Coming Home: Prosek To Speak At Easton Library Tomorrow

When eels come home, they swim thousands of miles from freshwater streams, lakes and rivers, far out into the salty sea where they were spawned.

For artist, author, naturalist, explorer and eel tracker James Prosek, home is anywhere in nature.

But Prosek has many other homes as well.

One is the , whose collection of John James Audubon’s Birds of America reproductions schooled him from an early age in observing, sketching and rendering in watercolors the native birds of Connecticut, setting his course for life.

The Easton Library is where he’ll be this Saturday from 3 to 5 p.m. giving a talk about his latest book, Eels, published by Harper Collins last year. It’s subtitled An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World’s Most Mysterious Fish.

Eels is his tenth book.

In the company of Rachel Carson – who wrote of a mass migration of silver eels from a marsh, “passing from human sight and almost from knowledge” – and Audubon – who watched thousands of eels struggling to ascend Niagara Falls to return to the sea during his explorations of the frontier – Prosek developed a fascination with eels, the only known fish to swim thousands of miles from freshwater to open ocean to spawn.

"Like the people I met in my travels, I get a good feeling from eels," he writes. "The nights and early mornings I've spent with them during the fall migration have pulsed with energy and light."

Over 11 years, he interviewed scientists, befriended eccentric eel trappers and lived among indigenous people of New Zealand and Micronesia who consider eels to be sacred gods. East Coast and European eels are believed to return to the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic off Bermuda to spawn and then die, and Asian eels have their place in the Pacific, but their life cycles remain cloaked in scientific mystery.

Some indigenous populations prefer it that way, Prosek discovered.

“They don’t want to know where they spawn,” he said during an interview with Patch. “Their attitude is: Why can’t you leave that unknown place sacred?”

"We allow ourselves to believe that nature can be explained. In the process we confine nature to those explanations," he writes. "The eels, through their simplicity of form, their preference for darkness, and their grace of movement in the opposite direction of every other fish, have helped me to see things for which there is no easy classification, things that can't be quantified or solved, and get to the essence of experience."

Prosek traced the massive collapse of eel populations around the world to Asian appetites for grilled eel and sushi and a multi-billion-dollar industry that keeps them fed and makes glass eels (the immature stage), at $7,500 per pound, the most expensive food fish in the world. His investigations also took him to the coast of Maine and Japanese eel farms.

Depending upon where he is at any given moment, the peripatetic Prosek is a scientist, philosopher, jungle-whacker, musician, lyricist, anthropologist, filmmaker and prodigious note-taker. Tall, handsome and well-spoken, a self-described romantic, he’s the icon The New York Times has dubbed “the Audubon of fish,” displaying his works at art galleries and museums around the world and giving talks, as he did last fall at the New York Explorers Club.

Born in Easton in 1975, he’s never left except to study at Yale and thereafter make frequent nature explorations around the world, often at personal risk. A harrowing journey to find the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and fish for trout in the midst of strife between the Turks and Kurds is one example. 

He’s fished for trout on a 41st parallel circumnavigation of the world, a two-year trip recounted in Fly-Fishing the 41st, subtitled From Connecticut to Mongolia and Home Again: A Fisherman’s Odyssey, published in 2003.

“It was a journey not only away from home, but toward it; which is the beauty of traveling in a circle, and the irony of adventure,” he writes in the introduction.

“This suited me, for in the event that I strayed – as I would likely take some latitude with the latitude – as long as I could find my way back to the 41st parallel I would not get lost.”

His naturalist’s life began around the age of five with family bird-watching outings in local woods. He took to sketching and coloring the birds, using the Easton Library’s Audubon collection as a guide.

His artistic drive began manifested itself early. Prosek was drawing from his imagination from the age of two, or probably as soon as he discovered crayons didn't taste good. 

His parents — both are of Czech origin, though his mother was born in Italy — recognized and nurtured his precocious artistic talents.

And so Prosek also found a home on the third floor of Yale’s Peabody Museum in New Haven, where his father, a teacher of astronomy, would take him to spend hours at the “Birds of Connecticut” display.

Back at home on the eastern edge of Easton, Prosek methodically assembled his early “bird books” based, like Audubon’s, on field observations, his woodland birds perched life-like on native bushes and tree branches.

Prosek’s equally focused pursuit of fish, and particularly freshwater trout, began at age nine when he took up the sport with a buddy in Easton. The pond across the street from his house became his personal nature sanctuary and thereafter he was rarely without a fishing rod in hand. At the dinner table, he created intricate artificial flies from his feather collections.

