I’ve paused Daily Catskills because I no longer get any feedback, and this website takes hundreds of hours to shoot and write. Do you enjoy the posts? Let me know and if enough people comment, I’ll pick it up this winter. I decided to enjoy this glorious fall in the Catskills instead of feeling pressure to get the best shot.
Additionally, I have a very long story to tell and I have started my memoir on Substack, the place where writers can get paid for their work. For a monthly subscription of $5, you can be entertained by all the stories behind the best pictures that have been offered free for the last decade. Do you want to read the – sometimes hilarious – stories behind these images? Hiking mishaps, radio daze, farming, food, booze, conversations and the dog’s life, in eight long-form posts a month: that’s 62 cents for an essay of 1000-2000 words.
If you’ve been enjoying Upstate Dispatch free for eight years, please consider subscribing so I can turn my story into a book. If you love what you see, please consider sharing on social media, so I can raise my subscriber level to make it worthwhile.
Another scorcher: a high of 86F with a virtually cloudless sky, save for the odd scattering of cotton balls in the distance. Fall and Summer collide to make a gorgeous day.
Another crisp morning under a big dome of pale blue with cloud moving in early afternoon. Humid with a high of 68F. Fall colors are muted by the cloud.
A chilly sunrise with overnight frost whitening the flora, and steaming mist rising into a crystal clear sky. A crisp day, with a high of 69F and the landscape looking like it’s slowly being sanded down. This is the penultimate day of summer.
Warm and sunny, with wispy bits of cloud like someone didn’t clean up the sky properly and a high of 70F. Overnight lows dipping into the thirties. Frost warning.
An overcast and gloomy morning clearing up mid-afternoon to late evening and a clear blue sunset. Chilly with some sprinkles and a high of 64F. Lows in the fifties.
Gloomy and rainy, with intermittent showers leaving a trail of thick mist in their wake. A high of 71F and humid. The goldenrod is enjoying this late summer.
Muggy, still and overcast with low cloud and a high of 77F. Late afternoon drizzle gave way to some patches of blue. A barely discernible reddening of the landscape. The greens aren’t giving up yet.
Yes, I’m still here! I know some of you can’t believe it. It is, however, the 9th birthday of Upstate Dispatch and this is the 2,355th post. Yes, I persist. The Daily Catskills section began again this year on September 1st for the fall season, but it’s just too much work to maintain it year-round. (BTW, there are a few splotches of red in the foliage here and there, and in small pockets, mostly shady areas, we have piles of fallen leaves, but because of the heat, it still feels like summer. Try telling that to the tomatoes, though.)
If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that I have mostly been focusing on art, and writing. I’m working on a memoir, not because I’m special, but because there’s a story here that I need to tell. Part of this story was published in Farmerish and it was well-received. You can read it here.
I will be publishing an introduction, some excerpts, and companion pieces to this memoir on Substack: a “new economic engine for culture”, which is a paid newsletter that gives writers a chance to earn a living. For those of you who are interested in paying a very small subscription for my content. Here’s a chance to find out more about who I am. I hope to see you there!
Finally, I often go out for lunch, breakfast or dinner in the Catskills and hear about how Upstate Dispatch has helped local businesses. I really appreciate the feedback and thank everyone for their support.
A steamy day. Hot and humid, with plump, fluffy cloud and a high of 89F. Mid-afternoon thunder and rain that took a pause for sunset and then continued with epic house-rattling thunder and lightning after dark. Some epic weather.
Early morning sprinkles, but otherwise sunny despite big, chunky clouds like a rumpled duvet, and humid with a high of 83F. The last of the downed hay needs to be dried out before its baled because of the overnight rain.
A very rainy summer is coming to a dry, sunny end – well, fingers crossed, as summer’s not officially over until September 22nd this year. I have mostly been focused on my fine art studies at Andes Academy of Art. Every Wednesday, there is a figure drawing session with a live nude model, from 4pm-7pm at Streamside Yoga, 509 Main Street Andes that only stops during the darkest depths of a Catskills winter (and word is that we’re in for a bad winter). Local artists Lisbeth Firmin, Steven Burnett, Gary Mayer, Peter Mayer, William Duke, Sandy Finkenberg attend this class, and it’s been a thrill to be influenced by the best artists in the Catskills, and although my sketching is getting so much better, my watercolor is what sells.
This year I launched a print version of Upstate Dispatch – a magazine – that was well-received, but did not sell well. I’ve caught up with the retailers of the magazine who said that customers did not want to pay $20 for the magazine. I’ve mulled this over with booksellers and local artists, and we’ve come up with the theory that people see magazines as disposable and don’t want to pay for them. I collect some magazines, and all my artist colleagues – about 30 friends – all bought a copy of Upstate Dispatch because they see it as art.
This theory is proven by the fact that our sketch sale to benefit The Heart of the Catskills animal shelter at the Andes Academy of Art this week was mobbed by customers who were happy to pay $20 for a rough sketch or watercolor that took less than 20 minutes to draw in our figure drawing classes. The whole show of about a hundred works that were tacked up on the wall unframed, was almost sold out.
