June 24, 2024 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Paige Williams’ absorbing “Ghosts on the Water.” It’s a reporting piece on Maine’s lucrative glass-eel fishery. What’s a glass eel? Williams tells us:

The Sargasso Sea, a warm, calm expanse of the North Atlantic Ocean, is bordered not by land but by four strong currents—a gyre. Vast mats of prickly brown seaweed float so thickly on the windless surface that Christopher Columbus worried about his ships getting stuck. The biodiverse sanctuary within and beneath the sargassum produces Anguilla rostrata, the American eel. Each female lays some eight million eggs. The eggs hatch as ribbonlike larvae that drift to the Gulf Stream, which carries them to the continental shelf. By the time they reach Maine, the larvae have transformed into swimmers about the length of an index finger, with the circumference of a bean sprout and the translucence of a jellyfish. Hence their nickname, glass eels, also known as elvers. The glass eel is barely visible, but for a dark stripe—its developing backbone—and a couple of chia seeds for eyes. “Ghosts on the water,” a Maine fisherman once called them.

And a couple of chia seeds for eyes – I like that. Williams is an excellent describer. Here’s her depiction of an eel-fisherman emptying a tail bag of elvers:

The patriarch’s son set an aquarium net over the top of an empty bucket and strained the first of their sludge. The pour revealed sea lice, krill, a needlefish, and a bunch of twitchy sticklebacks, as silver as store-bought fishing lures—bycatch, all of which gets returned to the river. Cupping the net from the bottom, the patriarch teased the few glass eels into view and plucked them out, the way you’d pick lint off a sweater.

And here’s her description of a scene at an eel-fisherman’s house:

Several days later, Loughran and Glass brought kimchi (a gift from their business partner) and fresh crabmeat over to Glass’s house. They were making crab rolls when I arrived. Glass stoked a fire in a woodstove and handed me a Heineken in a jelly jar. We ate some dried haddock as he prepared the rolls, which he served on square porcelain plates at the dining table, whose centerpiece was a chessboard. Afterward, Glass walked me out to the greenhouse and showed me his dad’s lobster boat, the Don’t Know. He was thinking of renaming it the Andromeda. In the distance we could hear the ocean. He said, “When it’s real rough, it sounds like a lion’s den.”

That is a wonderful passage – vivid, specific, filled with the kind of details ("Heineken in a jelly jar," "square porcelain plates," chessboard centrepiece) I devour. 

“Ghosts on the Water” explores the slimy, smelly, secretive world of glass-eel fishing. I enjoyed it immensely.