Arts and Culture along the CMSB

This just cats cast the bi weekly podcast featuring history, interviews, arts and culture, sustainability and the outdoors in the Catskill Mountains and Hudson Valley. Cats cast is supported by the Finnish Playhouse and historic 150 seat Playhouse that's home to community theater, film screenings, local community events, road productions and corporate meetings. The Playhouse is located in the beautiful hamlet of Phoenicia, New York, convenient two main street shops, local eateries and outdoor activities, more at Phoenicia, playhouse.com, and on Facebook and Instagram, and by the central Catskills Chamber of Commerce, providing services to businesses, community organizations and local governments in the central Catskills region. Follow the central Catskills Chamber of Commerce on Facebook, and sign up for a weekly email of local events at Central catskills.org. In our last episode, we presented our audio guide to outdoor recreation along the Catskill Mountains Scenic Byway. This week, we've pulled out our arts and culture guide produced a few years back in association with the Catskill Mountains Scenic Byway, you'll hear from local artists, farmers, musicians and historians, with tips on farms, galleries, museums and scenery you'll want to mark on a map for your next trip up the Catskill Mountains Scenic Byway route 28 from Olive to Andes. Welcome to New York's Catskill Mountains and the Catskill mountain Scenic Byway, I'm Alan Parker, you're listening to the arts and culture driving guide designed to inform, entertain and inspire as you wind your way through the mountains from the town of Olive to Andes, New York, hear from local historians, farmers and artists, starting with Robert selkoe. Let's keep an eye out for his studio on the north side of Route 28 in olive, New York. I'm Robert saltcoats. And I'm a painter and were in a show can on route 28. We're about to enter the carriage house that's my studio here at 302 for route 28. And I do a lot of landscape painting in the Catskills in the Adirondacks and all over the United States. And I've had a home base in the Catskills since 1975, and been in this property on route 28 and the show can since 1996. The 1903 The Automobile Manufacturers Association, sponsored an endurance run that run came up the Ulster and Delaware turnpike and had their first overnight in Pine Hill brought some business and tourism to Pine Hill. Like five cars couldn't get over Pine Hill they had to use horses to help. This stretch of road is very historic. It's very scenic. And calling it the Catskill Mountains Scenic Byway is really appropriate because it comes from right through the heart of the Catskill Park in the Catskill Mountains and from here, you can branch off to reach say the mountain top, our Scenic Byway will meet with the mountain close Scenic Byway up along Route 214 historic stony clove road there through the devil's tombstone and the notch or going in the other way down out in West show can off Route 28. A you can take the road down to sundown there's a tremendous artistic heritage to this area as well. They call it the Hudson River School because the Hudson River is what the ships came up to get the view but the Hudson River School was about the views of the Catskills. And when Thomas Cole went out, he went out into the Catskills. I guess the big attraction in the show, Ken is the Ashokan reservoir. And I've done many paintings at the reservoir. It's a beautiful scenic view, you get a whole panorama of the kind of South Eastern facade of the whole Catskill range walking along the three mile long dam at the show camp. And that's just a few minutes from here. Generally, I'll travel around until I see a view that just arrests my attention and strikes me as beautiful. And if I see a strategy for making a composition, you know, I'll stop and look around and unload and set up my easel and do a pastel and I have some favorite places that I like to return to. And it's a question of also getting to know a place. So certain times of year certain times of day are going to be right for that that place that composition there. There's a softness and a human scale to these mountains that aren't overwhelming but are just very fulfilling to experience. Route 28 follows the soap it's up to big endian where the soap is will turn and go into olive Urrea the path up to slide mountain and frost valleys up there and then if you keep going up towards Pine Hill, you leave the SOPs behind. And once you go over Pine Hill, then you're in the watershed for the Delaware River. The East Branch and West Branch of the Delaware River define Delaware County and you get over Pine Hill up high mount and the VISTA opens up there. It took me several years of living in the Woodstock area before I made it over Pine Hill and discovered Delaware County and Andes, which is a whole different landscape. It's the dairy country Delaware County was the largest butter producer in the United States had the highest percentage of Scottish born residents in 1880 of any county in the United States. It has a real mountain pasture quality, and the dairy farms still are operating in many cases. So the pastures are still there. Our section here