Night Fishing

Sargasso Sea

Baby eels are hatched from eggs in the upper levels of the warm, unfathomably deep Sargasso Sea, halfway between Bermuda and the West Indies.

***

In the middle of the night, the air feels different.  Thinner somehow, like the earth itself is less solid, less real.

It’s autumn, windy and wet, and we’re going fishing for eels.  This is the best time for them – when the sky is dark and the river is a black, twisting coil, lit only by the new moon’s sliver.

When I go into the boy’s room to wake him, he’s already sitting up in bed.  The shadow cast by the light of the oil lamp makes his face look pinched and a bit frightened; but when he sees me, he smiles.

“Is it time to go, dad?” he says.

“Get yourself ready.  It’s time”, I reply.

He moves with a twelve year old’s chaotic speed.  Grabbing clothes and tying boots.  Picking up the things we need to take that we’d piled against the door into the garden the night before.

We don’t want to wake his mother up, so just before we go, we sit silently in the kitchen, drinking bowls of tea at the table, watching the raindrops roll down the window.

***

I am made of glass. Or at least parts of me are.  My stomach and chest are glass and in the last few weeks, my left arm and my back are becoming see-through and brittle too.

I hardly dare move any more.  What if I crack?  What if I break?  Instead, I sit carefully in my bed and I listen out for my son and my husband as they get on with their lives.  I still go to the toilet in the outhouse, although when I move, it’s slowly and delicately.

I don’t cook any more – it’s too dangerous.  My husband brings me food in my bedroom and he takes away what I don’t eat.

Every day, he brings me a bowl of hot water, so I can wash and I do so for now, gingerly and without gusto.  One day, I know I’ll stop, but not just yet.

My husband has had enough.  He doesn’t say much; but when he does, he asks what happened to the woman he married, to the mother of his son?  He never looks angry when he says these things; instead he looks wistful, like he’s lost something.

He says I need to see a doctor, but what he doesn’t know is that I already have.  Six months ago, when he’d gone to the market in Gainsborough, I got my sister to take me to Lincoln to see our old family doctor.

He looked me up and down, he ummed and aahed.  And then he told me, I was suffering from a kind of hysteria called Glass Delusion.  That it was an odd and old condition he’d come across before and that I needed to rest, as well as fight what I was thinking.  That is was all in my mind, but I know the doctor was wrong.  For I am made of glass.

I hear my husband and son getting ready to go eel fishing and I hear how hard they’re trying not to wake me.  But it’s no good because I haven’t slept at all tonight.  I’m thinking about my son coming to visit me in my room earlier in the day.  He’d sat on the edge of my bed and when he’d tried to hug me, I’d flinched so he wouldn’t shatter me.

But I saw understanding in his eyes.  He knows what I am and under the turned down counterpane, I’m sure he can see what the doctor failed to.  My glass chest and inside that, the beating of my heart.

***

Glass Eel

Glass eels typically refers to an intermediary stage in the eel's complex life history between the larval stage and the juvenile (elver) stage.  For many months, they drift through the ocean like leaves towards fresh water.  Glass eels are called this because of the transparency of their bodies.

***

We walk along the river side in the dark.  Our path is lit by a lantern that I hold in front of us on a long hook.  The lantern was my father’s and his father’s before him; and one day, it’ll belong to the boy.

We’re carrying the eel baskets to set them on the river’s edge. I’ve woven them from willow and they’re long and dark, like the eels themselves.  We put the bait in and then tie the baskets with rope and float them out on the river. Once we’ve set the basket traps, we pull in the existing ones to see what we’ve caught.

Before we open them, the boy always wants to hear the things I know about eels.  He’s heard my stories many times before, but he never tires of them.  So we sit on the mat we’ve brought for the purpose and we tell tales.

“People used to think eels were made of the hairs of dead sailors, or decaying bodies.  Or that they came from the mud.  Your grandma, my mother, hated them and though she’d cook them for us, she always said they tasted of mud.  But I didn’t.  I thought they tasted of the fresh water of the river.  You’ve heard of Aristotle, haven’t you?  Well, he thought they were born ‘of nothing’.  Slithering, liquid nothing.”

The boy never asks me any questions – he doesn’t need to.  He knows the sermon of the eels too well for that.

It never ceases to amaze me that for all their mystery, the eels are so stupid.  They wriggle into the big opening in the basket traps, but they can’t turn round to get out.  The first time they do is when me and the boy pull them head first out of the baskets’ smaller exit.  Then they’re out, sleek and glistening.

As we start to put them in the storage chest we’ve carried with us, I’m thinking of the old wives’ tale that reckoned eels slithered from the thatched roofs of cottages, or what Izaak Walton said in ‘The Compleat Angler’ – that is they sprang from the action of sunlight on dewdrops.  I don’t believe it for a moment though.  Eels are blacker and stranger than that.  They have nothing to do with the sun.  But even so, everything has a beginning of some sort or another.

***

Everything has to start somewhere and I often wonder when it was I started to become glass.  We tell ourselves stories to comfort ourselves and to make sense of things, but there’s not a story I know that makes sense of my transformation.  I’m not sure where I started.

