Headwaters - by Dylan Tomine (Hardcover)

A conservation advocate and blueberry farmer shares his love of nature with his children by teaching them to forage, fish, and find firewood. -- O Magazine

"Tomine is too modest to boast, but he's clearly an adept writer, and Closer to the Ground is as understated as its author, a quietly compelling account of four seasons of foraging just out the back door... This is some of the most evocative, mouthwatering food writing I've ever read... The strength of the book, of course, is that, like Tomine, it leads by example. It's a paean to eating locally without ever being preachy." --Outside

"...Tomine expresses peace, gratitude, and satisfaction with life and Mother Nature in an homage reminiscent of Noel Perrin's ruminations on the pleasures of the simple life... While Tomine's memoir is decidedly food-focused (particularly food specific to the Pacific Northwest), he also shares thoughts on matters large and small, whether the many uses of plastic buckets or the trade-offs that must be made in choosing a budget-friendly sustainable lifestyle. That their lifestyle creates quality time for the family is evident from a conversation with his daughter and sweet moments in the woods with his son."
--Publishers Weekly

"Tomine weaves his memoir with lyrical passages, family dialogues and accounts of gathering shellfish and chanterelles--as well as delicious descriptions of cooking them--in an engaging, slightly self- deprecating tone... Closer to the Ground inspires readers to examine their own daily lives and rediscover their surroundings." --Shelf Awareness

"Closer to the Ground is a pleasure to read, depicting as it does the days and seasons of a family intent on living joyfully, and providing at the same time a lively meditation on our relationship with nature. I found its buoyant, irrepressible, self-deprecating tone entirely winning, and was drawn in, happily, from page one." --David Guterson, author of Snow Falling on Cedars

"Closer is a good-humored guide to teaching our kids how to learn from nature as teacher and mentor... You can see in Dylan's kids, the more time they spend foraging and fishing with their dad, just how different their relation is to the food they eat, and how they develop a confidence anyone of any age could envy." --Yvon Chouinard, founder and owner of Patagonia

"Tomine finds...a way for regular people to live a little more consciously in a world that underpins the contrails and Twitter feeds of our twenty-first-century civilization. Closer to the Ground is accessible, well written, and optimistic. It is a warm reminder that even on the days when salmon are scarce, it is a kind of sustenance to be in the boat together under the sun and to feel the tension on the lines and the rhythm of shifting water in our bodies. -Orion

"When Dylan Tomine was young, he and his friends would scamper throughout the neighborhood picking blackberries. 'If you pick 'em, I'll bake it, ' his mom would tell him. It was the remembrance of his mom's steaming, fragrant pies, fresh out of the oven that years later would, in part, make wild food gathering a way in which his family could spend time together in the outdoors. In this beautifully written and heartfelt account, Tomine describes his family's forays into nature. They grow vegetables, fish for salmon, dig for oysters, forage for mushrooms, and hunt for deer. The book is not about survival. Tomine fully admits that they still get much more of their food from the grocery store, but, rather it's a way to raise a family in modern times while remaining grounded with the natural environment." --National Outdoor Book Awards


With quick delivery, injections of humor and such
locales as Northwest steelhead country, Patagonia,
Russia and Japan, Tomine's explorations will keep you
in your chair when the river is too swollen to fish. But
after a day or two of dropping water levels, the author
will be the first to tell you to go cast a line: "It's just
that when the river's right, the river's right. -- Anglers' Journal

Dylan Tomine isn't just a writer, he's a researcher, reporter, biographer, historian, humorist, essayist, and columnist. But mostly, he's just a great storyteller--one that understands a story needn't be twelve thousand words to be compelling. -- The Drake


. . . a sparkling, elegiac book. -- The Wall Street Journal

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. (Apr.) -- Publishers Weekly

Tomine delivers a work that informs and moves in equal measure. This is sure to reel in readers. --Publishers Weekly

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}

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.