The Greenfield Distorter ~ our local corporatized monopoly rag

HERE’S A PIECE THEY’LL NEVER PUBLISH. THEY’D RATHER RUN FLUFF PIECES FOR INCOMPETENT “LEADERS” TO SAVE FACE THAN ADMIT THEY WERE WRONG. IT’S INSTITUTIONAL INERTIA AT ITS WORST — POLLUTING THE VERY DEMOCRACY THEY CONSTANTLY CLAIM TO BE SAVING.

Submitted with My Turn: "The Soil, the Silence, and Six Years"

To: Dan Crowley, Editor, Greenfield Recorder

From: John F. Sendelbach, Shelburne FallsDate: May 2026

Mechanic Street Brook Daylighting & Village Greenway

UnErase Mechanic Street Brook

Daylighting, Greenway, and Watershed Learning Site

© 2026 John F. Sendelbach — Shelburne Falls, MA · May 2026 All Rights Reserved

 

NOTE: This document evolves as field investigation continues. Current version: May 2026.

SHORT SUMMARY

Behind the barn at 49 Mechanic Street lies a steep-sided, ten-foot-deep hollow — the unmistakable ghost of Mechanic Street Brook, a living stream that once flowed openly through the village within living memory. This project will restore baseflow to that historic channel by installing a Dutch-Door Weir at the existing diversion structure, decommissioning and removing the 1961 Rat Tunnel, and daylighting the brook through Ghost Hollow on the town-owned parcel via the restored Otter Way corridor. The Town of Shelburne is requested to retain the 49 Mechanic Street parcel as permanent public infrastructure and authorize submission of a MassDEP Ecological Restoration Pre-Design Grant application.

Mid-twentieth-century alterations — the flattening of school fields and installation of the 1961 Rat Tunnel — created high-velocity surges that the older causeway pipe could not handle, resulting in chronic backyard flooding and standing water. The Rat Tunnel is the root cause. This proposal removes it. Current field investigation from May 2026 documents that the school's upland swale is actively bypassing its catchments and directing unauthorized runoff onto the 49 Mechanic Street parcel and into Ghost Hollow. Ongoing brush and leaf dumping in Ghost Hollow constitutes unauthorized filling of a jurisdictional wetland under the Massachusetts Wetlands Protection Act. These conditions create both a municipal drainage liability and a regulatory concern under MassDEP stormwater standards.

The proposed solution centers on a Dutch-Door Weir — a self-regulating, passive flow-control structure — that returns normal baseflow to the historic Ghost Hollow channel while reserving the existing 600-foot concrete diversion as an automatic emergency overflow. The weir requires no human activation during storms: when water exceeds the channel's capacity, it spills automatically into the diversion, the same way a bathtub overflow handles more water than the drain can take. This daylighting will create a natural meandering channel with pools and riffles, built largely from approximately 200 tons of glacial stone located less than a mile away on the upper watershed property. The project forms a public greenway connecting Buckland-Shelburne Elementary School to the Deerfield River waterfront, eliminates the stagnant standing water responsible for mosquito breeding in the adjacent neighborhood, and replaces it with moving water that prevents it.

The MassDEP Pre-Design Grant will also fund the first accurate hydraulic mapping of the Mechanic Street stormwater corridor — addressing a documented gap in the town's drainage records that recently produced a drilling incident on Bridge Street when a contractor impinged an unmapped concrete pipe installing a utility pole. The town has no stormwater maps. This project builds them.

Immediate municipal actions required: Direct DPW and the Conservation Commission to cease and remediate illegal brush dumping in Ghost Hollow. Authorize the Water Department to release any available drainage records. Retain the 49 Mechanic Street parcel permanently in public hands. Approve submission of the MassDEP Ecological Restoration Pre-Design Grant.

