would see us poaching and sound the alarm, catching us red-handed like the criminals we were.

We rowed across and moored the boat; I was both terrified and exhilarated. Then we picked up our things and walked along the stream, commenting on just how much more convenient this side was. It wasn’t merely the stuff of dreams, it was real, and there was no tall, wet grass to slog through and no muddy banks to slide down. I told myself it was virtually our moral obligation to fish there.

But we set up our spillers faster than usual, glancing nervously at the railway all the while, poised to flee at the first distant sound of the approaching train. When it did come, it careered through the bend so much faster than I could’ve imagined; we turned off our flashlight and threw ourselves down in the grass. I pressed myself against the ground, doing my best to disappear among the tussocks, hiding my face and holding my breath. The train thundered past and the whole meadow was illuminated like when lightning makes time stop and I imagined we really were invisible and that my dad was lying there just like me, with his hands over his face, not breathing.

Now I’m thinking he was probably smiling. That he wasn’t scared of being caught at all—Why would anyone care? How would they identify us?—but was playing along for my benefit. That he staged the whole spectacle to make it more exciting. Maybe he was worried I would grow tired of it all otherwise.

I don’t know why he would have been worried about that—there was nothing I liked more—but it’s also only now, much later, that I’ve started to wonder if Dad really ever went eel fishing as a child. I’d always figured he must have. I’d always thought he and I were carrying on a tradition that had begun long before either of us. That he was doing for me what someone else had done for him and that those nights down by the river constituted some kind of continuity across time and generations. Almost like a ritual.

But he certainly never fished with his father (the man he called Father). My grandfather (the one I called Grandfather) didn’t fish. He never did anything that wasn’t immediately useful. He worked and he rested and when he ate he did it quickly and in silence. He was teetotaler and hated the effects of alcohol; as far as I knew, he had never in his life taken so much as one day off, had never traveled anywhere, never been abroad. Wasting time and energy on something as seemingly frivolous as eel fishing was not for him. It had nothing to do with patience, it was more a matter of obligation. The narrow path looks different to different people.

Maybe Dad fished alone, or with someone else entirely, but if so, I don’t know anything about it. I remember Dad telling me how much fish there used to be in the stream a long time ago, about how the bottom crawled with eels and how the surface turned silver when the salmon traveled up it in the spring. But he didn’t speak from experience; these were stories from before he was