261. Longmeadow: Fannie Stebbins Memorial Wildlfie Refuge

I had this old boss named Rick when I was growing up, who was larger than life in the eyes of a teenager. He only had about six jokes, but he delivered them with such gusto and panache, not to mention a constant ear-ringing laughter, that you felt as if you were in the presence of one of the world's most confident, important people. He had this one saying, just two little words, that often heralded his appearance in a room. They were initially words of discovery, used when he found out something ribald or slightly off-color, and wanted to call attention to it. It later became a simple greeting. All day long he had us all smiling and chuckling whenever we bumped into each other in our mad scramble around the video arcade. "Hey now!"

Such were my initial thoughts as I "discovered" Fannie Stebbins. "Hey now!"

Were it not for the rain, which had grew more intense as I approached the trails, I might have had more fun in Longmeadow. The habitat was there. The puddles on the trail, though, were more than just weak depressions. They were deep, wide, edge-to-edge oceans of rain water. I tiptoed along those edges as much as possible, but in the end found it to be an exercise in futility. I stood at the edge of a pond as a flock of Canada geese blasted in with a series of uncoordinated honks, which term could also be used to describe my coworkers and me during my arcade days. Both a hairy and a downy woodpecker laughed at me as I slowly moistened at both ends.

One of the best features of the sanctuary was a water level marker for the famous storms that had inundated the Springfield area. The Hurricane of 1938 was pretty bad, but the winner, at least on this very spot, was the 1936 flood. I've studied it from afar, and know that Coast Guardsmen from my childhood home of Hull responded to the rising waters at the time. Kind of made my ankle wetting today seem a bit of a trifling thing.