The patriotic summer holiday is here, flags proudly waving to passersby and, yes, my wheels are spinning out of control.

So let’s begin with those tall browning hayfields you’ve probably noticed in your travels. If they seem odd, well, they are — the result of prolonged wet weather we’ve endured, preventing what farmers call first cut, a hay harvest that should have occurred weeks ago under normal weather, which we haven’t had. Just the other day my brother-in-law, a retired professor enjoying an idyllic existence on his gentleman’s farm in Maine, said the month of June was the wettest on record since 1871. So, no Agnes, it’s not your haywire geriatric imagination, or dementia creeping in. It has been unusually wet. In fact, just today that familiar scent of summer mold gave me a sharp back-hander as I walked into my dining room. That’s what you get in an old house with extended humidity like this. Even with the bulkhead open wide, windows, too, at night with fans spinning, you can’t avoid that musty odor in downstairs rooms that aren’t air-conditioned. Which reminds me, I noticed something odd Wednesday morning on my daily walk with the dogs through Sunken Meadow. The Green River was flowing a filthy brown, rare indeed. Usually when roiled, it runs a thin milky green, tinted by fine gray clay particles from the watershed, thus its name, I suppose. Not so on overcast Wednesday morning, though. Hmmm? Can’t remember that color ever before. Don’t ask. No clue. Just one of them things, I guess: a mystery.

But back to the hayfields I have watched turn brown on daily rambles through chest-high cover with rambunctious dogs. Oh how the dogs love that tall, dense mix of orchard grass, red and white clover, tall timothy, and tiny white wildflowers standing high and straight, a combination which produced the subtlest, most pleasing aroma for weeks. Now some of the red-clover flowers have rotted to a drab dark brown, not what I’m used to seeing around my birthday. The light Great Plains brown you see from the road is matured orchard grass, which has gone by and lost most of its nutritional value (not to mention its healthy green hue), now ready to deposit seeds from drooping pods in the dense, moist air. Soon high pressure and a good stiff wind following bright, hot sun will send those seeds asunder to sprout anew. Meanwhile, the green timothy pods have formed and also stand erect and fertile, which I am not accustomed to seeing this time of year, when typically all fields have been scalped and regrowth is under way; same with the clover, which I also think of more as a summer grass. I assume both of these local fodders take longer to mature than the orchard-grass staple of first cut. This year the summer grasses will be mature for first cut, not what the doctor ordered for farmers, trust me.

On the other hand, the tall dense hayfields are great for wildlife and field birds, even turkeys. In fact, I’m surprised the dogs haven’t yet kicked out the doe and twin fawns I have seen signs of for weeks. I know they’re there, and they surely know we pass through daily yet know how to stay out of our way, their prints announcing they’re lurking. Sooner or later I’ll get a glimpse as I always do, hopefully before the lambs lose their spots.

I love bumping into little spotted fawns. Take for instance the buck that’s still roaming the Meadows. I have known his track for three years and crossed it often, having watched him grow from a suckling, spotted babe. Recently a colleague who owns an adjacent farm told me his father and uncle had been seeing a big deer near their barn. I told him it was almost certainly the buck I’ve been watching for three years, his track easily identifiable by its exaggerated splayed V that you can’t miss. The last I saw of that deer a couple weeks ago he was roaming with a yearling buck while the does they traveled with in winter and spring were tending their young in seclusion. A few days later, the man I call Big Boiczyk came to work excited to inform me he had seen the wide V track in his tilled croplands. It didn’t surprise me. I saw that deer as a 3- or 4-pointer two years ago, a 6- or 7-pointer last fall and expect it will sport eight or 10 points if he makes it to autumn this year. Will I kill him? No. If hungry? Yes. Though capable, I have nothing to prove, and won’t be drawn into that silly game of the insecure.

As for turkeys, well, as suspected, spring was a brutal nesting season. Maybe some people are seeing hens with poults. Not me. Down in the flatlands I’ve watched two hens, neither of which are with young. I saw those two birds often within a half-mile of each other on my daily travels; and I still see one of them regularly, every other day or so, feeding alone through a scalped, green hayfield and the infant cornfield t’other side the road. The other one down by the river is dead, killed by a predator. Finally, after watching my dogs roll in that bird’s feathery remains at two sites and carrying bits and pieces a short distance for more than a week, Chub-Chub and Lily finally swallowed the last wet feathers and legs with no ill effects I can detect. I’ve asked and there has been no sign of broods on the Big Boiczyk’s acreage, either. Just one of those years, I guess. But don’t toss and turn in your sleep over spring mortality. You can rest assured that there are more than enough turkeys around to sustain a healthy future flock. Who knows? Maybe the flock needed a year like this to thin it out a bit. Old Mother Nature has a way of managing her kingdom much more efficiently than human societies governed by corrupt leaders who do their best to disrupt just, natural order purely for selfish reasons.

That reminds me. What’s with all the white clover invading my yard, anyway? I don’t recall ever before seeing it. It’s everywhere, pervasive. Or is that invasive? Who cares? My wife mentioned it to me as something new, and since then my neighbor called and, unsolicited, mentioned to me that his lawn’s full of it. But it gets better. Perhaps the clover’s not just a neighborhood phenomenon. My aforementioned Maine brother-in-law lives six hours away and he has it too and new. Retired, learned and into such things in a big way, he has no explanation. My guess is that he soon will have a theory, though. Either that or maybe someone local will chime in. Could it have anything to do with the return of honey bees? Global warming? The rain? An occurrence last fall? Fukushima? The Gulf spill? I’d love to know, and apparently I’m not alone. Not that white clover’s a bad thing. I love it, vividly recall the school fields on both sides of my childhood South Deerfield homes filled with it, oh so fragrant. Foraging critters, wild and domestic, like it, too — turkeys and chickens, rabbits and deer. Mice, too, I discovered last week when I passed one chowing down while mowing the lawn along the wide opening into my barn’s cellar.

Before I go, a quick reflection from last week’s column about turning 60. After opining that I would have “grown up” sooner had I jilted softball in the 1980’s and early 90’s, I dreaded that I may have been insulting special people I met on the small diamond, folks whose friendship I greatly value. Well, at least some of them understood my point and didn’t take it personally. Among the myriad feedback I received was a heartfelt birthday card from the wife of a man I played softball against in Buckland, now retired and enjoying hilltown-farm nirvana, also an impromptu visit from another couple I met through softball, they delivering a book and two birthday cards. The visitors are sophisticated teachers, no less, another lot I don’t hesitate to publicly harangue. Apparently, they know my criticism is not aimed at them. How could they not? I once told the lady I wanted her to teach my grandchildren to read and write, and I meant it. That’s what she did — taught lucky kids to read and especially write. And now so does her longtime partner, a former college history professor and softball teammate of mine. They now work as a team, collaborating to teach teachers, a novel idea, at least the good ones who don’t know it all and are willing to listen.

Of course, I suspect that anyone who tried would have no trouble assembling a gang of my former teachers who’d identify me as a poor listener. All I can say in defense of myself is that even as a boy I think I had a good ear and knew who was and wasn’t worth listening to. Sadly, the latter far outnumbered the former and probably still do, a great reason I chose the autodidactic route I still travel.

