Letter from America by Candia Peterson Part 1 Get off my land

Letter from America By Candia Anderson

1. Get off my land!

In December 2019, just before Christmas, I packed up my life and my four dogs and left my home of seventeen years in the French Alps and moved to another set of mountains, the Catskills of Upstate New York. My reasons for doing so were complex and not for these pages but suffice it to say I was lucky enough to be entitled to an automatic Green Card and my path to immigration into the Land of the Free, whilst not without some Covid-related complications, was remarkably smooth.

Frozen Reservoir

Frozen

Phlox in the woods

The Delaware Rive

Fall Colours

Having now been settled here for the duration of the pandemic, and in spite of it, life here has been extremely easy. To be sure, I had anticipated a lot of travel from my new base both within the US and back to Europe but, unfettered by local lockdowns (there were none of any consequence!) I have made use of my time exploring my new playground for landscape photography.

I live in an area in which beauty abounds; thickly forested rolling hills (not really mountains in the Alpine sense despite them being called such by the locals) vast reservoirs serving New York City and, all around, the branches and tributaries of the mighty Delaware River flowing through my village. All of this I anticipated, as I did the seasons; long, bitter winters with snow on the ground for months on end turning, almost without a spring, to blistering summers, lush and green, in turn giving way to the glorious colours of “Fall”.

Spring

What I had certainly not expected was quite how difficult it all is to photograph. With no great National Park on my doorstep I had, nevertheless, imagined woodland trails and scenic hikes, easy access to views and vistas, rivers I could walk along and lakesides I could visit. Of course, these exist but getting to them is incredibly difficult and access hard to find. Private land is sacrosanct, and boundaries are marked with large signs declaring it “posted”. I still haven’t worked out what “posted” actually means in the linguistic sense but what you know it means beyond a shadow of doubt is Keep Out – in bold capitals! You also know, this being the good old the US of A, that behind every posted sign is a man with a gun who is not afraid to use it. You just don’t want to argue with those signs.

It is so frustrating when you find a lovely little lake and drive around it, only to discover that that every single bit of the water’s edge is someone’s private land – their own little vista point, forbidden to all passers-by. I soon learnt that almost the only way to scratch the itch of landscape photography was to find the safe spots on the roads to pull over and get as close as I could. I have dealt with busy roads, curious (but mostly kindly) police wanting to know why I’ve stopped, the occasional house owner telling me not to park on their bit of public road (no driveways blocked) but, given the beauty in front of the lens as opposed to the bustle behind, it was worth the while.

Down on the Farm

All the images that pepper this first Letter from America were taken under these circumstances and most of them in my first year, giving a flavour of the changing seasons. As my local knowledge has grown and I’ve travelled further afield (including to Maine earlier this summer) I have, of course, found new places where access is easier and I look forward to showing my fellow landscape groupers some of these over the coming months.

All image © Candia Peterson