Monday morning. Eagles’ Super Bowl LIX rout in the rearview. Cold and calm. Skies icy gray. Intermittent flurries flying. Fresh snowbanks framing roads.

Splendid day for a road trip.

No sun. Classic bluegrass spinning. Loud. Stimulating. Stringed instruments trading the lead, helping to ricochet spontaneous thoughts through the rocky, vegetated canyons of my mind.

What random thoughts entertain a solo, septuagenarian traveling man on such a ride? Bear with me. That’s precisely why I’m here. I’ll try recapture snippets from that heavy-footed journey up the slice of our Connecticut Valley I call home.

Call the mission pickup and delivery. Destination: Plainfield, New Hampshire. Awaiting me there at an auction house less than 90 minutes’ north was an Oriental rug I bought from the comforts of home during the second half of the runaway Super Bowl. I had found it in an online 600-plus-lot listing, registered for the sale, and suggested to my wife that a distracted Super Bowl marketplace could be the perfect place to buy it as a replacement for a threadbare Oriental that didn’t us a dime.

We both liked the rug, particularly its large, solid, light-blue central field surrounding a small medallion. The design was remarkably different from any of our Persian rugs, and the first of its style I remember laying eyes on. Why not go for it?

I can’t say we stole it. There were 26 bids – two of them mine. Still, when the hammer fell, I felt confident we had done well. Had we purchased it at one of those pricey retail shops advertised on TV, it would have cost at least five times what we paid. That’s what I love about auctions; that and the action, the banter. Social entertainment.

Soon after my 9:45 a.m. departure from our upper Greenfield Meadows home, my thoughts began to swirl. Across the Pumping Station’s covered bridge on the back road to Interstate 91 in Bernardston, the sight of the Eunice Williams Monument was the impetus. All it took was a quick glance at the steep hill behind it, climbing north from the riverside flat where an Indian tomahawk had abruptly mercy-killed Deerfield Reverend John Williams’ struggling wife.

Weakened by recent childbirth, the unfortunate 1704 captive displayed obvious signs that she wasn’t capable of walking to Canada with her French and Indian captors. Shivering, swooning, and ready to fall after a frigid Green River crossing, she was struck down.

I figured the weather for that tragic event some 321 years ago would not have been much different than what greeted me to the site. The northward trail looked cold and daunting indeed – likely about how it must have felt that fateful March 1 morning.

As I drove past the monument to the top of a gentle slope heading to Leyden Road, my thoughts traipsed to a place called Larabee’s Grove. Definitely a well-known Greenfield placename back in the day, it appears in accounts of the 1884 monument-dedication ceremony as the place where participants gathered before walking a short distance to the engraved stone marker. I have often wondered where exactly that small patch of open woods or orchard stood.

Then I ponder whether those Larabees were from the same bolt of cloth as Sixties slugger Len Larabee, of Greenfield baseball lore. I can’t imagine he isn’t connected to that “Country Farms” neighborhood. Had I been raised where I currently reside, community memory would have answered that question long ago. But I’m a Meadows transplant – South Deerfield was my playground.

Not long after filling my tank in Bernardston, at a rare gas station where self-service is prohibited, I was heading north on the Interstate. Soon, heading down the hill to the first Brattleboro exit, I passed the “Fort Dummer” sign, which always stirs my historic juices. The French and Indian War fort was built in 1724 and survived about 50 years.

My first thoughts went to Major John Arms, a distant Deerfield relative and one of Fort Dummer and Brattleboro’s first settlers. His tavern was “Bratt’s” first, located a bit upriver from the fort on the river terrace that today holds Brattleboro Retreat. Arms Tavern was known as a favorite watering hole of Ethan Allen his Green Mountain Boys.

From there my thoughts jumped like an ovipositing mayfly to Ebenezer Hinsdale (1707-1763), the intemperate, Harvard-trained Deerfield chaplain and Indian missionary born in captivity at sea – his parents had been 1704 captives – and stationed by 1731 at Fort Dummer. He eventually built an estate that still stands as a museum across the river in his namesake Hinsdale, New Hampshire.

