My father taught me to fish for eel in the stream bordering the fields of his childhood home. We drove down at dusk in August, taking a left off the main road to cross the stream and turning onto a small road that was little more than a tractor path in the dirt winding down a steep slope and then moving parallel with the water. On our left were the fields, the golden wheat brushing against the side of our car; on our right, the quietly hissing grass. Beyond it, the water, around twenty feet wide, a tranquil stream meandering through the greenery like a silver chain glinting in the last slanted rays of the setting sun.
We drove slowly along the rapids, where the stream rushed in a startled fashion between the rocks and past the twisted old willow tree. I was seven years old and had already gone down this same road many times before. When the tracks ended in a wall of impenetrable vegetation, Dad turned off the engine and everything went dark and still, aside from the murmur of the stream. We were both wearing wellies and greasy vinyl waders, mine yellow and his orange, and we took two black buckets full of fishing gear, a flashlight, and a jar of worms from the trunk and set off.
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.
After forty yards, Dad stopped and looked around. “This’ll do,” he said.
The bank was steep and muddy. If you missed your step, you ran the risk of falling over and sliding straight into the water. Twilight was already falling.
Dad held the grass back with one hand and carefully walked down on a diagonal, then turned around and held his other hand out to me. I took it and followed with the same practiced caution. Down by the water’s edge, we trampled out a small ledge and set down our buckets.
I imitated Dad, who was mutely inspecting the water, following his eyes, imagining I saw what he saw. There was, of course, no way of knowing whether this was a good spot. The water was dark, and here and there stands of reeds stuck out of it, waving menacingly, but everything below the surface was hidden from us. We had no way of knowing, but we chose to have faith as from time to time a person must. Fishing is often about exactly that.
“Yes, this’ll do,” Dad repeated, turning to me; I pulled a spiller from the bucket and handed it to him. He pushed the stake into the ground and quickly gathered up the line, picked up the hook, and gingerly pulled a fat worm out of the jar. He bit his lip and studied the worm in the flashlight; after putting it on the hook, he held it up to his face and pretended to spit on it for luck, always twice, before throwing it into the water with a sweeping motion. He bent down and touched the line, making sure it was taut and hadn’t traveled too far in the current. Then he straightened back up and said “All right,” and we climbed back up the bank.
What we called spillers were really something else, I suppose. The word spiller usually denotes a long fishing line with many hooks and sinkers. Our version was more primitive. Dad made them by sharpening one end of a piece of wood with an ax. Then he cut a length of thick nylon line, about fifteen feet, and tied one end to the wooden stake. He made the sinkers by pouring melted lead into a steel pipe and letting it set before cutting the pipe into short pieces that he would then drill a hole through. The sinker was placed about a hand’s length from the end of the line and the fairly sizable single hook right fastened at the end. The stake was hammered into the ground, the hook with the worm rested on the streambed.
We would bring ten or twelve spillers, which we’d bait and throw in, one after the other, approximately thirty feet apart. Up and down the steep bank, the same laborious procedure each time and the same well-rehearsed hand-holding, the same gestures and the same spitting for luck.
When the last spiller had been set up, we went back the same way, up and down the bank, checking each one again. Carefully testing each line to make sure there hadn’t been a bite already and then standing around for a minute in silence, letting our instinct convince us that this was good, that something would happen here if we just gave it some time. By the time we’d checked the last one, it would be completely dark—the silent bats visible now only when they swooped through the shaft of moonlight—and we climbed up the bank one final time, walked back to the car, and drove home.
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.
We lived just a mile or two from the stream; when we got home late at night, we would pull off our wellies and waders on the front steps, and I would go straight to bed. I’d fall asleep quickly, and just after five in the morning, Dad would wake me up again. He didn’t need to say much. I got out of bed straight away, and we were in the car a few minutes later.
Down by the stream, the sun was rising. Dawn colored the lower edge of the sky a deep orange, and the water seemed to rush by with a different sound, clearer, brighter, as though it had just woken up from a deep sleep. Other sounds could be heard all around us. A blackbird warbling, a mallard entering the water with a clumsy splash. A heron flying silently over the stream, peering down with its large beak like a raised dagger.
We walked through the damp grass and stomped our way sideways down the bank to the first spiller. Dad waited for me, and together we studied the taut line, looking for signs of activity under the surface. Dad bent down and put his hand to the nylon. Then he straightened back up and shook his head. He pulled the line in and held up the hook for me to see. The worm was gone, probably stolen by crafty roaches.
We moved on to the next spiller, which was also empty. As was the third. Approaching the fourth one, however, we could see the line had been dragged into a stand of reeds; when Dad pulled on it, it was stuck. He muttered something inaudible. Grabbed the line with both hands and tugged a bit harder, to no avail. The current might have carried the hook and sinker into the reeds. But it might also have been that an eel had swallowed the hook and gotten itself and the line caught up in the plant stalks and was now lying there, biding its time. If you held the line taut in your hand, you could sometimes feel tiny movements, as though whatever was stuck below the surface on the other end was bracing itself.
Dad coaxed and pulled, bit his lip and cursed helplessly. He knew there were only two ways out of this situation and that both had its losers. Either he managed to dislodge the eel and pull it up, or he could cut the line and leave the eel where it was, tangled in the reeds with the hook and heavy sinker like a ball and chain.
This time, there seemed to be no other option. Dad took a few steps to the side, trying a different angle, pulling so hard the nylon stretched like a violin string. Nothing worked.
“Nope, no luck,” he said at length and tugged as hard as he could, breaking the line in two with a loud snap.
“Let’s hope it makes it,” he said, and we moved on, climbing up and down the bank.
At the fifth spiller, Dad bent down and tentatively touched the line. Then he straightened up and stepped aside. “You want to take this one?” he said.
I grabbed the line and pulled on it gently and could immediately feel the strength that answered back. The same force that Dad had felt with just his fingertips. I had time to realize that the feeling was familiar, then I pulled a bit harder and the fish began to move. “It’s an eel,” I said out loud.
An eel never tries to rush, as a pike might; it prefers slithering sideways, which creates a kind of undulating resistance. It’s surprisingly strong for its size and a good swimmer, despite its tiny fins.
I reeled it in as slowly as I could, without letting the line slacken, as though savoring the moment. But it was a short line, and there were no reeds for this eel to hide in; before long, I pulled it out of the water and saw its shiny yellowish-brown body twisting in the early-morning light. I tried to grab it behind its head, but it was virtually impossible to hold. It wrapped itself around my arm like a snake, up past my elbow; I could feel its strength like a static force more than movement. If I dropped it now, it would escape through the grass and back into the water before I could get a secure hold.
In the end, we got the hook out and Dad filled the bucket with water from the stream. I slipped the eel in, and it immediately started swimming around and around the inside; Dad put his hand on my shoulder, said it was a beauty. We moved on to the next spiller, stepping lightly up the bank. And I got to carry the bucket.