Headwaters: The Adventures, Obsession and Evolution of a Fly Fisherman
Headwaters: The Adventures, Obsession and Evolution of a Fly Fisherman
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781952338083 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Patagonia |
| Publication date: | 04/12/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Sales rank: | 867,642 |
| File size: | 21 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Thomas Francis McGuane III is an American author. His work includes ten novels, short fiction and screenplays, as well as three collections of essays devoted to his life in the outdoors.
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
A dime-sized clump of mussel guts concealing a size-eight bait hook sinks into the murky depths. I lie on the splintery dock, head hanging over the edge and hands cupped around my face, watching it disappear. I am completely absorbed by the task at hand, which is to say, enticing a bullhead or shiner or baby flounder to bite and stay attached. It’s not easy. Most of the fish here are so small our tiny bait won’t fit into their mouths. My fishing partners, Skyla and Weston, are fifteen and twelve years old, respectively. We are killing time, waiting to see if the wind will quit enough to let us launch the boat and do some “real” fishing, but disappointment has turned into a nearly fanatical level of intensity. When Skyla rears back to set the hook and her rod tip bends into the slightest of curves, that old, familiar feeling surges through my stomach. Fish on!
After a lifetime of dragging a fly rod around the world in search of large and glamorous fish species, it’s more than a little disorienting to discover that this moment on the old dock strikes me in the same spot as that twenty-pound steelhead on the Dean or the sight of giant trevally tearing into a school of bonefish. Maybe to a slightly lesser degree, but still, the feeling is there. And I am reminded that whatever ambiguity and doubt may cloud my day-to-day thoughts, there is one thing I know for sure: I was born to fish.
Fishing was never a sport or hobby for me. It was, and continues to be, who I am. In a vast majority of photos taken of me as a kid, I am holding one kind of fish or another, smiling through the amber of old Kodachrome. In fact, pretty much all of my childhood memories involve fish as well. When we went to the market, I made a beeline to the seafood counter to study the fish. When we crossed a bridge, I strained for a glimpse of water and the possibilities it held.
All of this makes for a pretty strange kid. While I was careening around town on my bike with a fishing rod across the handlebars, or holed up in my room poring over the well-worn pages of an ancient Herter’s catalog, my contemporaries worked on their jump shots and traded baseball cards. Later, when the more mature among my peers started delving into the mystery of girls, I was too busy trying to catch my first steelhead to notice. When I recall people saying I was “obsessed,” it occurs to me now that they were probably being charitable.
As a young adult, my life revolved around a carefree fishing schedule, where the main concerns were water levels, weather, and scraping up enough cash for the next trip. Summers, I guided in Bristol Bay. In the off-season, I fished wherever and whenever; traveling from the Klamath up through the Deschutes, the Hoh, the Thompson, the Bella Coola, and on into Skeena Country, mostly on a mission to quench an insatiable thirst for steelhead.
For a long time, I found the comfort of home waters on the Skykomish River, where I probably spent close to seventy days a year. Most of those days were during the Sky’s famous March and April catch-and-release, wild-steelhead season. It was fantastic fishing, filled with big, wild fish that chased down flies in classic water, and an opportunity to develop an intimate understanding of a single watershed. Better yet, it was just forty-five minutes from my home in Seattle. Those days, I worried very little about anything beyond my ability to catch more fish.
In 2001, I received the proverbial wake-up call: My beloved Skykomish was closing for the spring season, an emergency ruling necessitated by the dwindling wild steelhead population. I’m ashamed to admit, this was the first time anything about conservation ever crossed my mind. But it hit me hard. As I write this, more than nineteen years later, the Sky remains closed in March and April. Each year, when tree frogs start chirping and buds appear on salmonberry canes, I feel an almost physical ache over the loss of this fishery. It’s still open in December and January for hatchery steelhead, and there are usually a few wild fish mixed in, but I can hardly bring myself to fish the old, familiar places anymore. I’m not sure why. Maybe I just don’t want to be the guy who shoots the last buffalo.
In the years since the Skykomish closed, I’ve had the great fortune to travel widely in search of fish, often writing for various publications and representing fly fishing companies. Yes, the word boondoggle comes to mind. But the places! Christmas Island, Arctic Russia, the Outer Banks, Patagonia, Japan, Cuba, and countless days on the Skeena and other systems in British Columbia. The Bulkley, nearly nine hundred miles from where I live, became my de facto home river. Somewhere along the way, I realized that nothing could fully replace the Skykomish in springtime for me, and I have been forced by circumstance—and a vague sense of guilt—to wade ever deeper into the issues surrounding wild fish conservation.
I think the stories in this book, written across the better part of two decades and arranged more or less in chronological order, show a kind of arc in consciousness. My daughter, Skyla, was born around the time my first story was published, and Weston followed three years later. My fishing and writing have been shaped by them and thoughts of their future ever since. Even when traveling, I find it’s hard to fish anywhere now without thinking about how it used to be, what the future might look like, and how my own travel impacts the resource. I’m just not the same person I was back when I started writing these stories.
I’m not the same fisherman, either. Priorities change. I find myself looking forward to fishing trips as much for the company of good friends as I do the actual fish. There’s a deeper appreciation for the natural and cultural history of a place, and more time spent watching the weather and birds. Great meals are often remembered as highlights of any trip. With kids I love being around, work to do, and decent fishing nearby, I spend more time on waters closer to home now. Of course, I still feel the stoke of adventure whenever a trip starts coming together, but it’s different from the raw bloodlust I felt in earlier days.
What about the footprint left by my travels? Does advocacy for wild fish make up for the damage caused by planes, helicopters, jet boats, and trucks employed purely for recreation? Then there’s the car and boat I drive at home, along with the electricity we use, the products we buy, the food we eat… Today, it’s not just the Skykomish. The overall population of wild Puget Sound steelhead hovers below 4 percent of historical average. Many of the great fisheries I’ve traveled to and love are in peril from the ever-present forces of resource extraction. How complicit am I in all of this? I honestly don’t know. But I understand clearly the irony pointed out by former Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell when she talks about driving a gas-powered car to get to the oil company protest.
Back on the old dock, the wind is still blowing and our boat remains on the trailer. The rising tide has brought in bigger bullheads—some pushing well into the four-inch class—and I watch the kids fish with growing intensity. When Weston lands and gently releases a nice, seven-inch mini flounder, my adrenaline really kicks in. Before I know it, I’m rigging up a hand line and pulling another mussel off the underside of the dock to join the fun. I want to feel the bite, that vital sensation of life on the line, and say, yet again, the best two-word sentence in the English language: Fish on!
Looking through the stories in this book, I feel overwhelming gratitude. What an amazing world we live in. I just hope the one Skyla and Weston inherit will be at least as good, if not better. There’s plenty of work ahead to make it happen, but I think we have a shot.
Bainbridge Island, Washington
Table of Contents
What People are Saying About This
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. —Monte Burke, author of Saban and Lords of the Fly
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. — Callan Wink, author Dog Run Moon and August
Dylan Tomine vividly recounts an arc many anglers experience, from passionate beginnings, through diligence and expertise, to enlightenment. — Tom McGuane, author, artist and angler
"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." —Chris Dombrowski, author of Body of Water