Matthew Dickerson: Finding fresh air while cabin camping on Eklutna Lake

The rain was falling again. Alaska’s 2023 summer was beginning to feel a lot like Vermont’s.

I gave Bill Lee a call last week, hoping he was at his home in Craftsbury and we might arrange a visit. I was concerned for his health.

I never have — and with complete confidence can say I never will — be seen “Dancing with the Stars.” As for dancing with the bears, however, that’s another story.

Satchel Paige supposedly said, “Age is a case of mind over matter: if you don’t mind, it don’t matter.” The sentiment applies to Middlebury athlete Chris Hamilton, who has competed at masters track and field events throughout New England, and in other par … (read more)

My wife recently pointed out to me that there are 45 known species of mosquitos in Vermont. This summer I think I have interacted with all of them.

River after river, stream after stream was running high and muddy. Unfishably muddy.

The timing was right, and ripe, for those first-generation Irish boys to be swept up by the baseball fever that had overtaken America after the Civil War — and indeed the Irish dominated the early game.

Thanks in large part to the public’s purchases of Vermont Habitat Stamps, the Blake Higgins Dam on Vermont’s Saxtons River — a tributary of the Connecticut River in southeastern Vermont — is scheduled to be taken down in 2024.

A long time ago, Dec. 9, 1999 to be exact, in my first year offering these pearls of wisdom in the Independent, I started a column with “Fenway Park: What a dump!” and went to offer additional observations in that vein.

On such a hot day, my daughter-in-law McKenna and I figured that if we wanted both to enjoy the fishing and to catch fish, we’d need to get up to some cool, well-shaded bit of water, either far up into a gorge somewhere or to a mountain stream in the nati … (read more)

Road trip to Trois Rivières, Quebec, for a ballgame. At least that was the plan.

Late on a Wednesday afternoon, four huge Atlantic salmon finned in the current at the tail end of a long, deep pool on a small Maine river.

Hogan Beazley, a 2019 graduate of Middlebury Union High School, and now Middlebury College as well, has done his namesake proud.

An hour or so earlier, a hefty trout had chased my imitation stonefly nymph up from the deep water in front me to within a foot of the surface just off the massive boulder on which I was standing.

One thing the Red Sox and Yankees had in common, historically, was a reluctance to sign dark-skinned players after the historic breakthrough in 1947 of Jackie Robinson with the Dodgers and Larry Doby with the Indians.