The ghost of Mike Globetti wandered back into my sphere recently. A blast from the past. One triggered by my soon-to-be 97-year-old mother, still going strong.

So, you ask, who’s Mike Globetti? Good question. Though I knew who he was, Google had to tell me who he is 40-some years later. Discovered was that the man I long ago knew as the Boston Herald’s outdoor columnist is now media relations manager for the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. Also, get this: He authored a humorous 1991 book that’s still in print, titled God Save the Quarterback!: American Football Goes to England.

So, why did this faraway media-relations man suddenly reappear to me? Well, bear with me.

When I met Globetti in the early 1980s, he had recently taken the Herald reins from retired outdoor writer and my late friend Dix White. A tad older than my father, “Dixie” was the Williams College man and Wayland Orvis store owner who sponsored my New England Outdoor Writers Association membership in 1981. A couple of years later, he backed me for inclusion in the Outdoor Writers Association of America. I remain a dues-paying, active member of both organizations to this day.

When I met the fun-loving Dixie in the spring of 1980, I was a cub sportswriter and outdoor columnist at the Greenfield Recorder, and he was in Charlemont as guest speaker for a sportsmen’s banquet – probably Trout Unlimited – held at Herm Prilipp’s Oxbow Motor Lodge and Restaurant.

Those were the earliest days of my Thursday “On The Trail” column that for 38 consecutive years arrived on Franklin County doorsteps each Thursday. I was then nearing 30 and mired between uncertain part-time and stable full-time employment under then-sports editor Bob York. Meanwhile, I was supplementing my meager income with a weekly two-hour sports talk show, The Sunday Sports Page, partnered with old friend and partner in crime Chip Ainsworth. The 10 a.m. till noon show was aired for more than five years by Greenfield’s WPOE, AM-1520, which promoted itself, if memory serves me, as “15,000 watts for western New England.”

But enough background. Let’s return to Globetti and what it was that pulled him back into the picture.

My mother was “going though stuff” at her South Deerfield home across from the Bloody Brook Monument and had uncovered a few things she thought I may want. Nothing extraordinary. Just a plastic, ring-bound, 2003 softcover booklet of historical essays, Come Home Again: As Greenfield Celebrates 250 Years, published for the city’s bicenquinquagenary, and three newspaper clippings documenting accomplishments from my own sporting past.

Two of the sports clips memorialized youthful exploits on the diamond. The third was Globetti’s July 2, 1984 Herald column about a productive flyfishing outing I guided on the lower Deerfield River between Bardwells Ferry and Stillwater. My mother thought that the Herald column especially might someday, if not now, be of interest to my grandsons, so she didn’t want to discard it.

After retrieving and reading through everything, what immediately struck me was that my salient memory from the Globetti adventure wasn’t mentioned in his praiseful column. What I most remembered was the female friend he brought along for the ride, flyrod and waders in tow. I remembered her as “coordinator” of the state’s Urban Angler Program – established in 1979 to introduce city folks to fishing – but couldn’t for the life of me recall her name.

Enter the AI Genie, who informed me she was Debbie Chamberlain, which immediately rang a bell I accepted.

As planned, Chamberlain and Globetti arrived well before dawn. I think we met at the Whately diner off Route 91, where we loaded their gear into my Jeep Cherokee and drove Conway backroads to one of my favorite Deerfield River access points at South Station.

We drove to the cul-de-sac looking down at the South River gorge at the end of the dirt road and took a right onto an old trolley bed soon blocked by a barway. There we pulled on our waders, gathered our equipment, and journeyed down a steep game trail to the river’s western edge. Though we caught a few trout and some smallmouth bass, I wasn’t thrilled with the action and suggested we pack up and circle back to Johnson’s Hole, another of my favorite spots about three miles downstream.

“You never know,” I told them. “The fishing might be better there. If the flow stays the same, it should be perfect.”

So, off we went, eventually taking Conway’s Hoosac Road to the southern end of the same trolley bed on the other side of South River to my customary parking place on a power line high above the Deerfield’s west bank. From there, we descended another, even steeper, game trail following the edge of a potentially perilous ravine.

At river’s edge we crossed the shallow, narrowed head of the rapids flowing into Johnson’s Hole. Then we spread out, wading waist-deep into angling position along a curling riffle that emptied into a long, deep channel. The plan was to cast 45 degrees upstream into the passing current, mend line to eliminate drag, and dead-drift our weighted nymphs for the final 90-degree swing through the trout-feeding zone.

I was fishing a Montana nymph on sink-tip line, the fly colored like a bumble bee and simulating a variety of aquatic insects trout eat. My guests, too, were fishing sink-tip line and nymphs I can’t remember. Because their offerings were most likely selected by me from my own fly box, they were likely casting such trusty patterns as Hare’s Ears, Grey or Olive Nymphs, Revised Muskrats, March Browns, or Dark Hendricksons, all proven producers in my experience.

The problem for my inexperienced guests was that they couldn’t execute the necessary precision casts, presentation, drag-free drift, and the right depth required for success. Plus, they didn’t know the water like I did. As I caught one nice rainbow after another, they couldn’t buy a strike if their lives depended on it. When helpful instruction and demonstration failed to improve their success, I ultimately stood them by my side to play fish hooked by me. By morning’s end, they became happy campers as I started thinking about the looming worknight of taking calls on the Recorder sports desk.

On our drive back to their car at the diner, we had a spirited conversation about what had unfolded: the beautiful surroundings, the rattling river and its many trout-rich tributaries. That’s when Ms. Chamberlain suggested I would be the perfect candidate to write an informative Deerfield River fishing guidebook for anglers unfamiliar with the ecosystem and clueless about hidden accesses like the two I had traveled that day. It would be nice, she said, for outsiders to have a pocket-sized resource with maps pinpointing the best holes and runs, not to mention long-forgotten trolley beds, game trails, and other access routes.

I chuckled at what was, to me, an absurd suggestion. I didn’t hesitate to tell her that, for selfish reasons, I was not interested in any such job. I felt absolutely no inclination to share my waters with transitory anglers. I preferred nature’s solitude – peaceful tranquility backed by the percussion of the river’s rattle. Heaven on earth.

As it turned out, my requested promotional services weren’t needed. Within 10 years, the book Ms. Chamberlain desired hit the market, perhaps written by a willing author she convinced to do the job I refused. Close on its heels came the whitewater community, their rambunctious presence violating the quiet sought by wilderness anglers.

These days a destination for hit-and-run recreational users, the Deerfield River ain’t what it used to be. Far too chaotic for anglers like me.

The river I knew and loved was a wilder place, minus occasional disruptions of passing trains on the opposite bank – sights and sounds I learned to tolerate, night or day, but could have lived without.