It was a late Saturday morning a couple of weeks back, and my shirt drenched with sweat, I was returning from my daily ramble with the dogs along verdant riverside marsh and meadow.
Truck widows wide open, I pull into the southwest corner of my yard, drive across the grass, park next to an old stone hitching post and get out to kennel my refreshed, fulfilled pets in the cool shade of a backyard maple along babbling Hinsdale Brook. I immediately notice a gray, late-model Chevy sedan slowly passing, as though the driver needs directions. The car stops and the power window on the passenger side drops.
“Gary?” inquires the driver, his wife between us in the passenger’s seat.
“Yes?”
“Joe Manson.”
“Oh yeah. Hey. That was quick. Pull right in.”
He spun around, parked atop the western leg of the horseshoe driveway alongside the carriage sheds, hopped out and started right in, quickly introducing his wife. Four months younger than my dad, he’ll be 89 in August and had Manson written all over him — the eyes, their devilish glint, his affability. He has for many years called Greenfield home.
A classroom and neighborhood friend of my late dad’s from their childhood Depression days in South Deerfield, Manson had called the previous day to reminisce about the Sugarloaf caves we visited often as boys of successive generations. I had never met Manson but knew of him from my dad and had grown up in the company of his nephew, Mike Manson, whose father, Babe Manson, worked at the downtown service station, owned it for a while and lived in the old North Main Street Manson homestead along Bloody Brook. He taught me to hunt for and catch trout from mountain streams, an invaluable lesson that entertained me and taught me about the woods well into my 30s, if not early 40s. Though I haven’t hunted trout up and down wooded streams in 25 years, I am confident my skills are still there and available in a simple snap of the fingers.
Though the man in my driveway goes by Joe, his given name is Durwood, a playful moniker my father hung with a glowing smile on young, blue-eyed, curly-haired, mischievous nephew Mike. I was supposed to have met the elder Manson and another boyhood friend of my dad’s for an 8:30 Memorial Day breakfast at the Deerfield Inn a month earlier. The other man, John Clark — now a Californian on whom success and fortune has smiled — had reached out to me by phone. He had read my column from afar for years and especially enjoyed local history. Clark wanted to talk about the old days in South Deerfield. So did I. Then, sincerely looking forward to it, the breakfast date totally escaped me that holiday morning. Distracted by an extended visit from my Vermont grandsons, I never thought of it until the following day, when my mother asked my wife how the breakfast had gone.
“We figured you got tied up and couldn’t make it,” Manson said. “No problem. John comes through every year. We can meet next year.”
But, back to the Sugarloaf caves, which keep coming back these days, Manson said he was up at the one on North Sugarloaf in recent years when, returning north to his car along the ridge road, he bumped into a fashionably clad runner, who briefly stopped to chat in the clear mountain air. During the conversation, standing not 100 yards from the cave, the runner informed Manson that he ran the ridge trail daily and knew North Sugarloaf like the back of his hand.
“Oh,” Manson responded. “Then you must know the cave.”
“What cave?”
Enough said. Manson hid his amusement that day. Not so in retelling the tale. The message was clear. “If you don’t know the cave, you don’t know the mountain. End of story. But, please state Department of Conservation and Recreation, don’t put up a flashing florescent sign pointing the way. The less traffic, the better.
“Honestly,” offered DCR employee Paul Grabowski, who has harbored longtime fascination with the trails and caves on the two Sugarloafs. “I’ve watched that cave for many years now, visit it often, and must say people seem to be respectful. No trash. No vandalism.”
I guess a few field trips are in short order: one with Manson, another with Grabowski and yet another with a boyhood pal who grew up along the River Road eastern base of North Sugarloaf and knows a peculiar ledge pothole he’d like to find for the first time since he was a boy and show me.
As for Manson, he recalls as a boy in the late 1930s construction of the current road to the Mount Sugarloaf summit house. The old road to the top went from the end of Mountain Road up the north face, hitting today’s road near the hairpin turn. He said the Civilian Conservation Corps built the road, a construction project that required blasting away ledge all the way from the base to the hairpin turn. Before I can accurately address that topic, I must tour the site with Manson to figure out how far the ledge extended before dynamite reduction.
Manson also recalls the young, hellion CCC boys bunking under the dance pavilion at the southwestern base of the mountain, remnants of which are still visible behind the Little League Field’s left-field fence. The man then delivered another gleaming little nugget of “Sowdeerfeel” folklore I had never heard.
“You wanna hear a good one,” asked Manson with a devilish glint. “Those CCC boys used to come into town at night and (raise hell) with the South Deerfield girls. Maybe you can find a way to put that in a headline?”
Hmmm?
I guess some things are best left untold in a family newspaper … not my rules.
Recorder Sports Editor Gary Sanderson is a senior-active member of the outdoor-writers associations of America and New England. Send your questions, stories about our area to him at: gsanderson@recorder.com.