Along the northern border of Lithuania is a small town on a low hill by a river. The name of the town is Pandelys. When my family lived there, it was called Ponedel, and it was in Russia, in the Pale of Settlement, where Jews were required to live. Beyond the town are a forest and a swamp that were once a refuge for wolves. Nearby, the Apascia river wanders the countryside in search of its larger cousin, the Nemunelis. When they meet, they join, and together they riffle and surge west until they reach the Baltic Sea, along with nearly 900 other rivers that meander with them toward the water-logged horizon.

Lithuania’s land is part of the vast Eastern European Plain, which is contiguous with the Great European Plain: it’s all one formation, bordered to the west by the Baltic Sea; to the north by the Barents and White Seas; to the East by the Ural Mountains, and to the south by the Black and Caspian Seas, the Balkans, and the Crimean mountains. These plains are woven together by ancient rivers, bogs, and broad-leafed woodlands, fringed with a tonsure of verdant boreal forest, and topped with a pate of ice. Its abundant waterways and legendary marshes were the gift of a glacier ten thousand years before. Lithuania is an edge where taiga and temperate biomes meet.¹

We humans tend to see edges as things that divide rather than as things that connect. Rivers and shorelines are especially convenient for differentiating what humans deem useful from that which is considered deficient or superfluous. Perhaps this is why edges are often what’s modified first when humans remake a landscape. We tend to look past transition zones because nuance and context do not interest us. We forget that edges are loci of vitality. In-between places and in-between times reveal patterns that keep the world intact as well as those that dismantle it.  

Because the plain is mostly flat, Lithuania’s rivers loiter and curl; they change direction often and are partial to peat. Because the soil is saturated, the waters move slowly and rest often, and specific words are required to describe the different kinds of soggy ground. There are four types of mire: bog, fen, marsh and swamp. The water in a bog comes from rainfall. A fen is fed by groundwater. A marsh is a wetland with vegetation rooted in soil. Swamps are wetlands shaded by forest canopy. At one time, the mires of Europe and Russia stretched for more than 300,000 square kilometers. Now, more than half have been lost. These days, liquid Lithuania is polluted with agricultural runoff and industrial waste. Two thirds of its original forest are gone; two thirds of its rivers have been straightened or dammed; seventy percent of its wetlands have been drained and, of what remains, only about forty percent are protected. Still, it’s a watery place and its flumes have plenty of company. From Lithuania and elsewhere in Europe, more than two hundred fifty rivers and streams pour into the Baltic Sea. It’s an inland sea, an arm of the Atlantic whose waters are brackish – neither salty nor fresh, but somewhere in between. Its shallow underwater sills impede mixing and flow, making it saltier at the bottom than at the top. 

 In April of 1892, my great-grandmother, and her youngest children – including my grandfather, sailed for America from the Baltic port of Swinemunde. It would not have been possible to travel except in spring and summer. Even fall would have been risky: until the 1980’s, the Baltic Sea froze solid in winter. Now, even during the coldest months, the ice of the Baltic is confined to its northern edge, barely enough for the grey and ringed seals who depend on it – they nest there and can only feed their young on ice. Perhaps the lack of ice is due, in part, to the unnatural things the water contains. Maybe it’s the rotting bodies that were dumped there at the end of World War II when the Baltic became a mass grave for retreating troops and refugees whose boats were torpedoed. Maybe it’s the more than five thousand warplanes and warships rotting on its shallow floor. Maybe it’s the ammunition stockpiles that Germany disposed of in the Baltic after the war, along with the chemical weapons dumped there by the U.K. and the U.S.S.R. But at the turn of the 19th century, when my relatives sailed for America, the Baltic was full of life: bottlenose dolphins, harbor porpoises, basking sharks, and a plethora of whales, including minkes, belugas, orcas, beaked whales, fin whales, and humpbacks. The family must have seen them. Perhaps my great grandmother and the children saw whaling ships, blood-stained waters, and glistening carcasses stretched across decks. Did they smell the stench of the rendering pots? My great-grandmother’s corsets would have been stiffened with baleen.

We humans are the only species that destroys what we don’t understand.

