GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Oh well. So, here's the deal... The remnants of Nicole are barreling northward while a low pressure system up this way is going to accelerate their arrival. Winds shouldn't be too bad in the valleys, though, and it's looking like the CT River Valley may escape the worst of the rainfall, but there'll still be plenty and it will be heavy at times. The upshot: Mostly cloudy in the morning, temps climbing into the 60s by early afternoon, rain most likely arriving late afternoon and settling in for the night, winds mostly steady but with gusts possible.Here are the forecasts for:
Foliage was spectacular. Nice to have a record of it. While some of us just gaped every time we went outside, Jim Block took his camera. And on his blog, he takes us all around Vermont and New Hampshire, alphabetically, from Benton to Wilmot, with stops at B, C, D, E, G, H, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, and T in between. So many towns, so much beauty."How do you know if someone is your doppelgänger?" And more to the point, what if there really are two Eddies and two Auks? Eddie and Auk discuss. As he does every week in this spot, Lebanon writer and illustrator DB Johnson chronicles the doings in his favorite patch of forest—and on his blog this week, chipmunks tease and run. Fast.Enfield still under boil water order. Last Friday, a sample site tested positive for E. coli, reports Liz Sauchelli in the Valley News, and residents on town water have been boiling water ever since. “We’re pretty certain that the E. coli hit was at the sample site itself and never in the water, but...we have to use an abundance of caution, public works director Jim Taylor says. The town has begun bringing in drinking water for residents who need it and worked with Friends of Mascoma to deliver cases of water to Enfield Village School. Workers chlorinated the system yesterday, and will test it again on Monday.SPONSORED: Big savings from electrifying homes and powering with solar! The new federal tax incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act that kick in this January provide hefty savings for homeowners who move more of their power usage to electricity. But with utility rates soaring, it takes powering your home with solar to fully realize those savings. Hit the burgundy link to learn about the wide range of energy-related purchase incentives signed into federal law in August, with details about how each can affect your home energy budget. Sponsored by Solaflect Energy.A look ahead after the Hop closes. The now-venerable performing and visual arts venue is turning 60—and hosts its last public performance next Tuesday, as its long-planned expansion and renovation begin; work will last through 2025. There are all sorts of events this weekend (see below for some of them), and in Dartmouth News, Aimee Minbiole lays out how performing arts will move onto campus. The Black Center will remain open, Rollins Chapel and the Church of Christ will host shows, and there will be pop-up events around campus. Minbiole also looks ahead to some of next year's performnces.The importance of being a living Jew. As antisemitic sentiments and incidents burgeon around the country, Still North Books' Allie Levy—whose father is Jewish and mother is Catholic—has found herself grappling more deeply with her heritage. In this week's Enthusiasms, she writes that this has led her to Dara Horn's 2021 collection of essays, People Love Dead Jews. In her dozen essays, Horn reckons with "our society’s tendency to venerate historical Jewish victims while turning a blind eye to antisemitism," writes Allie, and urges looking both the past and the present square in the eye.Hiking Close to Home: The New London-Wilmot section of the Sunapee Ragged Kearsarge Greenway trail system. The whole thing is a 75-mile loop of hiking trails in central NH that connects Mts. Sunapee, Ragged, and Kearsarge. The Upper Valley Trails Alliance highlights a 14-mile section in Springfield, New London, and Wilmot, dropping on one side to Kidder Brook, then crossing a ridge and descending along Great Brook to near the northwest end of Pleasant Lake. There the Greenway connects to multiple trails within the Webb-Langenau-Cook network before continuing north to a trailhead in Wilmot.Been paying attention to Daybreak this week? Because the Upper Valley News Quiz has some questions for you. Like, what's that new exhibit at the Montshire about? And what are Lebanon police cracking down on? And over at the DHMC cafeteria, what's disappeared because of supply chain issues? You'll find those and other questions at the burgundy link.But wait! How closely were you following VT and NH?
Because Seven Days wants to know if you know... What's in the constitutional amendments VT voters approved on Tuesday? What percentage of ballots were mailed in? And where did an Essex family find their missing cat this week? Plus more...
And NHPR's got a whole set of questions, too. Like, what did the secretary of state report about Tuesday's balloting? And what's the partisan breakdown in the state House look like for next session? And what did the state education department just make it possible to track? Plus more...
