Research and Development continues

Mike Barker provided a couple of well-crafted crawfish imitations.
Patrick L. Sullivan
Mike Barker provided a couple of well-crafted crawfish imitations.
Saturday, June 15 was clear and blessedly cool, ahead of what the weather ninnies assured me is a massive unprecedented disastrous heat wave.
I had one main item on the agenda, the angler’s flea market in Riverton.
So I figured I would prowl Sandy Brook beforehand.
Sandy Brook in Colebrook is a secondary tributary of the West Branch of the Farmington. I know this because I am a highly trained observer, and because I found a United States Geological Survey map that says so.
I am happy to report that getting the map from the USGS website was simple. Go to usgs.gov and look for The National Map, which is exactly what it says it is.
The state stocks Sandy Brook, twice this spring. With what exactly I do not know.
I’ve fooled around in this stream a couple times before, with minimal results. But I always came at it moving upstream, off Route 8.
This time, coming downstream on Sandy Brook Road (another triumph of clarity in labeling) I saw the stream and a couple of pull-offs with DEEP signs regarding creel limits and so on.
So I pulled off and suited up.
Water temperature at 8 a.m. was 63 in a shallow spot next to the bank. Not ideal, perhaps, but not terrible either.
I noticed the stream running roughly north-south, was almost completely shaded over at that hour, with the sun just starting to get through the canopy from the east.
This is good. Streams that have an east-west flow get the full brunt of the sun during the course of the day. In the summer, this means warmer water.
The first thing I noticed was this bucolic, babbling brook is misnamed. It should be called “Super Slippery Brook.” It’s a lot of rock shelf and getting around is like the proverbial tap-dancing on ball bearings dipped in motor oil. Some actual sand would have been nice.
Next time I will wear felt soled boots with studs.
Mike Barker provided a couple of well-crafted crawfish imitations.Patrick L. Sullivan
I deployed an eight-foot nine-inch four weight rod. There was plenty of room for casting and the four weight allowed for turning over a dry-dropper rig while not making a huge splash.
The rig was a Chubby Chernobyl on top and a size 16 Zug Bug, tied on a jig hook and with a heavy tungsten beadhead, on what started as two feet of 4X fluoro tippet tied to the hook of the Chubby with an improved clinch knot. (And don’t ask what an unimproved clinch knot is because I have no idea.)
This produced an immediate hangup and I lost the Zug. So I shortened the dropper to about 14 inches and put on another Zug.
This produced two immediate hookups of brook trout in the eight-to-10-inch range.
So far, so good.
I clambered downstream, because it looked slightly less slippery than upstream.
It wasn’t.
I found one cleft running into a deep, wide slot that just had to have fish in it. I worked it hard for 30 minutes, abandoning the dry-dropper and chucking the heavy artillery into the depths: Big Bread and Butter nymph, a Walt’s Worm, which has more lead than a .22 short, and Joe’s Weenie.
Bupkis. Infuriating.
Then I went back to the Chubby-Zug Bug rig and proceeded to catch a dozen more fish, including some browns and one lone rainbow.
I have no idea of the proportion of wild to stocked here. I can’t believe the state stocks eight-inch brookies, but maybe there’s some deep fish reason I don’t comprehend.
Around 11 a.m. I packed it in and went down to the flea market, which was in the little public space across the street from the post office.
A modest number of vendors were there, including Harold MacMillan who still runs Housatonic River Outfitters in Cornwall, albeit without the brick-and-mortar shop.
We exchanged fishing gossip, and he sold me a grab bag of bass poppers for an eminently reasonable 10 bucks.
Most of the vendors were selling conventional gear, which doesn’t interest me, but I did spot Mike Barker of Ansonia.
Barker is a garage door installer in real life, and ties flies as a side gig. He said it “calms the nerves” after a busy week driving all over the state installing garage doors.
He’s been tying and selling for about three years.
He had a couple of poppers the approximate size of Oklahoma, which he said were for getting the attention of big fish. Like the star of “Jaws.”
