A light-gray silt film covering the dense, green, wild-rosebush border showed the water line from Sunday’s flash flood that inundated Sunken Meadow. It was head-high, maybe even a little over six feet, and had deposited a significant layer of what looked like clay throughout the Christmas tree farm, the blanket deepest in the depressions, where I sunk almost to my ankles Tuesday, covering my Keen sandals with fine gray mud. I was there to walk the dogs and assess the damage two days after observing the flooded meadow from its elevated western lip. Even the dogs recognized the difference, seemed extra curious. You could read it in their gait and demeanor.

One symbolic discovery told me how severe the flood had been. Following the riverbank wood line back to my truck, I noticed little Chubby, four months old, sniffing at something on the two-tire farm road with grass in the middle. When he picked it up and ran, head high and proud, I could see it was a fish, maybe a foot long. Upon closer inspection, it was a plump rainbow trout. Yeah, I know, a hatchery trout released this spring. Not “wild.” But, still, if fish died, it had to be serious. The two Great Blue Herons we flushed from the periphery must have been cleaning up other dead or stranded fish in the narrow wetland puddles along the back side.

My wife and I had taken a ride down there out of curiosity Sunday around 5 p.m., after witnessing the extent of the flooding at the Green River Swimming and Recreation Area. I had seen the place under water before, but not that deep. The Butynskis living along the southern lip concurred. About my age and living there all their lives, they had never seen their lower meadow and the swimming pool across the street under so much water. Not even close. It wasn’t far from spilling over Colrain Road. Truthfully, I would have never suspected such nearby devastation while sitting at home reading Sunday, maybe a half-mile west of the Green River. My backyard brook was roaring. I could hear it and went out with an umbrella several times to observe. Even my dogs respected it, obviously wanted no part of it. The roar must have warned them to stay away. But the deeply-cut bed, which drains runoff from Patten Hill in Shelburne, would have needed to rise three or four additional feet to overflow its banks; amazing when you consider what happened to the Green River just a hop, skip and a jump away.

I guess most of the Christmas trees down in Sunken Meadow will be salvageable with a little work. The larger ones sustained more damage than the little ones planted over the past two years, which seemed to “weather the storm” just fine, minus some that were uprooted and flattened by deadfalls and other debris swept up from the river below. The taller trees were leaning south and had sustained some damage to branches on their upstream sides, but they’ll probably be OK once pruned and straightened.

When I returned home, I passed the “Road Closed” sign at the outflow of my driveway and headed for the Jersey barriers 200 yards up Brook Road to see what was happening on the other side. A Shelburne Highway Department crew put up the sign and barriers Saturday, before the tropical storm hit, presumably as a precautionary measure on a gorge road where all hell can break loose during heavy rainstorms. Curious to see if the heavy-duty repairs to some washed-out ravines from a few years back had held up through four to six inches of rain in less than 12 hours, I figured I’d take a little walk with the dogs. I love it when that road is closed and I can walk the dogs up it totally safe, no worries about traffic. People from Patten Hill, East Colrain and southern Vermont have a different opinion. When the curvy, brook-side road is closed, they wail at the inconvenience. If you don’t believe me, ask Shelburne selectmen. They’ve heard the cries every time they’ve suggested discontinuing the troublesome road to save money and labor. I walked about a half-mile to two bridges and found no damage other than a couple of small trees down in the road. Nothing serious. So, unless something let loose above where I walked to, the road closure is temporary. It was still closed Wednesday, reopening it not likely a priority with all the damage in downtown Buckland-Shelburne.

When I got back to my yard, greener than it’s ever been this time of year since I bought the place, I put Lily and Buddy in the kennel, brought Chubby around to the backyard alcove with me, fed him, sat down and finished “Ethan Allen: His Life and Times,” by Willard Stearne Randall while awaiting two loads of cordwood, primo, gray, dry oak. The biography ought to be required reading these days for anyone who believes that these Tea Party idiots making such a commotion resemble in any way the colonial radicals who fomented the American Revolution. The rebels who filled Boston Harbor with tea and plotted revolt were liberals and ardent democrats, not reactionary right-wingers protecting the status quo. The conservatives in those days were Tories, or loyalists, who supported the king and even took up arms alongside the British against the likes of Washington, Allen and the Revolutionary army. Had the latest health-care fiasco occurred in Ethan Allen’s day and been resolved as it was in favor of the larcenous insurance companies pilfering Americans daily, Allen would have ridden in with the Green Mountain Boys and ran them out of town on a rail, if they were lucky. Ethan Allen was a defender of the common man, no friend of the clergy, the royalty, the courts and corrupt politicians. Had he been alive a few years back, he likely would have ridden down Wall Street on a chestnut horse and ordered it burned to the ground, not bailed out the thieves so they could continue abusing the little guy. Allen had no love for New York schemers in the 18th century and would have had no change of heart today. Trust me.

I can say I’m proud to call Ethan Allen a cousin. We needed more like him back then, and desperately need a few good men like him now. But don’t hold your breath waiting. It ain’t happenin’. If you thought it was difficult to overthrow power in those days of sailing ships, flintlocks and tomahawks, try it against today’s frightening military force, which always protects those in charge.

I guess all we can do these days is shut up and accept it. Either that or pretend we don’t understand it.

Had Mike Flanagan been told that Gary Sanderson would publish a story about UMass memories after his death, he probably would have flashed that wry, crooked grin I remember well and quipped, “Bags? Uh-oh!”

