A lot of questions, few answers: That’s what’s facing me this week, especially Tuesday, on what would have been my late son’s 29th birthday.

I remember Gary’s 1982 birth well. There I was, marching with a bare-bones, pick-up softball team toward the annual Athol Labor Day Tournament finals, and my wife went into labor around 4 a.m. on, yup, Labor Day. How appropriate. Off to the Cooley-Dick we went, taking the back road through West Whately. We arrived at the hospital before 6, Gary was born by 8 or 9 a.m. and I raced off to sweltering Silver Lake Park, where we wound up winning the tourney against an array of ringer semi-fast pitchers from Gardner, the North Shore and New Hampshire. But that’s not my subject this week; no, just a quick diversion down memory lane before returning to the present. So now it’s back to the flood aftermath, and threats of new flooding with more rain that must be derailing opening week of bear season. These days, I’m most fascinated by the silt, sand and stone distribution on Old Deerfield’s meadows, north and south, quite a variation from one site to the next. It’s challenging to make sense of it all.

I’ll start on the North Meadows, where my friend raises a vegetable garden on historic Native American farmland owned by the Yazwinski family. There is no better soil in the world. That’s why the Pocumtucks, Deerfield’s indigenous tribe, chose it for their maize fields, which were discovered sometime after 1636 by William Pynchon and scouts seeking beaver pelts to export from their riverside Springfield base. I long ago told my buddy he was fortunate to have a garden down there, that he couldn’t find a better plot. If the Indians used it as cropland, it had to be the best soil on earth. Yeah, there are other local spots as good — Hadley’s Honey Pot and Northampton’s Oxbow, for instance — but none better than the North Meadows. Although I know I’m traipsing into blasphemous territory and am not intentionally trying to stir up true-believers who think the world is flat and began with Adam & Eve, sites like the North Meadows have layers of deep, rich soil deposited by annual floods dating back tens of thousands of years. Less than a mile upstream from the Deerfield’s confluence with the Connecticut River, that North Meadows soil got a foot or so deeper two weekends back.

A couple of days after the Aug. 28 flood closed local roads and bridges and swamped buildings, my buddy and I were discussing it on the phone. His North Meadows garden had been submerged by water so deep that it covered the 10-foot, steel rebar rods he erected for his climbing, Sicilian heirloom tomatoes. When the water disappeared, a five-gallon pail rested atop one of the rods like a Mexican sombrero, clearly illustrating a serious flood. Likewise, Sunken Meadow where I walk my dogs had been covered by six or eight feet of Green River water. When we discussed the fine, grayish silt spread over both sites, I mentioned something about it being the most fertile soil money could buy. He said he wasn’t sure that was true but offered no debate. He had walked through the deep, cumbersome mud that day, it was sticky and he wasn’t sure what to think. It appeared clay-based and he couldn’t be certain it was rich, organic soil. And I must admit that his uncertainty got me wondering about the silt’s quality, a question that bugged me for a few days.

Then, toward the end of the week, I got a telephone call at work from an old South Deerfield pal of mine, an “official” observer of the Deerfield flooding. He had not been to the North Meadows but had visited South Meadows and the Bars. When I mentioned that the only positive from a negative event was a new layer of rich topsoil, he told me I was mistaken. He had spoken to landowner Sandy Williams, whose South Meadows farmland was covered with sterile sand that had to be scraped off and trucked away. Hmmm? That got me thinking. Maybe fall floods don’t spread the good stuff like their spring cousins. I almost mentioned something about it last week here but was perplexed and decided against it at the last minute. I wanted to take a field trip before commenting, didn’t want to pillory my ignorance on the public square.

The plot thickened this week when I called my North-Meadows-garden buddy. He had spoken over the weekend to Butch Yazwinski, who told him the gray silt covering his acreage was as rich and fertile as it gets. With that question answered, my buddy drew the landowner into a conversation about a related subject he was curious about. He had noticed that, unlike North Meadows farmers, those working the South Meadows irrigated their crops. Why? Yazwinski told him the soil in the two adjacent meadows was dramatically different, the South Meadows’ sandy, the North Meadows’ rich. Intrigued, my buddy took a ride to the South Meadows and, sure enough, just like my other friend had told me, Williams and other farmers were busy scraping into big piles what looked like beach sand left by the flood. It had to be removed along with stones. The desert sand was obviously better suited for swimming than farming. The color alone made that obvious. Wasn’t it interesting, he thought, that two meadows on the same bottomland plain, just two or three miles apart, could have such different soil composition.

That Tuesday telephone conversation is what initiated my exploratory mission. I picked up my buddy and off we went to territory I am quite familiar with. We drove through the two meadows joined by a narrow, riverside strip that includes the flooded lower Deerfield Academy athletic fields, one meadow on each side of Old Deerfield Village. The North Meadows was covered with a rich, dense, gray silt with no resemblance to the stuff deposited on the South Meadows, where bucket-loaders were still scraping up sand. We wondered aloud about the phenomenon of two meadows so close getting entirely different soil deposits from the flood. It must have something to do with elevation, flow-rate and the comparative weight of the sand and rich gray sediment raging through the long, steep Shelburne/Conway gorge before flowing into Stillwater and spilling into the bottomland, sweeping around several sharp turns that eventually can’t contain the rising water. Whatever the dynamic, it has remained consistent for millennia, thus the dry, sandy soil in the South Meadows and rich, deep, black soil in the downstream delta. The lighter sediment settles in the expansive basin after the slightly higher plain gets the heavier sand and gravel. Plus, the rich sediment gets spread fairly evenly throughout the North Meadows by a backwater swirl that gently circles away from the destructive current hugging the western perimeter and fills the basin all the way to the Route 5 & 10 eastern lip.

Who knows? Maybe my explanation is way off. Then again, maybe common sense put me on the mark. I admit I’m no expert, just thinking on my feet. So why not just throw it out and see what happens. Not my first fishing expedition by any means. Maybe someone will read my observations and chime in. I may get three or four convincing explanations, not one of them accurate. I guess it’s a chance you take when chumming for answers. But I have a feeling that by next week I’ll know a lot more about flood silt distribution than I do now.

I hope so. It keeps life interesting.