Like White Ghosts Swimming

The film director chose to shoot the interview with Paul in the living room. Behind Paul: three deer mounts, one pheasant with outstretched wings, and a largemouth bass, interspersed with family portraits. They’d lit him well; Paul looked good in the frame. So dramatic. Behind him was a fish tank in which he kept a couple of fish, including an American eel he was trying to raise from one of the juveniles he’d caught the previous spring.

“They’re like white ghosts swimming on top of that water,” he’ll end up saying in the film. “When I start seeing them eels, I can’t go to sleep. It’s like Christmas. I can’t wait to see what’s in that net!”

Paul first knocked on my door in 2014. It was my first year living on the river, but he’d been there fishing for juvenile eels, called elvers, since the nineties. He’d introduced himself and his fishing partner, Joe, and asked for permission to access the tidal river via our property, ensuring my partner and I that they wouldn’t leave any trash behind—they’d be quiet and wouldn’t make any trouble. Back then, elvers were constantly making the headlines, accompanied by stories about poaching, the black market, guns, cash, roving thieves—all under cover of night. Before moving there, we were told that during elver season, the forest surrounding our house would be crawling with marine patrol officers and poachers. 

Elver fishing wasn’t new—Maine’s elver fishery started up in the nineties, when they fetched 50 dollars a pound. In 2012, the price per pound jumped to 2,500 dollars due to the European and Japanese eel being listed as endangered due to overfishing, habitat loss, dams, pollution, parasites, and new restrictions preventing exporting to Asia, where they are raised to unagi size in aquaculture farms. Though elvers are present in fresh and brackish water systems from Greenland to South America, Maine has the only significant legal fishery in the US—the second most lucrative fishery in the state, after lobster. Paul came knocking every spring.

I wasn’t part of the LA-based film crew. The sound guy was an old friend who had heard of how mesmerized I was by the elver fishery stories playing out in front of my house while I slept, and had contacted me to see if I could connect them to anyone—elver fishermen can be an understandably elusive lot. I introduced them to the river and a few fishermen and they invited me to come along for one of the shoots.

This was before I started researching and writing about elvers and fishermen myself; Paul and Joe showing up was simply part of the phenological chronology: snow melt, coltsfoot, deer ticks, maple sap, elver fishermen, elvers. 

They’d show us their catch in the mornings before we headed to work—buckets full of translucent baby eels that had ridden the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current all the way to Maine after being born as leaf-like leptocephali (larva) in the Sargasso Sea, thousands of miles away, near Bermuda. One time our smoke detectors went off because the maple syrup we’d been finishing off on the stove turned to scalded treacle while we chatted with Paul in the driveway. Another time, one of my kids, who was learning how to use the brakes on her bike, rode straight into our granite retaining wall while Paul was showing me his catch. Together, we cleaned her grazed cheek. Paul was a fluke uncle we only saw when the elvers were running.

The director had asked me, “Do you have any questions you want to ask, Michele, while we still have him?”

When Paul talked about the cancer, his fear of leaving his family behind, he crinkled a plastic bottle between his hands. The sound person took the water bottle away and set it down next to Paul’s quiet wife in the dark kitchen, replacing it with a mug as consolation. Paul was crying. They didn’t interrupt him further. Neither the water bottle nor Paul’s reflections on cancer’s bearing on his ability to provide for his family through elvering made it into the movie.

A few years after the film came out, there was an obituary. No cause of death listed.

***

The year after Paul’s death, Joe shows up alone.

“The pain was so bad he couldn’t take it anymore,” Joe says, hammering metal poles for his fyke nets down into the silty mudflats, to withstand the spring tides. “He’d lost so much weight and strength that he couldn’t hunt, couldn’t fish. But he didn’t have to do that. I wish he’d have told me how bad he was suffering.”

“I don’t want to suffer before I die,” says my seven-year-old, Gloria. “I want to die in my sleep. That happens to some people, right?”

“I want to die in my sleep, too!” my five-year-old, Aloysius, agrees. “Can you die without suffering? Can you, Mama?”