Swinemunde sits at the mouth of the Oder River. In earlier times, the Oder was an intricate, serpentine braid famous for the extravagant wetlands known as the Oderbruch. Open patches of marsh and pools, where the main vegetation was grass or reeds, alternated with areas of thick, waterlogged brush and alder trees… It was a place where men went hunting for herons, a paradise of frogs…an area over which mists swirled… where the columns of insects were so thick that they made a sound “like a distant drumbeat.”² There’s an engraving from the 1600’s, looking down on the Oderbruch from a hill, before the marshes were drained: it’s an archipelago of forested islands connected by a tangle of silver – the reticulated coat of a vast, living skin.²  

By 1750, Europe’s rivers were being zealously ‘corrected’ and ‘improved’: they were dredged, straightened, and lined with gravel and stones to make way for the barges of commerce. The majority of this work was conducted during the reign of Frederick the Great, king of Prussia. As a young prince, he loved poetry and played the flute. His authoritarian father sought to toughen him up with beatings and military discipline. At eighteen, Frederick and a close friend, perhaps lover, decided to escape: they were caught, tried, and imprisoned for desertion. His father ordered the friend beheaded and Frederick was forced to watch. Two months later, he begged his father for forgiveness and was released to tour the countryside in order to study agriculture and local economies. He was known as a loner, “distant and self-contained” and prone to fits of rage – behaviors we now understand as signs of trauma. There’s a reason we use aquatic metaphors to describe our emotions. We speak of raging waters; we pour out our hearts; we release or endure torrents of abuse and seek ways to channel our fury. Humans pass trauma to the helpless, the silent, and the defective unworthy of mercy: children, women, water, and Earth are the unwilling recipients. Frederick the Great poured his shame and his wrath onto the landscape, as he sought to bend Prussian waters to his will.

He was fascinated by the Enlightenment notion that Nature was defective. Unruly landscapes were wasteful. Marshes, meanders, and floods were unacceptable. Nature needed correction in order to serve human needs. In Frederick the Great’s time as now, the thousands of islands, meadows, and wetlands that keep rivers alive were cleared for settlement and agriculture. River deltas were excavated; sidearms and oxbows were eliminated and main channels deepened. The upper basin of the Oder was mined and the river was shortened by one hundred miles. The silt and gravel that once traveled downstream accumulated instead behind the dams that were installed to control flow and, later, to generate electricity.

During the years of Frederick the Great’s reign – from 1740 to 1786, he straightened more rivers and drained more wetlands than any other ruler of his time. Through river ‘improvement’, hundreds of thousands of acres of land were made available for human use. As water tables were lowered, the roots of trees dried out and surface plants, like the Rhine’s famous water lilies, withered and died. It was as if Nature had decided to cooperate with the preferences of men. When the Industrial Revolution arrived, the Rhine and the Oder were ready: factories and towns sprang up along the straightened banks of rivers that had been remade. 

The habits of culture grow around blind spots like scar tissue. A few years ago, I rescued a root-bound pine from a friend’s side yard and planted it at home. The gardener and I carefully tied pieces of soft plastic rope around the trunk to gently secure it to the metal stakes keeping it upright. At first, the growth above ground was slow, nearly invisible. Years passed. Neither I nor the gardener noticed as the trunk grew thick around the strangling cord until, eventually, the tree bulged around it and subsumed the cord altogether. Now, the plastic rope is encased in its bark. Surely the rope damages internal tissue and impedes the flow of sap. I marvel at the tree’s adaptability, and its silent acquiescence, knowing that neither of us will fully recover: my lack of attention caused a permanent wound. It is one that I can daily forget, but the tree cannot.

