By Elinor Goodwin The high school gym is decorated in red and white; the bleachers are full of family and friends. The sports banners blow lightly from the breeze of the open doors; excitement permeates the air. For most people in the room, this night in June has nothing to do with basketball, but for […]
SteepleChats Dakota Edwards #4
By Williams McGuire III Since he threw the second no-hitter in SteepleCats history against the Sanford Mainers on June 20th, SteepleCats pitcher Dakota Edwards #4 has had no shortage of interview requests and local praise. Edwards was surprisingly unfazed by the accomplishment. He prefers to live in the moment, he says, and focus on the […]
SteepleChats
By William McGuire III On June 12, the North Adams Steeplecats played their second home game of the season against the New Bedford Bay Sox to a large crowd of fans at Joe Wolfe Field. As the summer air began to cool and the sun sank toward the rim of East Mountain, the fans in […]
Our trees, a Supreme Court Justice, and Citizens United
By Tela Zasloff Our trees, our New England forests, are an intimate part of our daily lives. We rely on our trees for high quality drinking water, our cool, clean air, for their invitation to walk and ski and bike among them and feel their wildness and their poetry, for their providing heat to our […]
The River Lives! Lauren Stevens and the Hoosic River Watershed Authority
By Tela Zasloff To describe our deep relationship with a river, we’d best turn to artists and philosophers. Mark Twain called the face of a river a book to be read over and over, delivering cherished secrets and telling a new story every day. Kenneth Grahame describes the river as “a babbling procession of the […]
Microcosmos
By Tela Zasloff For the last 40 years of her life, my grandmother crocheted afghans—for her five children and 18 grandchildren, then, when her eyes gave out, caps for her 18 great-grandchildren and their dolls and stuffed animals. At a family reunion 17 years after she died, we laid our afghans end to end, covering […]
Sweet Talkin’ With Local Beekeepers
by Shira Lynn Wohlberg and Tony Pisano Bee-vaccing. A big branch had broken off in a storm and exposed a hive inside, so we got a call. It turned out that there was a new comb. It was still white and empty, so we deduced that the colony was a recent swarm that was reestablishing […]
The Contours of the Land
By Tela Zasloff There is a certain view in our town, that stops traffic at all seasons. Driving south on Route 7, as you cross a ridge and start to descend toward Five Corners, the trees edging the road on your left suddenly open on a short downward sweep to a valley, across the river […]
The Sound of Silence in the Berkshires
By Shira Lynn Wohlberg Here in our Berkshire towns and villages, the touristic, seasonal soundscape is dominated by…machines, particularly the two-stroke engine of construction and yard vehicles. Often, the high-pitched back-up beeping of construction vehicles can be heard three blocks away from where one is standing. More continuous is the whine of leaf blowers and the […]
About Community
One mid-summer we lost three ducks at the farm–the White Peking male and father of the family, and two of his ducklings. The seven left were the White female, five of her ducklings, and the mallard. We knew that coydogs had gotten the three because on the day that only seven climbed up the riverbank […]