Late start, full plate, probably way more than I can handle in one sitting. No problem. I’ll just save the leftovers and nuke ’em next week. Maybe I should start writing two columns a week.

Anyway, the signs of fall that started creeping onto the edges weeks ago are now everywhere. Soon the leaf-peepers will be clogging the highways and bringing fall revenue to our local economy. But similar to the Republicans in Tampa, the irate fella who phoned me noontime Sunday during a beautiful Labor Day Weekend back-lit at night by a seductive blue moon wanted to look back, not ahead. He was still steamed up by irritating summer signals lingering along the lower Deerfield River, where he, his wife and dog camped Thursday for an intended long weekend away from it all. At least, that’s what they hoped for; definitely not what they got.

It seems that the once-tranquil stretch of river between Bardwells Ferry and Stillwater ain’t what it used to be, a disheartening fact that many of us discovered long ago. I know the lower Deerfield well from years of hunting and fishing, and that picturesque gorge is stained throughout with my DNA dating back centuries, starting with the surname worn by the bridge and ferry. The last time I went there, many years ago, to a familiar spot saturated with pleasant fishing memories, I left prematurely and vowed in hot, spicy language never to return; way too much “activity” for me — as it turns out, the same type of annoying activity that necessitated the early exit by the man who called my home Sunday. The name on the caller ID was a blast from the distant past.

“I had to get out of there,” fumed the South Deerfield man and Whately native on the phone with hunter-orange anger. “Those people floating down the river are hard to take. I didn’t know who to call, then thought of you. After 3 o’clock Saturday afternoon, more than a hundred tubers came by riding anything that floats — inner tubes, cheap blow-up prizes from the fair, you name it. I even saw six or seven people having a gay ole time drinking, littering, throwing bottles into the river, off a blow-up queen mattress. No lie. I decided to pack up and leave before I punched someone and got myself into trouble. We were outnumbered. I just wanted to get my Lab out of there before he cut his foot. That riverbed is a freakin’ mess.”

Irritated, the man folded his tent, loaded it into his canoe and headed downstream for his car, which was parked in the riverside lot south and west of Stillwater Bridge. Before turning the final corner to where he could clearly see the entire Stillwater Bridge, he found a disturbing pile of trash that stoked his ire to a red-hot glow.

“There were inner tubes, deflated floating devices, bottles and cans and trash everywhere. It looked like an ugly, stinking dump. Take a ride down there if you don’t believe me and see it for yourself. I’m sure it’s still there. Who should I call to report it? It’s freakin’ disgusting.”

Our source spoke to many of the frolicking folks passing by in the water and described them as outsiders, “not from town,” many from the Springfield and Northampton area, others from Worcester and Rhode Island. The most common question he was asked was, “How far to Stillwater?” That’s where they said their buses were waiting. Apparently, the flotilla gang didn’t feel up to lugging their garbage up the bank to the buses, easier to leave it streamside for someone else to clean up. Pigs!

Honestly, I can’t imagine such unacceptable behavior by customers of trips supervised by our local whitewater companies, although the source — who I decided not to name — claims to often see the local companies’ vehicles parked at Stillwater. It seems more likely that the folks involved in the floating circus he encountered Friday and Saturday were holiday excursions organized far away. Still, the whitewater companies cannot claim zero culpability because there’s no denying they put our Deerfield River “on the map.”

The problem as I see it from this lofty perch along the trestle overlooking the Deerfield’s wild west bank is that the slobs who create the problems will be long gone by the time law-enforcement arrives determined to make a vindictive statement. The “violators” ultimately charged, convicted and made examples of will likely be victims of circumstance and undeserving of what they get. Local lollygaggers will probably be punished for the dirty deeds of outsiders.

“It’s out of control,” said my source. “I usually mind my own business but I want to report these people. Hopefully we can send them back where they came from.”

Good luck!

The days of the Deerfield River as a hidden local gem are long gone. I suppose some think that’s a good thing. Not me. I miss the “old” Deerfield River, especially the inaccessible secluded sections, places Trout Unlimited fought and failed to protect. As usual, money talked, entrepreneurs won and the ecosystem is paying the price.

One of those days, I guess.

Maybe it was the clear, cool air that greeted me at 6 a.m., perhaps the strong, black coffee, possibly even lingering effects from that red-hot, spicy marinara sauce I concocted in a flash Tuesday afternoon, then devoured in the evening over a thick bed of linguine. Whatever the impetus, it was powerful, strapping me into a single-seat gyroscope that got spinning out of control, like a top on polished linoleum. So captivating was it that I extended my daily morning walk, taking a refreshing diversion through the knee-deep Green River before returning to my truck and walking right past it to follow the hayfield cuff to a path descending into a second hidden riverside meadow. There a mowed meandering lane looped me to a large red river rock that I believe harbors Native spirits, happy ones I hope to someday meet.