Catherine the Great, Louis XVI and King George III all shared Frederick the Great’s enthusiasm for correcting Nature’s frivolous excess. “Unimproved” land was wasted land: no crops, no towns, no taxes, no military access. Increasingly, the State saw itself as responsible for creating a pervasive sense of order that organized both exterior and interior space. Governments began keeping detailed records of births, marriages, and deaths, as well as land and resources. Copious information was required in order to create forests and rivers that were ‘scientific’. Across Europe, Russia and Britain, statistics were on the ascendant: Information was the fuel that fed the machine of the absolutist state, but the larger purpose was… to ‘order, measure, and discipline’.³ Nature came to be considered as a vast machine.⁴ New towns were laid out in squares and straight lines. Boundaries became fixed rather than fluid. The towns, roads, factories, and farms that sprang up in place of Nature’s neglected mess made progress visible. ‘Defectiveness’ and ‘improvement’ dovetailed with the notion of Original Sin, and with orthodoxy and bigotry of all kinds, which seek rigid distinctions between messy and neat, us and them, human and non. The perception of Nature as defective and in need of improvement was a hallmark of Enlightenment thinking throughout Europe, and was a philosophy compatible with industrialization.

As Europe’s rivers and bogs were brought under human control, the gaze of the State turned to fire, which, like water, was viewed as threatening the order that progress required. This meant breaking the natural cycles of fire that bring renewal to forests and grasslands. Large swaths of brush and trees were cleared for firebreaks. Next came the extirpation of animals and birds, who were perceived as competitors with humans for the fruits of river bottom bounty. Unamenable to domestication and ranked low on the Great Chain of Being, these species were considered verminous or predatory. The list was long. It included, of course, rats, mice, and foxes, but also moles, weasels, polecats, beavers, and a wide variety of birds and insects that represented a threat to livestock, orchards, or crops.⁵ Wolves, bears and lynx were hunted to extinction. Most of the animals that were destroyed are keystone species: the landscape suffered without them, and so did humans, though no one noticed at first. Hamsters and birds in search of food in newly planted fields were particularly targeted: by 1767, twelve million sparrows were slaughtered. Their heads were delivered to officials in exchange for payment.

In Germany after World War I, the notion of defective Nature was easily expanded to include defective humans: Slavs and prostitutes were referred to as ‘swamp dwellers’. They were considered murky, putrid, useless, and unclean. Nazi ideology was a logical extension of Prussia’s obsessions, with a shared vocabulary whose rallying cry was blood, soil, living space, and – above all – race.⁶ Jews were already reviled. By World War I, those that wanted to leave were permitted to cross Germany from Russia to Bremen en route to the New World only if they traveled in sealed trains.⁷ Culture came to mean human progress that was clean, orderly, and productive, shaped by racially pure colonists. During the reign of Frederick the Great, more than three hundred thousand ethnic German immigrants were brought into Prussia to remake its wasteful landscape. It was colonists who were expected to make the new-won land productive, colonists who would grow the feed that fattened the herds, tend the meadows that grazed the cavalry horses, and raise the corn that was needed in the growing capital.⁸ 

These notions of Nature’s need for human intervention, and of certain groups of people having claims on certain land whose thriving depended on their control, became embedded in the thinking of European immigrants, including Jews: it traveled with them, stowed away in their minds like the seeds on ships that arrived with the biota of colonial commerce. These ideas made their way to the U.S. and from there to Israel, with repercussions that continue to deepen and multiply today. Educated European immigrants became leaders of government, drivers of science and luminaries of cultural achievement. They shaped the military, financial, economic, agricultural, and medical practices that underpin western industrial culture, especially the reliance on science and technology that drives the mechanized disconnection of human beings from the Natural World.

‘Scientific’ forests and rivers replaced natural ones. Factories clung to denuded and straightened riverbanks, spewing effluents into the pristine water, including phenols and coal dust, and, later, also fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and dyes. Countless species disappeared into the maw of industrial zeal. Along most rivers, salmon, shad, sturgeon, and pike were eliminated. All are keystone species. Beaver, otter, tree frogs and mayflies – also keystones, suffered precipitous declines. Hydro dams, small and large, made rivers impassible for migrating fish, particularly salmon: female salmon make nests by lying sideways, fanning their tails in the gravel of the riverbed, dislodging silt and sand that is distributed downstream. This protects the river from floods and erosion by reducing the amount of gravel in motion when waters rise due to heavy rainfall or snowmelt. River ‘improvements’ meant that salmon spawning beds were eliminated or cut off and local salmon became extinct. At the time, salmon were considered a cheap and inexhaustible resource, used as fodder for animals as well as food for humans. Salmon are keystone species in both aquatic and terrestrial environments: more than forty different kinds of fish, birds and mammals rely directly on salmon to survive. Oceans suffered without them. Forests, insects, mollusks, birds, bears, and wolves went hungry. The few salmon, eels, and other fatty fish that remained stored phenols and other chemicals in their tissues and became inedible. The umbilicus of the story we are living now has become the story told in umbilical cords: in 2022, 100% of all umbilical cords in the U.S. and eleven other countries contained PFA’s – polyfluoroalkyl substances, the so-called ‘forever chemicals’ now found in water, air, fish and soil.⁹

