Headwaters

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