But I’m not here to dust off skeletons from the closets at the 20 Ball Lane, Amherst bungalow we once called home. No, that is not my errand. Mike Flanagan was a dedicated ballplayer. No Animal House tales. Only good stuff. I only want to embellish the legacy of a man we called “Flan,” polish the legend of this former major league pitcher and Cy Young Award winner who committed suicide Wednesday at his Maryland home. He was 59. Too young. I knew him before he made it big. But the truth is that Flanagan was always big, which doesn’t mean physically large, just huge on talent. Anyone who played with or against him would agree. We all knew he had it and was destined to make it. He was a that good.

“You really ought to give him a call sometime, I think he’d get a kick out of hearing from you,” urged a mutual friend who said my name came up in a conversation with Flanagan in the past five years. “He loves fly fishing and would probably like to go out with you if he’s ever around.”

Well, that never happened. I figured a lot of “old friends” had contacted Flanagan over the years looking for tickets or other favors. I didn’t want to be just another pest. Plus, frankly, I had little to offer. My serious fishing days were over in the early 90s.

It has been said that Flanagan and I were roommates, which is not true. Legends seem to grow with time. Actually, I was the man who took his Ball Lane bed when he departed for Baltimore Orioles training camp. I moved in after the start of the spring 1974 semester, sharing the small North Amherst bachelors’ pad behind Matuszko Trucking with UMass basketball guard Billy Endicott and two of my baseball teammates, righthanded pitchers John Olson and Chip Baye. I knew Baye because I had faced him in Legion ball and scrimmaged his Northampton High School football teams.

My Ball Lane transition period was uncomfortable at first because Flanagan was still in town until mid-February and there was an interim period of a few weeks when I was moving in and hanging in limbo. But we got through it with aplomb. Flanagan was always easy going, affable and funny, a great, fun-loving guy. The last time I actually saw him in person was during the 1974 UMass spring baseball trip to Miami Beach. We were playing Biscayne College, which served as the Orioles’ minor league camp, and he stopped by to sit on our bench and watch the game with O’s teammate Mike Boddicker. The last time I spoke to him on the phone was in the early 1980s, when Chip Ainsworth and I were doing a weekly radio talk show on Greenfield’s WPOE AM-1520. I’d get his phone number from his father, Manchester, N.H., mechanic Ed Flanagan, and set up a time to call him for an on-air interview. I don’t recall interviewing the man, but we probably did.

Flanagan’s dad was an average Joe. There was nothing average about son Mike. He never ceased to amaze me with his extraordinary athletic skills, a kid who could do anything he put his mind to. Take pinball, for instance. He was a master. We lived just around the corner from a jock bar then named Mike’s Westview Café. The place was busy seven nights a week and Flanagan often stopped in to have a few beers, play pinball and socialize. He loved “Big Indian,” one of those classic old machines that tilted, had flippers and bumpers and bells and whistles. He’d enter the bar after supper, say 7 or 8, and leave the machine a few hours later with so many free games racked up on the board that people would play “on him” until closing. No lie. That game fared no better against him than hitters. He dominated.

People have often asked me to rate Flanagan as a pitcher. He was a lefty and I did face him a few times in live practice drills with no success. I remember arriving at Earl Lorden Field for practice in the fall of 1972, checking the daily hitting schedule and finding my name among the three hitters who would face the phenom. On the one hand, I thought it unfair. I was trying to make a team against stiff competition, with about 140 candidates vying for 40 slots. Why did I have to face the best pitcher in New England? But on the other hand, the fact that I was slotted against him was flattering. It told me I was being seriously evaluated. I vaguely remember the at-bats. Flanagan threw hard and his control was excellent, the best I had seen, so he gave you little to work with. Your choices were pretty simple: hit it where it was pitched or strike out and look foolish doing so. Your only chance was a mistake. He made few. My recollection is that in three shots at him I hit two ground balls to second base and a pop-up caught by the shortstop in short center field. I didn’t embarrass myself, but he got me out. The name of the game.

Flanagan was a fine-tuned precision machine, the likes of which I had never faced. I had seen scarier fastballs. Amherst’s Tom White first comes to mind. You could hear his heater as it exploded past your face, the high ones rising, the low ones dipping. When Whitey was on, it was a victory to foul one off. No lie. He was that overpowering; a lean, mean, 6-foot-6 lefty with a nasty fastball. But he didn’t have Flanagan’s confidence, command or repertoire and fizzled out in Double A. I think he would have made it as a one-pitch short reliever in today’s specialized game.

I actually “caught” Flanagan informally a few times on the frozen, gravel Ball Lane parking lot. He and other pitchers sometimes begged to throw on warm winter days and I’d accommodate them by putting  on a glove and playing catch before squatting to offer my target. The others could be erratic and leave welts and bruises. Not Flan. I swear he rarely missed by more than the width of the baseball. That fine, whether throwing his tailing fastball, the big 12-to-6 curve or a tighter breaking ball he’d use to cut the corners on two-strikes pitches. His command was so good — even for those off-season, parking-lot sessions — that I wouldn’t have hesitated to catch him sitting naked on a peach basket in a paved lot. No one I ever faced could hit spots like Flanagan. It was the skill that separated him from the rest.

