I’m not sure why I still click to read the articles about upstate New York’s “cutest” small towns or the lists of the most “charming” places to visit in the Catskills. I should know by now that I’ll spend most of the read groaning — often out loud — at cliches strung together by a writer who’s taken everything they’ve learned about small towns from sitcoms and stirred in a confusing mix of “details” pulled together by ChatGPT. 

Last week it was a piece from Travel + Leisure that popped up in my social media feed. The promise of “7 Charming Small Towns in the Catskills—With Retro Diners, Wood-fired Hot Tubs, and New York’s Most Beautiful Waterfall” was just too good to pass up. Just like our state’s waterfalls, the article didn’t disappoint. 

Just three paragraphs in, they’d managed to position both Port Jervis and Bovina as towns right next door to Livingston Manor and not — as is the case — about an hour’s drive away in different directions. 

The writer’s imaginary visit to Callicoon was truly the piece de resistance, however. “When I stayed at Callicoon Hills, the 23-acre property felt like the town in miniature form: a historic boarding house reimagined as a boutique retreat, with 65 guest rooms and hillside A-frame cabins,” the article states. 

I grew up in Callicoon. I live a stone’s throw from the Callicoon Hills resort.

I’m fond of them both, and so it’s with absolutely no malice that I say these two Sullivan County locations have a list of differences a mile long. It’s a list that begins with the teeny tiny fact that Callicoon Hills is not, in fact, located in Callicoon.

There are plenty of people in the county whose point of view on these sorts of inane articles is “Who cares? We need the business.” Of course we do. Sullivan County’s poverty rates are the highest in the Hudson Valley, higher than the rates for both the state and the nation. We need all the money tourists can bring into our economy and then some. I’m pragmatic if nothing else. I’m also proud of my community, proud enough to feel insulted when I run across articles that describe our daily lives like something out of a 1960s television show.

Take the description of a drive from Callicoon to North Branch included in an article on our own Sullivan County Visitors’ Association website: “You’ll pass clapboard farmhouses with laundry snapping on the line, and roadside shrines of wildflowers growing in rusted milk cans.” The modern invention known worldwide as the clothes dryer made it to Sullivan County decades ago, but why bother with facts when it’s so much easier to paint a picture of simplistic hillbillies who still do everything by hand?

Here's what these writers miss when they're busy crafting their quaint narratives: Sullivan County doesn't need to be “made” charming or cute.

We’ve already got that down pat. 

We have actual eateries with actual good food. 

We have an actual piece of the National Park Service’s national wild and scenic river system that you can actually visit. 

We have resorts and small businesses run by people who know exactly where their town begins and ends. We have history and culture and yes, even clothes dryers.

What we need are writers who care enough to get the details right, who understand that accuracy isn't the enemy of charm — it's the foundation of it. Because nothing says “we think you're worth visiting” quite like bothering to learn where you actually are.