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For 17 years the hot dog guy, Mike Foley, has held down this spot, out at the truck turn-around on Route 5, at the southernmost edge of Northampton. His lunch-on-the-run customers skid into the lot one after the other, grabbing dogs, burgers, chili,...

There will be tears shed on this day, by grown men and women alike, not of sadness nor of defeat, but of the kind very hard to put into words.Joyful noise Turning the corner onto University Drive in Amherst on a brisk and golden Saturday on Oct. 26,...

Heaven. A little slice of it anyway. High in the hills of Hadley it suddenly appears, a soundless and angelic view of the world. Far below is the UMass campus, the Emerald City itself, its towers as mere candlepins. Beyond that, forest and mountains...

HADLEY — There are TV shows with “friends” in the title and we all have enough Facebook friends to fill the Mullins Center, but the sort of companions who help you bring in the harvest on a hot weekend in August are the ones you want with you...

We tend to take our vast network of rail trails for granted. We cherish the neatly trimmed borders and the freedom to bike or blade from Burgy to Belchertown and back again without a single branch in your eye or an overhanging wildflower smacking you...

Tommie Riggins conducts his fishing in a vigorous way. He prowls the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Bridge connecting South Hadley and Holyoke from one end to the other, reaching back with everything he has and casting powerfully into the churning white...

NORTHAMPTON — With the absence of traffic, sirens and billboards, your mind can drift when you’re biking the local paths. Up ahead, for some reason, Frank Frazetta’s bold painting of the sword-wielding warrior driving a team of four polar bears across...

AMHERST — At first it wasn’t clear what a line of seven teens were doing on the field behind Amherst Regional High School on a cold and sunny afternoon. There was a move, an apparent dance move, that one in a white T-shirt was demonstrating to the...

EASTHAMPTON — On the grayest day of the year — the one before the big snowstorm — the cold blurred the eyes as bundled-up walkers and a few masked cyclists hit the Manhan Rail Trail’s leafless path.Then, a burst of springtime color, as Storm Truman in...

SOUTH HADLEY — The kid can ride. You see him coming all at once, pedaling hard and rat-a-tat fast, breath visible, expression confident. He is up on the handlebars, elbows at 90 degrees, head jutting forward, almost in what a mountain biker might call...

FLORENCE — OK, when you come upon a “yard sale” sign on a sidewalk it’s safe to say you’ll see an old bike or two. But 40? Stan Pollack’s long driveway was teeming with bicycles, standing in rows all the way back to the barn. Pollack, known by many as...