I walk upstream from our house with these children, who want painless deaths. We walk at low tide, when the river below the dam transforms from a basin of flat, silent water to a rushing whitewater channel strewn with rocks. At the river’s edge, we see crayfish, mummichogs, and pissed fish trapped in puddles, playing dead when our shadows cross.

We return downstream to greet Joe, who is checking his nets in front of our house, and tell him what we’ve seen.

“Did Paul ever take you up by the dam and show you the elvers roping over it?” Joe asks.

Paul had described how elvers form a collective rope with their bodies to get over dams, but he died before he could show me how to find them. 

***

With time, elvers’ presence in my life becomes more than phenological. I start working on my own documentary film project, a feature story, and the scaffoldings of a book, motivated in part by the complexities of what Paul revealed in his living room, as well as a desire to know if close observation of the eel’s impulses—and those of the humans who relate to them—might help me make sense of my own.

The more fishermen, scientists, conservationists, elver buyers, and eel enthusiasts I meet, the more I hear people talking about this phenomenon of eels’ roping. I decide this will be the year I see it for myself. 

The season during which American eels can legally be plucked from their epic migration and flown to Asia to become unagi is short—eleven weeks or until the licensed fishermen have caught the allotted quota (roughly 10,000 pounds for all fishermen—state and tribal). But as all fishermen like to remind the public, “Just because we’re done fishing, doesn’t mean the eels stop running.” I’m told that as the temperature starts getting warmer, elvers will congregate below barriers. And once they’ve reached a critical mass, that’s when they start roping.

***

Early in the morning, I text elver fishermen, asking about the conditions.

“They’ll run like mad tonight in the Penobscot. Anywhere from Sea Dog to the hospital should be good.”

This is the thing about elvers’ migration. It starts slowly, a drip. Fishermen watch as one, two, three, then thousands, then millions of elvers push up the rivers, a small percentage of which land in their nets. They say that elvers used to run so thick that they’d form a mat you could almost walk across. Others talk about elvers—born in a sea bounded by four ocean currents—forming a visible blue ribbon in freshwater rivers as they push upstream. When this happens, elver fishermen post about it on social media with woefully underwhelming cell-phone photos. Around this time, elver buyers say the eels they’ve aggregated in their shops—packed up into tanks ready to ship to the market in Hong Kong—will start going “ballistic” trying to escape. Buyers receive frenzied phone calls and text messages from riverside fishermen: “It’s happening!” It’s not only that the peak means quick payouts for the fishermen and possible bonuses for the buyers—it’s also a shared excitement about being in close relation to a remarkable species doing strange things in the middle of the night, and about being lucky enough to see it.

***

Rivers and estuaries are often referred to as the circulatory system of an ecosystem. For healthy ecosystems to flourish, water and all it contains must be able to flow in all directions. Dams create two significant obstacles for eels. Elvers must somehow make their way over them to reach freshwater upstream. Mature silver eels must make their way downstream over them in order to spawn in the Sargasso Sea, where they then die. Derelict dams can be nuisance barriers, but hydropower dams not only prevent migrating fish from moving downstream but also chop them into pieces as they obey their urge to get home.

***

On the last night in April, I tuck my nonmigratory children into bed and drive 20 miles north. Just before midnight, I pull up outside a friend’s house. She slips into my passenger seat and we head to the Eddington Salmon Club on the eastern shores of the Penobscot. We park and I shine my headlamp into the black current. Nothing. 

We drive back across the river and then stand under the piers of the State Street Bridge. An otter swims toward us. We shriek and reach for each other, scampering up the riverbank. No elvers to note. We stand on the rocks by Sea Dog Brewing Company as the incoming tide creeps over the toes of our boots. Then the river becomes thick with them—Paul’s “white ghosts”—and the air grows thick with our coos exalting the arrival of this season’s elver brood, as if we’re cheering on marathon runners. With 14 miles between these elvers and the first dam up river, we won’t see any of them roping from our location, but now that the bulk of the run has arrived, they can begin to climb. 

With the elvers arriving in full force and the temperatures warming, I start a riverside vigil. Every day at low and high tide, I take to the shoreline, looking for elvers making their way over the dam.

