My mind started wandering on a fog-drenched Wednesday morning as my truck meandered home through the Greenfield Meadows, and for some reason it brought me back to my old footloose days, when I’d head for a hilltown stream on similar damp, grey days. Back then, there was always a round, galvanized, two-handled washtub full of […]

The crescent moon cast a vertical smile over the southwest corner of a little hayfield where a doe and her fawn had been showing up often on summer eves. I had seen them many times in my nightly travels, consistently entering the field around dusk, behind the cover of a razor-thin hardwood stand some 30 […]

A neighbor and I were on our way to Halifax, Vt., Saturday morning when, coming around the corner to a small East Colrain produce farm, we were confronted by an unexpected catastrophe. Farmer and friends were standing on the driveway below his hillside home, marooned from West Leyden Road by a muddy torrent as wide as […]

There was nothing unusual at the start of our telephone conversation last week, me at my Recorder desk, he his New Salem home, after dark. Pretty typical for my rambling chats over the years with Peter Mallett, brainchild/promoter in chief of the Miller River Fishermen’s Association. An affable sort, he’s always been upbeat and enthusiastic […]

Yes, the brook’s roaring, the songbirds’re singing, the snowbanks’re shrinking, and my last load of cordwood’s drying ever so slowly, stacked under the eaves of the sunny carriage sheds. No, it isn’t time for stream-fishing here in the northern tier of Franklin County. Too much snow, way too much, in fact; even worse, annoying mud […]

They’re raising a ruckus in the sleepy Hampshire County hilltown of Chesterfield, where officials are threatening to shut down a longtime camp on a Boy Scout reservation in a dispute over a temporary summer shooting range. Although I don’t intend to research and devote a lot of time to the case — surely, much to […]

Another evening phone call at my Recorder desk that got my wheels spinning. Gotta love it. The caller was a dear old friend, one I see far too little of now that we’ve “grown up” and gone our separate ways. That’s life. But he touches base now and again, usually at my workplace, to rattle […]

By now, the stink bait must be getting pretty ripe, sun-baked in a covered, five-gallon, galvanized pail with a bail handle — what we used to call garbage cans back in the day. If you’re confused, relax, you just aren’t familiar with catfishermen and the bait they use. Aficionados brew special bait for a catfish […]

It’s pushing toward dusk on a pleasant summer evening and I’m returning from my nightly trip to the top of the hill where I run my dogs. I round the corner and approach the scalped, lime-green hayfield where the bales had been removed earlier in the day. There it stood — a solitary, erect, tawny […]