River Stories: Headwaters To The Sea

The stories in Tom Alkire’s new book, River Stories: Headwaters to the Sea, are about rivers and most of them are about fishing as well. Sometimes meditative, other times humorous, these engaging essays will delight readers who like rivers, fishing and the out-of-doors. The 19 stories flow through the book, beginning from glacial headwaters and alpine creeks to the sea. One story details how our forebears discovered the origins of rivers because for many centuries they thought that rivers originated out of a mysterious subterranean sea.
Other stories include casting out small Elk Hair Caddis flies on quiet spring creeks to floating down raucous whitewater rivers in pursuit of large rainbow trout. Sometimes lyrical and other times practical, these stories include fishing for steelhead in the dead of winter and in the heat of the summer. And as rivers enter tidewater there are more stories -- stories about hooking salmon and halibut in the saltwater using hooks that barely fit in the palm of your hand.
The stories in this book are set in little icy creeks tumbling down steep mountains and big grown-up rivers flowing through rimrock canyons -- waters from California to Alaska, from the Rockies to the Pacific Ocean. These stories are not just about rivers; they are about us because rivers are intertwined with us in so many ways. The people populated in these pages include crusty fly fishermen, homesteaders, Rudyard Kipling, Gonzalo Pizarro, Spey casters, Izaak Walton, ocean-going dorymen, ghosts, a hole-hog sheriff and John the Baptist. All of these narratives written by Alkire are true, or at least as truthful as a fisherman is capable of.