Flanagan probably could have made it as a big-league hitter. Too bad he didn’t play in the National League, where pitchers hit. He would have done some damage. Few people who own his baseball card likely know he was not only one of the Cape League’s best pitchers in 1972, but also among its home-run leaders. Check it out if you doubt me. It’s true. Which reminds me of a night during the 1973 UMass season when I drew Flanagan’s ire after midnight. Limping from a sprained ankle that had ended my season and required two-a-day, physical-therapy, crushed-ice whirlpools, I flopped down at 20 Ball Lane on the night before a big Saturday doubleheader and hung around with the fellas for an hour or two. Flanagan was relaxing in a worn, dusty stuffed chair that looked like the ones you see roadside with a “free” sign. Watching TV and joking around with the gang, his mood changed when he discovered I needed a ride back to my frat house. He begrudgingly offered his services but wasn’t thrilled about the late-night inconvenience. After dropping me off at Sig-Ep and speeding off in what I think was a black Pontiac, he went home to bed, awoke the next morning and pitched a UMass game for the ages. Going against Yankee Conference rival Maine on short sleep in the twin-bill opener, he hit three home runs, drove in six runs, scored four and pitched a two-hitter with 10 strikeouts in a 10-1 win. The run he surrendered was unearned. Look it up if you don’t believe me. It’s a piece of the UMass Flanagan legend; to him, just another day at “The Earl.”

Baseball wasn’t the only sport Flanagan excelled at. He was a pretty fair country point guard on the 1971-72 freshman basketball team that compiled the best record in UMass history. Other notable players on that 15-1 team were Endicott, John Murphy and Jimmy Burke. Rick Pitino was a sophomore on the varsity. Another Flanagan teammate on that freshman team was South Deerfield’s late Rickey Boron, a friend of mine who was a year ahead of me at Frontier Regional School. Boron was Frontier’s first 1,000-point scorer back in the days when the milestone meant something, before the 3-point shot. He was the sixth or seventh man on the Redman team and had quite a reputation as a free-throw shooter capable of throwing in 100 straight almost anytime. One day after practice at Curry Hicks Cage, late UMass coach Jack Leaman approached Boron to tell him he’d heard about his free-throw-shooting prowess. He then issued a challenge: “I’ll rebound until you miss.”  That too became UMass legend when Boron proceeded to toss in more than 200, which apparently didn’t faze Flanagan a bit. Boron, who reportedly beat NBA Hall of Famers Sam Jones and John Havlicek regularly in free-throw contests at summer camps where he was a counselor, once told me that Flanagan was his toughest opponent. It was Flanagan’s confidence and Boron’s diffidence that leveled the contest. Flanagan would step to the line and throw in 50 or so, then playfully needle Boron until he missed. Boron wasn’t hesitant to admit that Flanagan could psych him out. You just can’t beat confidence in athletic competition, and Flanagan oozed it.

Apparently Flanagan recognized his basketball limitations quickly at UMass, though. When playing for the Toronto Blue Jays in the late 80s, he told a Toronto Sun beat writer about a memorable UMass practice against Erving that had set him straight. “I really didn’t know much about Dr. J until I came down on a fast break and pulled up to take a jump shot,” Flanagan told the scribe. “Dr. J was nowhere in the area but, out of nowhere, he blocked the shot and nine players were running the other way. First thing I thought? Better work on my slider, because this is a whole different level of play.” Perhaps he did scrimmage against Erving at the Cage, but Erving was a rookie for the Virginia Squires during the 1971-72 ABA season.

I could go on forever. There are so many yarns I could spin about Flanagan, all of them stitched with thread from which legends are stitched. Let me end with a couple anecdotes from a 1973 Amherst Common fair. The month was probably October and Flanagan, a pro ballplayer, was in town during the offseason to finish up his degree. Our UMass baseball team had returned from a Saturday doubleheader at Dartmouth College and I was headed downtown with two teammates when we bumped into Flanagan outside of Boyden Gym. We stopped to talk and he decided to accompany us to a downtown bar named Barsellotti’s, “Barsie’s,” for a couple of beers before checking out the fair. We figured we’d horse around and get a bite to eat. When we passed through the gate in a festive mood, a clown was juggling three wooden balls over to the side. Flanagan stood close and studied him for a minute or two before requesting a quick lesson. The clown obliged by slowing down a bit to demonstrate technique, then held out the balls with a why-don’t-you-try-it challenge. Flanagan accepted. After a few mess-ups, Flanagan surprised the clown and us by finding his rhythm and juggling like a court jester. That, I will never forget. The guy was blessed with extraordinary hand-to-eye coordination.

It gets better. Later that same night on the midway, we came upon a loudmouth carnival barker sitting on the plank above a dunk-the-dink tank. The dink dude was hollering out insults like, “Hey, chicken wing or noodle arm, give it a shot” and other barbs intended to pull in suckers. He clearly didn’t know what he was dealing with when our foursome approached. There we were, four ballplayers — three pitchers, one a pro with pinpoint control — and they were offering three throws for a buck. Baseballs, no less. Though short on cash as students usually are, we couldn’t resist the tease. Most enticing was the fact that the dink wasn’t wearing a wetsuit. He was about to pay a stiff price in the frigid autumn air. Within 10 or 15 minutes on that cold, dark, windy night, that dink was turning a light shade of blue and shivering so hard that we could hear his teeth chattering from where we stood outside the booth. He finally cried uncle, pulled in a replacement and wrapped himself up in a couple of wool blankets. The scene really tickled Flanagan’s funny bone. He laughed hysterically and tossed a few good-natured verbal harpoons at the shivering soul as we walked away.