I picked up a couple of beautifully crafted crawfish imitations. I generally make do with a Wooly Bugger for this, but I like to encourage the up-and-comers.
So the Research & Development ratio was nice and balanced. I established that Sandy Brook is not very sandy but has a lot of hungry fish in it, and it probably stays cool enough to be plausible most of the time.
I found a cost-effective way to replenish the bass bug box.
And I contributed in a small way to a young fly tier’s craft.
SHARON — Sharon Dennis Rosen, 83, died on Aug. 8, 2025, in New York City.
Born and raised in Sharon, Connecticut, she grew up on her parents’ farm and attended Sharon Center School and Housatonic Valley Regional High School. She went on to study at Skidmore College before moving to New York City, where she married Dr. Harvey Rosen and together they raised two children.
Sharon’s lifelong love of learning and the arts shaped both her work and her passions. For decades, she served as a tour guide at the American Museum of Natural History and the Asia Society, sharing her knowledge and enthusiasm with countless visitors. She also delighted in traveling widely, immersing herself in other cultures, and especially treasured time spent visiting her daughter and grandsons in Europe and Africa.
She was also deeply connected to her hometown, where in retirement she spent half her time and had many friends. She served as President of the Sharon East Side Cemetery until the time of her death, where generations of her family are buried and where she will also be laid to rest.
She is survived by her husband, Harvey; her children, Jennifer and Marc; and four beloved grandchildren.
Claire and Garland Jeffreys in the film “The King of In Between.”
There is a scene in “The King of In Between,” a documentary about musician Garland Jeffreys, that shows his name as the answer to a question on the TV show “Jeopardy!”
“This moment was the film in a nutshell,” said Claire Jeffreys, the film’s producer and director, and Garland’s wife of 40 years. “Nobody knows the answer,” she continued. “So, you’re cool enough to be a Jeopardy question, but you’re still obscure enough that not one of the contestants even had a glimmer of the answer.”
Garland Jeffreys never quite became a household name, but he carved out a singular place in American music by refusing to fit neatly into any category. A biracial New Yorker blending rock, reggae, soul and R&B, he used genre fusion as a kind of rebellion — against industry pigeonholes, racial boundaries and the musical status quo. Albums like “Ghost Writer” (1977) captured the tension of a post–civil rights America, while songs like “Wild in the Streets” made him an underground prophet of urban unrest. He moved alongside artists like Lou Reed and Bruce Springsteen but always in his own lane — part poet, part agitator, part bridge between cultures.
“I think what I tried to do with the film, wittingly or unwittingly, was just to show that we all have these lives and they don’t often meet our dreams of what we think we’re entitled to, we’re talented enough to get or whatever,” said Claire. “We all have these goals, but we’re sort of stymied. Often, it’s partly circumstance and luck, but it’s also very often something that we’re doing or not doing that’s impeding us.”
This is not the typical rock-and-roll redemption story. There are no smashed guitars, no heroic overdoses, no dramatic comeback tour. What we get instead is something quieter and more intimate: hours of archival footage that Claire spent years sorting through. The sheer effort behind the film is palpable — so much so that, as she admitted with a laugh, it cured her of any future ambitions in filmmaking.
“What I learned with this project was A, I’m never doing it again. It was just so hard. And B, you know, you can do anything if you collaborate with people that know what they’re doing.”
Claire worked with the editing team of Evan M. Johnson and Ben Sozanski and a slew of talented producers, and ended up with a truthful portrayal — a beautiful living document for Garland’s legions of fans and, perhaps most importantly, for the couple’s daughter, Savannah.
“She’s been in the audience with me maybe three or four times,” said Claire. “The last time, I could tell that she was beginning to feel very proud of the effort that went into it and also of being a part of it.”
Savannah pursued a career in music for a while herself but has changed tracks and become a video producer.
“I think she couldn’t quite see music happening for herself,” said Claire. “She was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to struggle the way I saw my dad struggling and I’m going to get a job with a salary.’”