closer in the Catskills with farms, there were had been defunct for so many years that the trees have all grown up and you'll see all of the stone walls going through. But there are no pastures between the walls. It's all second growth forest. Every time I drive up route 28 Every time I get through olive and I see those shandaken mountains rising in the distance, or I'm coming down into boys fill with Mount Tremper in the background and coming back from Phoenicia, where you have like six fingers of mountains coming down into the soap as Valley. It's just as beautiful as any place in the world to me to have the experience of being in that landscape. And then to capture that experience through pigments on paint. And then to have someone else see that and say, Aha, you know, that's like an alchemy. That's the alchemy of art for me to be able to embody that aspiration for beauty and the experience of beauty as a renewing aspect for the spirit. That's why I do it. For our children, their children to the woodland trails, the mountain peaks, the scenic view. So come and walk. We'll sing together and celebrate our Catskill Mountains. Our stretch of Route 28 from the olive town line up to Andy's has a great mix of history with creational opportunities, culture and scenery. And the creation of the SR byway in and of itself brings attention to that. And one of the things it does is tries to wend its way through the historic communities so that for example in Phoenicia, Pine Hill, Fleischmanns and Margaretville. It detours off the highway to bring you into the historic towns and villages. I am John Duda, I'm a trustee of the greater Fleischmanns Museum of memories. I bought my place just outside of Fleischmanns in the early 90s as a weekend home, and very quickly decided I wanted to be here full time, which I was able to manage. I grew up in Rutherford right near giant stadium. But life in the Catskills looked pretty good. And a lot of the people I worked with in Jersey, were sure I'd come to my senses and be back shortly didn't happen. The post Civil War, United States experienced an incredible railroad boom, both here in the northeast and all across the country. Before that time coming up here entailed an incredibly difficult journey up on a very rough road from Kingston. That would take many hours and was not pleasant. So it was proposed to build a railroad from Kingston that would extend all the way up to us we go on Lake Ontario, it would when this circuitous course, up to Oneonta, then up to Syracuse and continuing on up to us we go construction started in 1868. They got just a few miles west of Kingston and there were financial difficulties. Railroads at that era were sort of like the dot coms of our time there'd be a lot of things capitalized or planned. Somebody made a lot of money and somebody lost a lot of money and a lot of these companies would go under That's what happened to what was originally the Rondout and Oswego. It was reorganized as the New York Kingston and Syracuse that also didn't last very long, although they did continue construction and God as far as Grande Gorge. By 1872 1873, it was reorganized again becoming the Ulster and Delaware railroad. And that's how it existed for the next 50 some odd years. They completed the tracks to Oneonta within about 30 years, and then basically sat on their laurels. The original thinking for the railroad it was that it would open up these small Hamlet's in the Catskills to the outside world allowing products to come in and local produce to be shipped out other than cauliflower. There was not much farming produce that made it out of here, but the area was very good for dairying, so they're a lot of milk went also, lumber and bluestone. A lot of the cities on the east coast have Catskill mountain bluestone as their sidewalks as their curbs because it was just such a perfect material for that. What quickly became apparent was that people from New York City wanted to come up here, especially in the summers. This is pre air conditioning in New York, and people just wanted out of the hot climate into cooler and supposedly healthier environments. Initially, farmers would just take in borders. And within about 10 years, they started building hotels, they realized there was enough of a demand for accommodations, a cut above a room in a farmhouse. So by the early 1880s, you have the Grand Hotel being built in high mount was actually built by the railroad. So they not only made money bringing you up here, but they then made money because you stayed in their hotel. And this was one of the four most opulent hotels in the Catskills along with the Casco Mountain House the hotel Kaaterskill and the wrecks mirror and Stanford. If you got off the train at the Fleischmanns train station in 1903, you had your choice of 59 hotels and guest houses to stay in. Just a phenomenal number when you think about it. Pictures from that era show the summer streets thronged with people that you literally could not move. Families would come up for the summer, the husbands would just come up on weekends, they actually called them the husband train. It would bring the husbands up from New York on Friday evening and return them to the city on