About five hundred miles west of the Oder lies the venerable river once affectionately known as Father Rhine. The Rhine of 1750 looked nothing like it does today. Dark and waterlogged, filled with snaking channels half-hidden by overhanging lianas and navigable only in a flat-bottomed boat, these dwelling places of mosquitoes, frogs, fish, wild boar, and wolves would not only have looked but smelled and sounded quite different form the open landscape of windmills and manicured fields familiar to twentieth-century Germans.¹⁰ Father Rhine was shortened from 220 to 170 miles – one quarter of his overall length, and more than two thousand islands were removed. He was surgically amputated, scraped and straightened so ships could make their way upstream. Tributaries and alluvial basins were severed and the natural dynamics of flow were destroyed. In addition to toxic chemicals released by textile dying plants, factories and refineries, new towns discharged untreated waste directly into the river. By the 1960’s, the Rhine was considered ‘the sewer of Europe’. 

In 1986, a Sandoz warehouse caught fire and released more than a thousand tons of pesticides, fluorescent dye, organophosphates, and mercury compounds into the river, turning it red. Like Father Rhine, the spill flowed from Switzerland through Germany, France, and the Netherlands, spreading death for hundreds of miles. Toxic clouds hung suspended in the air. Stored chemicals and firefighting compounds filtered into groundwater and the ph. of the river was drastically altered.¹¹  Five hundred thousand fish were killed, along with most of the river’s benthic communities and eels. The waves of misfortune crashing into us now were set in motion by human doing.

When it is time, usually in autumn, the eels of Europe leave their freshwater homes to embark on a four-thousand-mile pilgrimage to the Sargasso Sea, where they will spawn and die. The journey can take a year, sometimes two. Carried by currents and Earth’s magnetic pull, they are joined by eels from Scandinavia, Britain, North Africa, and the Mediterranean, as they drift and swim, carried by the Gulf Stream current to the ancient waters of their birth.

The Sargasso is a sea with no shoreline. Instead, it is bordered by four mighty currents: the North Atlantic Current, the North Atlantic Equatorial Current, the Canary Current, and the Gulf Stream – also called the North Atlantic Drift. When these currents meet, they synchronize in a clockwise rotation around the deep and motionless bulge of water at the center, which is several feet higher than the flowing fence of its edges.

The Sargasso is elliptically shaped, like an egg about the size of the continental United States – two million square miles. The water is warm, on average between 64 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Because of its warmth and the lack of fresh water added by rivers or ice, it evaporates quickly, especially at the center. This is also why the Sargasso is highly saline and low in nutrients: in particular, it lacks nitrate, phosphate and trace minerals that feed plankton. Because of this, it’s considered a liquid desert. Yet, the Sargasso is home to a baffling profusion of creatures – more than two hundred species, of which eleven are endemic and found nowhere else.

The Sargasso Sea is a sapphire bowl 23,000 feet deep. Its name is derived from the floating blanket of sargassum seaweed that festoons its surface, known as the Golden Rainforest of the Atlantic. Unlike other seaweed, sargassum reproduces as it floats, suspended by oxygen-filled bubbles in spheres the size of grapes. Migrating birds perch and feed on the floating canopy. The seaweed is also a carbon sink. When a piece of sargassum breaks off, it grows. And when the seaweed dies, it drifts down to decompose, feeding fish and coral, and the benthic community that blankets the ocean floor. Beneath the surface, the seaweed cover protects baby eels, sea turtles, crabs, shrimp, tuna, dolphinfish, white marlin, and baby porbeagle sharks whose mothers leave the cold northern waters where they usually live to come to the warm Sargasso to give birth. Along the way, they descend nearly five thousand feet to feed. 