It really opened my eyes to what sells and what is valued. Art is, after all, a commodity. Periodicals, not so much.
This brings me to books. A local bookseller told me last night that nobody wants to buy books either! Journalists’ salaries have been in significant decline for decades, but do people really want all words to be free? How’s a writer supposed to live? Despite this, Upstate Dispatch celebrates its 9th birthday this year. Thank you to all who read regularly and, an extra thank you to a handful of you who contribute (through the donation page). Plans are in the works for an art studio and gallery. I hope you’ll come and visit.
Day 3 of haying in the Dry Brook Valley, mostly clear and sunny, a high of 72F, with late afternoon cotton wool cloud and some post-sunset sprinkles. Jewel weed is thriving down by the river.
The year 1992 was dubbed by The Queen of England to be her Annus Horribilis – a common Latin term for horrible year – after parts of Windsor castle burned down along with some of its priceless historical artifacts.
This year is farmer Jake Fairbairn’s Annus Hay-ribilis, an extraordinarily bad hay season, the worst in his entire decades-long career on the farm, due to this summer’s incessant rain. Nobody’s going to get that reference, Jake told me, but I just couldn’t think of another hay pun.
I didn’t think the reference was that well-known until along came The Crown on Netflix, which I stopped watching after Season 2. Being a Londoner, I had watched the real thing play out in British newspapers growing up and that was enough for me. No Brit who was old enough in 1992 can forget the images of the sour-faced Queen picking through the castle wreckage in her Welly boots and headscarf, tutting over charred objects that had been once admired by the likes of Henry VIII.
The very first post on Upstate Dispatch on September 9th, 2014, which you can find here, was a post on my first watercolor completed under the tutelage of Alix Travis. After ten years, this watercolor is up for sale at the Andes Academy of Art on 506 Main Street, Andes, NY 13731.
The opening of the show is on July 15th, 2023 from 2pm to 6pm and curated by Peter Mayer.
It’s been a while since I wrote with any regularity here, and I need to get back to my roots as a writer, so I started a new project: documenting the history and workings of this 93-year-old working farm to which I moved exactly two years ago: Lazy Crazy Acres Farm and its resident farmer Jake Fairbairn who makes hay and maple syrup on 100 acres. It’s a collaboration between Lazy Crazy Acres Farm and Upstate Dispatch. The farm is in need of some serious TLC. The house needs renovating and the farm equipment needs constant repair. Will we be able to fix up the house in time for the farm’s centenary? Who knows? But we have started by fixing the back porch, which was falling down.
Farming is a hugely risky endeavor. The weather is boss and this has been an extraordinary year in that this is the first year that Jake has not been able to make hay in June. In May 2023 we had a month of drought conditions: browned grass and hay growth that was only about 60% of last year’s mass. In June we have had near-constant rain. At time of writing, July 4th, Jake is fixing the steering wheel on one of the farm’s 50-year-old tractors, because it is still raining.
Furthermore, it’s not only good practice for me as a writer, but I also feel the need to publish my own authentic story. To this end, my next post will be a piece of my memoir that was published two years ago in Farmerish.net, which I am publishing for the first time here on Upstate Dispatch.
No sooner did I stop posting Daily Catskills on 5/31/23, than along came a swirling dark cloud of wildfire smoke that choked the Catskills, and much of the North East of the US, in a thick, dirty shroud unlike we’ve seen before in this area in living memory.
Historically, June has always been a bit boring for pictures, but not this year. Ordinarily, by the month of June, the Catskills has filled in with its multifarious greens, and daily shots during the summer all seem the same, so I suspend the Daily Catskills genre until autumn when the real colors start to pop. But this year in June, one hundred burning wildfires in Canada traveled on prevailing winds – looking much like a tornado from satellite images – blowing a layer of orange, sooty, ashy smoke for two days from Monday night (June 5th) until Thursday morning (June 8th). The sky became shades of orange, blue and grey – and blazing red around our bloodshot eyes. Everybody looked like they’d been up all night partying, coughing like they’d just smoked 20 cigarettes.
Moreover, it all got a little unnervingly chilly under that massive cloud of wildfire like we were in a Cormac McCarthy novel, I wondered, should we get the cart and starting walking??
But it all blew over.
The moral of the story is that we are all connected. It’s never been more obvious that the struggles of our neighbors are also our concern. Huge fires that burn thousands of miles away send smoke signals around the world, heralding the alert of climate change.
To compound the issue, we have had an unseasonably dry spring here in the Catskills and still have the big beige patches of crunchy brown grass to prove it. Hay season will bring roughly 60% of the yields of previous years in the Dry Brook Valley. The Catskills used to be a veritable rain forest, but not this spring. Our rivers are running low and the infamous Kaatskills waters are evaporating. Locally, we’ve received reports that springs are drying up, and that the water levels are at 50%.
We’ve had some rain in June thus far, but it’s been a mediocre mist at best. The first half of June has thus far been a drought.