Sunday night. The family would stay up for the rest of the summer, and enjoy the Healthy Climate and whatever activities their hotels were providing what had been the Austrian Delaware ran with passengers until 1954 and continued as a freight line until 1976. The stations you could see today, in Fleischmanns, the original freight house from the 1870s is still standing in our folder still, the station standing and in Roxbury, what had been the station is still there and now serves as the Ulster and Delaware railroad Historical Society Museum. The most well preserved and historic would probably be the finish station that is a classic u and d station from that era, and now serves as the home for the Empire State railway museum will cover Empire State Railway Museum, and rail explorers in an upcoming episode of cats cast. My name is Justin Cole. I'm one of the co founders of the Phoenicia International Festival, the voice and these days there are really two couples running it and that is Louie OD and Maria Tada. Ro Louie was 11 and a half years with the Met and a couple of years with City Opera, and Maria. She's been all over the world. Louis and I met doing a fundraiser, we became friends and it came to our attention that the Phoenicia field had no playground equipment, so the kids needed playground equipment. And we decided, well, let's have a fundraiser concert between five and 600 people show for the performance and we have never looked back. What we offer is high quality first class. Performance Level is astounding. It's a 10 on 10 system, I guarantee we feel quite strongly about the quality. We have the quality, that's number one to a vested interest on the part of community, our community builds our stage, our stages, 2500 feet. That's a huge stage I holds both the orchestra, the staging area and backstage area, and the community comes out we'll get 35 people. And they put this sucker together. It's all wooden screws, and they dis assembly. We have 55 families that house artists for us and take care of our artists, feed them breakfast, feed them lunch, if they're going to be back at the house for lunch. And everyday at five o'clock, we have probably a dozen people that cook wonderful food. And then all of our artists, everybody eats together at five o'clock every afternoon unless you're involved in a rehearsal. The vested interests of this community is impressive. I think overall, we have 23 events and instead six venues this year, sometimes seven, and they're spread throughout the hamlet. And you can walk from every venue to every other venue which makes it nice venues are the Wesleyan Church which is on Main Street, there's a Methodist Church, that's a block off Main Street, there's a railway museum that's black the other way, shandaken theatrical society, which is a wonderful old fashioned theater, and the church, the Catholic Church, also on Main Street, we do have other streets. But all the action is on Main Street. And the field is nestled in the wonders and magic of Mount Tremper. And it's absolutely gorgeous. You get an opera singer from the Met sings here, he and or she want to come back. And then they'll tell us look, I got to do concerts if you can move the the opera to July out here for NASA. Their agents don't always like that. If one, you know, looks down Main Street, every retailer loves us. And we love every retailer, you're going nowhere unless the community business and otherwise. It has a vested interest in what it is you're doing. We are all with the same family. They are our collaborators. And one of the things that we've been striving for and we're finally up we have 20% local talent. It's amazing how much talent is out here in these their hills. We celebrate the magic and wonders of the human voice. both spoken and sung. We have plays we have readings, wonderful operas, sometimes two opposite year. We also had Inuits singers that came down to us from Hudson Bay. We've had outrageous plays. We've done original works. We have events at our office on 90 Main Street and Phoenicia that are year round. And they're not all fundraisers most of them are not fundraisers, look up Phoenicia. So weird name pho II and I see I a voice fest.com. The artistic community in this area is really special. They say there are more artists per capita in Ulster County than in New York City. There are a good number of us. I'm Christy Schiele. I'm a contemporary landscape painter living in the high peaks region of the Catskills, Chester actually, in this area in the Catskills in the mid Hudson Valley. We really need each other, for companionship, camaraderie, and to share ideas. The community here is very supportive of each other. And there are a number of viable galleries in the area. And yes, there are always more artists and galleries everywhere you go, and it includes this area. But there actually is an art market in the area, which is quite delightful and not true in most rural areas. And there are also a good number of just for communities sake arts happenings. any given weekend, you can find something to go to and see. I sort of define myself as a non regional landscape painter only because I like to paint every place I've ever seen because they're also