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

the stream, pulling out our spillers. It was late summer and already warm, and the tall grass was dry and crackly. Big, heavy dragonflies hovered around our heads, and the stream flowed unusually calmly and contentedly through the rapids. I stood at the bottom of the bank, near the willow tree. Dad was about three feet away; we noticed one of our nylon lines was taut like a violin string. When I touched it, I could feel it vibrating; I grabbed it and was greeted by that familiar, undulating resistance. “It’s an eel,” I said out loud.

It was a fairly large one, with a dark brown back and shiny white belly; I held it firmly right behind the head and studied the fishing line disappearing into its clenched jaws. It writhed around my arm like a thick rope being tightened, all the way up to my elbow, then it suddenly let go and slapped me in the face with its tail. Thick slime covered my cheek. The smell of fish and the past and brackish seawater.

I fumbled its mouth open and saw that the line continued down its throat. The hook was buried deep; I couldn’t even see the loop. I spent a few minutes jiggling the line, pulling and yanking and trying to stick my fingers far enough down its throat to grab the hook, until I heard a soft, wet crunching sound and blood started pouring out of the eel’s mouth.

“It swallowed the hook,” I said. “Could you take it?”

Dad bent closer and studied the eel.

“Poor little thing,” he said. “It’s in there good, isn’t it? Now, why would you do that?”

Then he straightened up and looked at me again. “No, you take it. You can handle it.”

13Under the Sea

Despite the contradictory feeling the eel arouses, up close, in its natural habitat, it gives the impression of being fairly jovial. It rarely puts on airs. It doesn’t cause a scene. It eats what its surroundings offer. It stays on the sidelines, demanding neither attention nor appreciation.

The eel is different from, for instance, the salmon, which sparkles and shimmers and makes wild dashes and daring jumps. The salmon comes off as a self-absorbed, vain fish. The eel seems more content. It doesn’t make a big deal of its existence.

And thus the eel is in a more fundamental way the opposite of the salmon. Both are migrating fish, both live in both fresh and saltwater and both undergo metamorphoses, but their life cycles differ in their most essential aspect.

The salmon is a so-called anadromous fish. It breeds in freshwater and its offspring swim out to sea after about a year, spending most of their lives there. After just a few years (the salmon clearly doesn’t possess the patience of the eel), the sexually mature salmon swims back up into fresh water and procreates.

The eel, for its part, makes a similar journey, but in the opposite direction. It is a so-called catadromous fish that lives its life in freshwater but breeds in saltwater.

Another, more subtle, indefinable detail also sets them apart. When the salmon wanders back up rivers and waterways, it always returns to the spot where its parents reproduced. Every salmon quite literally walks in its ancestors’ footsteps. Somehow, it knows that’s where it has to go. A salmon can live a free and unrestrained life in the sea, but eventually it will return to the place of its birth and join the community it was destined for. This means there are clear genetic differences among salmon populations from different waters. The salmon is, so to speak, biologically tied to its origin. It doesn’t allow existential transgressions.

The eel, of course, also finds its way back to its birthplace—Sargasso, ho!—but once it reaches this vast sea, it encounters eels from all across Europe and breeds indiscriminately. Origin to an eel is not about family or biological belonging, it’s simply a location. And afterward, when the tiny willow leaf drifts toward the coasts of Europe and turns into a glass eel, it chooses a waterway to wander up seemingly at random. Where it spends its adult life apparently has nothing to do with previous generations of eels; why a particular eel chooses a particular river remains a mystery. This means the genetic variation among eels in different parts of Europe is negligible. Every eel seeks its place in the world without a guide, without inheritance or heritage and existentially alone.

Perhaps the eel’s fate is easier to identify with than the salmon’s predestined lack of independence. And perhaps that’s why the eel, with its enigmatic remoteness, remains such a fascinating creature. Because it’s easier to relate to someone who has secrets, too, people who aren’t immediately obvious about who they are or where they’re from. The eel’s secretive side is also the secretive side of humans. And seeking your place in the world on your own: Surely that is, at the end of the day, the most universal of all human experiences?

OF COURSE, I’M ANTHROPOMORPHIZING THE EEL, FORCING IT TO BE more than it is or wishes to be, which may seem somewhat dubious. Attributing human characteristics to nonhuman creatures has been a common device in, for example, literature: fairy tales and fables about anthropomorphized animals thinking, talking, and feeling, animals demonstrating morality and acting according to a set of values. It’s also common in religion. Divine beings are given human form and characteristics in order to render them fathomable. The Old Norse Aesir were gods in human guise. Jesus was the son of God, but also a human. Only by being both could he represent a link between the worldly and the divine and become the savior of humankind. At heart, what’s at stake is identification, the ability to see something familiar in the unfamiliar and thus comprehend it and feel closer to it. An artist painting a portrait always puts part of him- or herself in it.

But within science, anthropomorphism has never been accepted. Science claims to deal with