This piece is adapted from Patrik Svensson's book The Book of Eels. There is so much to learn from the wonders of this blue planet and our fellow dwellers.
Patrik Svensson not only teaches about Eel but also about the beauty of silence and our precarious memories.
This is where the European eel, Anguilla anguilla, is born. This is where mature eels breed in the spring and their eggs are laid and fertilized. Here, safe in the darkness of the depths, small larva-like creatures with disturbingly tiny heads and poorly developed eyes spring to life. They’re called leptocephalus larvae and have a body like a willow leaf, flat and virtually transparent, only a few millimeters long. This is the first stage of the eel’s life cycle.
The gossamer willow leaves immediately set off on their journey. Swept up by the Gulf Stream, they drift thousands of miles across the Atlantic toward the coasts of Europe. It’s a journey that can take as long as three years; during this time, each larva slowly grows, millimeter by millimeter, like a gradually inflating balloon, and when at last it reaches Europe, it undergoes its first metamorphosis, transforming into a glass eel. This is the second stage of the eel’s life cycle.
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When a glass eel reaches the coasts of Europe, it will usually travel up a brook or river, adapting almost instantly to a freshwater existence. This is where it undergoes yet another metamorphosis, turning into a yellow eel. Its body grows serpentine and muscular. Its eyes remain relatively small, with a distinctive dark center. Its jaw becomes wide and powerful. Its gills are small and almost completely concealed. Thin, soft fins stretch along the entirety of its back and belly. Its skin finally develops pigment, coloring it shades of brown, yellow, and gray, and it becomes covered in scales so tiny they can be neither seen nor felt, like an imaginary armor. If the glass eel is tender and fragile, the yellow eel is strong and sturdy. This is the third stage of the eel’s life cycle.
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It can migrate thousands of miles, unflagging and undaunted, before it suddenly decides it’s found a home. It doesn’t require much of this home; the environs are something to adapt to, to endure and get to know—a muddy stream or lake bed, preferably with some rocks and hollows to hide in, and enough food. Once it has found its home, it stays there, year after year, and normally wanders within a radius of only a few hundred yards. If relocated by external forces, it will invariably return as quickly as it can to its chosen abode. Eels caught by researchers, tagged with radio transmitters, and released many miles from their point of capture have been known to return to where they were first found within a week or two. No one knows exactly how they find their way.
The yellow eel is a solitary creature. It usually lives out the active phase of its life alone, letting the passing seasons dictate its activities. When the temperature drops, it can lie motionless in the mud for long periods, utterly passive, and at times entangled with other eels like a messy ball of yarn.
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In this way, the eel lives out the greater part of its life in a brownish-yellow guise, alternating between activity and hibernation. Seemingly lacking any sense of purpose, other than in its daily search for food and shelter. As though life was first and foremost about waiting and its meaning found in the gaps or in an abstract future that can’t be brought about by any means other than patience.
And it’s a long life. An eel that successfully avoids illness and calamity can live for up to fifty years in one place. There are Swedish eels who have made it past eighty in captivity. Myths and legends tell of eels living to a hundred or more. When an eel is denied a way to achieve its main purpose in life—procreation—it seems able to live forever. As though it could wait until the end of time.
But at some point in its life, usually after 15 to 30 years, a wild eel will suddenly decide to reproduce. What triggers this decision, we may never know, but once it has been made, the eel’s tranquil existence ends abruptly and its life takes on a different character. It starts making its way back to the sea while simultaneously undergoing its final metamorphosis. The drab and indeterminate yellowish-brown of its skin disappears, its coloring grows clearer and more distinct, its back turns black and its sides silver, marked with stripes, as though its entire body changes to reflect its newfound determination. The yellow eel becomes a silver eel. This is the fourth stage of the eel’s life cycle.
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Along the bank of the stream, the grass was wet and impenetrable and taller than me. Dad took the lead, forging a path; the vegetation closed like an arch above me as I followed. Bats flitted back and forth above the stream, silent, like black punctuation marks against the sky.
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I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream. I can’t remember us speaking at all.
Maybe because we never did. Because we were in a place where the need for talking was limited, a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence. The reflected moonlight, the hissing grass, the shadows of the trees, the monotonous rushing of the stream, and the bats like hovering asterisks above it all. You had to be quiet to make yourself part of the whole.
It could, of course, also be because I remember everything wrong. Because memory is an unreliable thing that picks and chooses what to keep. When we look for a scene from the past, it is by no means certain that we end up recalling the most important or the most relevant; rather, we remember what fits into the preconceived image that we have. Our memory paints a tableau in which the various details inevitably complement one another. Memory doesn’t allow colors that clash with the background. So let’s just say we were silent. In any case, I don’t know what we might have talked about if we did.
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