I have an idea that my professorial visitors would understand, and so would my retired brother-in-law smartly living off the grid in Maine, himself a respected full professor for some 40 years. We often talk about education in front of a convivial holiday fire, and he in his gentle, diplomatic way bemoans the influx of adjunct professors and the demise of critical thinking on today’s campuses. Some praise these contemporary college programs and degrees as the path to unity and harmony, freedom and justice and success. Then again there are those like my friend Doc, who said out in my driveway before departing Sunday: “Don’t you know that thinkers are dangerous?”

Yes, I suppose, but in my mind not nearly as horrifying as the scarcity of thinkers preferred by corporate America and right-wing demagogues.

A young colleague I often tease with playful barbs beginning “Hey Curtis,” followed by some lighthearted quip, wore a grin as he handed me an old, yellowed, Recorder sports section Tuesday night and said, “Here, I thought you may want to look at this. I found it in Irmarie’s desk. Nice hat!”

He was referring to the mugshot topping my August 27, 1992 column headlined, “Right church, wrong pew.” I would have been 39 at the time, still young, so I was, of course, hesitant to read it, typical anytime old stories resurface. I guess I fear immature style, syntax that’s juvenile and undeveloped, and hope to avoid embarrassed shudders if I do choose to read it. In this case I did read and was OK with it. I was taking a swipe at a favorite old punching bag, Friends of Animals, whose spokespeople had proposed vasectomies for Chelmsford beavers polluting the town water supply. No fan of vasectomies or the overbearing ladies who demand them of their men (Horrors! They clip their babes and snip their men), I viewed the proposal as absurd, not to mention sexist, even potentially a violation of animal rights. That said, I offered a counter-proposal: lobotomies for the folks suggesting such a haywire remedy. I don’t recall that column drawing angry letters to the editor. Shocking! Friends of Animals are activists, you know, which only encourages me to go after them.

But enough of that, which, by chance, happened to be a perfect segue plopped onto my lap like a perfumed divorcee to cap the first draft of this, my last column before turning 60. Imagine that, me 60 come Sunday. Detractors from my wayward youth speculated I’d never see 60. Again, I get the last laugh. And here I sit, summer solstice in the rear-view, its spectacular waning full moon still lighting the night sky as I approach a milestone folks seem to dread along the bumpy, winding, rutted road called life. I suppose I could call the place I’m fearlessly skipping toward my final chapter, which I find not even itty-bitty frightening. But I can’t deny old age is closing in no matter how I twist it.

I remember turning 50 and telling my wife we’d be 60 before we knew what hit us, that time flies as you age. Now — Bingo! — we’re there, me two short years from the freedom of “retirement,” which promises to open a new chapter, my last, on my own terms, no authoritarian strings attached. I can only pray to my Earth Mother and bolt-of-lightning Dad for a little extension to stretch this last chapter longer in duration than the previous three. You never know. I have after all tempted the fates. But I do believe an active, inquisitive mind and fertile imagination can unleash the fountain of youth; also that the probability of finding such a warm, soothing geyser can only be enhanced by a little drop of youthful mischievousness clinging to a shallow, glimmering crevice at the base of your soul.

So what does it mean, this turning 60? Well, I guess it’s what you make of it. To me, retirement will mark the beginning, not the end of work. What promises to stop are the mindless, mundane chores most of us are forced to do for a paycheck, duties a hairy ape could perform, usually a waste of precious time. I’ve had enough of it, can’t wait to break free from the caged, dazed flock spinning the hamster wheel for self-adoring heroes of mirror worship. Soon I will never again have to answer whether under way is one word or two, because in my world it doesn’t matter. I understand it written as one or two words and accept both. Let the Associated Press lords of style grapple with that stuff at their annual Hilton conventions of self-importance and tipsy oral flatulence. I have no patience for such pedantic crap, and neither did the man who pushed me into this profession: late, great UMass professor Howard Ziff.

A former night editor at the Chicago Daily News, Ziff fled the newsroom to Amherst soon after witnessing the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention unfold before his eyes in Mayor Daley’s corrupt Windy City. Then, to make things worse, then got a splendid view of the misinformation deluge that hit the street in the form of mainstream press. Ziff, truly a visionary, had seen enough and wanted to share his wisdom with aspiring young scribes. Yes, back before CNN and the Internet, this daring, gruff, well-read, cartoon character of a professor named Ziff — a Holyoke native and Amherst College man — predicted AP Style would be the demise of newspapers because the typical reader was better educated than in the past and wanted a little pizazz. He implored that the future of news-writing was literary journalism championed by the likes of Dickens and Orwell, later Sixties “Rolling Stone” New Journalists like Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Joe Eszterhas and Howard Kohn. He also had us read Joan Didion, Joe McGinnis, Thomas Agee and others, what he called “voices readers seek when trying to learn what really happened, because new readers are more sophisticated and want to be entertained with opinion and moxie.” I must have heard that advice a hundred times from Ziff, a devotee of storytelling news-writing style some call narrative.

Folded away in an old, red, tattered American Heritage Dictionary I’ve owned since college, I still have a half-page Ziff assignment slip from a “New Journalism” class I took, probably in 1973. The assignment reads, “In ‘Mau-Mauing the Flack Catcher,’ Tom Wolfe attempts to identify and define two social activities, mau-mauing and flak catching. What seem to you to be the characteristic terms he uses in making his definition? Do they seem adequate for the social activities he is trying to define? Does his activity leave anything out?” Classic Ziff: an assignment to activate the lost art of critical thinking in higher education; two pages, firm.

Before I move on, one more little Ziff anecdote. Soon after getting hired as a part-time Recorder sportswriter in the spring of 1979, I reconnected with my mentor and asked him to sponsor me in the  UMass “University Without Walls” program that rescued me. When I told him I was working at a newspaper and wanted to dovetail the job and some prior-learning activities into an independent degree plan, he gave me one of his priceless bemused looks, nose and right eye slightly wrinkled, and asked where I was working. When I answered “Greenfield Recorder,” he knew it, gave me a sheepish grin and imparted this advice: “Good place to start but you’ll never stay there. It’s an editors’ newspaper.” Well, wrong again, because here I sit, 35 years later, as an editor no less. What choice did I have? Franklin County’s my home. I had to find a niche or move somewhere I didn’t want to live.

Jumping back to the present, I cannot say I fear this final chapter I’m leaping into. No, in fact, I want to warmly embrace it like a dear old childhood friend or teammate. And please don’t expect from me that unimaginative claim we’ve all heard from wise old men who claim that, if they had it all to do over again knowing what they now know, they’d do it all different, much different, and better. Oh, really? How can that be? Because had we not lived the lives we lived, seen what we saw, and made the mistakes we made, then how in the world could we have learned what we know? I never understood that.

Though I never served on an altar, earned a merit badge or made an honor roll, I have always used my innate curiosity to learn what I need to know, figure it out without bowing and kneeling and saying, “Yes, Sir!” to arrogant bores who sing sweet tunes of self-promotion while speeding down the shiny rails of conformity. They can have that safe, tidy route. I have always preferred thin, overgrown trails leading off the beaten path and toward hidden truths. That is where my curiosity usually takes me, and it’s where I continue to uncover my most interesting data.