beautiful. But certainly this area that I see every day when I'm hiking and driving around is among the most beautiful anywhere. So I paint the mountains and the creeks and the fields. Frequently, Mike timberframe studio is right on one of our beautiful creeks that feeds into another creek that feeds into the surface. And I've been here since 1990, moved up from New York, and have never regretted it. Those of us that live here, the artists that live here, are still quite connected to the city. And that's readily accessible. And yet, it's much easier to get into your own head, your own creative space, in a quieter place. The busyness conversation is really very important to me. Sometimes I feel like as I'm working that what I'm capturing both in the process and in the outcome is a sense of being suspended between two breaths, I feel like we are really overwhelmed in our lives with stuff with too much in our schedule too much in our minds too much in our house, too much in our studio, perhaps. And I often think and I tell my students this as well, that if if you're looking at a reference that has all this great stuff in it, there are trees over here, and there are clouds over there. And there's this great water shape. And then there's a hillside and some fields. If you put all of that in, it's going to compete for attention, and you're not going to see it as well. So if you take some of that out if you prioritize and decide which stuff and sometimes you do this while painting, painting things in and painting things out, then you'll be able to relax into the peace habit, invite you in, create that kind of sense of meditative breath. And then the eye can move around to the detail that's there, appreciating it. I work in my studio every day, although there's a great deal of business side to this as well to having this as your livelihood. So I also spend a lot of time driving my work around and making deliveries and packaging things up to ship to my galleries and a lot of time on the computer. But I do work every day I actually crave it. And that's something that takes years to develop as well. In the early years artists find that there's a resistance to going into the studio no matter how much they love being an artist and are intent upon it. So there's this process of overcoming your resistance until eventually over the years, you've done that enough times and the resistance is usually not there anymore. It's more like it Bekins Kirsty shields been a longtime customer, the Catskills have always been a muse for artists, longtime an array every 10 or 15 years it seems to be a wave of a fresh escapees from New York, all with some kind of creative bent artists, sculptors, photographers several little galleries in the area in Delaware County as a co op bologna gallery. A couple out in Andes. And sooner or later, we're going to do a gallery here and show some of the artists that I've been framing for the past 30 years 18 by 24. This is Jeff Rogers from Jeff Rogers picture framing and Pine Hill 300 Main Street by New York. I've been framing here in the area since 1985. On and off I first came to the area as a young child spent all my summers here in my grandmother's house 1975 We bought my grandmother's house raised the family here I am now have my son working in the shop. Well we're one of the only frame shops you'll find anywhere that still does hand finish frames. We get local hardwoods from local sawmills mill it up into molding, chop it to size, hand sanded hand finish it in a variety of finishes. And you're not going to find that anywhere in New York you might find that but we join them all by hand. Everything is joined by hand no wonder pinners we're old school. The other thing we do we do a lot of barn wood will take down a barn and have some stock. People will come in with different things they'll want a frame made out of like a doorway where their kids height is measured on it and they're selling the house. They don't want to keep that piece of wood where you know all heights are so I'll make a frame out of that. Or somebody has a piece of boat or anything any piece of wood they bring in We'll make a frame matter so you know we're kind of unique in that aspect that we're real custom from scratch custom. We're full service we somebody needs a piece of glass fix they need a wire on the back, whatever they need we do stay tuned to visit an 1870 cider mill tour a vodka distillery and paint alongside a Catskill Creek This is closer to water by two dark forces Ranger skirt sky once was to drown 30 live stream of stones at once was a notion the pole of the tag please relax once was a great name a shows choke with a pound of the beaches gunmetal scale snow fell like last year waves that spring the Sun lights to the tree stop smoking and drink some water like wind to the tree ways. That was a dinner bell? You had three meals on the farm you had breakfast? You had dinner, which was the noon meal and you had supper? And for dinner you called the farmhands in with the bell that could be heard all over the farm. So that's how the farmhands knew it was time to break for the midday meal. In later years when I was a kid, that was how the kids knew they were supposed to get