#he even wrote an apology on my pillowcase when we all signed eachother's

[im-fairly-whitty]

-slides a corn chip- tell me, what's your eel story?

NOW I HAVE THREE (3) CORNCHIPS.

Sorry it took so long, but here’s the long-awaited eel story I hinted at in the tags of this post.

Alrighty, so when I was twelve my family lived in New Zealand for a bit, it was amazing. I live in the desert, so going to a country where there’s lush foliage EVERYWHERE boggled my mind. I fell in love with the ocean (the Raglan and Whangamata beaches are my favorites) and their ice cream, and living out of a pull-behind camper for months on end and setting up at a new beach every other night while we roamed around the islands.

I was an animal nut as a kid, and my parents Thornberried me (that’s a verb now), taking us kids on extensive hikes and birdwatching trips, so I knew the name of everything that moved out in the bush (forest) as well as the beach and loved every minute of it. 

But let me tell you about eels. 

So New Zealand doesn’t have snakes. Like at all. Because of this most everything on the island evolved to be round and fluffy and flightless. Although feline and canine and mustelid predators have made their way to the NZ wilds, the government has never ever allowed a serpent onto their islands, they even keep snake skins from being brought in. 

This means that the New Zealand longfin eel is the closest thing to a snake that they’ve got, and these guys sure are something. They grow up in freshwater inland in streams and rivers and lakes, then when they want to get it on they swim all the way out to the ocean to get a date and have some kids.

 ^^ First date, aren’t they adorable?

But anyway, as a kid I’d see these river noodles swimming in streams, mostly at dusk, when they came out to hunt. And these guys arent itty bitty either:

^^Try this on for size. 

They can get several meters long.

They’re normally pretty harmless if you’re on land, some places you can even feed them as an attraction, but if you get in the water they can get feisty. Not only that, but they’ve got several rows of tiny teeth in their mouths that point backward, meaning that if any part of you gets in their mouth…it’s not coming back out…They’ve been known to slowly mangle livestock to death that have become trapped in river gullies, pulling them apart bit by bit.

So! What’s my story? 

This is the story of when 12 year-old Wit went eeling in the middle of the night in the middle of the bush.

I was on a girl’s camping trip, a bunch of pre-teens from my neighborhood, and our camp leader and her husband were leading the way on this adventure that was distinctly non-American:

Exhibit a: We’re busting through the middle of the bush and pitch our tents in a clearing. Mr Campleader looks to the treeline and points, saying “Eh, right over there, my dogs and me got a 300 kilo wild-boar a couple weeks back.”

B: It’s the middle of the night and we’re roused from our sleeping bags, because it’s time to go eeling, eel fishing. You see, eels only come out when it’s dark, really dark, and so we go hiking off into the forest. Single file, and being as quiet as we can because Mr. Campleader has told us that there’s more wild boar roaming this part of the woods. (Boar that btw can slice open a grown man with their razor-sharp tusks.)

C: We’re all silent as we hike through the trees, and we hop a fence or two. That’s when the headlamps all get turned off, because we’re getting close to the eels, who hate light. 

“Alright, split into pairs,” Mr. Campleader says, pulling something out of his pack. It’s cubed raw ox heart, and he starts putting pieces on fishooks tied to a length of fishing line. “I’ll take you to the sinkhole once you’ve got your line prepped.”

Oh yeah, there’s a sinkhole.

“So this sinkhole,” he says, “it drops about three meters down to the water. Don’t you go falling in or they’ll start taking bites of you, just like my bro’s cow last summer. Poor thing was in the water for days, had to shoot her when they finally found her, the state she was in. Poor thing.”

Being the chronically overeager child I am, I grab a far less excited looking partner and volunteer to go first, so Mr. Campleader helps lift me over the last livestock fence and leads the two of us by the hand in the pitch black forest. 

We’re being quiet, but as I blindly follow him through the trees I hear splashes, it’s the eels hearing us coming and diving back into the water below. 

Did I mention that eels can walk on land?

