Embedded Files
Tommy grew up in the woods. He swims the mountain creeks in every season and grows lots of greens year-round. He prefers biscuits to biscotti, cowboy coffee to cappuccino, and cobbler to creme brulee.
He's bucked a lot of hay; worked on a timber framing and log building crew; followed seabirds out over the ocean from sandbars in Brazil and Argentina in sketchy airplanes and tuned his ears to the local language over cachaça and beer in coastal fishing villages in Brazil’s Nordeste; climbed cliffs from New York to the Mojave Desert, to British Columbia and the Mecca of Yosemite; swum under the ice; crossed North America by land a dozen times; steered rafts through the wildwater gorges of the New and Gauley rivers, living in his old canvas tent from May through October.
These things’ll shape you.
Those West Virginia rivers are where his life flowed together with Heather’s, and that tent was the first home they shared. Now they share a bigger little house with three rowdy younguns.
This’ll shape you too, and them.
For three years, Tommy rode his bicycle from an L.A. apartment through Beverly Hills to law school. They made him wear his wedding suit to the bar exam, so he wore his birthday suit in the river to celebrate afterwards. One year he grew tobacco and corn cob pipes in his backyard. He’s still giving these out to good friends.
Tommy likes his spring water straight from the mountain, or preserved in sour mash.
He believes that if we live our values, respect each other, and lead when it counts, we might just make it through with a lot of what we love.
What you’ve just read is accurate, mainly―and entirely true. But there’s always a lot more to the story.
Some of the things that shape you the most are harder to write down. Maybe that’s where the music comes in.
Tommy hopes you'll hear his songs like good water―spouting from the mountain, dancing down the creeks, raging in the rivers, and rolling in the surf.
Report abuse