I guess that’s how I want to remember “Flan,” with that infectious laugh and cool, calculated confidence. Don’t bore me with the portrait those who didn’t know him are painting in the press following his tragic final act. The way I view it, he departed his way. As a friend, I must accept that.

I always look forward to early summer when my raspberries and blueberries ripen and I can go outside, pick and drop them atop a fresh bowl of cereal before returning to the kitchen, pouring in milk and mixing it up with a tablespoon. Although the berries have gone by, I can now buy local peaches, a tasty harbinger of the fall bird-hunting season. I prefer the flavorful, tart yellows but don’t turn my up nose to the delicate whites. I cut them up small to mix with my cereal, hot or cold, depending on my mood.

These days, I notice myriad autumnal signs, such as the sound of random hickory nuts falling to the forest floor with a rumble, several knocks and a thud, the smooth, round green husks intact. And how about the rivers and streams? After a couple of melancholy months, the recent rain has brought them back to life, and they’re now swollen with vitality and vigor. Isn’t it interesting how dark, threatening skies can bring such happiness to a stream? Nature’s way. I often compare brooks and rivers to human passions, the ebbs and flows, and get a daily dose of that analogy with the centerline of a gravel-bed stream serving as my property’s northern boundary.

This fall should be fun when the gunshots echo from the upland meadows. It’s going to be the year when I figure out if Buddy, 2, is ever going to be a productive gun dog. He came to me a bit “confused” through no fault of his own, bringing with him a retrieving issue created by a handler’s heavy-handed error. I have now given him better than a year without any pressure, allowing him to freewheel and enjoy our daily romps through diverse coverts with me, including many tagalong hunts last season. This year, I’ll exert a little pressure and see how he reacts. If he doesn’t work out, so be it. I’ll live with mediocrity. But I suspect he’ll be fine. He displays all the tools, especially speed, nose and agility, and he’s always been easy to handle.

Lily, 8, is my finished gun dog, a little north of her prime following emergency April surgery. I figure she still has a couple of good years left. And with little Chubby, 4 months old, waiting in the wings, I’m all set for years. Chubby shows potential, pretty much a self-starter who’ll need a little guidance for retrieving and hand signals. Other than that, I’ve already seen enough to know the little guy’s going to be an relentless flusher. He’s been stalking butterflies and flying grasshoppers for a month, clearly has what it takes, and will soon learn to love the shotgun’s roar. I have no doubts that little Chubby’s going to be a good one, even if the unflattering name I gave him before I decided to keep him is an insult. I guess when I finally get around to sending in his AKC registration papers, I’ll have to call him Old Tavern Farm’s Ethan Chubb, maybe even Nathan, with that distinguished old-English ring. That’ll be as good a cover as any for an otherwise unsuitable name.

The great weather we’ve enjoyed this week has got me thinking about cordwood again. I’ve been sitting on two or three cords of seasoned red oak that I arranged Wednesday to have delivered. When I say seasoned, I mean good and seasoned, three or four years stacked outside and covered on top. My only fear is that it’s too dry. I have never picked up split 18-inch pieces of oak so light. Not punky. Bone dry and hard. I just hope it doesn’t burn too fast.

I still intend to buy my five or six cords of black locust from political soul mate Blue Sky. I’m addicted to the stuff. But this primo oak should be fun, too. I’ll pick and choose daily for just the right mix, may even use the oak for my fireplaces, especially the one in the taproom that serves as my favorite winter reading station, pole lamp with a hanging shade standing temporarily next to a flame-stitch wing chair and ottoman in front of the fireplace. Sometimes the flames, the heat and the music — typically bluegrass, maybe Dylan, Garcia, Norman Blake, Tim O’Brien, Steve Earle or Jorma Koukonen — send me off into another realm. When that happens, not infrequently, I just place the book down on my lap and let my mind wander off to forbidden places, sometimes rising for a quick trip to the computer to capture a thought or riff. It may sound like a tough life in the cold of winter, but somebody’s got to do it. Why not me?

Speaking of reading, I’ve been on an Ethan Allen kick recently and just discovered there’s a new biography out on the Vermont rabble-rouser. I can’t wait for Willard Sterne Randall’s “Ethan Allen: His Life and Times” to arrive in the mail. I was led to Allen by recent interest in the many French & Indian wars (1675-1763) that visited the Connecticut Valley, necessitating the construction of local forts like Pelham, Shirley, Dummer and No. 4. Irascible Ethan Allen was actually introduced to Vermont as young Litchfield, Conn., soldier during the final French & Indians War (1754-63). I have had an interest in the man for many years because I share many genealogical links and political philosophies with him. Some distant relatives would run away from the infamous rebel known as a brawler and blasphemer. Not me. I worship my fiery genes and am proud to have cousins like Allen, who had the audacity to call politicians and clergy of his day rascals and thieves. But enough of that. On to the next subject, one still inspired by thoughts of autumn.