Though I have no direct genealogical links to the Hinsdale family, it sure seems like I do. For nearly 30 years I have called a historic Hinsdale dwelling my home, resting on the 1770 homesite of Ebenezer’s slightly younger brother Samuel. So, I guess I have blood in the game.

The ride from Bratt to Bellows Falls, Vermont and Charlestown, New Hampshire was unusually uninspiring under low, gray skies. That customary first glimpse of Mount Ascutney’s peak from a Route 91 highpoint outside of Putney was invisible, totally hidden behind cloud cover that day. Its absence was disorienting.

With that temporary issue in the rearview I was on my way to 91’s Black River crossing, just west and in view of Charlestown’s reconstructed French and Indian War Fort at No. 4. It’s a place where my roots lie deep through sixth-great-grandfather Lieutenant Isaac Parker, a Massachusetts soldier from Groton. I have regularly visited the museum for reenactments and other activities, especially when my grandsons were young, but also to catch up on new scholarship.

Unfortunately, historic Charlestown is a black hole of New England genealogy due to a mid-19th-century fire that destroyed the earliest vital records. Many a professional genealogist has met his or her match there. Though the aggravating void doesn’t affect my Parker family much, the same cannot be said for the many families they married into. These vexing gaps reach into my Whately Sanderson family – not to mention those of Deerfield miller Adonijah Taylor and his brother-in-law, brief East Whately resident Nathaniel Sartwell, both of whom share Fort No. 4 legacies.

I never pass No. 4 without thinking about its first blacksmith, Mayflower descendant Micah Fuller. I am certain his daughter Lois Fuller married a great-uncle of mine named Joseph Sanderson but, much to the chagrin of Joseph’s descendants trying to establish Mayflower roots, it has not been proven and may never be. Birth records for Micah Fuller’s children vanished in Charlestown flames.

Which brings us to the last part of my journey thought train I’ll share. It involves a peculiar house painter named John MacAulay, who dropped into my life for five years at the starts of our current millennium. He lived in his GMC van that was often parked in my backyard overnight when the weather was right for painting. He dropped dead from heart failure about 20 years ago at a Greenfield laundry mat. He was 66.

John’s spirit always visits when I climb Springfield Mountain, just up the Interstate from Charlestown exit. He grew up in Springfield, Vermont and is buried there. Someday I intend to find his grave.

I paid John by the day, cash, and often fed him as a gratuity. When my wife and kids were away I’d grill something over which to chat in the carriage-shed seating area. A HAM radio operator, John introduced me to the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones before he became well-known, and also spoke often about the Rothschilds, diabolical bankers, and the Illuminati. Alive today, John would be a card-carrying Trump-cult member.

One day our carriage-shed discussion turned to hunting, and he told me a hair-raising tale about his late father’s Vermont bear-trapping exploits on Springfield Mountain. When a scouting mission revealed evidence of a monster bruin feeding regularly through an upland nut grove, he set a trap anchored with a towing chain to a heavy log he believed only a bulldozer could move.

When he returned the next day, the trap and anchor were gone, leaving a trail John claimed “could have been followed by Helen Keller.” Supremely cautious and alone, John’s dad followed the trail much farther than he would have imagined in his wildest dreams and killed the beast with his 30.06 rifle.

John was a boy at the time. He didn’t remember the bear’s weight. Just the massive carcass. A crowd pleaser, he said.

A good place to end. With a classic North Country hunting yarn that just keeps on giving every time I climb the central Vermont mountain on which it unfolded, likely before I was born.

Meanwhile, our new rug lies on the dining-room floor. A perfect fit.

Chalk it up as another worthwhile trip up a valley stained deeply with my DNA. That said, I don’t ignore the humble people who were here to greet us. They left indelible reminders of their ancient presence with petroglyphs pecked into Bellows Falls bedrock.