Key Partners: Shelburne Conservation Commission · Shelburne Water Department · Shelburne DPW · Buckland-Shelburne Elementary School · Connecticut River Watershed Council · Mass Audubon · Franklin Land Trust · UMass Amherst LARP Department

The Fish Tour

The Culinary Institute of America ~ Hyde Park, New York

A Culinary Sculpture Series for the Hudson River Watershed Proposal ~ May 2026

John F. Sendelbach  Sculptor & Landscape Designer. Shelburne Falls, MA 

The Idea in Plain TermsOne sculpture already lives on the CIA campus: a twelve-foot Atlantic sturgeon made entirely from salvaged culinary cutlery. “Old Diamondsides” stands near the entrance plaza, overlooking the Hudson River that once teemed with its living namesakes. It was installed in 2015 as the first node of a larger idea. The Fish Tour completes that idea.
Eight site-specific sculptures, each fabricated primarily from recycled stainless steel kitchen tools and equipment, trace a deliberate pedestrian route across the Hyde Park campus. Each piece represents a signature species of the Hudson River estuary — ecologically, historically, and culinarily significant. Interpretive signage at every stop weaves together river science, watershed restoration, culinary tradition, and the deeper interdependence of healthy waters and healthy kitchens. The tour begins at the academic core and descends toward the riverside, turning underutilized spaces into moments of surprise, recognition, reflection, and quiet delight.It is a walking conversation between the kitchen and the river.

20 song autobiography

©2026 John F Sendelbach

7 AM Knock

The 7 AM Knock: A Ledger of Silence and Revelation

Thinking about Omi’s life on the day of her birth got me reflecting on the rest of the bloodline. If Omi’s deafness created the "inherited acoustics" of our house—the need to project and launch words across weather—then my father’s silence created the deeper infrastructure of our history.
By the fall before COVID hit, the family rhythm had shifted to a hospice rotation. My brother, my sister, and I—the three of us left after losing our brother Alan—took turns traveling from Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Massachusetts to sit vigil in Lancaster, New York. My parents were in their final landing place: a modest apartment at Greenfields. Three weeks prior, during our last real conversation, my mother had drifted into a hallucination, calling me Jeff, my childhood best friend. My father and I didn’t correct her; we just shared a quiet glance of acceptance, watching the blurred lines of a long life softening at the edges. When I arrived that final Friday, she was unconscious in the medical wing—just hours from death.
Everyone knows you don’t knock on a door at seven in the morning unless the world has shifted. I was kneeling on the white carpet of that small living room, surrounded by the vintage transit schedules and victorian papers I had brought to photograph for my eBay shop, trying to keep my hands busy while my heart waited. When the knock finally came, my father and I shared a look of absolute knowing. I opened the door to a Black nurse who had come to tell us that Nancy Ann (Sahs) Sendelbach born in 1929, was gone.
Later that afternoon, in the strange hollow quiet that follows a death, I drew one final entry out of my father’s internal ledger. I brought up the derogatory language I had pushed back against in my teens. At 94, he finally explained the root of it. He told me about the late 1930s in Buffalo—walking to technical high school through neighborhoods carved up by redlining, where he and his friends were regularly chased and harassed by Black kids. That unspoken trauma became the silent engine behind the “white flight” that carried my parents to the rural safety of Orchard Park in the 1960s.
The irony is layered and thick. They had moved us onto land founded in the early 1800s by Quakers like David Eddy (who arrived from Vermont in 1804 and claimed hundreds of acres around what became the Four Corners) and Obadiah Baker (who settled in 1807 and opened his home for the first sanctioned Quaker meetings). This was ground soaked in reformist ideals: a stop on the Underground Railroad, where Quaker families helped fugitives heading north to Canada. The Baker homestead on East Quaker Road still carries that marker today.
Yet that same Quaker “plainness” and moral clarity rested on prior displacement. The Haudenosaunee—particularly the Seneca Nation—had long stewarded this territory. By the 1820s–1830s, through treaties, pressure, and the gradual sale of the Buffalo Creek Reservation, the Seneca presence was largely removed from the immediate area, even as Quaker settlers built meeting houses, aided escaped slaves, and championed the oppressed. We grew up running through fields and playing in Smokes Creek, a landscape shaped by both the Friends’ quiet testimony and the later hand-crafted integrity of Elbert Hubbard’s Roycroft movement nearby. We were products of a retreat from urban friction, raised in a cradle built on layered displacements.
Sitting there at 94, my father didn’t need to be forced into reconciliation—he was ready. I coaxed the story out, and he spoke clearly: he had no problem with Black people. He had reached a place of transcendence, cared for in his final years by a diverse staff at Greenfields and delivered the hardest news of his life by a Black woman. He didn’t die carrying the secret or the old fear. When he handed me my mother’s gold wedding band that afternoon, the inherited acoustics of our house finally harmonized.
The fields of Orchard Park are mostly cookie-cutter subdivisions now. But on that white carpet in Lancaster, a much older and more complicated landscape was finally cleared.