I had planned to buy a new 16-gauge side-by side shotgun this year, preferably a classic, pre-WWII, European double with a straight English stock. But then came unexpected financial burdens — a funeral, a big veterinary bill and a couple of expensive car repairs to name a few — thus my vow to hold off till next year. Why cut myself thin for a gun I don’t need? I have enough shotguns to get by, and can easily squeeze out another year with my old, battered Jean Breuil, of that classic aforementioned style. Hey, even my 12-gauge Citori over-and-under would work in a pinch, although I prefer side-by-sides. But mark my words: there’s a fancy European double with a flame walnut stock that has my name on it. Call it my retirement gun, something made by an artisan, not cheap factory help. It has been said that fine double-barrels, tweed jackets and jugs of after-the-hunt Rare Breed can put a man in great places with excellent company.

Enough!

I better stop meandering. That’s about all I’ve got for this week. Sometimes I get to the bottom of a piece like this and wonder how I got here. What made me think of this or that or the other thing? But why even entertain such insignificant queries? The lawn is waiting. I’d like to put it behind me before the weekend. Then I can just sit back and wait for the sound of that dump truck backing up to my woodshed with a load of dry oak that’s seasoned gray; either that or mail lady Rose stopping out front to squish Ethan Allen into my mailbox.
I do hope Ethan arrives first. That way, maybe I can plow through all 615 pages before the wood is dumped. Yeah, I know it’s work. I can’t say I dread it.

Old buddy Richie Kellogg — Big R — phoned Monday morning to renew a summer-long discussion about a rogue black bear that’s been frequenting his Wendell neighborhood.

The first time he called, in May or early June, he was concerned because this bear was injured, had destroyed his bird feeders and didn’t seem to be the least bit afraid of Kellogg, a big man who’d blend perfectly into a NFL locker roomful of offensive tackles. It probably wasn’t the smartest thing Big R ever did the day he approached the animal in his driveway, walked up to within 20 feet and spoke to it in a friendly manner.

“Hey Buddy,” he coaxed. “You’ve gotta go. Carol’s afraid of you.”

That’s when he saw what looked like something attached to the bear’s lower left leg, just above the paw, which the animal was holding off the ground.

“I would have liked to reach down and pull it out to help the poor thing out but I didn’t dare,” he said. “I felt sorry for it.”

Seemingly unaffected by the face-to-face encounter or being spoken to, the big bear just stood there on three legs looking at Kellogg, then growled when he tried to creep a little closer. The growl unnerved Kellogg, who’s battling disability to his once powerful right hand and wrist, so he slowly backed away onto his deck and went inside to safety. Since then, Big R, who thinks it’s a 250-pound bruin, has been keeping his eyes open whether visiting his garden or backyard pool. He has seen the animal only twice but knows it’s around because of the calling cards it leaves behind.

“I don’t know if I have anything to be worried about, but I wouldn’t want to get attacked,” he said. “I don’t know if I could fight it off.”

It seems likely that the protrusion Kellogg noticed on the bear’s lower leg is a compound fracture, either from an awkward jump or a collision with a vehicle. If it was a large sliver of some type, the animal would have pulled it free by now.

By Monday, the picture had changed dramticaly. Kellogg reported that he’s not the only person in his neighborhood nervous about the bear. Just down the road, Joel Sears has been aware of the animal’s presence for some time because it’s torn up his blueberries and garbage, once even jumping up to take garbage from the bed of his pickup truck. It got worse for Sears late last week when he returned home to discover his kitchen had been ransacked. The bear had torn open the cupboards and eaten muffins and whatever else it could find to satisfy its hunger.

Kellogg says Sears called MassWildlife to suggest that the bear be removed by authorities, but they offered little help, just advice to be alert and keep potential food inaccessible.

“I’ve been locking my door ever since I heard about it going in the house,” Kellogg said. “I’m afraid it’s gonna break into my place. He could push that door in easily unlocked. My wife thinks I’m crazy. I told her it would be wise to respect this animal. It’s no teddy bear, and it’s injured.”

The problems may not last much longer. Bear season opens on Sept. 6. Maybe someone will put this pathetic animal out of its misery.

I would guess that many people who poke around in the woods like me have, upon entering a beech grove or passing an extraordinary beech tree, stopped out of curiosity to scratch at the ground searching for nuts to crack open looking for meat. I also imagine that these folks have come away as perplexed as me to discover that the nuts are typically hollow and quite useless.

I have repeated this exercise often over the years, alone or with someone, and have left scratching my head, wondering why I can’t find a fertile nut on a forest floor dense with immature beech trees of various sizes. Obviously some of the nuts that fall to the ground are good. The immature beeches tell me that. But why can’t I find any? It’s a mystery my friends and I have never solved. Then, this year, on my daily rambles with the dogs, I happened upon a lowland beech I’ve mentioned before, one full of good nuts from its bottom limbs to its crown. In fact, I have not yet picked one nut that wasn’t full of meat, very uncharacteristic in my experience.

By mentioning this discovery here and receiving feedback from foresters and wildlife biologists alike, the beechnut issue seems to be coming into better focus, although I must admit the massive beech I’ve been observing stands in a place where I’m not used to finding beech trees. I am accustomed to finding and sampling beechnuts along the upland ridges where deer and bears and turkey roam. Often these solitary beech trees or dense beech groves stand high and dry in ledgey terrain. Yes, such trees or groves may overlook a cedar or hemlock swamp, but I cannot recall finding beeches in upland swamps, which doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It just seems to me that this is not where you’d expect to find them.

