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.

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.

Whew! What a day, week, month, fresh new year. Freakin’ incredible!

Information’s been flying at me like angry white-faced hornets, all of it interrelated, interesting, dynamic and highly contagious. I told my wife the other day that all the details bombarding me have created such a bizarre, glistening labyrinth that I fear I’m going to at any moment awaken and realize it’s all been a wild dream. If it’s all accurate, I will probably have to take this discussion out of the playpen and into a big-boy section of the newspaper. No lie. But it must wait for another day, another week. I’ve got other items to deal with today, easy subjects (I won’t say simple), starting with old friend Joe Judd of Shelburne, soon to be the recipient of a prestigious award from the National Wild Turkey Federation, which he’s been affiliated with for decades; also, a little Vermont deer-hunting caper good ole boys who still peruse this space may find to their liking.

But first a quick rundown of my local travels, home visitors, emails, readings, telephone conversations and what have you. It’s amazing, all focused on ritualistic Native landscapes, sacred stones, archaeology, anthropology and an alleged, deeply-ingrained bureaucratic ivory-tower mentality that’s not at all helpful when attempting to piece together a fascinating puzzle of random clues strewn about the region. In the past week I’ve toured Montague, Turners Falls, Gill, Millers Falls, Wendell, New Salem, Shutesbury, Leverett, Colrain, Shelburne, Ashfield and Conway, attended a Connecticut River dam re-licensing meeting run by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, received a written bombshell of damning accusations against professional archaeologists overseeing ongoing and past Pioneer Valley excavations, entertained officers from respected archaeological organizations who echo many of the letter-writer’s criticisms, all the while fielding several long, detailed phone conversations concerning the above topics, all related, all alluring. Fact is I know much more than I’ve been writing, and there are supportive documents for back up; more observations and opinions arriving daily, very much connected, entangled and, yes, fascinating indeed. But that’s all I’ve got for now. Lots of time-consuming legwork remains. I want to give the authorities an opportunity to respond to the criticism aimed at them but suspect there will be many “no comments” and intimidating threats. Yeah, right! Always a great way to hold the weak-willed at bay. Count me out. I want answers and pray that by prying them out into the open I will eventually clear a path to future interactive discovery by a diverse crowd stitched together by a common thread of intellectual curiosity, all with the common goal of uncovering unwritten history that government and church officials have tried quite successfully for centuries to obliterate. These folks are still determined to complete the destruction of sacred grounds surrounding Peskeomskut, where they want to bulldoze what little may be left on the northwest corner, a site to which struggling geriatric indigenous tribesmen and women pathetically trudged through corn snow to die and be buried at a special place. But enough of that for now. Back to Mr. Judd, an old friend who more than 30 years ago introduced me to the sound of daybreak turkey gobbles on a bucolic hillside now within earshot of my residence.

A semi-retired insurance man and longtime Shelburne selectmen, Judd will be honored as one of five Roger Latham Award winners at the NWTF’s 37th annual National Convention and Sport Show on Feb. 14-17 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center in Nashville, TN. The awards, which will be presented during the Feb. 16 banquet, recognize outstanding volunteers who have given their personal time, energy and money to wild-turkey conservation and management. Judd is known to some local folks as the host of “On The Ridge,” which airs on local TV stations like GCTV and Falls Cablevision, and also as a longtime columnist for the likes of the West County News and currently the Shelburne Falls Independent. Other folks will know him from various NWTF seminars and events sponsored by the local Pioneer Valley Longbeards chapter, which Judd had a hand in founding.

“It was great being nominated,” said Judd in correspondence with another man he forwarded to me. “I will always be grateful and humbled for this opportunity.”

Moving to southern Vermont, how about that rascal James Smith, 47, from the Vermont/Massachusetts border town of Stamford, which touches the Monroe and Clarksburg lines, sitting between the Vermont towns of Whitingham and of Pownal? Sounds like this determined hunter got so caught up in the chase of a humongous Green Mountain State racker that he got disoriented and, lo and behold, shot it a day after the season ended. Yes, that’s right, the man was caught dragging his trophy buck out of the woods on Nov. 26, 2012, and will be prosecuted for “taking deer in closed season.” I guess the infraction is worth mentioning because, had he not shot the monster buck, it may well have been available to Massachusetts hunters during the shotgun and/or blackpowder seasons. With the case due to be heard in Bennington District Court next week, I was unable to get the weight of the 10-pointer, but it probably tipped the scales at way over 200 pounds. Described in a Vermont Fish & Wildlife press release as “one of the largest deer taken in Vermont in more than 20 years,” its antlers were impressive indeed, grossing out at 165 2/8 Boone and Crockett.

Back for a moment to the ongoing information bombardment I’ve thus far endured and survived; yes, you guessed it, cougars are back in my inbox, with several photos coming my way from a Pioneer Valley organization committed to searching for the four-legged felines. One photo suspected of being a spotted cougar kitten was not convincing to my eyes, which immediately screamed “bobcat,” or maybe even Canada lynx, which are acknowledged by New Hampshire Fish & Game to be back in the Granite State. Imagine that! This cougar chase just won’t die like that 170-pound mountain lion that met it’s maker on a coastal Connecticut highway less than an hour northeast of the Big Apple.

Reading? Oh yeah, just a quick rundown: more on Indian myth and folklore, a lot by this Leverett author who’s reached out to me about stone structures and much, much more, some of it wild indeed. I have now read four of his books (the latest “Our Human Destiny,” a humdinger) about some pretty new-age concepts that are new to me and will need further research. Plus, how about this one: just Tuesday night an email arrived from local stone-structures researcher/lecturer/writer Jim Vieira. I expect to sit down and chat someday soon. Why not? I think he wants to make his case for a giant race of North American human beings in ancient times, back when the plants and animals were also large. I’m not sure I really want to go there right now with so many other topics on my plate. I’m focused on Pioneer Valley archaeology, much of it very local, and a certain wooded lot in New Salem that I visited Friday and must revisit. I am still in awe of what I saw or didn’t see, and must say I have not seen enough.

I’m beginning to think I may be getting in over my head. No problem. I’ve always been a strong swimmer with no fear of deep, turbulent water.

Off I go. See you next week.