I’m fragile and brittle and I’m not sure my husband even sees me anymore.  It’s like looking through a window to the outside.  You take in the view, but not the glass you’re looking through.  You know it’s there, but you don’t see it.

I’m not sure my mind’s not becoming glass too because in one sense, I see things more clearly than I ever have.  Another thing the doctor told me when he saw me in Lincoln was he was sure there wouldn’t be another war, not after the last one.  Not after the war to end all wars.  But I don’t think he’s right.  Mark my words, I’m certain within the next few years, another war will come and my boy will go to fight and be lost to me forever.

When I’m in the house by myself, like I am now, with my husband and son out on the river; I feel a kind of peace because nothing can bump me and break me.  I look out of the window and notice the thickness of the glass at the bottom of the pane, where its liquid nature has continually shifted over years. Its flatness reminds me of the skies round here.  The thick clouded, dawn skies and their flat heaviness.  In the end, it’s the flatness that kills you.

***

Elver

Glass eels enter freshwater rivers during the spring, with the peak of the migration taking place on the increasing tides in April and May. Here they change colour into the familiar dark elver and  using the tidal currents they migrate upstream during the flood tide. The young eels shelter near the river bank during the ebb tide to avoid being washed downstream, and this is when they are more easily caught by elver fishermen.

***

And now, we sit on the storage chest of eels and we watch the dawn break over the other side of the river bank.  The boy looks tired in the grey light and I turn the lantern off as we get out the bread we’ve brought along for breakfast.

The boy chews his slice slowly and methodically and I notice how young he still is.  How fragile and breakable and I remember when we nearly lost him.

He was six years old and we’d gone for a picnic by the Trent on the edge of Nottingham.  I wasn’t long back from the war and we were finding our feet as a family.

We’d eaten and the boy was fiddling around with the strands of leaves from the willow tree near where we were sitting.  The sun was hot on our backs and I remember now how sleepy and happy I felt.  I looked over at my wife and she was so beautiful sat there by the willow basket, her dark hair coiling down her back.  I went over to kiss her and she recoiled for a moment to look for the boy; but when she saw he was safe, she leaned in to the kiss.  I kissed her long and hard, like it was the last kiss we would have, when we heard the screaming start.

It was a woman’s scream, then our boy’s and I jumped up to see him flailing in the water. His head was bobbing up and down and as I watched, he seemed to disappear for longer and longer seconds.  I jumped in then and dragged him to the edge.  He was cold and still, but after what seemed forever, his colour came back.  He was safe.  But we left soon after that as it started to rain.

I don’t think me and my wife ever kissed like that again and it’s not something we’ve ever talked about between us in all the years since.  It strikes me that some things are best left in the sediment.  Deep down and undisturbed.

***

I realise I’ve been asleep and my dreams have been of water.  Of deep, brackish water, its surface disturbed by the heads of children.  Floating on the surface and then sinking into the mud.  Their straggly hair, roiling the water, like eels.

And now I see clearly.  I remember everything with clarity.  The moment I started to become glass was when my son was nearly lost to me for the price of a long, hard kiss.  In that moment, I learnt how insubstantial everything is, how flowingly transient.

In that moment, the glass around me formed, took over and then it became who I am.

***

Yellow Eel

After ten years elver have matured and grown to a length of up to eighty centimetres. At this stage, they are called yellow eels because of their golden pigmentation.  When they’ve reached somewhere they’re happy, they stay, feeding and growing and swelling and darkening.  Some live undisturbed in forgotten pools for over thirty years.

***

It’s my responsibility, as his father, to make the boy learn to be a man.  To teach him the ways of the world and the countryside.  The ways of his land and the water.  His people.  To ensure he’s adapted and flexible.  To make him as grounded and flat as the fenland sky.

***

My son is slipping through my fingers.  Wriggling away from me, upstream to his father.  He’s changing and I understand him less and less.

As I become glass, he becomes heavier and more solid.  We’re both in transition.

I still try to catch him, to hold on, but he effortlessly slips away.  Extraordinary and sleek, like liquid velvet.

***

Big Eyes

One dark night, in September or October, usually after rain and when the moon's overcast, eels get the call. No one knows why.  They head downstream on the flood, and swim over 3,000 miles back to the Sargasso Sea. Then they spawn, and die.  By the time they leave this continent, their gut dissolves making feeding impossible.  The eyes start to enlarge in size, the eye pigments change for optimal vision in dim blue, ocean light, and the sides of their bodies turn silvery.  These eels are known as Big Eyes.

***

We’re going home, because where else would we go?  Back to our little house and my eel wife.  Slippery and unknowable in her glass nonsense.  We must take care not to wake her.  But if the eels can make their 3000 mile journey home, then we can surely walk back along the river’s edge and crawl into bed and adapt to what tomorrow brings.

And my solid, certain son?  He’s right by my side.

***

I’m on the verge of transformation into something else.  Will I become completely glass?  I know you have to adapt to survive, but will glass be the thing that can possibly protect me?

I’m changing and aging and I know eventually, I will break.  What have I become?

Go on, look at me now.  Look at me.  Look right through me.

***

 

(Thanks to the Guardian and various eel fishing websites for the info. on the life-cycle of eels.)