So, the fact that the bottomland beech I’ve been watching is rooted into the lip of a wetland could be the reason it produces so many nuts. According to a forester, beeches need lots of water for optimal nut production, and this tree gets plenty. Then again, maybe this is just a good year and it won’t be nearly as productive next year. We’ll have to wait and see. But at least this year, in my mind, the beech tree is fascinating. A factor that hints this could be an extraordinary year, though, is the absence of infant beeches surrounding the stately tree.

Former state Deer Project Leader John McDonald, now a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in Hadley, read about my beech and chimed in by e-mail about beechnut production and a survey he conducted years ago as part of a Massachusetts bear study. Focused on beechnut and acorn production that’s so important to a bear’s diet, McDonald put out seed traps to collect the nuts and did visual surveys of trees’ crowns to quantify the nut production in a study area. He remembers one year in particular when his visual assessment indicated an extraordinary year for beechnuts; however, examination of the nuts captured in the seed traps told an entirely different story. Upon opening his collected beechnuts, McDonald found almost every one empty.

“When I say ‘almost,’ I mean maybe one out of every couple hundred nuts actually contained meat,” he wrote. “The rest were empty. We would have totally overestimated how much food was available if all we did was the visual study or count the nuts in the traps.”

McDonald’s field research confirms my own observations from more than 40 years or traipsing through local forests and breaking open beechnuts with my worn teeth (Pssst. Don’t tell my buddy and dentist Dr. Mark). I don’t know how many nuts one mature beech tree produces, but apparently one fertile nut out of every couple hundred is enough to keep our beech groves alive and well.

It’s three till noon, a late start on column day.

Please excuse me. Other priorities. So now, here I sit, once again trying to come up with something, potentially dangerous, even though I do have some benign topics in the hopper.

My first priority this morning was to finish William McKeen’s recent Hunter S. Thompson biography, which took hold of me like a lusty snort of Ecstacy in the mosh pit. Yes, that exhilarating. Coming on the heels of the book I read over the weekend on baseball pitching legend Satchel Paige, I’ve been quite busy out back, soaking in the hot sun at a quiet, comfortable, canopied metal table hidden in the alcove between barn and woodshed; just me and pup Chub-Chub, him keeping me company, me teaching manners. Maybe if someone tried to teach me right and wrong in such a peaceful, non-threatening environment, I would have listened. No, probably not. I always leaned toward incorrigibility, especially with adolescent hormones flittering like that green hummingbird that approached my seat a few times the past two days. But let’s not go there. I don’t want to get distracted, flash back to the wayward youth I enjoy revisiting. Dr. Gonzo and Satchel took me there, stirred indelible memories.

When I read about Satchel barnstorming the nation, pitching three games in a day, winning that fabled, 1-0, 13-inning marathon over World Series hero Dizzy Dean in 1934, I thought, gee, the game was better then, less money, more pure. In those days, the tail end of which I fondly recall, every town had a team and from them came the semi-pro sandlot clubs that took on all comers and played with a weekend passion unknown in the game today. It wasn’t about money then. It was about winning, executing, matching your best against theirs, playing for keeps. And when the game was over, the boys sat down for a cold beer and some lively banter, maybe even a frisky little scrap here and there once the booze got flowing. In those days it was a game, not a corporation for cookie-cutter, sour-pussed behemoths turned pampered prima donnas raking in more money than even, heaven forbid, crack-head grandchildren could ever blow.

Maybe I shouldn’t get rolling down that path, though. It’s dangerous. Who among mainstream readers wants to be bored by another of my radical rants. Folks borne of Ronald Reagan’s redneck, consumerist America have no patience for men who think like me? Face it, Dude, that’s the audience nowadays, people who cut their teeth and earned their degrees in the boredom of Republican rule and police gone wild, not the days of Hunter S. and ole Satch. When Slick Willie came along, miraculously won two elections and even had the audacity to show people how to have a good time along the way, he promptly awoke the fundamentalist attack dogs still guarding the gate. No wonder Hunter Thompson blew his brains out at the kitchen table. He couldn’t stomach what Bush-Cheney was cooking, and neither could a lot of other folks who lived the idealism of the Sixties, when someone — far be it from me to venture a guess who — assassinated our charismatic agents of change and brought out the Third Reich in their jackboot splendor. The result? Open your eyes. You can’t miss it. With only a five-percent share of world’s population, we claim a whopping 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated. That’s right. Here in the land of the free. See what riches get you? How can anyone add it up and make sense of it? Oh yeah, I forgot, that’s easy. Just employ one of those advertising agencies, masters of deceit and deception that sell us our TVs, dishwashers, hunting boots, fishing rods, senators and presidents. They can figure out the perfect message and keywords to sell you anything, even Richard Freakin Nixon and Ronnie Ray Gun, the counterculture nickname he earned as a right-wing nut job in the Sixties, when both future presidents appeared politically dead and buried. Boy, were they resurrected. In a big way. The rest of the world is still paying.