One afternoon, I see a crayfish the size of a lobster scaling the granite wall of the dam. I crouch by a rock wrapped with fraying ropes from previous elver fishermen’s nets and glance into the glistening shadows, expecting nothing and instead find hundreds of elvers jammed into a crack, their tiny heads bobbing with the current, waiting to ride the next tide upstream.

Eels have an endogenous tidal rhythm—an internal magnetic compass that results in them rising and sinking every six and a quarter-ish hours. I used to think that the magnetite crystals positioned in eels’ foreheads were imprinted with a map given to them by their parents before rapid senescence (sudden death after spawning) set in, but current research indicates memory over genetics. Scientists are still trying to determine at what point in the eel’s life cycle these memories are imprinted into their magnetic compasses. They do know, however, that these compasses do not depend on external cues.

Yet, an eel biologist tells me, “Not all eels want the same thing.” Whether or not an eel is likely to use a humanmade fishway or rope over a dam also has to do with their individual personalities. Barriers like dams force them to make decisions when many of them likely would swim back and forth between estuaries, salt marshes, and freshwater rivers, lakes, and ponds to access the nutrients and habitats they need at any particular time in their life cycle. Eels’ sexual organs don’t mature until they leave freshwater to journey back to the Sargasso Sea. The main way biologists determine an eel’s sex is by size—females tend to be larger. The further up a watershed an eel is found, the more likely they are to become female, whereas eels who hang out lower in the watersheds tend to become male.

***

One day, I take Aloysius with me up to the dam. I hadn’t wanted to take him because I was afraid he’d fall in, but my partner wasn’t home, and I wanted to see if the elvers were still gathering along the granite seams or if they’d already moved above the dam.

“Climb on my back, little monkey,” I say as we make our way up to the waterfall flowing over the dam. He holds onto me like a strangler fig. As we approach the white water, I tell him to sit on a rock and not move a muscle. He complies, but by bedtime he’s frustrated.

“I already know what to do,” he says, when I repeat yet another command. “You don’t need to tell me.”

***

Back in 2017, Paul was quoted in a magazine story set in the area directly below the dam, where I’ve been keeping watch. Due to the dam and its aging fish ladder, the area, writes the reporter, is a “poacher’s paradise.” (Someone once told me about a woman sneaking away from the dam with a plastic lined-purse full of eels). But that’s not why the reporter was there, not entirely. She was there to see the elvers roping their way through the dam itself, and it was Paul who showed her.

“They’re finding a way, don’t you worry. These eels ain’t going back,” Paul said in the article, like a “proud parent,” the reporter wrote.

***

On opening day of another elver season, two years after Paul’s death, I’m in a riverside gravel parking lot. It’s mid-afternoon and I’ve watched twenty fishermen set their nets under the eyes of two young marine patrol officers. All but one fisherman have already left. 

“You know, some people say eels came here on an asteroid,” the remaining fisherman tells me. “That’s why they all return to the same place every year to spawn.”

“And die!” I exclaim. “What do you think it looks like? The whole spawning-dying thing. I always wonder. Is it graceful? A spasm? Do they die immediately after spawning? Do they ever get to see their leptocephali? How soon comes death? Does it look like this? Or like this?”

We bend our knees simultaneously, pretending to be dying eels. Maybe that’s too generous. Maybe it’s me imagining myself sinking down to depths of the deep ocean trenches after carrying out an ancient rite, witnessed by a fisherman who claims to be able to freeze eels in time by putting them in a solution with a special salt-water-to-fresh-water ratio that prevents them from evolving into their next life cycle.

Witnessing an eel evolve from an elver to a silver eel is a gift some fishermen try to give themselves—Paul was not the only one. Furthermore, fishermen often hold their eels until the prices go up. But eels are notorious for escaping. Keep them together too long and they’ll try to eat each other—I know how “Bite Mark” got his name. But most eels are not diverted from their instinctual journey—a journey they’ve been making for 65.5–145.5 million years. Most eels are still collectively, as Paul said, “finding their way, don’t you worry.” 

***

“Is it true that an eel’s heart goes on beating after it dies?” a caller asked on a radio show about eels. He had killed an eel, extracted the heart, put it in a jar, watched it beat for three days, and then called in to ask if what he had seen with his own eyes was true. None of the eel experts could confirm.

