| Watershed Post

SUNY Delhi freshman found dead

Above: SUNY Delhi's campus. Image via Google Maps.

A SUNY Delhi freshman from Wappingers Falls was found dead in a wooded area above the hillside campus on Tuesday, Sept. 8, according to a college official.

The student, who is not being identified by the college out of respect for his family, was found unresponsive by friends at 4:58 p.m., said Joel Smith, the Vice President for College Relations and Advancement. Tuesday was the day after Labor Day holiday weekend.

The student was pronounced dead at the scene by the Delaware County Medical Examiner, Smith said. There is no foul play suspected.

Freshmen arrived on campus for orientation on Friday, Aug. 28 and classes began on Monday, Aug. 31. Freshmen had been on campus for 12 days when the student’s body was found.

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Biennial Drum Boogie Festival brings the beat to Woodstock

Above: COBU performing at the 2013 Drum Boogie Festival. Photo courtesy of the Drum Boogie Festival.

It’s one of the oldest truths in music, and maybe in consciousness: Rhythm is an intense natural high, and brings people together like nothing else can. So prepare to be uplifted and moved at the the Woodstock Drum Boogie Festival, happening this Saturday, Sept. 12 at Andy Lee Field.

The festival taps into a rich regional vein of star power. Grammy winner and National Endowment for the Arts fellow Jack DeJohnette will perform with Gambian-born kora drummer Foday Musa Soso and jazz bass player Matt Garrison.

Above: NEXUS perfoming at the 2013 Drum Boogie Festival. Photo courtesy of the Drum Boogie Festival.

Mandara, a quintet of instrumentalists and vocal artists directed by Valerie Naranjo, a veteran percussionist who has played in the Saturday Night Live Band and in the Lion King orchestra on Broadway, will be joined by dancer Hettie Barnhill as a special guest.

Famed vibes player Joe Locke will be there, as will COBU, a Japanese taiko percussion group. The NYU Steel Drum Orchestra will take you on a voyage to the outer limits of Caribbean steel pans, and Aanadhha with Dibyarka Chatterjee will do likewise in their chosen realm of Indian tabla. You’ll hear American fife and drum and Balinese gongs. Big Takeover will serve up smoldering reggae.

The Drum Boogie happens every other year, and this is the year. Woodstock Chimes founder and CEO Garry Kvistad will be there again jammin’ out with his own band Nexus, a four-virtuoso ensemble that got started with an improv session back in 1971. They’ve since been dubbed “the high priests of the percussion world” by the New York Times.

Kvistad first dreamed up the Drum Boogie in 2008 while brainstorming with New York State Assemblyman Kevin Cahill about how to have some serious fun while raising the profile of local good causes and erasing the lines that separate folks. During the festival's first year, 2009, thousands showed up to catch the rhythm.

We talked with Kvistad about the festival's fourth iteration.

Watershed Post: Why do you think the human urge to beat drums is so universal, and the experience of rhythm so powerful?

Garry Kvistad: Drumming is fairly unique, in that anyone can beat a drum without any training while specialists have taken many styles of drumming to extreme limits of expertise. Everything in our bodies is pulsating, from the tiniest sub-atomic particle to our heartbeats. Rhythm is universal. Percussion is so much more than pulse, however, and the Drum Boogie Festival exposes the audience to a large array of percussion instruments and styles, including melodic percussion played on xylophones and tuned drums.

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Woodstock Drum Boogie

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Local candidates vie in primary election today

Photo by Kristin Ausk, via Flickr.

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2015 primary election

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Three members of NYC family killed in Labor Day crash

Above: A video report from NBC New York about the death of three people on Route 17 on Sept. 7.

A couple and their future son-in-law died in a fatal rollover crash on Route 17 in the Sullivan County town of Mamakating on Labor Day, according to a New York State Police press release and media reports.

Morris Faitelewicz, 58 and his wife Beth Faitelewicz, 54, were both emergency medical workers who worked in 9/11 recovery operations and were active members of New York City's Jewish community. Yehuda Bayme, 31, had just gotten engaged to their daughter, Shani, in June, according to NBC News.

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New York State Police

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Olive gets $150K in grants, just in time for Olive Day

The Ulster County town of Olive has a lot to celebrate this week.

On Tuesday, Sept. 8, State Senator James L. Seward announced that the town will receive $150,000 in grants to buy new police equipment and to replace the roof of the town highway garage. The grants will help the town make improvements without raising property taxes, Seward said in a press release.

