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

in because some aspect of it is familiar. The origin of the eel and its long journey are, despite their strangeness, things we might relate to, even recognize: its protracted drifting on the ocean currents in an effort to leave home, and its even longer and more difficult way back—the things we are prepared to go through to return home.

The Sargasso Sea is the end of the world, but it’s also the beginning of everything. That’s the big reveal. Even the pale yellow eels my dad and I used to pull out of the stream on late August nights had once been willow leaves, drifting four thousand miles from a strange and fairy-tale-like place far beyond what I could imagine. When I held them in my hands and tried to look into their eyes, I was close to something that transcended the limits of the known universe. That is how the eel question draws you in. The eels’ mystique becomes an echo of the questions all people carry within them: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?

Was it like that for Johannes Schmidt?

Perhaps, but it is of course perfectly possible that all those things were completely inconsequential to him. He had accepted a challenge and decided to see it through. He had formulated his own explicit question—Where are eels born?—and a method that generated its own momentum, so to speak. He caught tiny transparent willow leaves, and with each specimen caught, the task became catching one that was smaller still. His goalposts kept moving. It was as simple as that.

And the eels, for their part, were there beneath his feet while he crossed the Atlantic, as they had always been. The tiny willow leaves drifting on the ocean currents in one direction and the fat, fully matured silver eels, their course stubbornly set for the Sargasso Sea, swimming in the other. Year after year, they continued their mysterious journey away from home and back again, unperturbed by world wars and human curiosity. Just as they had long before Johannes Schmidt ever set sail, long before Aristotle saw his first-ever eel and tried to understand it, long before the first human ever set foot on this planet. The eels didn’t care about the eel question, and why would they? To them, it was never a question in the first place.

IN HIS EXHAUSTIVE REPORT, WHICH APPEARED IN PHILOSOPHICAL Transactions of the Royal Society of London, eventually published in 1923, Johannes Schmidt accounted for close to two decades of work. On a map, he demarcated the area he could with a considerable degree of certainty claim was the spawning site of the eel. The elliptical area almost exactly delineates what we today call the Sargasso Sea.

“During the autumn months,” he wrote as a kind of summary, “the silver eels leave the lakes and rivers and move out into the sea. Once beyond freshwater limits, the eels are, in most parts of Europe, outside our range of observation. No longer subject to pursuit by man, hosts of eels from the most distant corners of our continent can now shape their course south-west across the ocean, as their ancestors for unnumbered generations have done before them. How long the journey lasts we cannot say, but we know now the destination sought: a certain area situated in the western Atlantic, N.E. and N. of the West Indies. Here lie the breeding grounds of the eel.”

This is why we now know—at least with some degree of certainty—where the eel reproduces. All our knowledge on this matter rests on Johannes Schmidt’s work. What we don’t know is why. Why there? What’s the point of the long, hopeless journey and all the trials and metamorphoses? What is there for the eel in the Sargasso Sea?

Johannes Schmidt might have replied that it’s irrelevant. Existence comes first. The world is an absurd place full of contradictions and existential confusion; only those who have a goal are ultimately able to find meaning. One must imagine the eels happy.

And Johannes Schmidt as well. In 1930, he was awarded the prestigious Darwin Medal by the Royal Society of London. And, with that, he was done, his story complete. Three years later, he died from the flu.

8Swimming against the Current

July and August was prime eel fishing season. Never before midsummer. “There’s no point fishing before midsummer,” Dad would say. “It’s too bright, the eels won’t bite, it has to be darker.”

He talked a lot about eel darkness, when the nights are at their murkiest and the eels at their boldest, when out of a thirst for adventure or recklessness they expose themselves to humans.

But of course, he had it wrong. Or maybe he chose to believe his own truth because it made life a little easier.

There really is such a thing as eel darkness; it happens at the end of summer and lasts for a few months. This is when the silver eels begin their journey toward the Sargasso Sea and can therefore be lured into fishermen’s traps along the coasts. Our eel darkness was something else. It happened when Dad was on summer leave and therefore able to spend his nights down by the stream instead of in bed.

He’d worked all his life. For as long as I’d been alive, and before that, too, he’d been a road paver. He got up every morning before six, drank coffee and ate sandwiches, and was at work before seven. He was part of a work team who—in relative freedom, a chain gang without chains—traveled around paving, making new roads or fixing old ones. It was heavy work, hot and foul smelling; someone got to drive the big machine that spread the asphalt out over the prepped road surface, but someone had to walk behind it, too, with a shovel or a rake, in a cloud of tar and soot. They worked on commission, so each step taken and each shovel lifted was a krona earned. They worked from seven