themselves home. So there's no excuse for not hearing that if you're anywhere in the valley. Bert Hubble's family has farmed in the Catskills since the American Revolution from 1848. They've inhabited the same parcel of land off highway 30. In Margaretville when I was a kid, if you looked across the valley that was almost all open fields and you could see the stone walls running up and down and it's all growing up in my lifetime. I remember when they were Meadows when they were the night pasture and the day pasture for the cows. Once we got rid of the cows in the 60s, Nature took its course for years we had great BlackBerry picking on the farm because the berries were one of the first things to invade the fields. And then along came the saplings. And now we've got a lot of maple trees we make maple syrup here on the farm. That's one of our winter activities, we put out about 1200 taps, and this year we made about 300 gallons of maple syrup. Each generation finds its own way to make money here on the farm. It started out as a subsistence farm. When the railroad came through, it became a farm which could sell to one of the largest fastest growing markets in the world, New York City that continued up through the 20s when refrigeration came in, and instead of New York City relying on areas that could ship within a day or so it then put these farms in competition with farms all over the world. But as farming declined, you find other things to do when the cows were sold here in the 1960s. In the dairy was gone, they started selling lumber and building supplies, because people were moving up from the city, and building camps and second homes and that sort of thing. And for a generation, that's what was here on the farm was was a building supply store. When the building boom kind of ended, the natural progression was into construction, and we run a construction company. We don't know what the next generation is going to do. But we didn't know what we were going to do when we got started. And we found our way, and we're hopeful that the next generation will find its way. What the water does is it cools the engine, there's a water cooled jacket around the outside of the engine. And we run spring water through there from our spring up on the hill. This is what's powered the mill for the last 100 years. Most of our wood cutting that we do these days is just demonstration. This mill was efficient for a late 1800s Mail. It isn't efficient or practical today that to operate it as a male, but it is good for restoration projects. When the round barn was constructed, some of the lumber that was used in that construction was milled here in this mill does the pack attack and farmers market just up the road. So that's the sound of the engine running. And if we want to go outside, we can hear the pot from the exhaust. And that's what most people hear when they come to the farm when the mills run. That's the sound you hear mostly in the fall when we run the mill to make cider. And we do that. On the weekends on Saturdays and Sundays we do custom pressing here. So if you've got apples and you want to have cider made, bring your apples and we'll turn it into cider. We usually start the last weekend or so in September. And we'll do it up until early November. Whenever it starts to freeze. You get a hard freeze. The apples get mushy and they don't run through the grinder very well. And that's when we stop. I was born in 1958. And you know probably by the time I was three or four I was out here in the mill getting in the way at that point in time. But you grew up around this equipment. You learned how it worked. And as you just saw my brother comes in and starts the engine. He learned that from my dad and my dad learned that from his dad. One of the neat things about this mill is you go in there and you put your hands on something and it's something that six generations of people before me have had their hands on. Milo Hubbell and his wife Polly Faulkner were the ones who first bought the farm here. His son, John D. Hubbell was the one who probably did the most to build a lot of the buildings that you see around here today. He was a real entrepreneur and farmer. He was also an old school Baptist minister. So if you go to the yellow church up in Roxbury, that was a church that he preached at. And then his children were will Hubble and burn Hubble, they would have been my great grandparents. And they were the original Hubbell brothers who ran the first real business out of here. And they did all kinds of things. They had a machine shop, they sold cars. Burt Hubbell was very interested he was an auto mechanic and one of the first auto mechanics in the area. Before he got into a car dealership, he would accompany people down to Kingston, where they would pick up an automobile and he would teach them how to drive it on the way back because people didn't know how to drive a car. I mean, that seems kind of strange to us today. But these were people who grew up in the age of horse and buggies. And they were used to say and HA and gee, and whoa. And when you did that with a car, the car just kept going. And he would, you know, there there are stories about how people would say, Whoa, and the car