Truth be told, I’m switching on the fly. I had a column all written before I sat down, but I’m all fired-up by the election chatter that’s abuzz with — go figure — idiotic right-wing lunacy. Anyway, that first column can wait; it’s about the joys of watching Chubby, my young Springer Spaniel, develop before my eyes with pheasant season looming. He’ll be fun. I can’t wait to bust him loose. But I put that story in the freezer, will thaw it out for another day. This time of year is always lean on local sports and, to be honest, I feel guilty when filling pages with wire news that readers have typically seen on TV the previous day. It’s a good excuse, I suppose, to ramble a bit, always dangerous with my wife on the Cape, me “batching” it, not sure what to do with my freedom. Yeah, right! A colleague I call “The Big Boiczek” got a kick out of that playful complaint, reacting like he does whenever I whine about being a victim of small-town gossip. He gets a kick out of that claim, too.

Enough of that, though; onto other stuff, beginning with a quick follow-up on last week’s story about a mother/daughter cougar sighting in East Charlemont, one I hesitated from the start to publish. Why? Because I always shy away from nighttime sightings, potentially risky and unreliable. But those sinister green eyes and that guttural sound from dark woods, eerie indeed, tickled my fancy and I guess more than anything else I am a storyteller, albeit one sporting a thin white scoundrel’s streak down my back. It was a great tale that had to be told. And in my own defense, I did, if you care to check, cast subtle doubt early, a disclaimer, so to speak. Good thing.

After that wild tale hit the street, a few concerned West County sources fired off emails warning me that I may have been snookered. “I wouldn’t say they made up the whole story,” wrote a critic familiar with the witnesses. “I believe they saw eyes, maybe raccoons, and their imaginations ran away to fantasy land.” The source, a gentleman who worked around Western cougars, called it unlikely that any cougar would permit a human to walk within “five or six feet” without fleeing. He also said cougars prey on live animals, not road-kill and garbage, thus wouldn’t be attracted to seafood like the pungent mussel shells the witness described on the ground near a torn plastic rubbish bag. I had honestly tossed that factor around in my head before going forward with the tale but decided to go with it, considering troublesome cougars I had recently read about in LA and Chicago. Maybe urban cats can be temporarily reduced to scavenging, I thought. Oh well. You win some, you lose some.

Whew! With that in the rearview, let’s tippie-toe into a couple of other subjects that had my wheels spinning to a shrill scream during that extended walk through the sunken riverside meadows. I’ll try to be brief, can’t resist, am “Akin” to chime in on a couple of controversies, one from my boyhood home, the other from the national campaign trail that’s heating up for the stretch run to November 6. I’ll start in South Deerfield and jump briefly to Rep. Todd Akin (R-Missouri), who’s taken Romney/Ryan to a forbidden place called the uterus. No, forget “Sowdeerfeel” for a moment. I’m going to stay with Akin and his flat-earth Republicans. The more these Christian-conservative whack jobs talk, the more I like it: indecent exposure for sure, opinions that ought to send any woman in her right mind straight to the polls to vote for any candidate followed by a capital D on the ballot. Oh my! Where do these Neanderthal creeps come from? Is there any way to herd them all onto an ark headed for Timbuktu? Now they’re giving the uterus a brain and conscience to guard against rape pregnancy. Lord have mercy. These folks spew hate and fear of big government in one frothing breath, then ask the very same demon to define “legitimate” rapes and stand sentry to enforce the Christian way in bedrooms. What’s most frightening is that 40-something percent of the voting public will actually vote for these cavemen. Actually, the Cro-Magnons knew better. When they ambushed a female and took her like a buck intercepts a doe, they did so to propagate, not violate. We’ve come a long way since then, with the evolution of courting, engagement, marriage and nuclear families, but there’s little an unprotected, ovulating female can do to prevent rape fertilization, regardless of male intent or day-after prayers. It just don’t work that way.

Before I split, back to my old hometown, where it’s getting pretty wild concerning what appears to be the inevitable hiring of a native-son police chief town officials seem determined to install before thoroughly vetting baggage from Erving, where the man was chief of police for several years. Rumors are swirling, people are buzzing in the coffee shops and taverns, and now a supposed “group” of concerned citizens has appeared at the 11th hour to write an accusatory letter to the town fathers, The Recorder and The Daily Hampshire Gazette in an effort to stall, if not derail, the imminent hiring. Stay tuned. From what I’m hearing, this one is far from over. Problem is that people in Erving and elsewhere are hesitant to talk due to fear of reprisal. Count me among them. I don’t need the hassle. All I can say from my lofty perch in a tall white oak along Sugarloaf’s spine is: Where there’s smoke there’s fire. I see the smoke rising from a place I know well, have taken a deep whiff and it smells fishy — definitely not stinky roadside mussel shells, either.