But enough of that! Let’s move to beechnuts. Is that innocuous enough? Maybe the transition will keep the fellas in the white suits away from my door. You see, I recently learned something about beech trees and the nuts they produce; this after decades of observing beeches, actually seeking out beech groves for their smooth, peaceful, gray beauty, yet remaining clueless. In traveling through these quiet wilderness pockets, usually hunting or scouting, I’d marvel at the largest trees and often scratch up the fallen leaves at their base to retrieve the tiny, brown, three-sided nuts lying next to their open, brittle, brown spiky cases. I’d bite into the nuts and rarely find any meat, almost always hollow. Well, about three weeks ago on one of my daily treks with the dogs through Sunken Meadow, that changed. I noticed low clusters of these large, green, spiky husks on a long muscular limb drooping to eye level. They looked more like chestnuts than beechnuts, much larger than what you find on the ground in the fall. I pried several husks open and found two large, green, three-sided nuts in each, all of them full of dense, immature, greenish-colored meat. Hmmmm? Interesting. I was so intrigued that I retrieved a hunting buddy to show him my discovery. We had bitten into many a hollow nut in our days together.

Truth is I guess I’ve never been around beech trees in midsummer, so I was experiencing a revelation. Perhaps, I thought, beech trees, like white oaks, produce a nut that germinates and disappears quickly in the fall, leaving only barren, hollow nuts behind. But I couldn’t be sure, and with vacation looming, I put the puzzle on the backburner till this week, when I queried forester Bill Lattrell, a longtime e-mail correspondent I respect but have not met. I was happy to see his response when I finally got to my desk to write this. He offered a detailed explanation, prefaced by the warning that the answer to my question was a little complicated. He said beech trees flower in May, when the nuts start forming. When mature in September, the nuts fall to the ground and are quickly devoured by deer, bears, turkeys, squirrels and other critters. “As you can imagine, most of the good nuts are immediately consumed,” he wrote, “leaving behind the hollow ones typically found during hunting season.” But there’s more to it than that. The massive, productive beech I pass on my daily travels rises out of wet, bottomland soil not far from the Green River, perfect habitat for beeches, which require lots of water to produce a bountiful nut crop, according to Lattrell.

Fascinating stuff. What took me so long to figure it out?

But that’s enough on beechnuts. Something else I want to mention is a CD neighbor Tom Echeverria dropped in my mailbox before I rose from bed in the morning. Surgeons awake early. Seems he’s having fun these days with a video trail camera that has thus far captured a bear, a bobcat, a doe and fawn, and a flock of turkeys for his viewing pleasure. All the animals were making their rounds within earshot of my home. No cougars, though. At least not the four-legged variety. Who knows about that new two-legged breed of cat? They seem to be everywhere. Not that I harbor even a passing fancy. What would we be talking about for a 58-year-old man like me? Seventy? Eighty? Ninety? I guess I missed the boat.

But, really, I’m trying not to digress. When Doc Echeverria told me on the phone that he’d leave that CD in my mailbox, how did I forget to mention my expired knee-brace prescription he signed during a May 2009 appointment? The slip’s been held by a magnet to my refrigerator ever since, me protesting the mandatory $350 co-payment. Never did I pay a penny for two previous braces? Why now? I spent so much time arguing on the phone with greedy insurance maggots that the six-month scrip expired before I finally got around to calling the orthotics lab for an appointment. By then, I needed a new prescription, which irritated me even more. How embarrassing.

Of course, my Republican friends (yeah, I do have a few) would be quick to blame my misfortune on Obamacare. I know better. I took college rhetoric classes before they were removed from liberal arts curriculums. Why teach people to be skeptics and cynics? I guess that’s the rationale. Anyway, Obama wanted single-payer medical care, not the late-term abortion the other side forced upon him by “compromise,” totally weighted in favor of the scummy insurance industry that greases their palms. And then, to make matters worse, after creating the dysfunctional mess, they attach Obama’s name to it. These spinmeisters and wordsmiths can sell you anything, even poisonous nuclear power plants looming large in our backyards. It’s crazy-making. Insane. Where will it stop? When?

Appropriate questions. For me, sitting here today, it’s going to stop right now. I’m done. Finito! The rant is over. Time to feed the dogs, run them, fix supper, and wind down before heading to work. Tomorrow’s a new day. In fact, I think I’ll whittle away another surplus vacation day to create a long weekend. There’s another title from my Deadelus’ salebooks.com stack that I’ve been itching to read. It’s Bertrand M. Patenaude’s hardcover biography of Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary who eventually fled Stalin and was murdered in Mexico by his secret police.

So, be forewarned. I have no idea where my next little reading project will lead me. Why worry? It’ll be just me and little Chub-Chub sitting in the backyard, thinking, trying to behave, isolated from the maddening world, tiny green hummingbird occasionally buzzing through to break the hot summer silence.

Here I sit, vacation relaxed, yet compelled to write about a leftover subject I couldn’t get to last week that fits snugly into this, the week of Casey Anthony’s surprising Florida acquittal. My story is about an unfortunate defendant who, like Anthony, was falsely accused and, unlike Anthony, didn’t live to tell about it. Nope. The South Deerfield suspect from the mid-1960’s was tried and convicted by public opinion, then put to death in a most horrifying manner.

To begin, some readers may recall that a couple of weeks ago I mentioned my catalpa allergy. I said I should have known the deciduous trees we called “banana trees” as kids were in bloom, because of the sniffles, watery eyes and irritating random itches I was experiencing from the neck up. I have for as long as I can remember believed that the culprit for my birthday-time discomfort was pollen from catalpas in full bloom but, to be honest, had absolutely no clue why. And, frankly, I never gave it much thought before a distant Connecticut Valley cousin and loyal Ashfield reader enlightened me with a post-column e-mail that set my wheels a spinnin’ toward scientific discovery. Maybe it’s something I missed along the way in school, distracted by something sweet and young, or maybe I was never taught anything about pollen in the classroom, definitely a possibility. For Chrissakes, I lived on the site of the Bloody Brook massacre — whoops, I mean battle — and never learned a thing about it or King Philip’s War until I decided to do independent adult research, formal education by then a tiny speck in my rearview mirror. Anyway, there I go again, getting distracted. See how it happens? Nothing sweet and young nearby, but still distracted. Back to the subject at hand: catalpa pollen.

