More Tall Tales

Eel Tales
We baited a minnow trap. The minnows came and lured an eighteen-inch eel that ate the minnows. I freed the squirmy eel into the pond. It fled. I mentioned the eel to a lobsterman friend whose family once owned the pond. He told me these two tales. When his uncle was a boy, his uncle regularly rose early and went fishing in the pond. One day before sunup, his uncle watched eels wriggling on land through the heavily dewed grass, migrating from the pond through a meadow, past a fish house and down an embankment into the bay. One day, the uncle said, the sun rose so quickly that the dew dried up faster than the eels could squirm, leaving dozens stranded on land. That day he did not fish, he picked. My friend once saw that same uncle walking on the road from the pond with an eel over each shoulder. His uncle held the eels near their heads with the eels wrapped over his back, and down to his ankles, and dragging behind him. He had fished these monsters from the pond. I told these tales to a teenager who said, "There's something about five foot eels swimming in a dark pond that makes me think twice about ever getting into water again."

-- Courtesy Rev. Peter Panagore, Daily Devotions