To the editor:

Dear friends of Herb Hadfield:

Please, you who knew Herb Hadfield, send your opinion on how best to remember his name.  My neighbor for 20 years, Herb gave my daughters a mule-drawn buggy ride.  Herb supported wildlife and the trees they inhabited; he prevented hunting on his land.

In October, the first  squirrel or rabbit hunting on his land reminded me to urge  another name for the treeless hunting space that has replaced Herb’s own non-hunting forest.  To name it after Herb Hadfield is like naming a fracking well after Al Gore, a shooting gallery after Jim Brady or a gun shop after Sen. Gabrielle Giffords.

Yes, Herb’s name should continue, but not on what he disapproved. Perhaps the road leading from Cornell to the site could, with  co-owners’ approval, bear it. Or perhaps something else.

Herb’s successors should not slide into “unremembering hearts and heads” so reprimanded by the Irish poet Yeats.  My career has been to remember the Renaissance, its  writers and history. Personally, I remember my ancestor Stephen Powers of Shutesbury, who fought with Daniel Shays in the Revolution (and whose property wall continues across from Quabbin).

Remembering begins with the recent past, with Herb who said: “There are so many things and so many people in this town who are so beautiful and good. I’ve never met so many thinking and caring people in one place, and it’s just this environment that has attracted them all.

I’m an Indian at heart ... They had territorial and hunting rights, but the land was God’s and everything was a gift to them. They didn’t ruin it.”

Yours in remembering Herb,

Alan Powers

Box 3935

Westport, MA 02790