As he meandered in the woods, he developed a sixth sense for its sights, smells and sounds. His writings are full of evocative passages establishing the uniqueness of wherever he happens to be.

As an author, Prosek has a wide range.

He’s adept as a children’s book author and has published two — A Good Day’s Fishing and Bird, Butterfly, Eel. In clear and simple language and illustrations, he lures budding fishermen and naturalists into the woods and waterways.                  

At the far end of erudition, he cerebrates and philosophizes, revealing the first-class intellect that flourished at Yale, where he studied English, thought of becoming an architect and, while there, published his first book, Trout: an Illustrated History, a compilation of 70 portraits of colorful North American trout. It launched him professionally and freed him from becoming an architect. The book has sold 70,000 copies.

Trout of the World, a collection of 102 watercolors of trout found in the Northern Hemisphere, followed in 2003.

Both trout volumes follow the pattern of Audubon’s Birds of America: like Audubon, Prosek makes an art of observation and paints wittily and knowledgeably with words accompanying the pictures.

As a writer, he is “at once artful and natural, an original in literature even as he is in painting,” his Yale mentor and Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom noted in a book jacket blurb for Trout of the World.

Prosek encountered Bloom when he was looking for professorial support to write a senior thesis about the fabled 16th century troutsman Izaak Walton, who also knew how to turn a phrase. Walton’s The Compleat Angler, published in England in 1654, is a tour-de-force of nature writing.

Prosek’s goal was to follow in Walton’s footsteps through the English countryside, mingling with the locals, low- and highly-born, in pursuit of trout and a deeper understanding of Walton, in whom Prosek increasingly found a kindred spirit.

In The Complete Angler, which followed in 1999, Prosek describes his breakthrough meeting with Bloom, who called him “dear child” throughout the visit in his Yale office, as a doting parent might. Bloom invited him to his home for dinner, with one condition: Prosek must arrive bearing a gift of trout caught that day for his wife to prepare for their supper, an assignment Prosek easily accomplished with help from another mentor, local game warden Joe Haines.

An original watercolor, titled “Brook trout we caught for Bloom,” opens the first chapter of the book. It depicts two yellow, blue and red-spotted fish laid out on a moss-covered rock, their bright salmon-colored underbellies glistening in the sun.

These days, Prosek’s steps are still tracking those of his unmet mentor Audubon, who spent 18 years trying to capture all the birds of the American frontier to render them life-size, artistically, in his four-volume set published between 1828 and 1838.

Prosek is preparing a collection of watercolors of life-size fish of the oceans for publication in 2012. His portrait of a blue fin tuna caught Cape Cod Bay by a recreational fisherman he accompanied is a masterwork. Prosek observed the richly multi-hued coloration of the prized fish while it was freshly caught; moments later it would lose its luminosity and turn a dullish gray.

Even as Prosek captures the beauty and mystery of the ocean creatures with his paintbrush on a typical day in his warmly lit studio, he's mentally plotting out the discourse he's writing on ordering nature, the process of dividing natural life into species and categories.

That book was already in progress last spring when Prosek found a new home: a remote mountaintop in Suriname, formerly Dutch Guiana, reachable only by helicopter.

Prosek joined a small Peabody Museum expedition to collect new species of birds from the tropical paradise, a World Heritage site. In between painting watercolors of birds, moths and vipers in the field, he assisted in expedition tasks — collecting birds from nets, firing a 12-gauge shotgun with fine powder, similar to Audubon’s, to bring down birds from the high canopies, deftly skinning the specimens and stuffing them with cotton and, finally, eating their meat, which would otherwise go to waste.

A momento of the rugged 3-week expedition is a photograph of Prosek painting a likeness of a poisonous viper coiled in his lap (it having been killed humanely) under a tarp in a makeshift camp.

In the picture, Prosek projects an aura of Zen-like serenity, despite the fact that his team lost the use of its only satellite phone during a flood one week into the trip and as a result was cut off from all the world for the duration. The nearest known indigenous people lived miles away across dense, impenetrable forest and there was no anti-viper serum in the first-aid kit in the event of a viper bite to a vital organ.

But the photograph betrays no anxiety on Prosek’s part. After all, he had come home.

An exhibit of Prosek's Suriname paintings opens on February 28 at Yale's Whitney Humanities Center in New Haven and runs through June 24.