Looking back, I guess I was a boy till 20, a kid till 40, then a man, now an elder. The rest of the way, I hope to use my autodidactic, homespun perspective while peering in from the periphery as a seer and thinker, a reader and reactor and interpreter — a writer. How can it be anything but sad to realize that here in this tiny, provincial world of mine, my work will begin when I submit my final time slip. Topics are bubbling from my brain like a cool, refreshing spring trickling from black mossy ledge poking midriff through the steep, damp, shaded northern slope on a high forested ridge. The flow carves out a thin channel for clear thoughts, ideas and questions to escape through fern cover on the forest floor. These thoughts seek a larger stream leading to a secluded reservoir supporting large, colorful squaretails lurking deep in cold, dark summertime spring holes. There I will cast my bait, set the hook and bring to the surface with a loud splash wisdom borne from years of probing and pondering and combining it all into a way of life and thinking. I only hope to survive long enough to share this fruit ripened by decades of success and failure, agony and ecstasy, inner turmoil and torment and loss, serving it in a deep bowl at a festive harvest supper. Hopefully this last quarter of existence will bring a bonus and give me more than 20 years. The key is having something to live for, which I have, and it ain’t baseball or hunting or fishing or chasing fleeting hormonal urges and devilish lusts, pleasing indeed yet so deceitful and shallow. Been there, done that. New horizons keep an old man virile and, hopefully, interesting.

I pity those who found glory in youthful athletic arenas only to hit the wall as young men, forever burdened with a palpable void, one they cannot shake, forevermore lugging it to the tavern or ballpark, repeating the same tired tales ad infinitum. Retirement for them goes from swiveling barroom stool to supper table to La-Z-Boy recliner, beer in hand, to watch the ballgame and start snoring in the fifth inning. These people don’t understand a man like me, one who left it behind and moved on. Some are even critical because I don’t want to write about deer and turkey harvests, trout stocking and anadromous fish runs that I’ve covered repeatedly for 35 years. How long is too long? How many stories can you write about heroic hunters bagging 10-pointers from high tree stands in darkening woods? Who can read those stories, all similar, year after year, when only the names change? It gets old and tired and very boring fast if you’re worth your salt.

When activity on the local men’s softball diamonds faded out some 20 years ago, I wondered what I would do with myself, if I would miss the camaraderie between the foul lines, on the bench and during convivial post-tournament celebrations. Yet overnight I realized it would have been better had I stopped playing the first time I stepped away, after I blew out my knee in 1976 and knew in my heart I had lost too much to continue competing at a high level on the big diamond. But then old teammates and childhood friends lured me back to the little diamond for 10 or 12 more enjoyable years I now know I could have lived without. Not that I couldn’t compete. I could. But I had to swallow my pride limping around on a bum left knee that interfered with many important tasks which once came effortlessly, almost reflexive. Then, when I started reading and writing and exploring new subjects, I knew right away I had lingered too long in a dead-end kid’s game. I can’t say I brooded over that realization, just knew I should have pulled the softball plug before it started. Water over the dam.

So here I sit after more than 20 years of intensive reading and researching and exploring and trying to put it all together. I guess I’d describe my reading as an eclectic mix of literature, history and biography, plus nature, philosophy and political science with a little Indian spirituality thrown in. I’m at my best when assembling my own reading list, one book leading to another by perusing footnotes on the bottom of the page or at the back of the book along with bibliographies. Where such clues will lead, I never know, but it’s infectious and enlightening and dynamic, always something new to pique my curiosity and chase with vigor, often related to context and perspective pertaining to genealogy and personal identity. If you don’t know who you are, what do you know?

With formal work behind me, I fantasize about building a new daily routine, likely going to bed early and rising around dawn to pick up whatever I’m reading, maybe rewriting a piece I’m working on, or blowing out a first draft of something new while it’s still quiet, me fresh. Maybe I’ll unplug the tavern adventure I jumped into 15 years ago, say goodbye to part-time innkeeping and downsize in the hills where my dogs can run free and I can towel myself dry out on the deck. We’ll see. I’m getting a little ahead of myself but would be lying to say I haven’t entertained the concept of gathering my books and our best possessions, selling the rest of our assets and moving on to an easier place, off the grid, out of debt, free at last. A man can tire of the crazy capitalistic grind.

Lately, people have been telling me I ought to get a new photo taken to accompany this ancient weekly column, that I have taken on a new look with less weight, more hair and a grayer, more unruly goatee. Although I can’t deny that my appearance has changed or that I have considered inserting a new photo, let’s just say it’s not atop my priority list. Which reminds me, just the other day I bumped into a good old friend I haven’t seen for a while and he was quite surprised by my new look.

“Oh my God, Bags,” he chuckled, “I didn’t recognize you from a distance. You look great. How much weight have you lost? What? Are you, going back to the Sixties?”

I just slid back a devilish, half-cocked grin, looked him square and warmly in the face and told him, no, I never left.

Summer’s at the doorstep with my 60th birthday, late, great Mississippi John Hurt finger-picking and singing background blues as I sit here at my customary Wednesday station trying to come up with something. It won’t be difficult. I can feel it. But I really must discipline myself to stunt all those random thoughts flittering through my consciousness, perhaps the neighborhood too, as I moments ago sat drying off from a quick shower, hidden with a cup of strong black coffee behind dense, blooming mock-orange bushes along the sunny flagstone terrace.

The gray, soggy air has lifted and the windows and bulkhead are open, inviting dry, refreshing breezes inside to whisk stagnant dampness away to clear, sparkling-blue skies, clusters of white, billowy clouds floating by like ghostly cotton balls.

Is there a better time than the dawning of summer, when on my daily descent into Sunken Meadow I am greeted by that strong, uplifting scent of the sweet, wild white rose, so alluring and thought-provoking, the grayer and muggier the day, the stronger the aroma? For the past week, the overpowering scent has embraced me two steps through the open metal gate as I descend the double-rutted dirt road to the Green River’s edge. The pleasing scent bomb permeates the meadow as I skirt the brushy perimeter, dogs racing up and down Christmas-tree rows, in and out of narrow marshes, splashing through swollen beaver-pond overflows and across a thin purling channel that links them along the south end. Mother earth is happy and so are the dogs. Me, too, bowl of fresh native strawberries sweetening on the kitchen counter, a little maple syrup dribbled atop and mixed in, the bowl sealed tight with cling-wrap. My wife would tell me to refrigerate them. Not this week. She’s vacationing in Stowe, Vt. Can’t say I feel left out. I could have gone but am content at home. Plus dogs are unwelcome where she’s staying. Trust me, the berries won’t spoil. I intend to eat them.

