It always starts in slow-motion, like someone squeezing lightly on an eyedropper full of sweet wildflower honey.

Drip … drip … drip. Tediously slow. Like Chinese water torture.

Then all hell breaks loose.

I always know when it’s coming, the bright sun heating frigid air and warming the black Guilford slates under a deep roof snow blanket preparing one thunderous winter sermon. The slow dripping steadily increases to a flowing sound through gutter downspouts before the crashing crescendo falls to the ground, the sidewalk, the driveway, the flagstone terrace out front. Then it’s over, just like that an eerie silence, the gray, skeletal, mock-orange standing along the border trembling in fear.

Following a big storm like last week’s, the first melt triggers chain-reaction avalanches that create mini-earthquakes which shake my buildings’ sturdy chestnut frames with unrestrained fury. Although I’ve seen it many times before, the snow surge that roared down like a spring waterfall this week really got my creative juices flowing. I was reading staid Edward Hitchcock’s “Final Report on the Geology of Massachusetts” (1841) in a La-Z-Boy recliner by the sunny window when I heard the tell-tale “whoosh” of snow launching from above. I looked outside, caught the dump, pondered a moment, looked at my wife and told her that what we had just witnessed reminded me a lot of the recent archaeological swell I’ve navigated. The information’s been buzzing at me from all directions like black swarms of pesky no see ’ems, a few of them slanderous little buggers indeed, their hot sting unbearable to the victims. I continued, told her that, to me, it felt like this gushing geyser of information, much of it fascinating and politically sensitive, was ready to burst with similar force that may shake the brass candlesticks on the mantles, the paintings on the wall, perhaps even topple the upper section of a large, overstuffed, two-piece Federal-style bookcase consuming the north wall of the study where I spend so much time. If so, I told her, I’d just have to collect the pieces and place them, along with the snow piles outside, into a giant metal sifter — the kind with the handle you squeeze toward you — for repeated sifting, the goal being to meld the diverse mix of ingredients into a tasty and truthful puddling so difficult to procure.

How do you make sense of it all? That’s the question nagging me during idle, pensive moments and following conversation, some of it testy, even insulting. They’re coming at me from all angles — some from one perspective, others from the polar opposite, all jaded by personal bias and manicured narrow-mindedness. Take for instance the Mackin lot under so much scrutiny in recent years as the site of a potential big-box store rumored to be Walmart. Sitting on the only lightly developed quadrant of the ancient Indian fishing site known as Peskeomskut (now Turners Falls dam), activists have attempted to derail development there for many years and various reasons, including wetland and sacred burial-site issues. The activists claim the site was an important burial ground for local indigenous peoples dating back more than 10,000 years, and they say they have the bones to prove it. On the other hand, those in favor of development have accused the activists of “planting” human remains in a last-ditch effort to derail the project. Complicating matters was the supervising UMass professor’s opinion way back when that some human remains found there had been transported to the site in a duffel bag and dumped, a charge that has been repeated often in news accounts the past 20 years.

George Nelson of Northfield gets a kick out of that charge. A week short of his 83rd birthday, Mr. Nelson is perplexed as to just exactly where such a haywire conclusion could have come from, especially given the source, an esteemed, highly trained professional anthropologist/archaeologist. When asked about it this week, the man just grunted out a bemused little chuckle, shook his head wearing a wry grin and quipped, “There were no bags of bones. I picked those bones up right there. They were everywhere among stumps and rubble dumped in a swamp between Routes 2 and 2A, when they were taking fill out of the gravel bank for Route 2.”

Newspaper accounts of July 7, 1964 in the Greenfield Recorder-Gazette and Springfield Union bear him out, one of the Recorder-Gazette’s front-page stories accompanied by John Senior photographs of 34-year-old Nelson displaying a human jawbone extracted from the tangled stump dump. Nelson has saved a collection of the  press clippings in two scrapbooks chronicling the period between 1964 and today. The fact is that no one in 1964, not a lonely suspicious soul, questioned the veracity of the site as an ancient Indian burial ground. Nelson was artifact hunting with permission from late owner Peter Mackin, who had no reason to hide his property’s rich Indian antiquity. He was simply selling clean, sandy fill to construction crews and Nelson, an active amateur archaeologist, was the beneficiary, collecting many artifacts while picking through the refuse after work for a Three Rivers tree-service contractor. But the number of bones he was finding in the rubble finally unnerved him and he didn’t know where to turn. That’s when he took some of them to the Greenfield Police Station and officer Edward J. Powers brought in a county medical examiner named Howard M. Kemp to examine them. Kemp identified the bones as human and 200 or 300 years old before Nelson was allowed to depart with them. In subsequent days, Nelson, curious about the source of the bones, went to the sand-bank location where fill was being removed and discovered many oval dark spots in the clear, tan sand. Then, lo and behold, right there he spotted something unusual and carefully dug at it to uncover the shocking discovery of an incredibly intact human skeleton, later identified by UMass authorities as a young female. Somehow, it acquired the name “Herman.”

Nelson can now only chuckle now when looking back at the whole skeleton caper, marveling that, “It was in remarkable condition for its age, and all in one piece until I broke it in half while driving around with it in the back of my pickup.” He said he then kept it in his cellar for a long time before delivering it to UMass, where it somehow disappeared. “They were supposedly looking for it,” he recalled, “but I never did find out exactly what happened to it.”

Also missing is the letter he received identifying it as the skeleton of a young female. “To be honest, it’s about the only document I can’t find, and I’m still looking for it, did so just the other day. I must have hidden it in a too good a place, so good that even I can’t find it.”

I guess we’ve all been there at some point in our lives, huh?

As I write this rushed piece — delayed for an hour or more by an insightful telephone conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Chilton, a UMass anthropologist who wanted the clear the air about what she viewed as unfair accusations aimed at her department in this space — I await a personal visit from Nelson and wife Betty. On their way home from a neighborhood veterinarian, they’ll drop off their press clippings for my perusal. “I told George you looked honest,” said Betty, “why not just leave the stuff with you?” Mrs. Nelson vouched for the bones and dark oval stains her husband described in Mackin’s fine tan sand. She too saw the evidence when accompanying her spouse to the site he spent so much time at, perhaps even too much for her liking.

Mr. Nelson is not hesitant to predict there are many more grave sites near where he discovered the ones in 1964, but at least they’re safe for now because that section of the parcel is out of play for development, thanks to the purchase of it by the state and Friends of Wissatinnewag, a Native American activist group that ponied up a significant fee to preserve it.

As for Chilton, she vehemently defending local archaeological digs she’s led and said there was nothing secret about them, offering to share artifacts collected and reports written about local sites. She said she is protective of the artifacts because they belong to site landowners, and she conceals locations “out of respect for the landowner and all stakeholders who are working together to better understand and preserve archaeological sites.” I can’t say I fault her there, and will look forward to meeting her.

But now I must go, with new material on its way from the Nelsons and additional material likely coming from untapped sources. This inquiry project has proven cumulative and quite intriguing. Fun, too.

Stay tuned. I love a good chase.