Eels, too, swim deep: in daytime, they can dive more than 1200 meters to avoid danger and ascend to a depth of 300 meters at night, in search of food, though no one knows for sure whether or not they feed as they go.¹² The depths they select correspond with.¹³ When the water becomes too cold (at somewhere around forty degrees, Fahrenheit), the eels fall into a motionless torpor and drift. Sometimes they get trapped in eddies – circular currents that bring deep, cold-water nutrients swirling toward the surface. Their journey comprises a continuous array of sensations that guide them: sensitive membranes bulge, skin stretches, and bodies flatten in response to changing pressures at different depths and changes in water density and content. Maybe there’s a tug on belly or flank as Earth’s magnetic field pulls them close to keep them on course as they limn the underwater curves of the continents.thermal contours.

In order to spawn, eels must find each other. They are guided by pheromones and a complex combination of cues: odors, temperature changes, salinity fronts, geomagnetic anomalies, vertical movement of temperatures and nutrients, and hydrothermal vents along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. These vents emit scented, nutrient-rich plumes that contain olfactory markers that guide the eels to congregate near the southern tip of the Azores, just outside the liquid boundary of the Sargasso Sea itself. As eels approach terrestrial shores, they can detect the distinctive odors of freshwater plumes and even the scents of inland waters. They can ride the tides toward shore and swim counter to tidal currents that might carry them back out to sea. As eels approach freshwater estuaries, salinity gradients become primary navigation cues.¹⁴

Female eels lay between two and ten million eggs; the males find them and broadcast their sperm to bathe the eggs in milky, floating clouds. Still, their reproductive secrets remain a mystery. Sigmund Freud dissected more than four hundred of them, searching in vain for eel gonads. When eels are born, two days after fertilization, they emerge by the billions. Hatchlings are transparent: they measure about 3 millimeters – the size of a grain of rice or a tiny leaf. Each is born with a genetically imprinted geomagnetic map of the migration routes they will use during their lifetime. Starting in spring, the babies begin making their way back to wherever their parents arrived from, not all at once, but in staggered departures. Their return journey is a mirror of their forebears’ arrival, as they float and drift for another year, sometimes two, carried by the Gulf Stream back to the rivers of home. Along the way, they grow into translucent threads and are known as glass eels. In time, they turn opaque, then brownish gray, then yellow as they mature. This takes four years at least, and sometimes as many as eighteen. Once the eels have returned to their rivers, they eat mollusks, insects, larvae, and aquatic invertebrates. At night, they crawl up on land to forage for snails and worms. As adults, eels live in freshwater for twenty years and more, sometimes as many as fifty. In captivity, they can live into their eighties. One individual that was kept as a pet in Sweden lived to 155. Like us, in old age they turn silver.¹⁵

^{No other creatures know what eels know.}

Juvenile eels are called elvers: a word that sounds like elders. In their migrations, the very old and the very young are paired, traveling the same path in opposite directions. Elvers also sounds like elves – the tiny, magical forest creatures who are loathe to trust humans. The ambivalence of eels is well warranted: when they have completed their perilous journey back to Europe, they arrive at rivers they cannot enter. Those that survive the journey are blocked by dams or shredded in turbines. There is no place for eels. Gone are the mud and gravel beds to rest in. Gone the oxbows, meanders, marshes, peat bogs and fens. In their place are narrow chutes, lined with stones or cement, designed for ships with deep hulls to move quickly along rivers that have been straightened to “correct” their frivolous inefficiencies. Throughout Europe and beyond, riverbank forests and swamps have been replaced by factories, fields, and towns. The eels wait at the mouth of the Rhine, the Rhone, the Oder, the Vistula and all the rivers of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East where they once thrived. As they wait, they grow thin, rippling at locks with no keys, each eel-Self a banner waving an urgent message that humans will not read.