Tired of the crowds and prices at the big hills? Here are six small ski areas in VT. On her Happy Vermont blog, Erica Housekeeper highlights six spots that will keep you in tune and won't bust the bank, from the legendary Cochran's in Richmond to the Lyndon Outing Club to E. Corinth's Northeast Slopes to, it goes without saying, Ascutney.As FIS World Cup continues to cancel events in Europe, Killington remains a question. "But do not underestimate the mountain," writes Peggy Shinn in Outside. When temps dropped into the 20s on Tuesday, "mountain ops began blasting Superstar (site of the Killington World Cup slalom and GS) with 120 snowmaking guns, spaced 18 feet apart (compared to the usual 50 feet)," she reports. Sustained cold weather is due starting Sunday. “We are experts at dealing with what Mother Nature throws our way," president and GM Mike Solimano tells her. FIS will inspect next Wednesday.Wonder whatever happened to Maggie Cassidy? She spent nine years at the Valley News, the last several of them as its top editor. Then, in spring 2021, VTDigger snagged her to be deputy managing editor. Clearly, she's thrived there: Digger announced yesterday that she's moving up to managing editor. Paul Heintz, who shifted there from Seven Days a few months before Cassidy arrived, has been named editor-in-chief to replace founder Anne Galloway, who stepped back from her leadership roles in May this year.It's been a fruitful archery season for deer hunters. And, reports VTDigger's Dominic Minadeo, "wild game processing businesses in the state are having trouble keeping up." Vermont Fish & Wildlife’s deer and moose project leader Nick Fortin tells Minadeo that this year's hunt appears to be on a pace to match 2020's record. Processors are having trouble keeping up, and some blame 2020 rules changes aimed at boosting archery hunting. "For the past four years, every year we’ve had to close down during rifle season, but never during archery,” says Orange's Ian Holmgren of a recent weeklong pause to catch up.And speaking of rifle season... Just a reminder: NH began opening its wildlife management areas to rifles on Monday (specific dates vary); VT opens tomorrow. Now more than ever: Blaze orange out there, people!And speaking of deer... So, you know how you're always on the lookout for deer or moose crossing the road when you're driving? That's because you've gotta figure that VT and NH are among the riskiest states in the country when it comes to vehicles colliding with wild animals. Now along comes State Farm to say "Nope," Alex Nuti-de Biasi reported in the Bradford Journal-Opinion's daily newsletter yesterday. "Vermont was 21st [in the country], just outside the high-risk tier, with a 1 in 90 likelihood," he writes, "while New Hampshire was 33rd with a 1 in 130 likelihood." Tops? WV, with a 1 in 35 likelihood.Some things never change, even over 3700 years. Or so. Back in 2016, archeologists in Israel unearthed an ancient Canaanite comb that dates, they think, from between 1700 and 1550 B.C.E. It wasn't until last year, thought, that someone noticed it was inscribed with words. Which are now officially the oldest known sentence written in the world's first known alphabet, and have been translated: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.” Masters of disguise. Or, really, camouflage. It's actually pretty uncanny how some owls can blend into the background. Just hold the screen up close and then squint at this collection of photos from a few years back just rediscovered by Moss and Fog.The Friday Vordle. If you're new to Vordle, you should know that fresh ones appear on weekends using words from the Friday Daybreak, and you can get a reminder email each weekend morning. If you'd like that, sign up here.
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T-shirts, tank tops, and, of course, coffee/tea/cocoa mugs. It's all available thanks to Strong Rabbit Designs in Sharon. Check out what's available and wear it or drink from it proudly! Email me ([email protected]) if you've got questions.
Today is Veterans Day, and there are events all over the Upper Valley, from a flag-raising and run in Hanover at 7:30 this morning to 10 am wreath-laying and ceremony at the VA in WRJ to a parade at Colburn Park in Lebanon at 11. Plus plenty more. The Valley News helpfully rounds things up.
This evening at 7, Classicopia kicks off a weekend of performances of "Latin Cello", with pianist Daniel Weiser and Brazilian-born, Ecuador-based cellist Diego Carneiro. They'll be performing works by Guastavino, Florencia, Vicente, and others. Tonight at the Old South Church in Windsor, tomorrow at 2 pm at Fairlee Town Hall and 7:30 pm at the Hanover home of Fay and David Bisno, and Sunday at 2 at the First Congregational Church of Lebanon.
Also at 7, Left Bank Books in Hanover hosts a reading by three Native American poets: Heid E. Erdrich, Gordon Henry, Jr., and Kinsale Drake. Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain band of Ojibwe, has numerous collections of her own and is the editor of New Poets of Native Nations; Henry is a member of the White Earth Chippewa Tribe of Minnesota and teaches at Michigan State; Drake is a Diné poet, performer, and playwright.