***

Joe sets up his nets again. The kids and I greet him before breakfast as he’s pouring his catch through nets designed to filter out the larger eels that can’t be sold, that have to be tossed back.

My children build a dam of stones in the ditch beside Joe’s truck. They poke a stick into the clay-rich loam—a former ocean floor—to which they affix a paper towel flag. I ask if they know that a white flag means surrender.

“What’s ‘surrender’?” they ask. 

“It means you don’t want to fight anymore.”

“Can’t it just mean welcome?” they ask.

“Of course,” I say, wishing I would hold my tongue and make more space for them to imagine their own meanings without my eternal two cents.

***

Just a week after Joe started fishing, I come home to find the nets that had been adorning the riverbank now in the bed of his truck, next to a cooler of elvers.

“Caught four pounds over my quota last night,” he says, stripping off his hip waders. “Poured the extra pounds up over the other side of the dam. Figured I’d give them a head start.”

“Come here, dears,” he says to my children. He hands each of them an immaculate hundred-dollar bill, a small, but welcome, portion of that year’s elver income. They’d never seen a hundred-dollar bill before. I whisper the value in their ears and they run up and down our dead-end road, hundred-dollar bills flapping in the wind.

***

l call Maine’s Department of Marine Resources to ask what would happen—from an enforcement perspective—if I, a non-Native concerned citizen without a commercial fishing license, were to move elvers above the dam.

I find myself talking to the marine patrol officer who’s also quoted in the 2017 magazine story alongside Paul. Even though it’s been a few years, he hasn’t heard the news. I don’t give the specifics omitted from the obituary, but he quickly narrows in and we both become sad and return to the elvers. He says he’d have to fine me if he caught me moving them, but, as consolation, he encourages me to look for them roping.

“You’ve got to go there at night if you want to see them,” he says. “And for God’s sake, don’t bring any nets or anything with you. And be careful, that ledge is real slippery.”

***

I wait for the next reasonably-timed nocturnal high tide, armed with rubber boots and fresh batteries in my headlamp, and walk up the road to the dam, as there’s too much water in the river to travel up it as I normally do. I stand on top of the granite retaining wall, clap my feeble hands three times into the roar of the falls to make myself known to anyone below, and descend to the algae-slick ledge. 

Inside a crack in the dam wall, I see a writhing mass of slippery eel bodies fed by a fifty-foot-long, multi-generational eel highway extending along the bedrock where the water meets the ledge. Transparent glass eels and opaque yellow, purple, and grey eels—varying from three-to-six inches—wiggle across the slick of each other’s bodies, then pause, over and over again, a viscous leap frog. Were humans to try this, it would be a stampede. Too much friction, too much weight. But eels—these slimy, steely, and scaleless ancient creatures who have already survived a thousand-mile journey north— have found a way to use each other’s bodies in order to move not just over but through a dam. And it’s not just the glass-like elvers—it’s eels of many generations, all making their way together, now. I get on my knees and stare at them, wondering how many of them I’d seen hiding out in the cracks earlier in the week, waiting. I watch them like Paul must have, holding back tears.

An otter, waiting to pluck dinner from the eel highway, moves underneath me as I hop from boulder to boulder. I scream and scramble through the brush back to the road and home, shaking my partner awake. “I saw it! It’s real!” I flash videos I’ve taken of the glistening eels sliming their way over each other, the magnificent, multigenerational eel highway coming alive in our dry, dark bedroom.

***

I tell my sister about my fear. How I notice it at night, when moths flying into my headlamp make me shriek and unexpected otters make me scream. When I’m up by the dam in the dark, I’m afraid I’ll fall in or hit my head and that no one would know. I’m afraid of the suffering that would come for my loved ones finding out. After all, who would even find me? I haven’t always been this way. Becoming a mother turned on a channel of hypervigilant threat-scanning in my brain, eternally calculating factors that could contribute to painful deaths for myself and others while simultaneously aware that most of them can’t be avoided. 

“How deep is it?” my sister asks, bringing me back to the water.

“Not that deep,” I admit.

“What if you let yourself fall in?”

