Matthew Dickerson: Of rain and glaciers: An Alaskan residency, part 1

The history of the place was inspiring, and I soaked in as much as I could. But it was the surrounding scenery and landscape that moved me the most.

Paul Politano hardly played golf at all growing up in southern Vermont. “My dad never let me play,” he said in a conversation last week outside the golf shop at Middlebury’s Ralph Myhre Golf Course, where Paul has been the golf pro since 2017.

I’d only been out on the river once all month. So after dinner, when the river calls my name, I heed the call.

It could hardly have been more exciting: in the championship winner-take-all game at Centennial Field, the Vermont Lake Monsters, defending champs in the Future College Baseball League, were down by a run, 6-5, in the bottom of the ninth to the Nashua (N. … (read more)

William Clarence Matthews and I are very close, though he was born in Selma, Alabama, in 1877 and died in Washington, D.C., in 1928. My home is festooned with pictures of Matty, I have a vast collection of Matthewsiana, eBay treasures, displayed throughou … (read more)

A lone sockeye salmon sits in the stream in front of me under a low canopy of alder. The stream is wide, gravelly and shallow: only two to three inches deep and a few feet wide.

For five days and nights I resided in a shoreline cabin partway up the Wood River system in Alaska’s Wood-Tikchik State Park. Officially, I was serving as artist-in-residence for Alaska State Parks and had come to spend a week in the state’s largest park … (read more)

I relate today, loyal readers, the story of the Demolition Derby on the campus of Middlebury College in the spring of 1972, at a time in the life of the country when college students were mostly out of their minds. 

On July 4, as many of us watched fireworks, the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center gave a list of 424 wildfires being tracked in Alaska — all “active, smoldering, or in the process of being demobilized.”

Recently I wrote to a number of area coaches, both in the high schools and at the college, asking them to reflect on their experience coaching during the pandemic — “just a few sentences, off the top of your head.” I received a number of very thoughtful r … (read more)

Vermont’s Arrowhead Mountain Lake is the only place I have ever caught a bowfin.

In May, I helped my daughter Jane coach the Monkton Little League farm team — true beginners, five- to eight-year-olds.

It covers 26,164 acres, and it borders or contains eight lakes or ponds big enough to canoe. According to the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, that makes Groton State Forest the second largest contiguous land holding in the state

We were still within sight of the boat launch where we began our six-mile float down the Shoshone River in Cody, Wyoming.

Sammy Smith found out five minutes before the first pitch that he was in the starting line-up last Friday in the first game of the NCAA regional baseball tournament in Rochester.