And the Anonymous Coffeehouse heads back to the First Congregational Church of Lebanon tonight, with its full array of baked goods and performances at 7:30 by acoustic guitarist Liam Grant, at 8:15 by roots guitarist William Lee Ellis, and at 9 by 2 X 2, the quartet of Valerie Kosednar, Mark Grieco, and Betsy and Lee Rybeck Lynd.
And tonight at 9, renowned guitarist Zach Nugent and his longtime collaborator Daniel Marc do an acoustic get-together at Sawtooth Kitchen in Hanover for "an intimate evening of music and storytelling." Or as Nugent puts it: "Originals, covers, stories out the wazoo." Order tix off the menu.
Tomorrow at 4 pm, Upper Valley Music Center hosts a performance by the Boston-based Balourdet Quartet, with pieces including Derek Bermel’s Intonations (inspired by Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man), Jessie Montgomery's Strum, Debussy’s Quartet in G minor and Hugo Wolf’s Italian Serenade. At the First Congregational Church of Lebanon. From 1-2:30 at the church they'll be giving a master class to student musicians that's open to observers.
Tomorrow night at 7, Raq-On Dance presents a belly-dance concert by student and professional dancers and musicians from all over New England at the Hotel Coolidge in WRJ. It's the one public performance that's part of its weekend-long Shimmyathon Festival of workshops.
Also at 7 tomorrow, the Lebanon Opera House presents Warren Miller's Daymaker, a backcountry skiing and snowboarding tour by the avatar of high-altitude adventure filmmaking (this is his 73rd film) of Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Greece, Switzerland, and elsewhere.
At 7:30 pm tomorrow in Spaulding, the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra gives its fall concert, led by conductor Filippo Ciabatti. It features pianist and composer Karen Walwyn, playing the Piano Concerto in One Movement by Florence Price—a piece that was largely ignored for decades until an orchestral manuscript surfaced at an auction in 2019; actress Sharon Washington narrating Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait; and a performance of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. It will all be preceded at 6 in the Top of the Hop with a preview of the concert by Ciabatti and a presentation on the Hop's expansion plans by executive director Mary Lou Aleskie.
Sunday at 10 am, three alumnae from a “Small Prestigious College in New Hampshire" gather at Still North Books & Bar in Hanover to talk about that college's role in their novels. Sarah McCraw Crow ’87 (The Wrong Kind of Woman), Caroline Cook ’22 (Tell Them to Be Quiet and Wait), and Kimberley Tait ’01 (Fake Plastic Love) will discuss with creative writing lecturer Katie Crouch.
Sunday at 2 pm, Hop Film presents the New York Independent Children's Film Festival, 49 minutes of animated shorts for (and often about) kids: dads, cats, NASA, a rain boot lost at a river's edge... In the Loew.
And at 3 pm, pianist David Feurzeig brings his ongoing Play Every Town project to Seven Stars Arts in Sharon. Music from ancient and classical to jazz, avant-garde, and popular. He'll be joined by Strafford's Annemieke McLane on piano and oboeist Chris Rua (a former touring musician with Cirque du Soleil).
Finally, at 4 pm at St. James Episcopal Church in Woodstock (no link), Cameo Baroque presents "Musica Obscura: The Unfamiliar Baroque." The concert, with Leslie Stroud on traverso, Beth Hilgartner on recorders and voice, Laurie Rabut on viola da gamba, and Ernie Drown on harpsichord, features works by unfamiliar composers and pieces dedicated to obscure historical or mythological figures or written for unusual instruments. Sunday's concert, by donation, is a benefit for the Haven Food Shelf. They'll also be performing next Friday at 7:30 at the First Congregational Church of Lebanon, with proceeds going to the Haven. Email [email protected] with questions.
And into the weekend...
Oddly, for an album that imagines a future in which a small group of Black Americans rebuild after the environmental destruction of the earth, Jake Blount started out by looking backward. Blount's been exploring Black contributions to fiddle and string band music for years, but wanted to go even farther back, to a capella field recordings of spirituals, then build from there. The result gives
The New Faith
a vision of a future anchored in long experience, with new interpretations of folk and gospel standards.
best known because of a 1961 Alan Lomax recording of Bessie Jones, transported to the coast of Maine and accompanied by South Sudanese dancer Veeva Banga.
Stay dry out there! And have a fine weekend. See you Monday for CoffeeBreak.
The Hiking Close to Home Archives. A list of hikes around the Upper Valley, some easy, some more difficult, compiled by the Upper Valley Trails Alliance. It grows every week.
The Enthusiasms Archives. A list of book recommendations by Daybreak's rotating crew of local booksellers, writers, and librarians who think you should read. this. book. now!
Daybreak Where You Are: The Album. Photos of daybreak around the Upper Valley, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the US, sent in by readers.
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