Enough! I’m outta here. I can clearly read the signs tacked to trees. They say “No Trespassing!”

Curiosity is a stiletto, needle-point, both edges razor sharp, lethal in the wrong hands, yet also a stimulating path to discovery — just one more double-edged sword from which I have never cowered. In fact, I slide it under my belt to tickle my grandsons’ fancy, maybe even that of their children if ever so fortunate. Stifle a child’s curiosity and you ought to be charged with abuse. At least, that’s my view, televangelist, Sunday School teacher and chief of police be damned.

What’s got me thinking this week is the lawn, a rare three weeks without mowing. Having performed the chore for nearly 50 years in this fertile valley, I know it has never before happened in my lifetime. So, of course, my wheels are spinning to a shrill, piercing scream, on my walks, in my rambles, when random thoughts distract even the most gripping reads.

Yeah, I know, I can feel readers’ angst already: “Uh-oh,” they’re pondering, “where’s he going with this?” And I suppose there are a many turns I could take on a subject like curiosity, starting with that threadbare axiom about the cat and the pleasant outcome that brought about its reincarnation. But, no, far too familiar. What’s bugging me as I sit here today, contemplating a drought interrupted by our first puddles in weeks, followed by inspiring Wednesday-morning air, is the reading of Bill McKibben’s troubling “Rolling Stone” magazine piece titled “The Reckoning,” on global warming. When will people finally “get it” and expel the diabolical, manipulative deniers from our political landscape? I’m not optimistic it’ll happen anytime soon.

According to McKibben, for many years the lonely canary in a rickety, old, backwoods coal mine posted “No Trespassing,” it may already be too late. He lays out some simple, defeatist math concerning U.S. fossil fuels already in storage for intended use. He says if it’s all used, we’re freakin’ cooked, literally. So stop at the newsstand and pick up a copy, fresh cougar bait on the cover, it’ll tell you all you need to know and plenty you’d probably rather not know about the state we’re in, thanks to greedy energy companies and the clever wordsmiths and unethical scientists they employ to mislead the clueless flock. It’s criminal. If you want more, go to 350.org and sign up for email alerts, just so that the crisis threatening the world as we know it stays in plain view. A scholar from the beautiful Champlain Valley college town of Middlebury, Vt. — where I found myself sitting on the common Sunday afternoon — McKibben is from the neighborhood and well worth heeding.

Problem is that McKibben does most of his preaching to the choir, can’t seem to reach lazy mainstream-news hounds who continue to get their daily fix about the coast-to-coast drought ravaging our land, the related wildfires scorching the parched West, without even a faint whiff of the crucial question hovering over the whole crisis: Why? Gee, do you suppose it could have anything to do with the millions of gallons of oil sludge circulating along the deep, dark ocean floor somewhere in the Atlantic following the disastrous 2010 BP Gulf spill? How about Fukushima? Could the poisonous radiation belched into to the atmosphere and puked into the ocean be even partially to blame for this record heat and drought? Sadly, if you’re looking for a culpability analysis, you won’t find it on the nightly news or morning paper. No sir. If it’s the truth you seek, you must search alternative sources, be they cutting-edge blogs or other online news sources, or secondary publications like “Mother Jones,” “The Nation,” “Rolling Stone” or “Orion,” that literary gem few know of. If you can believe it, even Al Jazeera covered the Gulf spill and Fukushima back in the day better than Associated Press, and it’s not like Arabs have no energy interests to protect.

It reminds me of the old days, before the Internet and 24/7 cable news stations, when you had to read “Ramparts” or I.F. Stone or, again, “Rolling Stone,” if you wanted to know what was going on in Vietnam, at Kent State or on the city streets of San Francisco, LA and Chicago. It’s the same, tired old story today, with the courts, the cops and the mainstream press fighting hard to protect the status quo while lonely, altruistic voices like McKibben sound Paul Revere’s alarm to deaf ears of loyalist “sheeple” waving their flags made in Taiwan, singing praise of “true patriots” like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hanitty, prime-time gasbags for the Rupert Murdoch/Roger Ailes propaganda machine. Yes indeed, history repeats itself and will likely continue doing so until it all comes to a hot, fiery grand finale, by which time it’ll be pointless even to say, “I told you so.”

Which I guess brings us right back where we started, to the concept of basic human curiosity. Those who are curious today can find answers easier than back in the Sixties and early Seventies. Problem is that intellectual and philosophical curiosity have been suffocated in debt, which leaves middle-class college graduates with no freedom to explore or travel or figure out precisely who they are before settling down to own a home, raise a family and punch the clock; better still, blast away with an assault rifle at a movie theater. There’s just no time for floating and free thinking these days, only immense pressure to quickly plug into a “good job,” which these days translates to one that pays well, not necessarily makes you happy. What we end up with is a flock of expressionless automatons, what Orwell and Upton Sinclair and many others called wage slaves, even if some of the jobs do bring a livable wage and financial security, albeit for a job you either hate or, to perform it, must hang your conscience on the hallway coat rack.