One hundred years ago, eels made up about half of the fish by weight in most European waterways… Medieval England had an eel culture in the same way we think of England having a tea culture (now).¹⁶ Eels were so numerous that they blanketed the surface of rivers in vast, undulating slicks. Even now, fishermen speak of the wave: migrating eels make a racket that sounds like a loudly fizzing soft drink..¹⁷ At one time, eels, like salmon, were so abundant they were thought to be inexhaustible. People paid taxes, tithes, rents and debts with dried eels impaled on sticks. Now, most of the eels consumed by humans are bred in captivity. More than ninety tons – about three hundred million eels a year – are exported illegally to Asia. They are captured as glass eels and smuggled to eel farms far from home.¹⁸ 

Eels are a keystone species. Without eels, essential nutrients cannot circulate. Migrating birds and fish rely on fatty eels to sustain them on their long journeys. But since the 1970’s, wild eel populations have plummeted by 98% and European eels are now critically endangered. Their absence means that all the waterways that are missing their eels are now endangered as well. Like the ebbing populations of eels, the Gulf Stream current has begun to collapse. If that happens, like eels, we too, will be stranded.

Research on eels looks at tangibles: eels are considered a sentinel species for measuring hazardous chemicals that bioaccumulate in the fatty tissues of eel bodies as they do in human ones, though eels are monitored for only a handful of the more than thirty thousand chemicals that people dump into rivers. These days, eels are laden with toluene, benzene, ethylbenzene and the xylenes used to make plastic and unleaded gas. They contain Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC’s) used in herbicides, pesticides, solvents, waxes, gums, resins, wood preservatives, and paints; as an insecticide for termites and borers; in making dyes; and as a coolant, deodorizer, or degreaser.¹⁹ Eels also contain brominated flame retardants used in extruded polystyrene insulation, upholstery, seat cushions, adhesives, wires, cables, carpets, draperies and hard plastic shells for computers, televisions and stereos. They contain heavy metals such as cadmium and lindane, both of which are carcinogenic endocrine disruptors used as insecticides on sugar beets and oil seed crops (ironically known as rape). These substances are dumped, untreated, directly into rivers and lakes. The River Leie, in Belgium, is force-fed more than 3,000 cubic meters of toxic chemicals – about 800 million gallons, per day.²⁰ Multiply that by the thousands of rivers, tributaries and canals that were originally home to eels. All this and high on cocaine, too: European rivers are awash in recreational drugs, along with prescription drug residues that accumulate in eels in the brain, muscles, gills and skin.²¹ In marine ecosystems, antibiotics, anti-depressants and amphetamines affect the whole food chain because they change the bacterial or algal communities in water, and can affect the growth rate and life cycles of insects.²²

In addition to chemicals, sewage, garbage and drugs, eels must also contend with shipping noise that interferes with navigation and the ability to avoid predators. When necessary, eels can swim backwards, but not fast enough to avoid our toxins or escape the racket we make.

In May of 1887, when my grandfather was born, the Apascia river was full of eels. By day, they rippled across its surface. By night they foraged along its banks. As he took his first breath, millions of elvers were beginning their perilous return to Europe as tiny, translucent flecks. In fall, as he slithered across the floor and practiced sitting upright, elder eels swam past the town toward the sea to begin their pilgrimage of return. By the time he died, in 1964, the rivers of Europe were empty. Like the eels, our predicament is a legacy of the thinking that justifies profit extracted by force.

The peril of eels is analyzed and expressed as economic data: the loss of jobs for eel fishermen, or the lack of eels on dinner plates. Then there’s the loss of ‘ecosystem services’ measured by the benefits of eels to humans. But what about the agony of the eels themselves? What about eel lore and eel language? Eels are mythic, and ancient. They’ve been around for thirty million years.²³ They are a sensory wonder: not only do eels migrate from salt water to fresh and back again and can breathe both in water and on land; not only are they guided by genetics, by Earth’s magnetic field, and an array of sensory signposts, they interact with Earth’s core as they hover above thermal vents. No other creatures do all these things. No other creatures know what eels know. And what about their tranquility and their languid surrender? Despite our ignorance, the quiescence of eels and their waters has its purpose. Loss of calm is a significant loss. The eels and their strange pilgrimage are, were, something vital and quiet, silently weaving the world. What does that loss do to the balance of things, and, therefore, also to us?