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

for fish other than the eel. If we choose to stand up for the eel, we give up our chance to protect other species, he argued. “No one is going to be able to take the salmon’s side.” Once the decision had been made, there were, consequently, reductions in the quotas for salmon, cod, herring, and plaice, while the eel could continue to be fished much as before.

It took another year, until December 2018, before the EU decided to implement a union-wide ban on eel fishing, including in the Mediterranean and along the Atlantic coast. But the ban covers only three months of the year, and the glass eel is not yet included in it.

And thus, the eel populations continue to decline, while decisions about what to do to help it are punted down the road. Until we know more. Or until there’s nothing left to know.

IS IT POSSIBLE TO IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT EELS? IS IT POSSIBLE to erase a creature that has existed for at least forty million years, that has survived ice ages and seen continents drift apart, that when humans found their place on this planet had already been waiting for us for millions of years, that has been the subject of so many traditions and celebrations and myths and stories?

No, is the instinctive answer, that’s not how the world works. What exists, exists, and what doesn’t exist is always in some ways unimaginable. Imagining a world without eels would be like imagining a world without mountains or oceans, air or soil, bats or willow trees.

Yet at the same time, all life is changeable, and we will all change one day, and it was probably, at some point, at least for a few people, just as difficult to imagine a world without the dodo or without Steller’s sea cow. Just as I couldn’t, once, imagine a world without Nana or Dad.

And yet they’re both gone now. And the world is still here.

18In the Sargasso Sea

I don’t remember the last time we went eel fishing, but as time passed, it happened less and less frequently. Not because the eel lost any of its mystery, but perhaps because other mysteries became more important. Our closed little world down by the river found it increasingly difficult to compete with all the other worlds that gradually opened up. This was, of course, a predictable development. People grow up, change, leave, transform, stop fishing for eel. With all the symbolic metamorphoses we go through, some things are inevitably lost.

As a teenager, I sometimes took friends down to the stream. Dad stayed home. We brought beer and an air gun, and when we caught an eel, we tried to shoot it in the head. We took turns, shooting and missing and shooting again. I brought the eels home to Dad, who was furious when he almost broke his teeth on diabolo pellets. I think he felt we were being disrespectful, to him but maybe even more so to the eel.

Dad went down to fish by himself sometimes, but not as often. I finished school and started working. I went out on the weekends. We grew apart, not because of conflict or rejection but simply because everything changed of its own accord. The current that had once swept Dad with it to a new place now seemed to be carrying me away from him. When I was twenty, I moved away and ended up at what the current seemed to consider my final destination: university.

If the eel was our shared experience, university was the opposite, a manifestation of all the things we didn’t share. A strange place, very different from everything I was used to. A place where memories manifested as large buildings and people spoke in abstractions, in a language I didn’t understand, where no one seemed to work and everyone was busy self-actualizing. And I was fascinated by it, if slightly reluctantly. I let myself absorb the environment and the culture and learned how to mimic all the exotic social codes. I carried my books around as though they were identity papers and I learned to answer succinctly and defensively whenever anyone asked where I was from. I suppose I figured the smell of asphalt would expose me as a stranger in the academic corridors.

But at some point every summer, I would go back home and we’d head down to the stream to fish for eel. We’d abandoned the spillers and the trap by then and instead switched to a more modern form of bottom fishing. We used regular hazel rods with tackle consisting of a large single hook and a heavy sinker. We baited our hooks with worms and let them sink to the streambed. Dad had made rod holders out of heavy metal pipes, which we pushed into the ground so the rods stood erect like masts against the night sky. We brought foldable camping chairs and put bells at the tip of the rods that would jingle when we had a bite. Then we sat there, well into the night, listening to the monotonous sound of the rapids, watching the shadow of the willow tree lengthen and the bats swerve nimbly around our rods as they flitted past. We drank coffee and talked about eels we’d caught and eels we’d lost and not much else. Despite everything, I never grew tired of it.

Eventually, my parents bought a cabin. It was a red wooden cabin, small and not particularly pretty, with no indoor plumbing and a well full of dirty water. But it was built next to a small lake, surrounded by forest on every side, with big stands of reeds in which mute swans and great crested grebes nested. Almost every day, herons and ospreys would fly over the lake, and in the evenings, the sun would set like a big ball of fire behind the spruce trees on the other side. Mum and Dad loved that place and spent as much time there as they