Headwaters: The Adventures, Obsession and Evolution of a Fly Fisherman

by Dylan Tomine, John Larison Narrated by Dylan Tomine

Overview

Christmas Island. The Russian Arctic. Argentine Patagonia. Japan. Cuba. British Columbia.

Dylan Tomine takes us to the far reaches of the planet in search of fish and adventure, with keen insight, a strong stomach and plenty of laughs along the way. Closer to home, he wades deeper into his beloved steelhead rivers of the Pacific Northwest and the politics of saving them. Tomine celebrates the joy-and pain-of exploration, fatherhood and the comforts of home waters from a vantage point well off the beaten path. Headwaters traces the evolution of a lifelong angler's priorities from fishing to the survival of the fish themselves. It is a book of remarkable obsession, environmental awareness shaped by experience, and hope for the future.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

What is fly fishing? Everything.” Anglers will find Tomine’s book a spirited defense of that thesis. — Kirkus Reviews

A die-hard fly fisherman reflects on the glories of angling and his role in diminishing the natural world.

“Fishing was never a sport, a pastime or hobby for me. It was, and continues to be, who I am.” So writes Tomine, who has been fishing the Skykomish and other northwestern rivers since he was a kid. He was so obsessed that on Sundays, his single mother, a graduate student, would take him to the river and, as he cast his lines, do her homework while waiting in a parking area nearby. In this collection of his writings in sports and fishing journals, Tomine recounts some of his excellent adventures. In one shaggy dog story, he recalls being in a van in Russia in which was hidden a block of Swedish cheese so stinky that it ignited a pitched battle over which of the fishing adventurers had farted. In a less unpleasantly odorous tale, the author praises an Argentine barbecue during which his plate held “a significant fraction—like one fourth to one half—of an entire animal.” Tomine’s principal goal is to bag steelhead trout, of which he writes with affection and intelligence. His principal opponent throughout is a bureaucratic system that stocks the rivers of the Pacific Northwest with hatchery-bred trout, which crowd out wild fish even with the removal of dams on those streams. “If the point of dam removal is wild salmon recovery,” he asks, “why would we spend millions of dollars on something that works counter to the point?” Tomine ponders how climate change is affecting fish populations, wild and hatchery-grown, and his own role as a world traveler in putting down a heavy carbon footprint on the land. Mostly, however, the pieces are easily digested celebrations of the easy freedom of being on a river, rod and reel in hand.

“What is fly fishing? Everything.” Anglers will find Tomine’s book a spirited defense of that thesis. — _{Kirkus Reviews}

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178912737
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	04/12/2022
Series:	Patagonia
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Foreword

I learned to fish before I learned to read, but books—not bluegill or trout—stoked my boyhood interest into the inferno that still burns red-hot inside this midlife angler. We lived eighteen miles from the nearest trout stream, which was too far for my BMX bike, and so I was forced to take my fishing where I could get it: in back-issues of Field and Stream, and later from pages written by the likes of John Gierach, Ted Leeson, and Thomas McGuane.

Once I had a driver’s license and a drift boat, fishing became a daily ritual of exploration and discovery, yet the reading habit stuck. After a day on the water, I’d often devote an hour or two to tying tomorrow’s flies and then fall asleep with a fish story in hand. It was on one such night in my late twenties that I read an essay by a writer new to me, Dylan Tomine. It was called “State of the Steelhead,” and it’s collected here.

Something about Tomine’s voice drew me in. During the years to come, when I found a new story of his in a magazine, I’d flip straight to that page and read it first, often leaning toward the prose as if it was a dry fly bobbing down a riffle.

Part of Tomine’s charm on the page, then and now, is that he sounds like the ideal campfire guest. He’s funny and profound, humble, and well traveled.

Back then, I read his stories to be swept up in the currents of his latest adventure. He was exploring rivers I could only dream of, and not as a dude who paid for his five days and six nights, but as a devotee of the watershed who camped on the moss or the couches of sympathetic locals. Of course, I’d had other writer crushes, but for the first time in my life, I worked up the courage to pen a fan letter.

To my surprise, Tomine responded. After a few months, our email thread spanned tens of thousands of words, spurred on by the realization that we grew up in the same small college town in Oregon, half a generation apart. We had fished the same little cutthroat creeks and admired the same local angling legends (praise be Andy Landforce). We decided we needed to fish together on the old waters. We did. It was awesome.

In the almost fourteen years since I penned that letter, I’ve remained a Tomine fan. I like to think I bought the very first copy of his book, Closer to the Ground. Both my editions are signed. I’m still reading Tomine now because he’s a writer I’ve grown to trust.

Since the spark of our consciences, Tomine and I have shared a passion, a landscape, and its people. His new book delivers its audience to far corners of the planet; I can confirm the authenticity of his depiction of our shared rivers.

Headwaters is a book to reach for when you want to go fishing but can’t. It’s rich with the pleasures of angling: exploration, youthful obsession let off its leash, awe before fleeting beauty. In prose as fertile as a beaver pond, Tomine pays homage to the scaly abundance that still swam the rivers of the Pacific Northwest during the 1990s, and he bears witness to the steep decline in that abundance over the years since. Yes, this is a book that charts a fishing life, one man’s movement from angling bum to fish conservationist, but it’s more than that. Like a line cast over shadowed water, these pages come taut with hope for what happens next.

John Larison, author of Whiskey When We’re Dry Bellfountain, Oregon

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