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

“I just don’t get it,” Dad said.

One night by the stream, Dad put the bucket with our fishing gear down and broke a Y-shaped branch off the willow tree. He pulled off all the twigs and leaves and held it up in front of him.

“Should we try?”

I nodded, a little nervous, and watched him walk off slowly, in his orange waders and big, bulky wellies. He walked carefully and slightly bowlegged along the stream, away from me through the wet, somewhat unyielding grass. When he turned around and looked at me, he was a silhouette in the evening sun; I saw him holding the branch out in front of him, tentatively and almost reluctantly, as though it were leading him toward something he didn’t quite know whether he wanted to meet. He walked all the way back to me without anything happening, and when he reached me, he stopped, tossed the branch aside, and shook his head.

“No, nothing. I guess I don’t have the gift.”

What neither Dad nor I knew then was that there’s a simple explanation as to why a dowsing rod moves. The explanation has, in fact, been known for more than a hundred and fifty years. Numerous scientific experiments have been conducted to test the dowsing rod’s ability to locate things such as water, oil, or metal underground. Virtually all of them have shown that it simply doesn’t work. A tree branch is incapable of conveying any information whatsoever about what exists or doesn’t exist underground.

And yet, it moves. Sometimes, evidently, without the person holding it deliberately trying to affect it. The explanation is what’s called the ideomotor phenomenon. What happens is that a type of minute muscle movement is executed without the conscious intent of the person in question. Rather than deliberate acts, these movements are the expression of an idea, a feeling, or a perception. It’s sometimes called the Carpenter effect, after the English physiologist William B. Carpenter, who first described the phenomenon in 1852, and it’s the exact same phenomenon that, for example, moves the planchette on a Ouija board.

In other words, a person holding a dowsing rod unconsciously causes it to strike the ground through tiny, barely perceptible movements. But for it to work, the person has to have an idea or preconceived notion, an unconscious will leading him or her to a certain spot. Not necessarily the right spot, whether the goal is to find water or metals, but to a specific spot nonetheless. What does the unconscious find there, when the branch tugs our hands down toward the ground? Why do the muscles move in one spot but not others?

The ideomotoric effect cannot explain this, of course. Maybe it depends on our subtle sensory impressions. Maybe we subconsciously read our surroundings and come to conclusions we don’t even understand ourselves. Either way, we’re making these same unconscious decisions continuously.

Perhaps, after all, it’s just chance that tells us when it is time to move a muscle. When it is time to stay, or when it is time to leave.

NANA BELIEVED IN GOD.

“He’s big,” she’d tell me. “Much bigger than anyone you can imagine.”

“Is he bigger than grandad?” I asked.

“Much bigger!”

She didn’t go to church, but she believed in God. In Jesus and the Immaculate Conception and the resurrection. And a life after death in which she would meet her mother and father and eventually her older siblings and her husband. And in the end, her son. She believed in gnomes, too. She’d seen one when she was about fifteen and working as a maid. She’d been walking home late one night along a tree-lined gravel road and suddenly, he’d been walking there next to her on the verge. A gnome. Dressed in gray. Barely three feet tall. She’d been with a friend who’d seen him, too. For a while, the little creature had walked beside them, then he’d vanished.

I wasn’t a believer. I went to the children’s group in our local church but was kicked out because I couldn’t sit still, and when we attended church with school, I raised my hand and asked the priest: “Who on earth made all this up?”

Dad wasn’t a believer either. He’d been to school and learned about the Swedish kings of yore and the gospel, but he had a hard time with authority. He believed in neither gnomes nor God.

It was only where the eel was concerned that we had our doubts.

Once, when we checked our spillers in the morning, we found we’d caught only one lousy eel. Granted, it was fairly large, almost two pounds, grayish-yellow and broad headed. We put it in a bucket of water in the garage as usual.

That afternoon, I went out to change the water and discovered the eel was gone. The bucket was tall and white and filled with water to a point about ten inches below the rim; the eel had been hovering near the bottom, pumping its gills the last time I checked on it. Now it was gone. The bucket was still upright and full of water, but no eel.

I didn’t know what to think. At first, I figured it had managed to heave itself out of captivity and slither away. But the garage door had been closed and there was no sign of it; the eel had seemingly vanished without a trace. Had Dad cleaned it already? Without me? It didn’t sound likely, but he wasn’t home and wasn’t expected back all day. Maybe he’d taken care of the eel before he left after all.

When Dad got back that night, I met him at the car.

“Did you take the eel?”

“The eel? It’s in the bucket, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s gone. Someone must’ve taken it.”

We went into the garage and stood there for a minute, staring at the empty bucket. Dad confirmed the eel really wasn’t there.

“But I don’t think anyone would take an eel,” he said. “It seems an odd thing to steal. I think it escaped. It must be