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

He told me to water the lawn while he grabbed a pitchfork, cut off a piece of electrical cord, attached one of the exposed wires to the prongs, and shoved the fork into the ground.

“You’d better stand back now,” he said. “And put your wellies on.”

I stood on the front steps in my boots, pulse racing, watching as he plugged the cord in and two hundred and twenty volts jolted through it, into the pitchfork, and down into the damp soil. At first, nothing happened, not a sound, not a movement. Then the worms started appearing out of the ground, hundreds of them, covered in dirt, wriggling in distress. The whole lawn looked like one big living organism.

Once dad had turned the power off, we walked around, picking up our bait. It took just ten minutes to fill a big jar.

WHEN NIGHT FELL, WE WERE IN OUR WOODEN BOAT, HOLDING THE line with the revolting ball of worms dangling in the water beneath us, and I wondered what the point was. What was the point of this fishing method? Of course, one person may find meaning where another can’t even discern sense, but doesn’t meaning have to be part of a context? And doesn’t this context have to at least be perceived as bigger than oneself? After all, people have a need to be part of something lasting, to feel that they are part of a line that started before them and will continue after they’re gone. They need to be part of something bigger.

Knowledge can, of course, be the bigger context. All kinds of knowledge, about crafts or work or ancient insane fishing methods. Knowledge can, in and of itself, constitute a context, and once you become a link in the chain of transmission, from one person to another, from one time to another, knowledge becomes meaningful in itself, quite apart from considerations of utility or profit. It’s at the heart of everything. When you talk about human experience, you’re not talking about individual experience, you’re talking about our communal experience, which is passed on, retold, and reexperienced.

But this particular knowledge—how to string worms up on thread in order to try to trick an eel—was there any meaning to that anymore? And this particular experience—sitting silently in a boat at night, with a ball of slowly dying worms on a line beneath you—was there any humanity left in that?

Before long, it was completely dark and we were sitting dead still. The only sound was the gentle rushing of the water around us; from time to time, we’d raise our hands, lifting the ball of worms up off the bottom with a soft tug. As if to let whatever was moving down there know we were there.

And it soon returned the favor. A short, distinctive yank that felt like a sudden slap in my hand.

I instinctively raised my hand straight up in the air and saw the ball of worms rising toward the surface and in its wake, a large eel, slithering eagerly this way and that as though frantically swimming toward me instead of trying to escape. I pulled it out of the water and over the railing and then there it was, lying by our feet, whipping its head from side to side, a sudden reminder of the consequences of my action.

It was over in seconds, and then it started again. We caught twelve eels that night. Another night a few days later, we caught fifteen. They kept biting and we kept pulling them into the boat, like pulling carrots out of a vegetable patch. It was as though there were an endless source of eels that had suddenly opened just for us; it was, if not meaningful, at least comprehensible; the method, the knowledge, was functional and apparently even effective. We had found a way to outwit the eels that was in a different league from any other method we’d ever tried.

And yet, we never klummade again after those two nights. I think it had to do with the images it evoked. The yellowish-brown, shiny eel, slithering through the sediment in the dark, biting into a quivering mass of dying worms, letting itself get hauled out of the water, with neither hook nor struggle, as though it had given up; as though it were trying to escape something in the depths. It didn’t tally with what we wanted the eel to be. The eel didn’t behave as we expected it to. Maybe we had gotten too close to it.

11The Uncanny Eel

On November 11, 1620, the Mayflower dropped anchor off Cape Cod in the southeast part of present-day Massachusetts. Just more than two months earlier, the ship had left England with 102 passengers and about thirty crew. The passengers were mostly Puritans, members of a strict Protestant church that preached an orthodox, ascetic form of Christianity. They had left England as a result of both poverty and religious persecution, first for temporary exile in the Netherlands, then to the west to start over in the New World. They left not only because they hoped to find freedom and prosperity in this new land, but also because they believed it was God’s will. Rather than refugees, they thought of themselves as chosen. Chosen by God to be saved, chosen to spread the one true doctrine across the world in His name.

Salvation, as it so often happens in Christian stories, would, naturally, come only after a series of trials. And when it finally came, it did so in an unexpected form.

It was already winter when the Mayflower reached the coast of North America. The land was cold and desolate; most of the passengers were forced to remain on the ship for months before they could leave. The smaller expedition that rowed ashore on the first day to do reconnaissance had a bad time of it. Several of them froze to death as they camped overnight on the snowy beach. The survivors were cheered to discover a cemetery and