Happy Birthday to Omi: Erna Anna Marta

Today we light one up for Omi—Erna Anna Marta Knoop Sendelbach—born somewhere in the fog of 1900 Germany, back when the ground itself was starting to shake under the coming madness of the Weimar years. The family did the math and shipped three kids stateside—triage by ocean liner—because staying put was a losing equation. Omi lands here and the whole bloodline reroutes.

The notes on this photo are from my father, Frederick—three years old, already in the frame like a witness who doesn’t yet know what he’s witnessing. He’d grow up carrying the story in fragments. We never met our grandfather; heart gave out the day after Christmas in the 1940s—holiday lights still up, system offline.

Omi was partially deaf, which meant you didn’t talk to her, you projected. You leaned in and launched your words like they had to cross weather. So yes—if we’re loud, that’s not personality, that’s infrastructure. That’s inherited acoustics.

“Omi” just means grandmother in German. But in this house it meant: speak up, stay alive, cross oceans when you have to, and don’t expect the world to lower its volume for you.

Sixteen Paws Eighty Claws

Sixteen Paws Eighty Claws: George, Seamus, Ripple, And Totem

I. GEORGIE GIRL (circa 1967–1980?)

The kid with the transgender dog never really left the fields, even after the fields were gone.

Orchard Park back then — late 1960s, early 1970s — was still half-wild. No fences in the neighborhood. Just open land rolling out behind the houses, creeks cutting through, hayfields that hadn't been subdivided yet into quarter-acre dreams and driveways. A boy, second-generation German-Polish on his father's side, third on his mother's, spent most of his daylight out there, barefoot, grass to the knees, chasing whatever moved.

He was four or five when the dog showed up. His older sister had already claimed the name months earlier: if we ever get a dog, it's George. No vote, no debate. The name was waiting. When their mother came home with the toy collie–German shepherd mix — small, white-and-tan, bright-eyed — the name landed like it had always been hers. George was a girl. Nobody blinked. George was George.

She locked onto the boy like he was the center of her universe. Wherever he ran, she ran. If he slipped out the back door and sprinted across the yard, she would nose the gap or squeeze through whatever opening existed — no fences meant no real barriers — and catch him before he hit the tree line. He tested it on purpose sometimes: slam the screen door, bolt hard, duck behind the garage. Ten minutes later there she was, tongue out, tail whipping, looking at him like the chase had been the best part of her day. She never got lost. She never quit.

But George had another life nobody in the family mapped. Routes she took alone, destinations only she knew. One afternoon in high school biology class — first-floor room, big windows looking out over the campus — the boy glanced up and saw her: George, trotting across the high school lawn with calm purpose. No leash, no human, just a small dog cutting a straight line toward whatever pulled her. She crossed a busy road to get there. Cars slowed. Drivers stared. George didn't flinch. Later he learned she had a spot three streets over — someone slipping her treats, or a garbage can she raided, or both. She had secrets. Loyal to her people, loyal to her hidden paths. Both true at once.

The most vivid memory came during one of those western New York snow-belt storms that bury everything under two or three feet overnight. The creek behind the houses froze into a perfect toboggan run — steep drop, long flat at the bottom, kids from every house hauling sleds down the hill. The boy was there with George, who bounded through the drifts like she was born in them. She loved snow. Begged to go out in blizzards, curled up on the sidewalk, let the flakes pile over her until only a small mound remained. Call her name and her head would pop up, snow flying off her ears, eyes bright, as though she'd been waiting for the cue.

That day the kids played until fingers burned and cheeks stung, then started the slow trek home as the wind kicked up and visibility dropped. Nobody noticed George wasn't with them. The storm thickened. Hours passed. She was gone.

