RAY TURNER

The eel never had so staunch an admirer as Ray turner. Yes, it’s hideously slimy and it has an ugly face. But is it delicious? Is it nutritious? “It is good groceries!” Ray proclaims. His account of the lifestyle of the snake-shaped fish is inspirational.

Eel man of the Delaware River.

“Your androgynous species, like the salmon,” he scoffs, “they travel by rote back to where they were spawned. The eel migrates to where the water tastes best. It has an acute olfactory system with two sets of nostrils and can smell a few parts per million when it wants to look for brackish water. The male likes hanging back along the coast further south, but the female, she likes fresh water. She will stay here and grow for years—do you know you can read the age of an eel, just like a tree, by counting the rings on the stones in its head? After maybe twelve years she will reach sexual maturity, and when the drive hits to go down to the Sargasso Sea, look out, here she comes.”

When she comes, Ray is ready and waiting. He has been an eeler on the Delaware River for over a quarter century, and he speaks of the migration with joy. “Once the weir is built in July, we’ll catch maybe one or two a day from those who live in these waters,” he says. “In August and September it will grow to double digits. Then one night in September, when the moon is full and there has been a good rain, we will start to see the large black females. It is about to happen.” As he describes it, the spotting of the first big females in the weir is as awesome as seeing a couple of longhorns in a bedded herd rise to their feet—the signal of an impending slithery stampede. In the first good night he will trap over one thousand eels, which is about half of the whole season’s catch.

Ray learned to love eels as a boy. Before World War II, his father used to catch them downriver from the smokehouse at Eel Weir Hollow, and before that, he says, “The codgers around here will tell you that their grandfathers used to do it. It’s is an old, old art. Native Americans that lived along this river did it, that’s for sure. Imagine a tribe enduring a long winter, realizing that there are tons of eels going downstream in the fall. What a great opportunity to enhance the larder! Do you know that scientists have radioactively carbon-dated an eel weir site that goes back 5900 years? It may be the oldest man-made structure on this continent.”

The thought of a surviving prehistoric weir is spellbinding because building a sturdy one is an eeler’s primary challenge. Each year starting in July, Ray goes into the river to construct a stone conduit some three hundred feet long, and he uses timber to erect a ramped trap that will funnel big parts of the migrating school into his eel rack. Although his full white beard and the backwoods setting of his smokehouse make him look like a Western Catskills King Neptune, this water man was trained as a civil engineer, and he relishes telling about the joists, studs, and lattice work that go into the wood structure, and how, by triangulating the pressure, he erects a rack impervious to high water torrents. “If you don’t have a good rack, you can blow it and lose everything,” he cautions. “That is why I devote so much attention to building it right in the summer. Once they start coming, you must have confidence in your weir.”

Much as he delights in catching mature females on their way south, he disapproves of nabbing eels earlier in their life cycle as they float north with the currents. Eating the young ones, known to epicures as glass eels, is bad for the health of the species, he maintains. With avuncular affection for the little critters, he asks, “Do you know that when an eel is born, it looks like a willow leaf? It’s that fragile. Aristotle believed that an eel grew from a single horse hair dropped in the water. So little is known about them, it’s a shame.”

What really chaps Ray Turner’s hide is unfounded aversion to the Anguilla rostrata. “It is a cross the eel must bear,” he says. “People think of it as a snake, which it is not. I guarantee you will find eel good to eat, if only you can get over the eew! factor.”