I am entranced by this slender, luminous volume. Ryan Schnurr has created a subtle monument to a place that we overlook, yet glows with sacredness under his measured gaze. Delightful. -- Luis Alberto Urrea, author, The Devil's Highway and Into the Beautiful North

Ryan Schnurr is a keeper of the spirit of John McPhee, Edward Abbey, and Annie Dillard -- he writes about nature intimately and with a sense of wonder, but he's forever alert to the ways our environment is wounded and reshaped by our greed and neglect. The Maumee River may be relatively small and unknown, but reading this book it'll feel as big and important as the Mississippi: In the Watershed stretches from the glaciers of eons past to this year's algae blooms, from wars with Native Americans to Midwest industrial history. It's a rich, complex, and fragile place, and Schnurr is a superb guide through it. -- Mark Athitakis, author, The New Midwest: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt

The land surface of Earth is a quilt of watersheds, each one gathering runoff that reveals what humans have been doing in the catchment area. All the poisons we spray or dump on the ground, all the soils we expose to erosion, eventually wind up in creeks and rivers, lakes and oceans. Every watershed needs observers who monitor its health, who care about the quality of wild and human life it supports. The Maumee Valley now has a new and keen-eyed caretaker in Ryan Schnurr, who has written an engaging narrative about a journey downriver from the headwaters to Lake Erie, braiding together his personal observations with history, science, and folklore. --Scott Russell Sanders, author, Earth Works: Selected Essays and A Conservationist Manifesto