About Headwaters:
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.
Hardcover is available at fine booksellers everywhere.
Signed or personalized, inscribed copies are available through Eagle Harbor Books.
Audio book is available at Penguin Random House
MEDIA REVIEWS
There’s a moment late in Dylan Tomine’s story “The Grand Salami” where he refuses to acquiesce to a flats guide’s insistence that he cast to a school of bonefish. Instead, Tomine decides to do his own thing—because clearly, it’s the right thing. And this moment, arriving as it does late in his new book Headwaters: The Adventures, Obsession, and Evolution of a Fly Fisher (Patagonia Books), captures the essence of the stories he tells and the way he chooses to tell them.
Richard Adams Carey - Wall St. Journal
Some of the author’s most moving essays in this sparkling, elegiac book describe the joy of sharing this sport with his two children, who are growing up fishing for what he knows to be the remnants of crumbs. Mr. Tomine himself seems to have grown into much more than the bum he may once have been, but in the event, we dearly need bums like him— hunters or fishermen who still carry out those basic transactions with the earth that sustained the human race for so many millennia, and who remain so fiercely attached to the once-and-future dream of capturing a fish without scraping the cupboard quite bare.
Publishers Weekly:
Fisherman Tomine (Closer to the Ground) combines incandescent personal reflections and environmental advocacy in this moving paean to fly fishing. “Fishing was never a sport... for me,” Tomine writes at the outset, rather, it’s “who I am.” What follows is a vivid portrait of a man in pursuit of a lifelong obsession. As he relates, his “steelhead jones” had its hooks in him early, during his childhood fishing for trout in Oregon in the 1970s and, later, as a teen “too busy trying to catch my first steelhead” to notice girls. Arriving at adulthood, he recounts such adventures as catching a 90-pound giant trevally bonefish, and embarking on an expedition to the Russian Arctic—where the abundance of trout was rivaled only by the region’s mosquitos. Later chapters witness his evolution from acolyte to conservationist; in one section, he memorably recalls screening the conservationist documentary Artifishal to a sold-out crowd in Japan, where the “culture [is] built around the eating of fish.” Mixing good-natured humor with a reverence of the world around him—“It starts with the fish itself. The sleek, chrome beauty... carrying all the strength and fecundity of the sea to inland waters”—Tomine delivers a work that informs and moves in equal measure. This is sure to reel in readers.
KIRKUS:
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.
Foreword Review:
The essays of fly fisherman Dylan Tomine’s Headwaters cast into global waters, seeking to feed a lifelong addiction.
Tomine’s angling obsession began when he caught a steelhead salmon in Oregon as a boy. His passion lured him to far-flung points in Patagonia and the Russian Arctic. Reeling in interest with its adventure-packed travel accounts, the book ruminates on fishing, fatherhood, and the environment; it also considers threats to fish, including logging, lawn chemicals, and industrialization.
First published in various magazines, these captivating pieces deliver intrigue. Their exploits are organized in chronological order, showing personal growth as well as declines in habitats and aquatic life over time. They raise alarms about climate change, the stocking of hatchery-bred fish, and other threats to the natural world as they telescope between firsthand accounts of fishing expeditions and their overriding concerns about human stewardship of natural resources and the preservation of wild fish populations for the next generation.
Balancing personal and political perspectives in a seamless fashion, the fishing memoir Headwaters is a heartfelt celebration of the sport of angling.
AUTHOR REVIEWS:
Monte Burke, author of Saban and Lords of the Fly
“Early on in this wonderful collection, Dylan Tomine says he was “born to fish.” He was obviously born to write, too. Headwaters exemplifies the very best in angling literature, with prose that is, at various times, hilarious, profound and mournful. The book makes you fight simultaneous urges—Grab a rod and go? Or keep your butt in the chair and continue reading? You win either way.”
Thomas McGuane, Author of 92 in the Shade, The Longest Silence and Cloudbursts
Among thoughtful anglers it may become necessary to find greater meaning in fishing in order to go on appreciating it as they have. No longer aroused by novelty, they are in a quiet crisis that even a free trip to the Seychelles won't resolve. They've loved fishing all their lives but have suffered times when it seemed silly, or too late for something else obsessive like falconry or bow hunting. The tackle industry, syncopated to their rising need for stimulation, isn't getting to them anymore. The new fly fishing efficiencies--improve tennis by removing the net--is no answer. The problem was never that they weren't catching enough fish. They had missed the opportunities for learning about the greater importance of fish and their fragile places; where will they be when their fly rod has turned to dust? Dylan Tomine followed this arc from passionate beginnings, through diligence and expertise, to enlightenment. I can attest: I've fished with Dylan. He's a great angler but he never tries to outfish you. If you ask him how he did, he's liable to say, "I don't remember. I was watching something.”
Callan Wink, author of Dog Run Moon and August
“As someone who’s spent the bulk of his life in pursuit of some fish or another I wish I’d had this book much sooner, to enjoy, yes, but also as a source of validation for a way of living, a talisman to hold up against those with the audacity to suggest that there is some other, greater, more important activity to pursue. Reading Dylan Tomine on fishing is a rare opportunity to glimpse the essential, but often hard-to-pin-down, reason so many of us return again and again to cast our hope into the water.”
Chris Dombrowski, author of Body of Water
"If you stare at the river long enough, you may eventually find your own face in the current. Obsession, in Dylan Tomine's enviable world, is the bright root of discovery. A lovely and immersive book about a life led and fed by moving water, Headwaters shows us just how far the river will carry us if we let it."
