Daybreak Friday, 11/14/25

Partly sunny. It only lasts a day, since weather’s coming in tomorrow, but for today, we get clouds and sun, winds from the northwest, and highs up to about 40. Lows tonight in the low 20s. The models are a little unsettled on what’s ahead for the weekend, but at the moment it looks like starting late tomorrow afternoon we’re in for rain, freezing rain, and snow at various times through Sunday.

Definite drought progress. It’s going in the right direction in both states. Now that the feds are back open, the more useful drought monitor pages are back online. If you click on the “USDM 1-Week Change” tab at the links below, you can see where in each state things improved between last Tuesday and this Tuesday. Provincial version: the Upper Valley didn’t get better, but it didn’t get worse, either.

Searching for color as stick season sets in. Full on, the season itself “can be drawn with four crayons – gray, dull green, light brown, and dark brown,” writes Jim Block on his latest blog post. But in the leadup there’s still color, and he’s spent the last few weeks out with his camera, looking for it both up close and in the distance—in Etna, Enfield, Lebanon, Reading, West Windsor, and elsewhere. Stunning vistas, daybreak at Mascoma Lakeside Park, hiking trails around the region…

Rolling roadblocks on I-91 southbound by the Fairlee cliffs. Actually, they’ve been going on since earlier this week, and they’ll continue today, VTrans says. One big reason: Workers are installing wire mesh on the cliff face, using a big honking crane and, even more dramatically, a helicopter. You could always just head up there yourself to see it, or…

Former Tunbridge Fire Department bookkeeper loses town manager job in Williamstown after embezzlement charge. Jackie Higgins, who’d served as Williamstown’s manager for 14 years, resigned last weekend under pressure from the selectboard , reports David Delcore in the Times Argus. As you probably remember, Higgins, of Vershire, was arrested and charged last week by the VT State Police for allegedly embezzling $180K from the Tunbridge FD, which she’d served as bookkeeper since 1994. Higgins will be paid through the end of the year. There is no evidence that she embezzled town money, but residents have been pressing for a forensic audit.

Woodstock Village’s entire design review board resigns. All five members. The board (not to be confused with the development review board) is made up of architects and other design professionals, and since its creation “was the first stop for a [zoning] applicant in the design district of the Woodstock Village,” in the words of former chair Phil Neuberg. But, as Emma Stanton writes in the Standard, the town has recently decided that, under state statute, it “cannot compel or force an applicant to go through the design review board,” says municipal manager Eric Duffy. But a voluntary process, Neuberg tells Stanton, means “I have essentially been wasting my time.” 

After nearly a century in business, Bethel’s Valley Motor Sales shuts its doors. It happened Oct. 30, when owner Dennis Wood turned in his dealer license and plates to the DMV. For 80 years, writes Maryellen Apelquist in The Herald, the dealership was connected to his family, and his father bought it in 1968. Wood himself has worked there for six decades but now, at 70, he’s ready to retire, especially as he faces ever-rising costs. “When we started selling just used, we’d sell cars for $1,800, $1,900, or $3,000—there is no such thing anymore. You can’t touch an inspectable car now for less than $6,000,” he says. Apelquist profiles the business and its place in Bethel.

"My body might have gone through this thing…but it still works. Our bodies are amazing." That’s breast cancer survivor and rower Liza Serenqua talking to Bob Audette in the Brattleboro Reformer about Cancer Recovery Through Rowing, which goes by CReW—co-founded by the Upper Valley Rowing Foundation’s Carin Reynolds, its members, wherever they’re from, row out of Kendal Waterfront Park. Last month, an eight-person CReW boat came third in the Survivor Row Exhibition at the Head of the Charles. Racing isn’t the point, several CReWbies tell Audette: It’s being able to feel strong, and to work closely with people who’ve all been through similar experiences.

Collaboration between Opera Vermont and Chandler Center for the Arts aims to bring William Grant Still back into the public eye. A once-renowned composer who was also the first African American conductor of a major American symphony orchestra, Still has fallen into relative obscurity in recent years—but now, writes Marion Umpleby in the Valley News, the opera company and the arts center will stage each of his nine operas, one a year, starting this weekend with A Bayou Legend. “We want to encourage people to have fun and get dressed up and have a fun night out because it’s so rare that the opera comes to town,” says the Chandler’s Chloe Powell.

Dartmouth says it has “no current financial relationship” with donor Leon Black. The 1973 graduate and private equity investor directs the family foundation that gave $48 million in 2012 to help build the visual arts center that now bears his family’s name, and has been in the spotlight for his personal and financial relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. On Oct. 18, the NYT (gift link) published a story based on emails from Epstein to Black on how deep that relationship went. In The Dartmouth, Alex Klee reports that apart from denying current financial ties with Black, college spokesperson Jana Barnello “did not respond to multiple further requests for comment about when the decision was made or whether the College had any plans to rename the BVAC.”

