How difficult it is to describe what came over me right after hooking a hard right at the North Pleasant Street rotary onto Governors Drive, heading for Commonwealth Avenue, the UMass Parking Garage and an afternoon lecture at Bartlett 61. Yes, tough indeed to describe, uncomfortable, too. The place just isn’t for me. Never was or will be. Too big, too high, too congested and too windy, the air stifling when pulled into my lungs.

There I was, in the blink of an eye traveling back 40 years and, frankly, it made me shudder in an involuntary reaction not unlike a chronic asthmatic breaking into hives while racing through a dry autumn ragweed field. This allergic response started, really, with all the commotion, backpacked pedestrians walking both sides of the road, just past the old Wysocki-House home of University Without Walls, my last official campus stop in the early 1980s. It got worse when I took that hard right — gray concrete Grad Research Center staring me right in the face — and drove toward Lorden Field and the Mullins Center, off Commonwealth. Headed west on that busy, winding road, it whaled me like a sucker-punch upside the head in a dark alley. Of course, it didn’t help that I was running a little late after overstaying an entertaining visit at a Leverett home on the edge. In a rush, anxiety building, I panicked on Commonwealth, took the wrong left to the parking garage and was immediately confronted with one-way streets, crosswalks, stop signs, people hurrying willy-nilly, Walkman entranced, walking every which way, tow-zone signs everywhere, not a word about a parking garage in sight. Finally, dead-ended along a narrow road atop the gentle hill, I slid  down my window and asked a young, expressionless hipster with an iPod plugged into his right ear where the garage was. He pointed in the direction he was headed, south. I knew that.

“Can I get there from here?”

“No, you must go around.”

“Great, just what I wanted to hear!”

At least I then had my bearings and knew how to get there. I turned around in a jammed parking lot, retraced my path back down to Commonwealth Ave. and took the next left to the ugly hilltop garage, which three hours later cost me a tidy six bucks for the privilege of not getting towed. I backed into a slot on the lowest level, grabbed my old chestnut crook cane, and sped to my destination, racing up that familiar sidewalk passing right through campus, past the Student Union, the sky-scraping library and stone chapel to Bartlett Hall, home of the English Department, where I attended many a class, some special, most not, back in the day.

I walked through the double glass doors and down the central staircase to an overstuffed lecture hall, where I asked a young woman for directions to Room 61. More than helpful, she shocked me (must have been the cane) by popping to her feet, stepping into the hallway, walking me a short distance around the corner and pointing to a door with a plaque reading Room 61 above it. I peeked through the window to a class in session, timidly opened the door and was immediately invited in by the anthropology teacher, who had invited guest speaker Doug Harris, preservationist for ceremonial landscapes from the Narragansett Indian Tribal Historic Preservation Office in Rhode Island. He was there to speak to  undergrads and show a film everyone in Franklin County ought to see: “Great Falls: Discovery, Destruction and Preservation in a Massachusetts Town.” His goal was to introduce the students to the perilous path of awareness to ancient, sacred Indian landscapes. The film, produced by Smithsonian filmmaker Ted Timreck, focuses on a National Register of Historic Places sacred landscape overlooking Barton Cove from the sandy Turners Falls Airport bluff.

Yeah, that one! But get this: New interpretation of that ancient site goes in a straight line all the way from high ground called Blue Hills overlooking Boston Harbor to the Burnt Hill standing stones in Heath. Yup, no lie. That Turners Falls site you’ve seen ridiculed by almighty Mammon, god of greed, and the press as an activist-Indian hoax discovered to obstruct progress and profit and development is, go figure, real indeed. That according to none other than the U.S. Department of the Interior’s National Park Service. Talk about verification, the folks who fought hardest to stop airport expansion and preserve antiquity got it in bold, black letters. Maybe someone ought to fly around the county with a banner boasting of the long-shot victory.

It’s amazing where this recent discovery mission I stumbled into last summer has taken me — the correspondence immense, the enticing new concepts overwhelming and quite contagious. Since publishing pictures of a balanced rock and a related ancient prayer seat buried high and deep at the top of our western horizon, I have met and spoken to lecturers, authors, professors, antiquarians, conspiracy theorists, Gaia-Matrix devotees, and even a Shutesbury man who claims he’s being abducted weekly by space aliens, then trailed by U.S. Department of Defense shadows who want him silenced. Talk about wild, it’s like nothing I’ve ever encountered. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, but I’m way past dismissing everything new and unusual as insane. So here I sit,  listening, pondering and reading whatever comes my way in an effort to learn as much as I can about our continent’s Native past and related topics, even when they send me off on surreal little detours. A closed mind is one that’s easily controlled and manipulated. I don’t want to go there.

