It’s that cabin-fever time of year when, with little to write about, I’m usually searching for something, anything to fill this space. Such a predicament I found myself mired in this week while preoccupied with other pressing, non-work-related issues. Then, out of the blue, like a gift from the heavens, an envelope appeared in my mailbox from longtime friend and colleague Chip Ainsworth, who’s wintering in Florida and bailed me out with a “New Yorker” article he thought I’d enjoy. He was right. Not only did I enjoy it, it brought me back some 35 years to the Leeds Reservoir. There, from the road high above, we kept seeing a large fish nestled up against the edge of a massive flat stone in shallow water along the shore, then finally figured out what it was.

But first the article, titled “The Patch” and written by John McPhee of “The Headmaster” fame. The narrative is about chain pickerel and how his pursuit of them with rod and reel related to the recent passing of his 89-year-old dad, himself a longtime fisherman who taught the author to fish. The piece describes pickerel, their habits and sporting value, and it hit home for me on many levels. Even got me reminiscing about my youthful land-surveying days with Stevie Stange, an old friend from South Deerfield who, at the time, was the party chief of our two-man crew during the summer of 1974. A large parcel of Middlefield property was changing hands that summer, and we were surveying it. As I recall, the property, mostly woodland, exceeded 500 acres, had been in the same family for two centuries and had not been surveyed since George Washington’s days, always a fun project.

To be honest, I never knew the quaint Hampshire County town of Middlefield existed until arriving there to start our little project. We began by finding the corners and establishing the property lines, then went around with a 16-foot rod and a level to pinpoint the details for the mapmaker, a job that kept us busy until the leaves fell. Middlefield had a classic rural center of town straight out of the early 19th century, or maybe one of those little towns in Wyoming’s Red Desert, population 12 or something ridiculous. Downtown consisted of one large, two-piece, two-story building with a porch in front. The place served as a country store, restaurant, Post Office, tavern, liquor store and gas station all in one, a great place to strike up conversation, prit’near any time of day or night.

We’d depart for the job each morning at 7 from my grandfather’s South Deerfield home, where Stange was renting an upstairs apartment. From there, we’d snake our way through Whately, Haydenville, Leeds and Westhampton, have breakfast at a Huntington greasy-spoon and arrive at the Middlefield work site about 9. Each day we’d pass the Leeds Reservoir twice, often stopping on the ride home at a little side-of-the-road pullover overlooking the water to search for fish or fowl or whatever happened to be there. With the water at is lowest midsummer level, we kept noticing that aforementioned large fish snuggled up to the major flat stone and wondered what it was and if we could catch it. If it was a trout, it was a beauty, all of two feet long.

Well, our curiosity finally got the better of us and, one evening, we decided to give it a whirl, see exactly what it was, fishing rod in the cargo space of Stange’s Toyota Landcruiser, dubbed the “Toyotski.” We didn’t have any bait but did have a tackle boxful of lures, mostly for warm-water fish like bass or Northern pike. We figured we’d give it a shot with a floating, broken-back Rapala, maybe four inches long. Even if it was a trout, at that size it would likely hit a Rapala. The trick was to get the lure within striking range on the first cast from a challenging distance above, no easy feat for a rookie.

I don’t remember who actually made the cast, but it was a good one, touching down less than two feet in front of the fish with a loud, showy splash. We let it sit there for a minute or less to settle things down a bit before giving it a twitch with the rod tip, then another. The fish didn’t budge, just laid there as motionless as the stone next to it. Then, on the third little twitch, the fish wheeled 90 degrees in a flash and — whammo! — struck like lightning, furious energy, getting a toothy mouthful of piercing treble hooks before taking off, Mitchell 300 drag whistling a shrill mountain tune. We ran down the elevated bank to the reservoir’s edge and played the fish to shore. Then one of us (again, I can’t recall which) ran back up the hill to the “Yotski” for needle-nosed pliers needed to remove the hooks. With the hooks removed, we released the fish back into the water. It was a pickerel, a beauty, two feet or more in length, razor-sharp, pointy teeth, nothing to handle with bare hands.

The released fish was sluggish at first but soon swam right back to its stone-side feeding lair and remained there for many days thereafter. Like McPhee said in his story, pickerel will stay in the same spot for days, weeks, years, unless removed. Well, I can attest to that because of that Leeds Reservoir pickerel that captured our fancy that summer. I witnessed it with my own two eyes, occasionally impaired. Those were the good old days.

A sparse snow had just started to fall, tiny flakes floating to the ground with the buoyancy of dust particles in a ray of sunlight piercing the woodshed window, as I stood Wednesday morning along the backyard bank of Hinsdale Brook; pooch Lily scampering along its frozen edge, likely following cold scent of a coon, mink or possum, oblivious to the murmurs of spring whispering from deep beneath a foot or two of ice and its crystalline surface. I find it surreal how moving water, its ebbs and flows, sights and sounds, can bring peace and perspective to a perceptive soul. I’m sure maritime men feel the same about the sea; it talks to them, whispers, screams, breathes warmly down their neck. But I’m an inlander, a freshwater man who often compares day-to-day and seasonal stream alterations to life’s transitions.

I guess I have felt a mystical attachment to flowing water since skating, fishing or just horsing around with boyhood pals on Bloody Brook, along which my Arms ancestors, once Sunderland tanners and cobblers, built a profitable 19th-century pocketbook shop, by my time a decaying, red, three-story Victorian plastic shop piping horrible, raw, rust-colored poison into the water below. That building’s now long gone, replaced by Cowan Auto Supply.

My riparian lure only grew stronger in later years, when dropped off by my mother at West Brook in Whately or Mill River in Deerfield for a day of trout fishing; spinning rod in hand; leaky hip boots and worm bucket fastened to my belt; wicker, fern-lined creel looped over my shoulder and neck. It taught me to read water, respect it, compare its riffles and pools, runs and eddies to the game of life.

Still later, I moved to similar streams a little farther off, the South and Bear rivers in Conway, where I honed my angling skills and discovered a bigger, more dangerous river called the Deerfield, just a larger version of its tributaries, worthy of more respect. Yes, one must respect big rivers like the Deerfield, which can swallow a man in an instant, then spit him out in a body bag, stocking-foot waders still strapped over the shoulders, belted at the waist.

Although I no longer fish, I may be more in tune with streams now than then, all because of the backyard brook that carries the surname of the original taverner to call my property home. I observe that free-flowing, stone-bed stream several times daily, find myself just standing there on the bank, often thinking how it symbolizes life and parallels our moods: slow and sluggish in summer; frozen and narrowed to random slits in winter; full of energy and emotion in spring and after heavy rains, even those of winter, when sudden freshets transport large, dangerous ice flows and bobbing logs to bottomland destinations, out of harm’s way. It’s like the stream speaks to me daily, reminding me we’re all in this together.

It was that soft murmur of spring muffled under thick ice, amplified by cold, still air that reached my ears this morning; an optimistic sound distantly related to the lazy snowflakes falling. It made me wonder if a man who interprets nature this way is losing his mind or gifted. Then I realized it doesn’t matter. Judge it as you may. I know who I am.

Leave it to the eye of the beholder.