Finally, a sign of spring fawns has appeared along my trodden path. First, a few days ago, I heard deer run away through the thick green tangle. Then, on Tuesday, I saw my first quarter-sized tracks, twins and their mom crossing where deer always cross, their tracks crisp in fine, damp silt deposited by that old hag Irene, who filled a small dip in the road where puddles used to form. Whenever I see tiny tracks like that, I think back to the ones I spotted years ago in adjacent highlands. I monitored those tiny hoof-prints for a few days before the field was hayed. Then, the day after the farmer scalped it brown, I was running the dogs and noticed Lily pawing and sniffing at something in the distance. When I whistled to her, she dropped her head to the ground, picked up her item of fascination and ran back to me with it. Sure enough, a little front leg from the elbow down, including a tiny little hoof that had left some of the prints I’d seen. No matter how careful farmers are to avoid killing newborn fawns during their first cut of hay, it’s unavoidable, as are many other forms of fawn mortality. Yet it appears that enough always survive to maintain a healthy herd.

The same can be said of many creatures hidden in the bucolic landscape. Every year I watch the bobolinks and many other field birds appear to build nests and lay eggs in waist-high hayfields only to be destroyed by humming, smoking, grinding farm equipment. Yet every year more birds and beasts return to those same fields to meet the same disruptive fates, so I must assume that in the end it all works itself out. Still, it makes you wonder what was the population of these creatures when there were no tractors or hay barns to fill? Who kept the populations in check then? How many is too many? How many is not enough? Sometimes it’s impossible to make sense of it all. Some just accept it as nature’s mysteries; others turn to churches and preachers for enlightenment. Count me among the former.

Which brings me to a hen turkey I’ve been watching in nature’s chapel since the beginning of May? Lily was the first to find her, then Chubby several times. I once even flushed that bird myself from close quarters when the dogs were off on other splashy, brush-busting nearby adventures. That bird’s flush some 10 feet away startled me like many a partridge has,  then quickly disappeared through a small marshland gap. The last two times I saw that hen, Chubby flushed her from tall weeds and got right on top of her before she flushed, indicating to me that she was probably protecting a nest. After those two disruptions, I quickly called the dogs off in case little ones were near. Those potential conflicts sidestepped, I soon became concerned about the extended soaking rains of the past two weeks, knowing that saturated hatchlings would be wiped out by pneumonia brought on by the cold that had people burning wood stoves in June.

Well, truth be told, none of the above contributed to that hen’s demise — not me, my dogs or the farm equipment’s lethal blades. No, something else got her, probably a coyote or fox, fisher or bobcat or who knows what. All I know is that on Wednesday morning, not far from a spot where Chubby flushed that hen a week or two ago, he picked up the wing of a freshly killed adult turkey and came running proudly to me with it held high and firm in his mouth. Without coaxing, he just dropped it on the farm road, left it there and ran into the riverside woods hunting for a new fascination, obviously much more interested in that bird alive than dead. If that hen was with poults, they too have vanished, just a few more of nature’s many victims.

I’m not sure what the moral of the story is, or even if there is one. I guess just that there’s no telling how the end will come for any of us. We’re here today, gone tomorrow. Not a thing we can do about it.

Not only that but, it’s always possible to escape one form of violent death only to invite another that’s even worse.

That’s life.

The iron bridge connecting Springfield, Vt., and Charlestown, N.H., is straight and narrow, similar indeed to the live-free-or-die creed of rugged individualism and no taxes on the Granite State side.

So, no, I can’t say it’s a bit surprising that this contemporary, libertarian mind-set squares nicely with that of the hardy Massachusetts Bay Colony pioneers who founded Charlestown in the early 1740s with construction of The Fort at No. 4 on the east bank of the Connecticut River as a garrisoned northern outpost protecting isolated settlements in the lower valley.

It was that fort across from the Black River outflow on the Connecticut’s west bank — the mouth of which is a doorway to the ancient natural corridor slicing through the Green Mountains to the Hudson Valley — that indirectly drew my Sanderson ancestors to Whately, and sparked my interest in the historic site. Those two factors pulled me to the reconstructed fort’s annual French & Indian War re-enactment weekend Saturday with my wife and grandsons. It’s never too early to plant seeds of family discovery in a child: my mission.

The Connecticut was swollen, the framing landscape a vibrant green after soaking rains, and we had a blast, all of us, combined or solo, making our rounds about the festive fortress. We meandered through my seventh-great-grandfather Capt. Isaac Parker’s northeast corner home with a cannon in the bedroom, conversed with folks in the bordering encampments, and haggled with an array of interesting bohemian sutlers stationed along the outer palisade perimeter. I later overheard and concurred with my wife’s description of the trip as a home run, especially for little Arie, soon to be 4. The kid was all eyes and full of questions, racing around, enjoying the liberty to do so, learning much, some of it not from his grandfather. It must have seemed like a fanciful dream to the boy, a far cry from the typical, stifling, law-and-order classroom I’m most familiar with, have always objected to. There’s just something liberating about soldiers and settlers, sutlers and Indians and loud, smoky, 18th century battle re-enactments. Try it sometime if you doubt me. You won’t be disappointed.

One campsite that immediately caught Arie’s attention sat outside the fort’s southern gate. Near a sign identifying the small group as Col. Ebenezer Hinsdale’s Garrison, a small pile of round logs burned hot in an open fire. Some two feet above the flames, two whole chickens dangled from wet strings tied to the horizontal bar topping a six-foot-tall, four-legged metal cooking frame. The chickens, a moist, delicious, golden brown, were dripping into the fire, each greasy drop igniting tall, hissing flames that produced a most savory scent. I wanted to talk to the folks there because Col. Hinsdale, Fort Dummer’s chaplain, was from Deerfield and, even better, the older brother of Samuel Hinsdale, an early Greenfield settler who started the historic Meadows tavern I call home. So the site was rich in personal history I believed Arie could get his head around.

I approached the man tending the chickens and immediately initiated one of those spirited conversations I so enjoy inciting.

“I suppose you know Ole Ebenezer was a Haaavaaad man,” I blurted out with faux Ivy formality. “What you may not know, however, is that he was intemperate, possibly the result of being born in captivity and living with the humiliation of community uncertainty about the identity of his father. I suppose his intemperance was a reason they shipped him out of Deerfield to a hinterlands fort out of public view.”

The warm-eyed man flashed a wry grin and quipped, “Yup, I’ve heard that. They say he liked to hit the bottle.”

Little Arie was listening, and clueless.

“What’s ‘intemper,’ Grampy?”

“Drinking too much.”

“Oh.”

I don’t think he grasped it. I hope not. He’ll find out soon enough. Saturday wasn’t the day. Too young. The jesting had gone far enough. But then, as so often seems to happen in this wayward world of mine, not 75 feet away, just around the southeastern corner, lo and behold, a saucy sutler manning the “Geronimo Trading Company” tent, right up my alley, named after the rebel of all Indian rebels, the proudest and most defiant of all Apache warriors. While fellow tribesman Cochise tried to get along, Geronimo was determined to rid his Southwestern homeland of greedy, Caucasian invaders. Plus, the horse-trader who owned the company, one Mark Humpal, a barter-economy devotee, well, he too was right up my alley and soon was digging into a hidden location at the back of his tent for a clear canning jar filled with a most powerful peach moonshine taken in trade somewhere along the trail. How do I find these folks, anyway? I seem to have a knack for it. Must have picked it up in a stupor from the red Woodstock mud and clung to it evermore.