But wait. Now this: word that two local history buffs are, as we speak, “working to establish the true name of the local Indians who lived in Deerfield between 1600 and 1700.” They say these Indians, known for centuries as Pocumtucks, were actually “Horikans,” which I have seen elsewhere, and they promise to prove it in the near future. Who knows where that will go, or how “the authorities” will react to such blasphemy? For sure it could rattle some sensitive cages, given the honorable plight of the Abenakis to gain official national tribal recognition like the Narragansetts, both of whom would love to call the Pocumtuck homeland their own. So stay tuned, the fur could fly.

Trying to make sense of the ancient stone structures and ritualistic landscapes I discovered in the book “Manitou,” still a popular read after 24 years in print, I’ve moved on to a related work I have often seen footnoted and in bibliographies of scholarly works. Written by University of California-Berkeley Anthropologist William S. Simmons, “Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620-1984” explores Native-American spirituality, which must be understood to conceptualize ancient ceremonial landscapes and burial grounds. When stone structures, stone ruins, solstice chambers and connected, sacred, geological sites like Great Falls began coming into focus, even Narragansett tribal elders warned their people to deny their existence out of fear they’d be destroyed. Young tribal leaders like Harris disagreed, insisting that the stones had begun to speak and must be heeded because they were being destroyed anyway.

An hour or two before Harris told us of that little tribal dispute from the recent past, I had learned of a special site in our own eastern hills that fit the mold before it was long-ago demolished. Said to be located on a Shutesbury or Wendell hilltop with a stunning view in many directions, I had heard nothing about the site before it was brought to my attention by a spry, outspoken octogenarian, scholar and cultural critic who was way ahead of the curve on the subject of ancient stone structures. Interested  in Native landscapes for 30 or more years, the man tells of a multi-million dollar hilltop development many years back on this site, where six massive rectangular stone structures stood head-high in two parallel rows of three before they were leveled to build stately McMansions overlooking Amherst and beyond. I will learn more about this site after the snow melts; it sounds interesting, and was probably a component of the vast sacred landscape surrounding the ancient Great Falls landmark, where many New England tribes assembled each spring to harvest anadromous fish, feast, play games and build acquaintances. According to Harris, that site, now named for the colonial captain who slaughtered Indians there in 1676, was one of perhaps five in the Northeast used as an annual ceremonial gathering place for diverse, faraway tribes. He, I presume quite intentionally, did not name the other four.

Well, although quickly running out of space, why not one last tidbit from that Thursday UMass trip? On the second or third question of the post-film Q&A, a pretty, dimpled, 20-year-old girl sitting at the back of the class expressed her sincerest gratitude to Harris for exposing her to a new subject that had touched her deeply. She said she had been “blown away” by what she had seen because her father owned some 200 acres surrounding their Virginia country estate, where the upland stonewalls were tightly constructed works of fine art. Her father had for years extolled the expert stonework of our colonial ancestors, who she had always without question accepted as the builders. Now, she told Harris, he had opened a new window. She couldn’t wait to revisit the property and re-examine the walls with a new perspective that perhaps they were the work of prehistoric Middle-Atlantic indigenous people. I knew precisely what she was feeling and later told her so, explaining that I too had experienced a revelation about familiar woods while reading “Manitou” last summer.

It was obvious that the Virginian girl was not alone in awe. Her class seemed fully engaged during the film and quite responsive during the Q&A. Harris was pleased. “That’s why I’m here today,” he said in response to the girl’s comments. “We must familiarize young people like you with our ceremonial landscapes and culture. Who knows? I may have to deal with you as state or town officials in future negotiations. If so, it’ll be helpful if you understand our ceremonial landscapes.”

And, although he didn’t mention it, one or two of them could even become reporters willing to challenge knee-jerk objections from copy editors, who are uninformed, unaware, unimpressed and unlikely to pursue any wave-making stories that shake conventional pillars and bring shoot-the-messenger cries from the frothy rabble.

Have you ever noticed that those who scream the loudest tend to have the most to hide? It’s true. Even fools know that. No scholarly research needed.