Category Archives: Columns

Published pieces I’ve written, primarily in The Recorder, Greenfield, Mass.

May
24
2017

Record-Breaking Shad Surge

by Gary Sanderson

With turkey season in the rearview, irises bloom, Memorial Day looms and woodstoves limp to the finish line, burning just hot enough to kill the chill as hayfields, soon to harbor newborn fawns, whine for their first cut. Overall, it’s been a cool May, one that’s apparently excellent  for American shad migrating up the Connecticut […]

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May
17
2017

Tempting Fate

by Gary Sanderson

Ominous swords of Damocles have leaned out over my daily path for years — first three, then two, now one; same species, same size, same menacing presence. Yet there we were last Dec. 1, my friend and I, with the help of an aluminum, 24-foot extension ladder, harvesting five pounds of late oyster mushrooms from what is […]

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May
10
2017

Open The Gate

by Gary Sanderson

A day late and a dollar short, it’s time to include me in the chorus of support for Paul Luippold’s plea to reopen the old, padlocked boat-access just downstream from Stillwater Bridge. Luippold’s written complaint — dated May 1 and addressed to two local news companies, a chief of police and two state politicians — […]

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May
03
2017

Sing Praise For His Yankee Ways

by Gary Sanderson

My dad’s sun set last Thursday morning. A glorious setting it was, peacefully ending the life of a man three days short of 89. He had a good life, a dream death. How can you beat it? After maybe a half-hour in the yard digging up dandelions, he must have been tired. Job complete, he neatly […]

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Apr
26
2017

Fiddleheads And Feedback

by Gary Sanderson

Turkey season is underway as skunk cabbage brightens marshy floors with splotches of salubrious green, fiddleheads are sprouting – providing harvesters a tight window in which to pick the springtime culinary delight – and feedback about the 1959 Deerfield River reclamation project discussed here last week was, not surprisingly, considerable. It’s difficult to say exactly […]

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Apr
19
2017

Correction And Reclamation

by Gary Sanderson

A mishmash of fishing stuff this week, beginning with a little correction from last week, when I incorrectly noted the old “April 15” opening day of the Massachusetts trout-fishing season. It seems that the father of a colleague I call “Big Boiczyk” thought a “clarification”  was in order. He looked forward to opening day as […]

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Apr
12
2017

Fishing Season Is Here

by Gary Sanderson

In the old days, anglers would have been gearing up this week for the traditional April 15 opening day of trout-fishing season, which this year falls on Saturday. It would have been a big day for fathers and sons, grandfathers and grandsons, fishing buddies or just plain secretive, solitary anglers fishing from a boat or […]

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Apr
05
2017

A Dark, Sunny Place

by Gary Sanderson

Spring is the season of hope and optimism, fertility and life, mating and nesting, buds and sprouts; also spontaneity, which unexpectedly seized me noontime Sunday. It all begins Saturday night at 10, returning home from day two of “Writing Naturally,” a three-day environmental-writing workshop led by “Orion” magazine editor H. Emerson Blake. The circle discussions […]

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Mar
29
2017

Lunchtime On Boondocks Pond

by Gary Sanderson

As MassWildlife’s Western District stocking crews deposit netfuls of large, fresh and frisky trout along the upper Deerfield River this week, diehards are still ice-fishing at secluded upland ponds nearby. Well, at least I think there’s still enough ice left up there. “I hope so,” growled my buddy Killer, still a hard-charger at 72, when […]

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Mar
22
2017

Beech Blowback

by Gary Sanderson

One never knows when a topic tossed into the city square for public discussion will attract interest and spur feedback like last week’s subject — beech trees — did. Who knows why? It just did. Among the folks of both genders chiming in were a card-carrying historian/archaeologist, a couple of foresters — one a photographer […]

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