Anyway, this fella Humpal was quite a character from the nearby hills of Cornish, NH, and he drew quite a crowd, obviously a regular at such events, a throwback, to boot. Back in the days of Fort No. 4 and Rogers Rangers, colonial authorities frowned upon such traders because they were too friendly with the Indians and, for a price, willing to supply them with guns and liquor, a deadly combination that often resulted in the most hideous carnage. That isn’t to say the woodsmen they fought against were any better. Many of the frontiersmen went into battle drunk, too, which only complicated matters further. But don’t tell anyone. Conventional wisdom tells you buckskinned militia and cavalry soldiers alike were valiant heroes, and that those who besmirch their reputations today are “revisionist historians,” a pejorative description indeed. Not me. I believe in revisionist history, the mission of which is clearing the dense, manipulative fog borne of “official” government reports.

This too I will someday teach my grandsons, and one path will return straight through The Fort at No. 4, where ancestors learned the Indian way, respected it, used Native battle techniques to defeat a superior British oppressor and, later as disgruntled anti-Federalists, had a way of staying two steps ahead of the government on a western exodus known as manifest destiny, which ended late in the 19th century.

Today, there’s nowhere to run. We’re trapped like rats and forced down conformity’s funnel.

Monday, the morning after, gray and muggy following hard overnight rains. Heavy wet pods topping tall orchard-grass stems droop low, seeds shedding onto my shoe-tops, collecting on the shaft of my tiger-striped chestnut crook cane. My feet are wet, getting wetter with each step as a hidden yet discernible sun fights to penetrate deep cloud cover I sense will vaporize to a warm, powdery, midday blue.

The dogs are drenched and covered with tiny light-green seeds as they bounce joyfully through tall, dense cover they were born for, lingering scents clinging to the sodden turf, even more enticing for gun dogs bred for the sporting chase. God, how I wish I could still bounce and dart and leap and sprint like them. Then again, back when I could, I was clueless. So I guess I’m now better off, lame but sentient, aware of what life’s about, who I am and where I fit into this place called Happy Valley.

The dogs break through the tall hayfield into a scalped rye field burnt a shredded-wheat tan. A flock of maybe 20 turkey vultures is standing right there, 100 yards ahead, enjoying a ripe carrion breakfast, the smell of which had first drawn the dogs a couple days earlier. In such fields, Lily and Chubby tend to chow down a little but prefer dropping onto their backs and rolling in the stench with forbidden carnal glee, eventually returning with the most unpleasant odor and streaks of slimy, stinky flesh smeared like grease deep into their necks and ears. I always get a passing downwind whiff here and there along our walk, but the rancid odor of that violent mechanized carnage is most intense after I’ve crated the pets, closed the black fiberglass cap, driven a short distance home and opened the tailgate to a hot flatulent release that could gag and bring tears to the eyes of a weak-stomached man, which I am not. I typically remedy the problem with a hardy, green, braided lasso leash and the nozzled front-yard hose, which never takes long but is inconvenient.

Chubby spotted the flock first. He froze momentarily, silently proclaimed, “Oh boy!”, and sprinted at the birds, quickly scattered every last one into an airborne wheel of circling scavengers waiting for our rude intrusion to pass so they could touch down for another round of savory breakfast buffet. “Be my guest,” I quipped under my breath. “The sooner that decomposing slop vanishes from the field, the better.”

The prelude behind us, we dropped into Sunken Meadow, where, as so often happens, I quickly spun off into captivating introspection that started humming like a tuning fork wedged deep between my ears, swollen Green River’s rattle elevated from purl to growl. Yes, that again, my cranial wheels awhirl. Schoolmarms used to call it daydreaming when a warm April breeze or ray of bright sunlight pierced a stifling classroom’s window to pull young inquisitive minds off task and into liberating fancy. Not me. Such metaphysical adventures can be creative indeed, even productive, maybe therapeutic, and likely far more interesting than the subject scratched on the blackboard or the droning instructor repeating a lesson delivered many times before. Like most contemplations, the one at Sunken Meadow was ignited by the senses, a pleasing scent in heavy air, sweetest of sweet, so alluring, even seductive, a harbinger of summer — the fragrant white wild rose. I knew that soon the uplifting scent will fill the meadow like a scent bomb, signaling: the arrival of swooping field swallows and flittering, scolding bobolinks; the migration of turtles seeking sandy riverside soil in which to deposit eggs; the subtle scent of native strawberries bleeding a salubrious red tint into morning cereal’s almond milk or maple-sweetened oatmeal. Yes, there it was, the first welcome whiff of the wild white rose, a scourge to those managing meadows, but not to me. It walloped me at the far corner of a small riverside woodlot leading to a secluded swimming hole graced by a tall, solitary apple-tree sentry. God, I can only imagine what that tree which also blossoms white has witnessed over the years at such a a peaceful, secluded spot along by the water’s edge. To me, no church mouse, it’s a comforting thought related to human frailties.

The powerful yet delicate scent of those tiny riverside roses filled my nostrils and immediately for some reason got me thinking back to the charming home concert I had attended the previous afternoon. With work looming, I knew it would be tight but found my way to that little slice of Franklin County paradise high atop a majestic Colrain hill. Owned for generations by the Stowe family, Bill Cole now owns it and is building an eco-village called Katywil, which is, from the best I can tell, an upscale, new-age version of the small cooperative communities encouraged by Ivy League outcast Scott Nearing, that radical Wharton School professor and “Good Life” advocate who had the audacity to take a public stance against World War I. The man defended himself and miraculously kept himself out of prison back in the Palmer-Raid days, then  withdrew forever from conventional society.

If Cole is following Nearing’s path, I’m totally cool with it. I believe in “localism,” local economy and finding a way to live “off the grid” even though that lifestyle-change has probably passed me by; too independent at this point, I think. But who knows? I met Cole briefly before the concert overlooking Catamount and may even seek him out again someday. Sunday he was on my periphery. I was at his home to get a little taste of singer-songwriter Erica Wheeler’s music and leave it at that. I do hope it wasn’t rude to leave before the last chord was struck. But what can I say? Work beckoned from the distant shire town mired in dysfunction. No choice.

What immediately attracted me to this green, hillside Sunday service was the Pioneer Valley Institute’s email notice a month or two back. Titled “Sense of Place,” it immediately piqued my curiosity, pulled me in like a Venus fly-trap. I flagged the message. Sense of place is important to me. I live it, do believe it to be my strongest sense, that proverbial sixth one. As the other five fade with age, my sense of place only sharpens, strengthens and deepens, hardens as bedrock. So, yes, I think I hold a profound understanding of the concept. In fact, I’d take it a step further and admit I worship it, an airborne inhalant that inflates my consciousness with each breath. I feel it wherever I am, be it reading a book on the warm flagstone terrace, engaged in marketplace chatter, pecking away at a keyboard here or at work, challenging an arogant authority figure who deserves no respect, walking Sunken Meadow’s perimeter, swimming the Picomegan, chasing the dogs through a thorny, mucky alder swamp, following a ridge-top stonewall through regal shagbark hickories, or strolling the isles of ancient, lichen-layered graveyards soaked with family DNA.

