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

The yellow eel is a solitary creature. It usually lives out the active phase of its life alone, letting the passing seasons dictate its activities. When the temperature drops, it can lie motionless in the mud for long periods, utterly passive, and at times entangled with other eels like a messy ball of yarn.

It is a nocturnal hunter. At dusk, it emerges from the sediment and starts looking for food, eating whatever it can find. Worms, larvae, frogs, snails, insects, crayfish, fish, as well as mice and baby birds when given the chance. It is not above scavenging.

In this way, the eel lives out the greater part of its life in a brownish-yellow guise, alternating between activity and hibernation. Seemingly lacking any sense of purpose, other than in its daily search for food and shelter. As though life was first and foremost about waiting and its meaning found in the gaps or in an abstract future that can’t be brought about by any means other than patience.

And it’s a long life. An eel that successfully avoids illness and calamity can live for up to fifty years in one place. There are Swedish eels who have made it past eighty in captivity. Myths and legends tell of eels living to a hundred or more. When an eel is denied a way to achieve its main purpose in life—procreation—it seems able to live forever. As though it could wait until the end of time.

But at some point in its life, usually after fifteen to thirty years, a wild eel will suddenly decide to reproduce. What triggers this decision, we may never know, but once it has been made, the eel’s tranquil existence ends abruptly and its life takes on a different character. It starts making its way back to the sea while simultaneously undergoing its final metamorphosis. The drab and indeterminate yellowish-brown of its skin disappears, its coloring grows clearer and more distinct, its back turns black and its sides silver, marked with stripes, as though its entire body changes to reflect its newfound determination. The yellow eel becomes a silver eel. This is the fourth stage of the eel’s life cycle.

When autumn rolls out its protective darkness, the silver eels wander back out into the Atlantic and set off toward the Sargasso Sea. And as though through deliberate choice, the eel’s body adapts to the conditions of the journey. Only now do its reproductive organs develop; its fins grow longer and more powerful to help propel it; its eyes grow larger and turn blue to help it see better in the depths of the ocean; its digestive system shuts down; its stomach dissolves—from now on, all the energy it needs will be taken from existing fat reserves—its body fills with roe or milt. No external interference can distract the eel from its goal.

It swims as much as thirty miles a day, sometimes as deep as three thousand feet below the surface; we still know very little about this journey. It may make the trip in six months or it may stop for winter. It has been shown that a silver eel in captivity can live for up to four years without any nourishment at all.

It’s a long, ascetic journey, undertaken with an existential resolve that cannot be explained. But once an eel reaches the Sargasso Sea, it has, once again, found its way home. Under swirling blankets of seaweed, its eggs are fertilized. And with that, the eel is done, its story complete, and it dies.

2By the Stream

My father taught me to fish for eel in the stream bordering the fields of his childhood home. We drove down at dusk in August, taking a left off the main road to cross the stream and turning onto a small road that was little more than a tractor path in the dirt winding down a steep slope and then moving parallel with the water. On our left were the fields, the golden wheat brushing against the side of our car; on our right, the quietly hissing grass. Beyond it, the water, around twenty feet wide, a tranquil stream meandering through the greenery like a silver chain glinting in the last slanted rays of the setting sun.

We drove slowly along the rapids, where the stream rushed in a startled fashion between the rocks and past the twisted old willow tree. I was seven years old and had already gone down this same road many times before. When the tracks ended in a wall of impenetrable vegetation, Dad turned off the engine and everything went dark and still, aside from the murmur of the stream. We were both wearing wellies and greasy vinyl waders, mine yellow and his orange, and we took two black buckets full of fishing gear, a flashlight, and a jar of worms from the trunk and set off.

Along the bank of the stream, the grass was wet and impenetrable and taller than me. Dad took the lead, forging a path; the vegetation closed like an arch above me as I followed. Bats flitted back and forth above the stream, silent, like black punctuation marks against the sky.

After forty yards, Dad stopped and looked around. “This’ll do,” he said.

The bank was steep and muddy. If you missed your step, you ran the risk of falling over and sliding straight into the water. Twilight was already falling.

Dad held the grass back with one hand and carefully walked down on a diagonal, then turned around and held his other hand out to me. I took it and followed with the same practiced caution. Down by the water’s edge, we trampled out a small ledge and set down our buckets.

I imitated Dad, who was mutely inspecting the water, following his eyes, imagining I saw what he saw. There was, of course, no way of knowing whether this was a good spot. The water was dark, and here and there stands of reeds stuck out of it, waving