The film doesn’t just track the arc of an underappreciated musician, however. The music, always playing, is the soundtrack of a life — of a man navigating racial, musical and personal boundaries while balancing marriage, parenthood, aging, addiction andrecovery. Garland and Claire speak plainly about getting sober in the film, a life choice that gave them both clarity and shows Claire as a co-conspirator in his survival.
“I did some work early on with a director,” said Claire. “He wanted the final cut, and I didn’t feel like I could do that — not because I wanted so much to control the story, but I didn’t want the story to be about Alzheimer’s.”
Diagnosed in 2017, Garland, now 81, is in the late stages of the disease. Claire serves as his primary caregiver. The film quietly acknowledges his diagnosis, but it doesn’t dwell — a restraint that feels intentional. Garland spent a career refusing to be reduced: not to one sound, one race or one scene. And so the documentary grants him that same dignity in aging. His memory may be slipping, but the film resists easy sentimentality. Instead, it shows what remains — his humor, his voice, his marriage, the echo of a life lived on the edges of fame and at the center of his own convictions.
The Moviehouse in Millerton will be screening “The King of In Between” on Sept. 20 at 7 p.m. Peter Aaron, arts editor of Chronogram Magazine will conduct a talkback and Q&A with Claire Jeffreys after the film. Purchase tickets at themoviehouse.net.
The Haystack Book Festival, a program of the Norfolk Hub, brings renowned writers and thinkers to Norfolk for conversation. Celebrating its fifth season this fall, the festival will gather 18 writers for discussions at the Norfolk Library on Sept. 20 and Oct. 3 through 5.
Jerome A. Cohen, author of the memoir “Eastward, Westward: A Lifein Law.”Haystack Book Festival
For example, “Never Take the Rule of Law for Granted: China and the Dissident,” will be held Saturday, Sept. 20, at 4 p.m. at the Norfolk Library. It brings together Jerome A. Cohen, author of “Eastward, Westward: A Life in Law,” and Mark Clifford, author of “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong King’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic” in dialogue with journalist Richard Hornik to discuss the rule of law and China.
The Council on Foreign Relations stated, “Few Americans have done more than Jerome A. Cohen to advance the rule of law in East Asia. He established the study of Chinese law in the United States. An advocate for human rights, Cohen has been a scholar, teacher, lawyer, and activist for sixty years.”
Cohen, a professor at New York University School of Law and director of its U.S.-Asia Law Institute, revealed his long view on China: “We are now witnessing another extreme in the pendulum’s swing toward repression. Xi Jinping is likely to outlive me but ‘no life lives forever.’ There will eventually be another profound reaction to the current totalitarian era.”
Mark Clifford, author of “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic.”Haystack Book Festival
In “The Troublemaker,” Clifford chronicles Lai’s life from child refugee to pro-democracy billionaire to his current imprisonment by the Chinese Communist Party. Clifford is president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, a Walter Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University, and holds a PhD in history from the University of Hong Kong. He was the former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post and The Standard (Hong Kong and Seoul).
Journalist Richard Hornik, adjunct senior fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu.Haystack Book Festival
Richard Hornik, adjunct senior fellow at the East-West Center, will moderate the discussion. Hornik is the former executive editor of AsiaWeek, news service director of Time magazine, and former Time bureau chief in Warsaw, Boston, Beijing and Hong Kong.
Betsy Lerner, author of “Shred Sisters,” is giving the 2025 Brendan Gill lecture at the Haystack Book Festival.Haystack Book Festival
The Brendan Gill Lecture is a highlight of the festival honoring longtime Norfolk resident Brendan Gill, who died in1997. Gill wrote for The New Yorker magazine for fifty years. Betsy Lerner, New York Times-recognized author of “Shred Sisters,” will deliver this year’s lecture on Friday, Oct. 3, at 6 p.m. at the Norfolk Library.
Visit haystackbookfestival.org to register. Admission is free.