wouldn't stop and you'd have to tell him you got to step on the brake you got Whoa, doesn't do it. This farm in the 1840s was bought and used originally as a subsistence farm. They probably sold some butter, but most of it was just an effort to support the family. When the railroad came through in 1870, it opened up markets. So this was a dairy farm and operated as a dairy farm from probably the 1870s up until the herd was sold in the 60s. And then for about 50 years. We did almost no farming at all. We made some maple syrup. We kept cutting the hay in the fields. But about three or four years ago, we went back Farming. Now we raise Scottish Highlanders. We have some sheep, some goats, some chickens for eggs. And we're slowly expanding our farm operation. We have Berkshire pigs. We have a new batch of little piggies in the barn. And so we're back to a different kind of farming now we're raising meat instead of dairy products. One family has been here for a century and a half for six generations engaged in a variety of businesses. And those businesses reflect what went on typically during those time periods that they lived here. And a lot of it's still intact everything from the 1870s mill. But we show the transformation as well. We run a modern top quality excavation contracting company, we're very fortunate to have been able to preserve it and we hope to turn it into in the future a tourist attraction which will again help improve the economy of the area provide jobs to the area, we see a lot more people coming up and taking advantage of all that the Catskills has to offer whether it's hiking, swimming in some of our streams and Brooks, going out sightseeing and seeing the things like we have to here offer here on the farm, taking a ride on our heritage tourist railroads. And we encourage people to drop by and take a look at what we have. Me Union Grove distillery use the Hubbell farm cider press for their first batch of Catskill mountain vodka. That initial batch of cider that we made in press at the Hubble's was 1000 gallons of cider Preston one day. We started about seven o'clock in the morning and ended at about 10 o'clock at night. The Hubble's we're very excited to press all that cider in one day, they told us to never come back and press that Minneapolis in one day again, ever. 500 bushels of apples in one day on the Hubble press. So you're in the tasting room right now. This is our cocktail lounge tasting room. We have live music. So I'm Brian molder. I'm Todd Pascarella, and we're the owners of Union Grove distillery in Parkville. And we've gotten a lot of calls for people that say, can you bring our kids because it isn't a distillery where we make alcohol. And when we tell them that there's a kid's room, they hang up the phone, we don't even say goodbye. They're here in 10 minutes. And the kids have something to do while they're taking the tour and having tastes so it works out pretty good. We are we're we're family, people ourselves. So we try to make it really open to people to bring their whole families in so that you know parents get to enjoy grownup stuff while the kids are not completely completely bored. And actually, a lot of kids come back on the tour and look around at all the neat science stuff we have back here and they're kind of kind of impressed. So it's cool to see that. We met in the construction field. We both are building science guys and energy auditors and Todd was a cellulose insulation guy and I was a spray foam insulation guy. And we met at some different conferences and we became good friends from that and worked on this plan to start up a distillery a logical next step Yes. spending your day in in an attic insulating to what else could we be doing with ourselves it's, you know, much more putting our imaginations to mind and this is this is what we came up with as our little less impact on our bodies. We have a 250 liter electrically fired still and 1000 liter fermentation tank which we're all manufactured in Poland, they're very super high tech equipment, it really helps us to make a great product. Trying to decide on the best name for the distillery itself we literally pass by the sign that said former side of Union Grove along the prepacked and reservoir and both agreed instantly that would be a great name of a great story to use the town name that no longer existed and of course, what is so relevant there is the the reservoir and the water in the in the Catskills which is a huge part of the history of this area and affects virtually everything around here. So we decided to try to incorporate local stream names into our product names Keeping with the theme of the water and so of light Creek is it's an alliteration because it starts with a V and vodka starts with a V so we thought it'd be a place to start look for a lot of local stream names and locations and lower in our in our story. My name is Michelle so drain my name is Alex Travis and I'm a member of the East Branch Delaware River plein air painters. It's French and My French is p l e i n AR and you say you're painting on plein air painting outside pure and simple. That's it. It's not. It's not very complicated. Painting anything outside you could paint a vase of