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

were small, simple houses, with a storage room and a small living space with a table and a few cots for sleeping. During the fishing season, the fishermen typically lived in them in order to guard the corves where the caught eels were kept, or to ensure they would be ready to head out and salvage their equipment in case of a storm. Before the sheds were built, fishermen would simply turn their wooden boats over on the beach and sleep under them on simple beds of straw.

The season traditionally lasts only three months, the length of the so-called eel darkness, when the eels move out into the ocean, passing along the coast on their way to the Sargasso Sea. These eels—the largest, fattest ones, which have adapted their bodies to the long journey across the Atlantic—are the ones the fishermen are after. Usually at the end of July, the fishermen place the traps they will then inspect every day at dawn until the start of November, when they are removed. That’s the end of the season. No more eel darkness.

Eel fishing has always been a cottage industry. Neither the location nor the eel itself has permitted scaling up. The fishing is primarily done using a so-called homma, a special kind of trap equipped with a grapnel and floaters, which has long mesh wings leading into a tapering bag in which the caught eels are collected. The boats used are small and flat-bottomed to aid navigation in shallow water and to facilitate their being pulled up onto the beach. Both hommor and boats are traditionally crafted by the fishermen themselves.

Things do change, of course, but only in minor ways. The boats, which used to be made of tarred oak, are now plastic. Where oars were once used, people now prefer outboard motors. Fishing rights are no longer paid for in eels and no longer passed down from father to son. These days, women are allowed in both eel sheds and at eel feasts. But other than that, things are done the way they’ve always been done. Partly because the eel demands it and partly because that’s how the fishermen want it, but also because on the eel coast people agree that there’s value to keeping traditions and knowledge alive. And thus, the eel has, in time, become a cultural heritage.

WHAT KIND OF PERSON CHOOSES TO BECOME AN EEL FISHERMAN? What does the eel provide such a person with? A profession and an income is the simple answer. But that’s not the whole story. True, the eel has been an important source of food in large parts of Europe throughout history, but it has always been tricky. Difficult to catch, difficult to understand, enigmatic, and to many people simply unpleasant. It has forced fishermen to develop special methods and tools; its peculiar behavior has kept the fishing industry small scale even though demand has been high. It can’t be farmed like salmon, for instance; in fact, it won’t breed in captivity at all. As a source of nourishment, the eel has been crucial for a lot of people, but it has rarely been particularly cooperative. And today, when fewer and fewer people eat eel and catches are shrinking, why become an eel fisherman at all?

If you were to ask the people on Sweden’s eel coast, many would probably tell you it’s rarely a choice. You’re born into it; you have been groomed for it over the course of generations. It goes without saying there are no university courses or professional training programs for eel fishermen. The special knowledge an eel fisherman possesses isn’t gained in the classroom or a laboratory. It has been passed down through centuries, like an ancient story that no one has ever bothered to write down. How to craft a homma or how to flay an eel, how to read the sea and the weather and how to interpret the eel’s movements under the surface: this specific and particular knowledge has been transmitted through practical work, as a shared experience transcending the ages. And thus, fishing for eel has often been a profession that runs in families, handed down from one generation to the next. No one becomes an eel fisherman who doesn’t have it in his or her blood. And no one becomes an eel fisherman who doesn’t also view the work as a way of protecting and preserving something bigger than fishing per se: a cultural heritage, a tradition, and knowledge.

The parts of Europe where eel fishing has been most important have rarely included big, well-known cities. The metropolises of the eel are not those of humankind. Instead, they have been peculiar places, populated by peculiar people. Stubborn and proud people who, like those on the Swedish eel coast, have often inherited their profession from their fathers and been shaped by hard labor and simple circumstances. Who have let their work become their identity and who have as a consequence, much like Johannes Schmidt, kept plying the waters in their boat, hunting for eels even when common sense told them not to. Oftentimes, these people have nurtured a kind of outsider status and a suspicious attitude toward the powers that be. The eel fisherman has, in more places than the Swedish eel coast, been a creature apart.

GLASS EELS ARE FISHED IN THE RIVER ORIA IN THE SPANISH BASQUE Country in winter and early spring. The river, which empties into the Bay of Biscay, meanders through the mountainous Basque landscape and is a popular thoroughfare for the transparent glass eels, which after a couple of years of drifting across the Atlantic, swim up waterways to find a home for the next ten, twenty, or thirty years. Many of them don’t make it very far. Near the estuary by the coast, fisherman spend cold, rainy nights in wooden boats, sieving the fragile eels out of the water.

The small village of Aguinaga, located on the river a few miles inland, has only six hundred residents but no fewer