Illustration by Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo
There are lights at the bottom of the river. You can see them if you peer down into the water. They look like wobbly lines, iridescent, blue, and silver. They’re not supposed to be there. We’re not supposed to be there.
There’s a secret place, in the Ocean, a gateway to the heart of the world. The water is calm, the deepest blue color. Not many can live there, and that’s why they are our realm. Our families have gathered in this deep blue sea for millennia, coming back from faraway lands, bringing stories of faraway waters. We tell those stories when we die, passing them on to the future generations. Maps are woven into those stories, the directions that our children use to navigate the currents of this world.
Illustration by Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo
We are small when we leave our deep ocean home. We’re light, leaflike, and free. The water guides us, and we blend with the water. Our transparent bodies are just refractions, easily missed, specks of floating light. During the journey, we evolve, and by the time we reach the coast, we’ve grown longer, but not less transparent. This is when we find the streams and rivers our ancestors have traveled; the streams and rivers our ancestors have called home.
A new journey now begins for us, a new adventure. We plunge into the rivers’ estuaries and split into smaller groups as we travel upstream, swimming against the currents. Our bodies change again. Now that we’ve reached our new homes, we become the same color of the riverbeds: brown and yellow. There used to be so many of us. Some might say we owned the rivers, but we prefer to think that we were the rivers.
Illustration by Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo
Other species took advantage of our passage. Freshwater mussels hopped on our backs to swim the currents and find new homes. It was a beautiful life. The rivers lulled us, took us to far away and mysterious places. Sometimes, we ended up in lakes. Some lakes are small, marshy, and nestled in the crooks of mountains. Other lakes are immense, so big they remind us of our birth.
It’s hard to leave our homes. How do you say goodbye to the world you love after thirty years? But we have to think about the future, the generations to come. It always comes a time when it’s your turn to tell the story, and begin a new cycle, a new life. We travel back to the Ocean following the moon. The moon guides us, tells us where to go, reminding us that it is time to return. We take this trip in mass, changing shape as we go. We’re not yellow and brown anymore. We become black, while our bellies are now white. If you were to look up at us, you’d think we were part of the sky. If you were to look down at us, you’d think we were part of the riverbed. Our eyes also change. They become big, some say immense and blue. Blue, like the Ocean we now yearn for. Blue, like our first home.
It should be easy. We travel down the currents, hopping through the rapids, all the way to the sea. That is how the story goes, that is what our parents and grandparents before us told. The story has changed. The rivers have changed. Immense walls now block our way to the sea. They slow down the currents, barring our passage. There’s no way around them, just a hole with many sharp teeth. Most of us don’t make it through the hole. A monster eats us and spits us to the bottom of the river. Our bodies accumulate, and our silver bellies facing the sky are not a disguise anymore. We are hundreds upon hundreds, lying at the bottom of the river. As the sun shines upon us, you can see lights, wobbly, iridescent, and blue.
There are lights at the bottom of the river. They’re not supposed to be there. We’re not supposed to be there.
Illustration by Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo
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Once one of the primary guardians of the Upper St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario basin, the American eel population has crashed and is now 2% of its former size. Two major hydroelectric facilities along the St. Lawrence River, the Moses-Saunders dam (Cornwall, ON) and the Beauharnois Generating Station (Valleyfield, QC), cumulatively kill 41% of the mature "silver eels" each year as they pass through dam turbines on their way to their ancestral home, the Sargasso Sea.
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