flowers. It's just the idea that the natural The light we are seeing actually is very much affected by what the natural light is doing clouds coming over the sun glinting off of it. And that's important, we think is important to a painting. And plus, it's our way of enjoying the outside. I'm not much of a hiker. But I love to paint outside. Plein Air painters all over the country are involved in preservation in landscape preservation, conservation, in preserving our habitat, and our buildings and our history. And we have an exhibit of our work, an event we look forward to, because when you put the work up, it gives you a chance to relive, we can look at each painting, even paintings from years ago, and probably tell you exactly what time of day and who's there and what birds were singing. And it's, it brings back memories. And we enjoy putting together plus looking at the different the different approaches that each painter takes. When I was four years old, my mother decided that she wanted her daughter to know that milk did not come from bottles. And so she brought me up to dry Brook, which is just behind tide mountain through which 28 runs. And we spent an entire summer there. We knew it as the Todd farm. And about 38 years later, when my husband and I were looking for a place that was going to be a getaway where our family could be together that would indeed be restorative. Because we lived in the city and we worked in the city, we ended up in the town of Fleischmanns. And I did not know at the time that that's where my childhood taught farm was. So it was meant to be. And I found that this area was so comfortable to, to paint outside in. I didn't know anybody when I came to paint, and I felt perfectly comfortable and safe just stopping my car on the side of the road. And painting no one objects. Everybody understands there used to painters there are so many painters around here. This has been an area that has drawn artists since the middle of the 19th century, the Hudson School of Painting was right here and an offshoot of the Hudson school, the pack attack and School of Painting was just down the road about two and a half miles. So there's something in the majesty of the mountains, that's incredibly restorative. And if we're fortunate we can portray that restorative atmosphere in our work. We're on the bench McHale now, which is a man made creek that runs through Margaret, on the other side of this parking lot, is the East Branch, which goes all the way down and it follows this road. So you've got the river on one side, and you've got the mountains on the other and then you end up with the reservoir where people are fishing, the trees, the vegetation all along the creek differs. And it's attractive at various times of the year. And then of course, there's the railroad with all of the antique railroad cars down there. We've painted there several times. Oh, and swimming holes. I didn't even mention that. There are wonderful swimming holes along this river. It's beautiful. It's just gorgeous. And we I mean, we are a modern community, we have telephones, and computers and whatever, but it looks beautiful and we value that. To be a member of our group. You don't have to practice a particular medium or be experienced or not experienced. We are made up of amateurs rank beginners, all the way to professional painters. Route 28, you know, brings people through the area on their way to other wonderful places. But we're not just a bypass, we're not just through way we really are a community of caring individuals and a lot of artists and those who appreciate the best of what nature has to bring. This driving guide was produced by silver hollow audio, and made possible by the generous support of humanity's New York and the central Catskills collaborative. Producer red berry production assistant Ryan kaki Pine Hill audio Recordist Charlotte Berry, special thanks to the Catskill center and to Carol O'Byrne Original Music by Jay Unger and Molly Mason and by two dark birds. Thanks to everyone who participates Add in the project links and info at drive 20 eight.com I'm Alan Parker. Thanks for listening and Happy Travels wherever the road takes you John burrow he wrote about these how he loves to trap through all the rocks and reveal where the birds are singing in the tree the leaves are dancing in the breeze he taught us how to love our Catskill sky The summer is rolling thunderstorms, the winters snow calm and Catskill waters Thank you. For our children, their children to the woodland trails, the mountain peaks the scenic view so, come and walk We'll sing together and celebrate our Catskill mountain home in the sky the summer's rolling thunderstorms, the winters snow and let those Catskill waters make you Catskill wise name cats cast is a production of silver hollow audio. Please be sure to subscribe wherever podcasts are found for free and automatic delivery every two weeks. Until next time, you can find us on Instagram at cats cast. Thanks again to our local sponsors and to you our listeners for your contributions to the show. If you'd like to contribute, just go to cats cast.com and click Support. Until next time, I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai