The Elversphere

Last night, I walked past the little stream often overrun with trash. I saw a man down there, with a headlamp and a net. I knew what he was looking for (smelt). I asked him if he was seeing many.

“A few,” he said.

I stood there.

“I have to really wait for them,” he said.

“Good luck,” I said, and carried on to my destination: a dam, or rather, a phenomenon that occurs there—elvers roping. While elvers are strong enough to swim all the way to Maine from the Sargasso Sea, they are not strong enough to make it over the waterfalls themselves, nor is the fishway at this dam fully functional. Elvers can and do, however, create passageways over these obstructions to reach critical upstream habitat by forming themselves into a rope made of their own collective bodies.1