Cyberpal Andy Smith, whom I have met but usually communicate with by e-mail, was the man who alerted me to my inaccurate perceptions about the banana-tree pollen. Himself an old beekeeper and gardener, Smith understands the intricacies of pollen delivery to different plants and wasn’t hesitant to inform me that I was sorely lacking in that area of expertise, as evidenced by blatant column mistakes. You see, according to Smith, there are two types of pollen in this world: one carried by winds, the other by bats, birds and bees (oops, there I go again with my carnal distractions). Big, showy flowers like those on catalpa trees attract flying critters to deliver their pollen, while the windborne pollens come from ordinary flowers you can walk past without noticing. The pollen from big, showy flowers is too heavy to be carried any distance by wind, thus the need for transporters, and thus the reason why, in Smith’s humble opinion, my allergy was not to catalpas unless the blossoms were smack-dab in my face.

“You are falling victim to (my best guess) grass pollen being flung into the air in large quantities by farmers cutting hay,” he wrote. “Or perhaps it’s some other plant’s airborne pollen you are reacting to. But I would bet money it’s not catalpa.”

Smith underscored his contention with a common example of the wrong plant getting blamed for allergies, that being the showy goldenrod, which is often blamed for ragweed coughs and sniffles. “Ragweed has green flowers you hardly notice and it billows out billions of airborne pollen that people breathe in and suffer,” he wrote. “Goldenrod pollen is big and heavy and needs to be carried by honeybees and wasps and butterflies. Its pollen isn’t bothering anyone, but since it’s the plant people see flowering when they’re sneezing, it’s the one they blame.”

So, I stand corrected for the world to see, undaunted and unashamed. In fact, I’ve now exposed myself as previously clueless on the matter; however, I must say I welcome any such corrections that prove educational. Regardless of what my old teachers would tell you, I enjoy learning and always have. Enough of that, though. No more distractions. On to another subject, that of confirming Smith’s informed opinion by figuring out the origin of my misdiagnosis, and by relating that discovery to the gory execution of an innocent South Deerfield catalpa next door to the dwelling I started calling home as a young teen.

Again, first a little background. I had immediately responded to Smith’s friendly e-mail by yielding ground and admitting I was no expert on pollen distribution, as if he had to be told. I admitted that I had no clue where my catalpa-allergy diagnosis came from but said it could have been from testing at Boston Children’s Hospital, or perhaps from a local doctor. I told him I’d ask my mother. She’d know. And indeed she did. Fact is there never was anything scientific about the diagnosis. No, it had been purely observational and deductive, just as Smith surmised.

“Don’t you remember that catalpa tree next door on Pleasant Street, over by Zimnowski’s? Mother asked. “Well, every year when that tree was in bloom you had hay fever, so I figured that’s what you were allergic to.

“‘Topher’ Bill was allergic to catalpa blossoms, too. Phil and Kay eventually had their tree cut down because of it.”

Hmmmm? Do you suppose “Topher’s” allergy disappeared after the man behind the chainsaw hollered “Timmm-berrrrr!”? Probably not. But who could have possibly questioned the credibility of his parents, the esteemed A. Phillips Bill and wife Katherine.” Kay was a Decker of late 19^th and early 20^th century South Deerfield royalty, Phil a veritable math prodigy of Bostonian blueblood ancestry, descending from none other than Revolutionary banker William Phillips, the wealthy benefactor of prestigious New England prep schools Phillips Academy in Andover and Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H. Everybody knew Kay from her days as a substitute teacher in the local schools, a job far below her calling or social standing, probably just a way to cure boredom and help put food on the table. As for Phil, well, he was a bit eccentric but quite a unique and interesting character, professorial in appearance, his glasses always a little off-kilter. Local legend had it that Phil had graduated from Exeter and Dartmouth College, where his father was Dean of Men, and was teaching math under Deerfield Academy Headmaster Frank L. Boyden at age 19, if you can imagine that. A South Deerfield man who knew him well from his moonlighting” days as the human computer for a South Deerfield land-surveying company said precocious Phil was so smart in grammar school that he skipped from the first to fifth grade. Quite a feat. The crews would bring him their daily field notes before 5 p.m. each day and he’d have them all computed — flawless, of course — before supper.

Respect for the Bills’ wisdom wasn’t the only factor leaning toward the validity of their son’s catalpa allergy. Town doctor Kenneth Rice’s home and office were right across the street from the Bill residence, so one could have easily assumed the good doctor had had a hand in the diagnosis and tree removal. Sort of a perfect storm, it appears.

You’d have to know the key players to truly enjoy this tale. But looking back, it strikes me as funny that a stately tree died and a legend endured for half a century. Then, two short weeks ago, a reader’s critical note and a simple query cleared the air, so to speak. No, that annual late-June hay-fever epidemic in my old neighborhood was not caused by catalpa trees, but rather by summer hayfield harvests.

Go figure.