I suppose a man can live in many places and have a sense of them all. Not me. This is my place. That’s why I’m here, why I came back, will die here. Where else can I walk in the woods, any woods, sit on a stonewall, any stonewall, swim in a river or lake, any river or lake, breathe the air, thick or thin, high or low, and know it contains my DNA? Even there at that bucolic Sunday site visited, it was comforting to know that if I researched it I’d surely find Colrain ancestors who once walked that property and left indelible stains which still live in the budding trees, the greening pastures, the springs trickling from stern black ledge. I wonder what the Indians think? They were here before us and must feel a smilar, even deeper, attachment to place. I think people are born with place but must discover it within. Lucky ones are successful. Fools and unfortunates pass it undetected.

It’s gratifying to be capable of attending a short event in a strange place, looking around, listening, speaking to a few people and departing with enough information absorbed to continue processing it internally for days. That pondering was still there when I passed the wild rose bush at the river’s edge, and it reappeared later, carrying me back to younger, wilder days. I vividly, even fondly, recall my road daze, touring the country lost in an intoxicated fog while fund-raising for cops in faraway spots like Colorado, Delaware, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio and, worst of all, “Joysie,” all places where I didn’t belong or want to stay. I felt like a foreigner. Even swimming in that gorgeous northern-Illinois lake named Wauconda, 60 or 70 miles south of my mom’s natal Wauwatosa, Wis., I could not, no matter how hard I tried, feel like I belonged or had anything in common with those folks in the land of fascist Joe McCarthy and his Red-Scare shame. I guess it’s all about perception, but that was mine and I returned home, to the place of my ancestors, and have remained without regret, constantly exploring new concepts to fine-tune understanding.

I pray I live long enough to instill in my grandsons this passion for place. They may not know it but it’s their place, too, which I hope to teach them. I think I can connect the dots if they listen.

In closing, I must say it’s difficult to understand those who seem bemused when I claim to be spiritual, not religious. My religion is a sense of place, the chapel an open, mature oak grove bordering a ridge-top shagbark alter overlooking a bloated aquifer shimmering through skeletal forest in bright noontime sun. There’s no golden glitter, no incense, no leaf, vine and rosette-carved walnut pulpit from which to brainwash a bulging congregation of crown-of-thorn cookies punched out of flattened, ghostly dough by a portly prophet.

I guess some will call me blasphemous.

Be my guest.

I’ve been tempted lately to jump back into the anadromous fish fray, for which local gadfly Karl Meyer has so capably taken the baton and sprinted off toward a distant, cluttered finish line. But first things first — specifically closure on the location of Greenfield’s Bull Head Pond, which I know much more about since last addressing it here a month or so back.

Since then, it’s been a phone call here, email there, questions, reading, personal observation and visits, conversations, interpretations, pensive pondering, evaluation and re-evaluation, all of it critical to discovery and a conclusion, which I have.

“How’d you get onto this subject, anyway,” wry-grinned key source Peter Conway during his Tuesday-night Recorder visit, Dave Allen’s multi-bookmarked “Historic Greenfield Maps” booklet in hand. The third in a four-generation string of family ownership on the hidden “downtown” site where the original Bull Head Pond rests, Conway was the strongest thread stitching it all together for me. In fact, I think he became my equal for enthusiasm.

Oh yes, there were others, many others who played important roles, but Conway had personal reasons for exploration, just as I expected when I first focused on his hideaway farm at the base of a steep hill descending from Main Street, past one “Jungle” and into another, t’other side the Green River from River Street.

First, let me remind you that I quite innocently happened upon this topic of a long-forgotten pond and Greenfield’s last Indian, whose inconspicuous wigwam was said to have stood near it, probably early to mid 18th century, “next to a fine spring.” This whole search and recovery mission just sprang up by accident as I picked my way through home bookshelves searching for descriptions of local Indian graves, especially surrounding Turners Falls’ dam, east of which stands the infamous Mackin site still in the never-ending Walmart-dispute’s crosshairs. I was at the time confused about ancient burials I had for years read about. Most descriptions I recalled situated interred bodies sitting upright to greet sunrise at the base of east-facing hills. Having read of several burials which fit that mold in various Pioneer Valley town histories, I accepted it as the preferred method for regional indigenous burials. But that ingrained perception changed dramatically after accepting an invitation to UMass/Amherst for an Anthropology Department showing of “Great Falls: Discovery, Destruction and Preservation in a Massachusetts Town.” There, in an untidy Bartlett Hall-basement classroom, eloquent Narragansett Tribal spokesman Doug Harris introduced the film and afterward answered questions that helped spawn more in me. Most confusing was his description of Eastern Algonkian burials oriented toward the setting southwestern sun, facing the happy hunting grounds of Cautantowwit’s House.

Determined to clear my confusion, I purchased and read William S. Simmons’ scholarly 1970 book “Cautantowwit’s House: An Indian Burial Ground of the Island on Conanicut in Narragansett Bay,” which chronicles the archaeological excavation led there by the esteemed anthropologist in the Sixties. With that information digested, I started reviewing indexes of local town histories searching for mention of burials with a southwestern orientation. I found none and was later told by a Lenape Indian and former Friends of Wissatinnewag president that most of the Mackin-site burials face east, overlooking the sacred Connecticut River elbow called Peskeomskut and the morning sun. Then, while flipping pages for the listed “Indian Skeletons” in Lucy Cutler Kellogg’s “History of Greenfield 1900-1929” I discovered a short entry titled “The Last Indian,” read it, and it immediately captured my fancy. The chase was on.

To briefly summarize what has been previously written here in three installments, Kellogg claimed that during a 1914 Women’s Club presentation by famed Greenfield children’s author Mary Prudence Wells Smith — known for her popular “Boy Captive,” “Young Puritans” and “Jolly Good Times” historical novels — she “related many anecdotes of the Indian times told her by her father, and which were related to him in his boyhood by Asa Childs, an old Indian fighter of Deerfield. Among other things brought out was that the last Indian in Greenfield lived in a wigwam in the west part of the meadows on the edge of Bull Head Pond and near a fine spring.”

That tidbit to me implied that the pond cited sat in the Lower Meadows somewhere out by Greenfield Community College, and, being myself an Upper Meadows resident since 1997, I knew precisely who to query. Well, when my captive-audience source phoned his father to ask if he had heard of Bull Head Pond, his dad answered yes, it sat along the southwest corner of their farm, right about where I figured. When I published that discovery and invited reader feedback in an effort to substantiate the location for posterity, well, let’s just say it opened a can of worms. Yes, my trusted source was quickly challenged by none other than his older brother, then, lo, his 86-year-old mother, not to mention several 60- and 70-somethings who grew up in Greenfield and identified a Bull Head Pond at the corner of Woodard Road and Colrain Street, roughly where Davenport Trucking today stands. They all remembered Davenport filling it in with gravel some 50 years ago for the truck yard.