Parker Berg — three years older, same age as the boy's brother Alan — was the one who went back out. Parker was tall, long-legged, strange in the best way: read books nobody else touched, listened to records nobody else had, talked about things nobody else mentioned. He'd already turned the boy on to Pink Floyd at age ten or so, sitting in Parker's room with the lights off while "Echoes" filled the space like fog. Parker walked into the whiteout, found Georgie Girl curled in a snowdrift, half-buried, shivering but alive. She would have frozen if he hadn't gone looking. He carried her home, snow caked on his coat, set her down by the radiator. She shook once, hard, then curled up again like nothing had happened.

Parker shows up in the boy's stories again and again. The strange kid with long legs and deeper thoughts who walked into hell and came back with a dog. He didn't make a big deal of it. He just did it. Years later the boy would understand that was the model: see the need, move toward it, don't wait for permission or applause.

George wasn't panicking when Parker found her. She was doing what she always did: settling in, waiting, certain someone would call her name. Loyal without possession, independent within bond, keeper of unseen paths who always returned. She lived her whole life that way — girl and George at once, public devotion and private routes, disappearing into snow and trusting the world would dig her out.

Georgie Girl was the first. She set the template. Every dog that followed would be measured against her without knowing it.

GEOMETRIC SHORELINE ©2026 John F Sendelbach

GEOMETRIC SHORELINE   ©2026 John F Sendelbach

Bennis non gratis……Paulis non gratis…Johnis non gratis……

Three promontory flyers on the peninsular brink

Waves of laughter crashing where the water starts to think

Subcontinental Seer cuts the truth down to the ink

Red-tail wingbeat…  …non gratis…

Attic brick slant-roof where the east-wind heaves

For-rent house, shadows breathing under eaves

Jeep ride evening Paulis sings a Sparkle true

Non gratis knew the dreams we chased right through

Grad house busted mansion coffee black and strong

Feral shadows stretching where we don't belong

Windows full of questions nobody dared to ask

Brothers drinking twilight from the shining flask

Geometric shoreline, high moon wind leans in

Geometric shoreline, high moon wind leans in

high moon wind leans innnnnnn...

high moon wind leans innnnnnn...

promontory flyers high moon wind leans in

Subcontinental Seer smiles and sees us through

Peninsula laughing — newt and salamander stay

Brothers where the teaspoon rivers sullenly sway

Peninsula laughing, water drags us to the brink

Pondside shadows syncing where the world begins to sink

Water turning language into liquid moving light

Every wave a sentence bearing left and leaning right

Circle drifting outwardly while nothing's holding tight

Everything seems funny when the harmonies delight

Paulis out of nowhere in his rigor mortis haberdashery

nonsensically spouts a silly seer saying —

and we hit the floor laughing....we fell apart

we hit the floor laughing....we fell apart

..we fell apart, ...we fell apart, ...we fell apart

...we fell apart, ...we fell apart, ...we fell apart

Geometric shoreline, high moon wind leans in

Geometric shoreline, high moon wind leans in

high moon wind leans innnnnnn......

high moon wind leans innnnnnn......

promontory flyers high moon wind leans in

Subcontinental Seer smiles and sees us through

Backroom voices echo, newt-eggs burst and talk

Salamander tail-road slithers spiral hawk

Wet clothes woodstove denim steaming levi's blue

Subcontinental Seer smiles and sees us through

Geometric shoreline, high moon wind leans in

Geometric shoreline, high moon wind leans in

high moon wind leans innnnnnn......

high moon wind leans innnnnnn......

promontory flyers high moon wind leans in

Subcontinental Seer smiles and sees us through

high moon wind leans in

high moon wind leans in

 ...we fell apart, we fell apart, we fell apart......

 ...we fell apart, we fell apart, we fell apart......

 ...we fell apart, we fell apart, we fell apart......

 ...we fell apart, we fell apart, we fell apart......

 high moon wind leans in...we fell apart, we fell apart......

 high moon wind leans in...we fell apart, we fell apart......

 high moon wind leans in...we fell apart, we fell apart......

Geometric shoreline, high moon wind leans in

Geometric shoreline, high moon wind leans in