This Saturday, Olive celebrates its 42nd annual Olive Day at Davis Park in West Shokan with a "food and farms" theme. There will be food vendors, dancing and games, and Ben Rounds, The Pontiacs and the Spillway Band will play live. The highlight of the day is a puppet show performance of “The Rejuvenary River Circus” by Arm of the Sea Theater, sponsored by the Olive Free Library.

Olive Day. Saturday, Sept. 12, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Davis Park, West Shokan, Olive.

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Festival of Women Writers comes to the Hobart Book Village

Above: The Hobart Festival of Women Writers enters its third year. Photo via hobartfestivalofwomenwriters.com.

For a few days each fall, the Delaware County town of Hobart is ground zero for the Festival of Women Writers, a weekend dedicated to female poets, novelists, memoirists and more from the surrounding region and beyond.

Hobart is already steeped in literature: With only about 400 residents, the self-styled Book Village is home to an impressive six bookstores.

That population is expected to nearly double in size this weekend, when dozens of writers and hundreds of attendees will pour into the tiny town for three days of workshops, readings and events.

Now in its third year, the festival is the brainchild of two literary sisters—poet Cheryl Clarke and novelist Breena Clarke. They started the FWW in 2013 with the idea of bringing female writers together from across the Catskills, and from Delaware County specifically.

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Hobart Book Village

Hobart Festival of Women Writers

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Teen drowned while tubing after bus dropped her near notorious hazard

The place where 14-year-old Jordyn Engler drowned on the Esopus Creek on Saturday, Sept. 5 was near a notorious local river hazard. But that didn’t stop a Catskills tubing company from dropping her off at an abandoned tubing launch nearby.

The hazard, a heap of downed trees, piled up a decade ago near what was once a popular tubing launch location. It regularly destroys boats and gear, but it has never been removed. No signs warn of its presence.

Neither of the two tubing companies that work the Shandaken stretch of the Esopus Creek drop busloads of tubers at the site. But on Saturday, police say that the bus driver for F&S Adventures Tube Rental made an exception for Jeffrey Engler and his daughter, Jordyn Engler.

The two were on vacation from Ellington, Connecticut, where Jordyn was a freshman at Ellington High School and a cheerleader on a nearby all-star team. They were visiting a spot where Jeffrey Engler had tubed many times before, and planned to float downriver to the hamlet of Phoenicia.

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Ulster County Sheriff's Office

F&S Adventures Tube Rental

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After years of dysfunction, Schoharie County hires its first administrator

Above: Photo by Doug Kerr, via Flickr.

After more than twenty months of debate, interviews and political maneuvering, Schoharie County has hired its first administrator to oversee the day to day operations of its county government.

At a meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 8, the Schoharie County Board of Supervisors hired Steve Wilson as the county's first full-time administrator. Wilson will receive a salary of $100,000 and will begin the job no later than October 1.

The hire comes at the end of a long journey for county's elected leaders, who have been arguing over the county's need for a full-time administrator since January 2014.

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Schoharie County Board of Supervisors

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Reggae comes to a Bloomville dairy field

The last place you'd expect to find a reggae festival is Bloomville, a hamlet in the middle of rolling dairy country. Here, you're lucky if you can get a strong radio signal, and if you do, you'll hear country or rock, or maybe bluegrass and folk. Jamaicans in the Catskills are few and far between.

One of them is artist and woodworker Michael Milton, who runs the Turquoise Barn B&B in Bloomville with his wife, Michelle Premura. In 2013, Milton brought a lineup of reggae acts to a field near the barn. The daylong festival was a surprise success, attracting “happy campers dancing barefoot into the small hours,” according to Conde Nast Traveler.

Despite some setbacks--last year's festival was rained out, and one of the organizers is no longer involved--the concept has stuck.

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Dairy Field Music and Arts Festival

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Bovina Farm Day will highlight the town’s rebounding agricultural scene

You can hop in a potato-sack race, careen down a hay slide and enter the scarecrow-making contest at the seventh Bovina Farm Day, which will take place this Sunday, Sept. 6. At 2:30 p.m. there will be a talk about heirloom apples; at 4:30 p.m. cows will be milked. And all day long you can ogle goats and sheep, and peruse displays of maple syrup, meats, and cheeses produced on Bovina farms.

The annual event—a celebration of the town’s agricultural heritage and a showcase for local farms and producers—will be held on the dairy farm of Ed and Donna Weber, hosts of Bovina Farm Day every year since the Labor Day weekend tradition began in 2009.

But just as exciting as these and other activities—and who isn’t eager to sample the “Bovina Casserole,” to be concocted using only local ingredients?—is the fact that longtime locals and newcomers to the area are banding together to write a new chapter in farming in this smallest town in Delaware County.