But it doesn’t stop there. No. In fact, we’re just getting started. Octogenarian Bill Allen — a former selectman and, as retired county engineer, perhaps the authority on local roads — decided to throw in his two cents worth. He phoned me at home to inform me that Woodard Road was a very early county road leading from Colrain Street to Wisdom, Shelburne and beyond. He wasn’t sure when it had been designated a (then-Hampshire) county road but was certain it occurred in the 18th century, perhaps even before the Revolution. More new perspective added to old, always helpful to historical investigation. Before Allen’s call, I had known that Colrain Street and the Green River crossing at Smead’s Bridge (Davenport’s) were early, and that the road itself was likely an old Indian trail leading from the downtown plateau to the fertile meadows and beyond. I had thus speculated in print that in my mind it was an unlikely place for a solitary Indian to hide out. But sandwiched between the Green River and the junction of two busy roads? Uh-uh. That made no sense at all to me, seemed more unlikely than ever, despite credible testimony that the pond there in the mid 20th century was called Bull Head by those who fished and skated it.

At that point, I had totally accepted that the pond identified by those sources as Bull Head had indeed been known by that name in the day. But, still, I was not so confident it was the same pond known by that name two and more centuries earlier, and I hinted skepticism in print. Then came a breakthrough tip by late-night weekend email from a Bernardston woman who, curiosity piqued, had embarked on her own Bull-Head-Pond  research. It just so happened that one of her Internet keyword searches dropped her straight into the Google Books edition of David “Willard’s History of Greenfield,” the town’s earliest published history (1838). Near the end of the book she found a biography of William Coleman, a prosperous transplant lawyer who built the historic McCarthy Funeral Home off Bank Row before departing for New York around 1800. The location of his stately new Asher Benjamin home made Coleman the downtown neighbor of Willard (1790-1855), who lived west of the town common. So Willard knew Coleman’s promontory point well and penned a description of the pastoral western prospect from Coleman’s backyard, which reads: “The very fertile and beautiful meadow west of these buildings was, within memory, covered with many lofty walnuts sprinkled over the soil like an orchard, excepting the western part that was covered with alders, among which and near the margin of Bull Head Pond, where is a fine spring of water, once stood the hut or wigwam of a solitary Indian.”

Aha! I rose from my chair and went straight to the bookcase for Willard, reading the Coleman bio, rereading the short segment about the solitary Indian and immediately focusing on Power Court and Power Square off Mill Street. That’s when I thought of contacting Conway, if needed. But first I went through my Dave Allen Maps CD and found little on my maiden journey; then, early the next week on my way to work, pulled into Mowry & Schmidt to see if there were any ponds there. Sure enough, I found one along the western border of the parking lot. Intrigued, I drove around to the top of Bank Row and pulled through McCarthy’s driveway to orient myself with Willard’s view. Once at work, I hunted down Conway’s phone number, called him and got the wheels spinning in a new direction. Willard could not, in my opinion, have been talking about the Bull Head Pond of 20th century fame in the written picture he paints. The Greenfield native would have known the view well, and the scene he sketched just doesn’t fit the Bull-Head-Pond site near Davenport’s. His description implies that the pond, or at least the alder swamp fronting it, was visible as he looked over the open meadow (later the first fairgrounds) that is now a congested Power Square and Power Court. So that would place the site between Mowry & Schmidt and the railroad trestle behind Dunkin Donuts. The Colrain Street Bull Head Pond identified by several living sources is around a sweeping bend and far out of view. Also, that pond would have been on the other side of Green River. Wouldn’t Willard have noted that in his description?

Truthfully, soon as I ruled out the faraway Bull Head site near GCC, my intuition told me that the old pond at Davenport’s was too far away and out of Willard’s Bank-Row world. That’s why I took that first field trip to Mowry & Schmidt, discovered the pond and spoke to Conway about his son’s property under Main Street on dead-end Conway Drive. When I spoke to him on the phone that night from work, I was rushing on deadline, scribbling illegible notes, and ultimately made a key mistake when writing my column the next day. Conway had told me that the small pond with the island I spotted just west of Power Court was known as The Donut, and that there was another, not far west of it, called Horse Shoe Pond. I mistakenly remembered him telling me they were both man-made sometime around 1900. The truth is that Horse Shoe Pond, called “Old Channel” on the earliest map I could find naming it, was not man-made. No, it’s an old oxbow that was long ago separated from the main Green River stem and still holds water, though much less than years ago. Conway remembers Horse Shoe as bigger, deeper and better defined as a kid when he fondly recalls catching — his hands spread apart a foot or better — fat bullheads. He also remembers a marshy spring hole between the Horse Shoe arch and the base of the steep escarpment, where a thin stream bed ran out of it to the river. He says the marsh and stream bed are still discernible but have been filled in by erosion triggered by railroad vibration over the years.

“I think you’ve put the Bull Head Pond mystery to rest,” predicted Conway. “Horse Shoe pond was once called Bull Head. There is no question in my mind.”

I agree. In fact, I do believe the names Bull Head Pond and Old Channel appear in the earliest deeds related to that fertile, secluded hollow between Power Court and the railroad trestle. I tried to research it and cried uncle after two unsuccessful visits totaling up to three hours at the Franklin County Registry of Deeds. There were just too many transactions and legal maneuverings to plow through, starting with an insolvent Coombs estate that got tangled up and remained that way from just after the Civil War until the dawning of the 20th century, when Conway’s grandfather purchased it. I am thoroughly convinced that due diligence by a capable researcher will bear me out.

In closing, I must say I love the symbolism of that last Indian choosing to live buried deep in the lowest fringe of downtown Greenfield along a sparkling escarpment spring passing an ancient, detached piece of Green River bed that became a pond where fat, tasty bullhead lurked. It all just fits snug as a skullcap.

A rattler it wasn’t, but still, how would like to find one in your lingerie drawer?

Yes, it seems dangerous-looking reptiles are lurking in my neighborhood. That’s what I’m chasing this week. Just another interesting little tale that piqued my interest after arriving as an email tip from a friend and neighbor. Why? For one thing because of a recent personal encounter, with what I’m not certain, just up the road. You can’t make it up. How is it that this stuff just seems to find its way to my doorstep? No complaints. Stories like this write themselves.

I’ll start with the email, which arrived Monday afternoon and went like this (names and locations excluded): “Info came my way today that three timber rattlers were taken by Fish & Game personnel recently at (a neighborhood) estate. Workers found them while fixing a foundation around a shed/barn? Did you know? Check it out.”

Hmmmmm? I knew the estate. Pass it daily. But what’s really interesting, probably just a coincidence if you believe in such things, is that historical research on an unrelated subject had led me straight to that old farm recently. Now this.

Intrigued by the spicy rumor, I figured I’d swing through the driveway on the way into work to see if the visit drew or caught the owner outside. No such luck, just a tabby cat on the porch and a happy pappy dog trotting down to greet me, friendly tail wagging. I stopped my truck, opened the door just long enough to pet the dog between the ears, noticed no activity in the house and departed unfulfilled. Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I didn’t want to be a supper-time pest, had time to pursue it in the morning. But, just out of curiosity, I from afar scanned the stone foundation of an outbuilding on the way out and found it tidy indeed for stonework of its age. Yes, a likely candidate for recent renovation.

At that point, having noticed the neat, clean facing of that exposed stone foundation, my wheels started spinning to a low hum. Perhaps the rattlesnake rumor was true. Plus I kept mentally traipsing back a few days to that personal encounter with something I never saw but knew for sure was there. Young Springer Spaniel pal Chubby had alerted me to its presence during our daily walk down a familiar game trail at the point of an escarpment that leads down to a narrow marsh flooded by beavers. It was Friday or Saturday, I can’t recall which, hot and sunny, late morning. About a third of the way down the brushy path, getting thicker by the day due to fresh spring growth, Chuby-Chub, maybe 20 feet ahead of me, stopped, froze statuesque — nose elevated, ears perked — and chose to skirt whatever it was he smelled, heard or both by walking a tight little five-foot detour loop to the left. Whatever it was, he wanted no part of it. Me neither. But, curious, I carefully approached the site and used my chestnut crook cane to investigate the ground by pushing small, leafy, infant beech seedlings to the side, Chubby already standing chest-deep, drinking beaver-dam overflow below as foot-free mother Lily trotted down to join him. Although my quick probe  revealed nothing, I was convinced it was a snake. Because animals have a sixth sense for danger, I pay attention. So, when I heard this neighborhood rattlesnake rumor, that’s why it really grabbed a hold of me. Maybe a rattler had persuaded young Chubby to change his path down that natural, constricted earthen ramp.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I was a little skittish upon returning to the site the next few days, walking down through the small marsh between two agricultural plots with my four-legged friends, me crossing the water over a large fallen tree trunk. I don’t believe an observer would have noticed caution in my gait, but let’s just say that minor tangles and sapling slaps across the back of my naked calves startled me a little more than usual, not to mention the sight of thin, dead, fallen limbs dangling in the sumacs. Yes, those dangling particles attracted closer inspection than usual as I snaked (no pun intended) my way through that familiar little wetland strip. Once I poked through the marsh into open Sunken Meadow, it was always clear sailing, no more heebie-jeebies for the remainder of my circuitous riverside ramble back to the truck.

Although I can’t say I’ve have ever considered owning a pet snake, I wouldn’t call myself ophidiophobic. I remember handling garden snakes as a kid before witnessing a friend getting bitten by a big ornery one. That instilled in me a healthy respect for snakes, which still give me the creeps. My youthful fears only intensified as I wandered out and discovered more threatening-looking serpents on my travels up and down the Indian trails scaling the red North Sugarloaf cliffs. It was worse on the way up, when I’d reach for a scrub-oak or an outcropping a ledge to pull myself up only to meet face-to-face with an unfriendly-looking outstretched snake adorned in colorful geometric bands baking in the summer sun. To this day I can’t say what kind of snakes they were, but like Chubby-Chub-Chub, I never pestered them. No, I always did my best to avoid them. Yet I can honestly say that such close encounters never discouraged me from returning to the scene, just taught me to be aware. Never in my recollection did one of those snakes act aggressively toward me, though, which makes sense because I never bothered them. But let’s not digress, back to the present.

When I returned home from a Tuesday walk, wanting to chase the rumor, I immediately called the neighbor who, rumor had it, discovered those rattlesnakes at her historic Greenfield Meadows home. When I told her why I was calling and admitted skepticism, she chuckled and said that, in fact, what I had heard was pretty accurate. Yes, as it turns out, the three snakes were not discovered by contractors working on an outbuilding but instead by the woman herself on April 10 and 11. First, upon walking into her office, she found one critter right out in the open, coiled neatly on a printer shelf. When she and a colleague witnessed the snake rattling its tail, she phoned police and a temporary animal-control officer was dispatched as she waited, snapping off photos with her cell phone. When the public servant arrived on the scene, he observed the four-foot snake and, yup, identified it as a rattlesnake before removing it from the building and releasing it over the bank into the woods, because, you know, rattlesnakes are a protected endangered species.

It gets better. Next day, with the harrowing experience sort of behind her, lo, upon opening a desk drawer in the same office, there lay an identical three-foot snake stretched out among the contents. Convinced she was dealing with yet another rattler, the woman was brave indeed, eventually removing it from the drawer with long-handled pruning shears (I call them loppers) and taking it outside. Concerned that there may be more big, menacing reptiles lurking, she called the contractor who had performed the carriage-house-to-office transition and asked if he’d please investigate further. He arrived on the scene the next day and, sure enough, removed a third snake from a warm place near a pilot light to a gas fireplace, end of story. Well, except that the property owner says she had seen a large snake colored and marked the same as those in her office while doing yard-work last fall. She figures it and others must have hibernated in a stone-foundation pocket and found a way inside upon awaking from their long winter nap.

After recounting the tale and checking for dates in her email messages, the proprietor emailed me two photos she had taken, the first titled “office visitor,” the second “in the drawer.” I promptly forwarded “in the drawer” to Ralph Taylor, MassWildlife’s Connecticut Valley District manager, who viewed it and quickly replied that it was a harmless Eastern milk snake.

“That’s typical milk-snake behavior,” he chortled. “They seem to like people’s homes and are often confused with rattlesnakes because they, and black water snakes, will shake their tails like a rattler when nervous.”

Taylor says his office answers calls from concerned citizens who find milk snakes on cellar rafters of their homes and barns. He said the snakes are docile creatures that eat rats and mice and are thus attracted to cellars, crawl spaces and woodsheds. Taylor said the loamy bottomland location of the Greenfield incidents makes it an unlikely place to find rattlesnakes, but not milk snakes. Which isn’t to suggest there are no Franklin County rattlesnakes. Anyone who’s studied local history dating back to the first two centuries of settlement knows New England Indians tribes used ominous rattlesnake skins ceremoniously and displayed their fangs in jewelry. Accounts of early settlers depict rattlesnakes as quite common dating from the colonial period well into the 19th century, their range extending far north of here, into the Green, White and Adirondack Mountains, and deep across upper New York State. Given the factors of global warming and Northeastern reforestation, rattlesnakes could indeed be on the comeback trail locally. In fact, if you went hunting for them tomorrow, you could find them with little effort. Taylor identified the Holyoke, Mt. Tom and Tekoa ranges as local hot-spot sites, saying the most likely place to find them is on sun-splashed talus slopes composed of stone, ledge and shale. Rattlers also seek out the warm, manmade concrete floors and platforms poured to anchor mountaintop cell towers and windmills. Although humans are likely to survive rattlesnake bites, Taylor said their venom is a protein destroyer that initiates a flesh-eating process and causes permanent damage. Rattlesnakes and copperheads are nothing to fool with.

My guess is that Chubby was skirting a Milk Snake that day and, even though they’re harmless, I can’t say I blame him. In fact, on my way into bed after work Tuesday night, I’ll admit to having an extra little hop in my step upon jumping into bed after midnight. I’m sure that temporary phobia will pass. It’s just that the images and discussion were very fresh and creepy, our homes close and similarly constructed.

Milk snakes may be harmless, but I’d rather not crawl onto a heated mattress pad with one, thank you.