No matter what McKibben and others of his honorable ilk say, I sense I’m going to miss the day of reckoning. Yeah, I know the salmon and the Pocumtucks have already vanished, and soon Franklin County sugarbush will follow the same tragic path. I truly believe I will live to see the day when the nostalgic sight of steaming springtime sugar shacks will require a drive north. It’s an image that makes me think of my grandsons. I’m convinced they’ll taste global-warming horror. For that I feel diluted guilt and a pure rage, because we could have prevented it with curiosity, activism and rejection of capitalist greed that benefits few and leaves the rest of us sucking filthy wind the press assures us meets acceptable government health standards, whatever that means.

All I know is that Mother Earth has taken ill, greed’s to blame and the culprits would fight another civil war to prevent change. Activists tried to foster change in the Sixties, got squashed and are now following our salmon and indigenous tribesmen to a lonely place called Oblivion. Just bang a hard right at the four-corners to Doom, and drill, Baby, drill.

With news flying at me last week like black flies in a sticky Maine bog, I never got to a subject I wanted to discuss but figured I’d get to it this week. So, here it is: the subject of deer jumping to their deaths one by one off highway overpasses in deadly chain reactions. Who would have ever guessed that the little tidbit I put in this space a few weeks ago, just a simple tease to smoke out information that was for some reason impossible to pry from the authorities, would grow such sturdy legs? I can’t say I’m disappointed.

Anyway, soon after that quick mention of possibly two deer catapulting to their death off the Route 2 overpass spanning Interstate 91 in north Greenfield around daybreak June 17, I received an email from an old friend and UMass professor who preferred to remain anonymous. A PioneerValleytransplant from westernMaryland, where many family members remain, the man recalled “nearly 10 bucks leaping to their deaths near Flintstone, Md., on Interstate 68 one summer evening several years ago.” He had unsuccessfully Googled the story before sending me a link to theCumberlandTimes-News and suggesting I call there. Someone would remember the incident that had received extensive press coverage. Well, I followed the link, found the name of Managing Editor Jan Alderton, gave him a jingle and spoke to him at his midmorning desk. Although he couldn’t remember the incident, he knew just the man who would, veteran Outdoor Editor Mike Sawyers, and patched a call through to his extension. Sawyers picked up on the second ring and instantly remembered the carnage, which wasn’t recent. He guessed it occurred 10 or more years ago and, he thought, involved six bucks in velvet jumping one by one to their deaths, leaving a messy scene on the pavement below.

“Do a YouTube search on ‘deer jumping off bridges’,” Sawyers suggested. “I don’t think there’s anything on that particular incident but such deer events are not unusual. I remember someone sending me a YouTube link years ago.”

I took his advice and, sure enough, many videos, some with sinister laughter in the background as deer leap bridge railings to their death. Myself, I can handle such visuals and accept them as tragic reality, but I can’t say I find any humor in watching animals take death leaps.

Back to my original UMass professor source, he grew up on a dairy farm and surmised deer were predisposed to a follow-the-leader mentality common among hoofed farm animals. “I guess most people were astonished that those deer would follow one after another over the railing but I suspect it may be similar to other hoofed-animal behavior,” he wrote. “For instance, cow behavior. The old farm boy in us told us to identify the lead cow, get her to go somewhere and the rest of the herd would follow. This is the ‘lead-cow concept’ that leads a herd in a specific direction, and in this case, a lead deer leading the rest (on a fatal, panicked decision). Pretty amazing but it happens.”

Yes indeed. And apparently it happened right here inGreenfield, although the state police weren’t about to confirm it or provide further details to the scribes who tried to follow up on the initial June 17 police report. I’d love to know why. Sounds more like a power trip than anything else.

I blame secretive presidential candidate Willard “Mitt” Romney, who is now under fire for withholding income-tax returns from his days at Bain Capital. As governor, Romney instituted silence fromBayStateemployees by forbidding any press interaction without prior approval from a third-party screening agency. Now, even the most benign news must pass through these channels, stifling investigative journalism by tipping off the targets of probes and eliminating surprise bombshells. Such potentially damaging stories are these days softened by government spokespeople who flood the press with damage-control releases before the story “gets away from them.” In the old days, the harmful story broke, then the damage-control tried to play catch-up. There’s less and less of that these days, thus old news and declining readership. It’s a death knell for newspapers that wait for press releases, the same ones sent elsewhere the same day and “broken” by local television and radio stations before hitting the street in print.