Their coming of age quest to return to the ocean will lead them to go for strolls on their tiny stiff fins across paths and pastures when necessary. Or basking on the edges of sinkholes in the middle of the night. 

Mr. Campleader, who apparently can see in the dark, sits me down in the dark. He whispers that I’m at the very edge of the sinkhole, so not to move at all, and helps me toss my baited hook down into the water below, the end of the string wound around my hand.

Oh, and my partner? He sits her down behind me, and has her wrap her arms around my waist.

This you see, is to prevent me, a twelve-year-old girl, from being forcefully yanked down into the sinkhole by the very eels I’m trying to catch.

This is also approximately the point when I begin to question the wisdom of this entire situation.

Mr. Campleader goes to get the resto f the girls seated around the sinkhole and I sit in the dark for a long time with my human anchor. I’m seriously considering where my life choices have led me at such an early age, when the line in my hand twitches. 

And then the line in my hand yanks.

Already hyped on “I might possibly die tonight” adrenaline, I jolt and frantically whisper for Mr. Campleader to come. I’m still supposed to be quiet, so I let the line yank at me as I stage whisper as loud as I can. Mr. Campleader hurries over and I start to pull on my line, but then it snaps slack. Mr. Campleader pulls up the frayed end for us to see in the light of his headlamp.

“Ah, see? You left her on the line too long, all her teeth sawed through the line.”

You know.

Like fish usually do to fishing line.

It’s fine.

My line’s rehooked and rebaited, I’m applauded for getting the first bite of the night and told to call sooner if it happens again. 

Now my anchor and I are much tenser now we know they’re down there. 

And it’s not too terribly long before my hand is pulled downwards again with a mighty jerk.

Mr. Campleader crashes over as my anchor and I whisper hysterically, the line getting heavier as we try to stand and I reel up the line hand over hand as quickly as I can. He reaches over with his huge Maori arms and grabs the line, powerfully yanking it up. 

There is an image forever branded in my memory, and it’s the circle of light from his headlamp illuminating a glistening and writhing length of slimy grey muscle hanging from my fishing line. For an awful and awe-inspiring moment my eel, twice as thick around as my own neck, hangs there, and then suddenly, it drops back down into the water with a splash. 

Mr. Campleader is devastated.

“I am so sorry!” he cries, grabbing his hair, “I lost you your eel! She must have been six feet long! I should have pulled it up faster, it got off the hook, it must have been nine feet long! I am so so sorry!”

I shakily tell him not to worry about it. 

I’m suddenly very grateful not to have six feet of angry eel on my hands in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. 

No one else gets a bite the rest of the night and we eventually pack up and head back to camp. The next morning Mr. Campleader tells us he set an eel trap downstream yesterday in case we didn’t catch anything and he holds up the trap triumphantly to show a very much alive two-foot eel inside. 

I am the only one of the girls willing to go near it, so I fish the little guy out and hold him while the others gather around. You know how some people think snakes are slimy, but they aren’t? Well, eels are slimy, really slimy. they’re coated from tip to tail in a thick layer of mucus that clings to your skin when you handle them, and soon my hands and arms are covered in the slippery clear substance.

He was actually pretty docile and I was careful to hold him right, having had countless pets in my day. Picture were taken, the others tentatively touched it while I calmly held him, and then Mr. Campleader announces brightly that its time for our next activity. He takes the eel from me, cuts its head off with his hunting knife, and then shoos us away to wash our hands.  

We spend the afternoon decorating pillowcases while said eel bleeds out, hung from a nearby tree. 

You know, normal girls camp stuff.

Later that day as we pull back into town Mr. Campleader’s brought fish and chips for everyone, with a surprise side dish of the eel, who has been battered and deepfried. 

I’ve had eel and eel sauce since then, but friends, perhaps you will understand when I tell you that I did not eat a single bite of that particular eel that day.

#eel #long post #every time I saw Mr. Campleader he would apologize profusely #he even wrote an apology on my pillowcase when we all signed eachother's #wit writes #story #my life #new zealand