***

What have I learned from the eels? Hide in the cracks. Wait for the others. Sink in the day. Rise in the nocturnal high tides. Wait for momentum. You will know when it’s time. Move as a collective, a band, a stripe. Make your biggest moves under cover of darkness. If the current washes you downstream, wait for the next high tide. If someone catches you in a net, throw up (this is for adult eels only). Don’t forget that being out of water doesn’t mean you have to die. You can breathe through your skin. Try it. After reaching fresh water, you will spend much of the rest of your life alone, that is, until you reach the giant orgy in the Sargasso Sea. It’s worth it. Until then, age in relation to your access to resources, not years. If someone says, “You haven’t aged a bit!” to an eel, it’s probably true. Eat as much as you can while you are hungry, as one day you will metabolize your entire digestive system, in preparation for the great return. If someone asks you why you left freshwater and started the journey back to the Sargasso Sea, don’t tell them. Stare at them with your eyes that have grown large to help you make the journey as your gonads grow inside you. Keep them guessing. Young? What young? Never heard of them. 

***

An older friend, a father, tells me, “It doesn’t matter what you do as a parent. Your children are who they are and nothing you do will change them.”

I haven’t been a mother long enough to know if I can believe in that level of absolution, but the argument is compelling. How I might revel in the relief it would offer if I could believe that it’s true. For eels, however, it seems to be unequivocal. While a juvenile eel could overlap in the same bend in the river as a more seasoned eel, the seasoned eel is more likely to eat the juvenile eel than to offer advice, and no eel with mature sexual organs could ever be found in freshwater. Eel parents and their offspring will never cross paths.

***

Semelparous (also called “big bang reproductive”) species like eels—whose reproductive strategy involves producing offspring just once before death—are often associated with “low parental input,” producing greater numbers of offspring in their “single fatal reproductive episode” than their iteroparous counterparts—such as humans—who may play a more significant role in caring for their offspring. It’s said that semelparous species put all their available resources into maximizing reproduction at the expense of future life, but what about all the species who have been sustained by eels across their vast range? Eels used to make up fifty percent of the fish biomass within waterways in Mid-Atlantic states. Their migration pattern is astounding, but so is this evolutionary interdependence.

There are clans named after eels. Rivers—Kenduskeag: “eel-catching place.” Songs that are sung for them. Dances. Among the Mi’kmaq and Passamaquoddy, eels have been so revered that they were often the first food given to babies after breast milk, and they are still requested by elders as their last meal before transitioning to the spirit world. Yet the people who have been nourished by eels since time immemorial can barely eat wild-caught eels now. Eels are bioaccumulators, their bodies keeping the collective score of pollution.

***

Maine’s silver eel fishery shuttered in 2014, the result of the seeming decline in adult eel populations. But elvers—eels’ big bang offspring—support hundreds of fishermen throughout Maine with income that morphs into food, housing, and increased financial security, while the elvers themselves are flown across the sea and raised in pollution-free tanks and ponds so that they can be eaten without fear of poisoning.

Technically, as a distinctly iteroparous organism, I distribute my available reserves for the long haul. I invest significant energy in the survival of my offspring. Perhaps too much or not enough of the right kind, but see how I have not fallen to the ocean floor? I am trying to learn not to think aloud so that my fears do not become crystalline structures inside my children’s heads. I am taping a white flag emblazoned with Paul’s “don’t you worry” to a flagstaff beside a dam inside my head, even though I know that in the end we don’t all find our way. I hope enough of us do.

Aloysius continues to recite his lines about his hope for a painless death while brushing his teeth. I continue to want what’s best for all children—and for the eels. Who may die to be eaten as unagi, who may earn the fishermen I’ve come to care for thousands of dollars, transforming their families’ lives. Eels, who may get eaten by a trout upstream. Who may have their hearts removed by meddlesome humans. Who may be killed for science. Eels, who will eat anything they can get their mouths around, one buyer tells me; eels, who will even eat each other. Or who may die as they try to pass dams on their way to the Sargasso Sea—turbines or water pressure, either way, dead. Eels, who may live their best life, dying only after reaching their sacred—and collective—spawning and burial grounds. Yet no matter how painful or painless an eel’s life or death, their parents—riding the counter side of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation—will never know.