Out in the woods this week, there’s still evidence of past ice storms. The most recent ones took place in 1998 and 2008, writes Northern Woodlands’ Jack Saul this second week of November, and in recent years “the necessary atmospheric conditions [have grown] more probable across a broader and more northerly geographic range.” White and gray birches are especially susceptible to bending toward the ground. Also out there: red-bellied woodpeckers caching acorns and berries here at the northern edge of their expanding range; and the brown creeper, hard to see as it spirals up trees, “its long, stiff tail bracing it in a position flush to the trunk” looking for insects.

Hiking Close to Home: Montshire Museum Trails, Norwich. The Upper Valley Trails Alliance just finished accessibility improvements on the River Loop Trail at the Montshire, and you can check out their work along this pleasant, 0.8-mile trail that winds through Science Park, travels along the Connecticut, and features several overlooks with river views. The newly improved section is now wheelchair and stroller accessible with hard-packed surfacing, making it easier for everyone to enjoy the scenery. The museum's entire trail system spans 2.9 miles across 110 acres, all beautiful: You’ll need museum admission to access them.

Were you paying attention this week? Daybreak’s Upper Valley News Quiz has some questions for you, like: Where would you find downtown Hanover’s lone cell tower? And what’s going on with Goose Pond? Meanwhile, you’ll find both NHPR’s New Hampshire quiz and Seven Days’ Vermont quiz at this link.

NH Supreme Court ruling “could upend how public education operates” in the state. The Concord Monitor’s Jeremy Margolis (via NHPR) is referring to a decision last month holding that if a family sends a student to an open-enrollment public school outside their district, the home district has to pay a share of the tuition. The result, Margolis writes, is that “public schools, which have increasingly been pitted against private and charter schools, could now be forced to compete with each other for students”—and superintendents in lower-income districts worry they’ll lose students and face new fiscal strains. Margolis dives into the case and its implications.

In NH’s disability system, “acts of violence, negligence, and exploitation are common”; governor says reports “need to be examined.” In the final part of his series on cases of abuse and neglect in the state’s disability care network, NH Bulletin’s William Skipworth reports that after the first two parts were published, Gov. Kelly Ayotte reached out to other state officials to discuss them; “I take this very seriously,” she tells him. Officials in charge of the system repeatedly declined interviews. Skipworth pulled together death and abuse numbers from VT, MA, and ME as well, and talks to advocates in NH. “It doesn’t seem clear that there’s a path forward,” one tells him.

Sterling College to close in the spring. The small, environmentally focused college in Craftsbury announced the decision this week, citing “persistent financial and enrollment challenges,” reports VT Public’s Lola Duffort. It will become the ninth private college “to effectively close up shop in Vermont in the last decade,” she notes. Its president, Scott Thomas, tells Duffort the school has had to deal with flooding, debt, unanticipated infrastructure costs, and other issues all while enrollment has declined: its capacity is 125 students, but only 50 are enrolled this year. What will happen to the school’s land, including 160 acres in Craftsbury Common, is up in the air.

VTDigger and PBS’s Frontline to team up on VT flooding aftermath. In the wake of three consecutive years of devastating July 10 flooding, “Our goal will be to investigate why some Vermont communities are struggling to recover from the floods and how they could be better supported in getting back on their feet,” says VTDigger editor-in-chief Geeta Anand. Lead reporter Emma Cotton is looking to talk to people who’ve been directly affected—about what happened; whether federal, state, or private relief efforts have helped; and how recovery’s been going. You can help shape her team’s reporting through the form at the link.

What does it take to get back on the horse, when the horse is a plane, the plane crashed, and you were on the wing? At the Bournemouth airshow in 2021, the biplane Dave Barrell was piloting stalled and crashed into the water. Kirsten Pobjoy was harnessed on top, performing tandem acrobatics with a wingwalker on a second plane. Max Henderson’s gentle new film, The Goldfish Club, takes us along as Pobjoy, fellow wing walker Emma Broadbent, and Barrell find their footing after the accident. Weaving everyday moments of their lives today with scenes of the crash, Henderson quietly shows how friendship can heal the invisible scars after something terrible happens. 

What a meteor looks like from an airplane. Pretty cool, actually, as captured by a flight attendant during a flight over Russia.

Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak. If you want Wordbreak all weekend long, just use the same link tomorrow and Sunday.

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HEADS UP

It’s a chock-full weekend, from A Bayou Legend to a solo concert in Strafford by Annemieke McLane to the play Perfect Arrangement in Springfield to Reese Fulmer at Court Street Arts and The Moanin’ Frogs in Claremont… And that’s just tonight. Check it all out in the Weekend Heads Up.

And for today...

One of the pieces Annemieke McLane will be playing in Strafford tonight is Debussy’s Suite bergamasque, which the French composer began writing early in his career but didn’t publish until 1905, after he’d become famous. It’s known especially for one of its movements, “Clair de Lune”, his tribute to the night sky. But there are three other parts to it, and they’re pretty darn great, too. Debussy wrote the composition for piano—and it’s a fair bet that what he did not have in mind was a bluegrass quintet of mandolin, banjo, guitar, fiddle, and bass. But that’s because he never had the chance to hear the Punch Brothers, led by Chris Thile. Here they are at the Kennedy Center some years back, with the final movement, “Passepied”.

See you Monday for CoffeeBreak.

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