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

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

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