Daybreak Friday, 4/17/26

Clearing, chance of isolated showers. The frontal boundary that’s been at the root of this week’s unsettledness is headed toward the Atlantic today. So while we start out with patchy fog and the chance of showers this morning, clouds will part and we should have a lovely afternoon. Highs in the upper 60s, lows either side of 50, and things cool down over the weekend as a cold front comes through.

You don’t often see gray fox in the daytime. But there it is on Erin Donahue’s trail cam. “Two kinds of wild dogs go up trees: the raccoon dog of Eastern Asia and the gray fox,” writes Ted Levin. “No one doubts the gray fox belongs in the branches. The only question is how. Clearly, something in the fore limbs loosens, turns. A Google search is contradictory: the paws rotate; the wrists, like a little primate. Or the forearms. Maybe the shoulders. Whatever it is, a gray fox vanishes into the forest canopy to steal eggs and nestling birds, to harvest fruit. It floats from limb to limb, curls up in the ragged bowl of an abandoned hawk’s nest, then oozes backward down a tree trunk, soft and sure as a cat. No wonder the BBC calls the gray fox ‘the weirdest dog in the world.’”

Did you catch Dear Daybreak yesterday? If not, you missed Sally Duston’s photo of a soft, beautiful sunrise the other morning in Thetford Center, Patricia Kangas Ktistes’ story of trying to raise Big Boy tomatoes in Grafton and nature’s other ideas, and Kevin Donohue’s poem touched off by our recent April snow. If you’ve got a good Upper Valley anecdote or entertaining story or bit of local history, please use this form to pass it along or email me at [email protected].

Oh, by the way: “We are aware that Irving is currently conducting a propane tank burn-off at the Maple Street Co-op Food Store. This process may continue into tomorrow,” the Hartford Fire Department noted on social media yesterday morning. You can just imagine all the alarmed calls that led them to post that.

Vershire offers a look at why Dems in the VT Legislature shifted on Act 181. Not only were the “road rule” and Tier 3 hot topics at last Saturday’s town meeting, reports Darren Marcy in The Herald—”We’re finding out more and more that rural Vermont was left out of the conversation,” said GOP Rep. Mike Tagliavia—but residents have been leaders in the push to revisit or deep-six the 2024 law. The group includes current planning commission member Michelle Massa and former members Debra Kingsbury, Bill Bayliss, and Marc McKee. “Our residents do not require state-mandated ‘Tier 3’ mapping to protect the environment and manage it thoughtfully,” they argued.

Construction on Quechee Gorge Bridge due to end this summer. The Standard’s Emma Stanton caught up with J.B. McCarthy, VTrans’s manager on the long-running project. Starting in July, McCarthy says, both lanes should be open during non-work hours, with lane closures during the day as needed. “A final inspection has been scheduled for sometime mid to late August,” he says, “so, at that point, everything will be cleaned up for Foliage Season… Issues could always pop up, but the one side of the bridge is already fully complete. The team knows what to watch out for and how to do the second side quickly and efficiently.”

SPONSORED: Eat what you LOVE! Join Sweetland Farm’s CSA and bring joy to your kitchen! Our Free Choice and Farmer’s Choice shares offer all the seasonal veggies you already love, plus new ones you’ll love to try. Grown on conserved land using radically sustainable practices, reducing your carbon “food-print” has never tasted so good! Weekly recipes and newsletters, 2 acres of pick-your-own gardens, and frequent events, with multiple pickup days, on-farm pickup or in-town delivery, and a member discount in our farmstand provide convenience and affordability. We’d love to be your farmers! 742 Rt. 132, Norwich. Sponsored by Sweetland Farm.

Upper Valley Symphony Orchestra to premiere local composer’s work. The piece, Upper Valley Seasons, is a clarinet concerto written by Pablo Santiago Chin, who teaches at the Longy School of Music at Bard College and is a lecturer at Dartmouth—and, as it happens, the UVSO’s principal clarinetist. Moved by the changing seasons, Chin took field recordings at different times of the year, then “interpreted the sounds of winter, spring, summer, and fall into an orchestral composition,” Upper Valley Music Center writes. Concerts on April 26 and 29 will feature movements “Autumn” and “Winter.” The premiere of the complete work will occur during the 2026-27 season.

The baking/construction nexus. WCAX’s Cat Viglienzoni likes to stop at King Arthur whenever she’s in this neck of the woods, and on Wednesday she went up with a piece that offers a tour of the company’s flagship in Norwich (and for nostalgia buffs, a quick still of its first, simpler building) and a tour of the Norwich Grange, which is currently being renovated thanks, in part to a kickoff donation from King Arthur. The historical society’s Sarah Rooker shows her the future Community Kitchen (“I can’t wait to see this building full of people eating pancakes, talking together over the table, cooking together in the kitchen”) and the upstairs performance and meeting space.

SPONSORED: Public Talk by Juliet Schor on “The Future of Work and the Four Day Week Movement”. Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College, is an expert on consumer society, working hours, environmental sustainability, and alternative economies and societies. Her many books include The Overworked American (1992), The Overspent American (1998), Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth (2010), After the Gig (2020), and Four Days a Week (2025). She’ll give a public talk for the Ethics Institute at Dartmouth College, in the Rockefeller Center, Room 003, on Thursday, April 23 at 5pm. Sponsored by the Ethics Institute.

Windsor County sheriff faces new charges. Ryan Palmer has already pleaded not guilty to seven charges that include lewd and lascivious conduct and soliciting prostitution. But yesterday the VT State Police said in a press release that “additional women have come forward and reported being victims of sexual misconduct by Palmer.” As a result, new VSP charges allege that Palmer “paid a woman on multiple occasions to participate in sex acts, and that he sent unsolicited sexual material to another woman.” In all, VTDigger’s Alan J. Keays reports, Palmer now faces a total of 12 charges. He’s due to be arraigned on the new ones April 24.

NH Supremes: Hanover on hook to Valley News for right-to-know lawyers’ fees. In a ruling Wednesday, reports the VN’s Clare Shanahan, the justices ordered the town to pay the not-yet-calculated fees in the newspaper’s bid to obtain arrest records for two Dartmouth students taken into custody during a 2023 protest on the college green. Hanover police refused to release the records due to “active criminal prosecution of the case,” Shanahan writes, and the VN took the town to court in 2024. In its ruling, the Supreme Court said the penalty was “necessary to enforce compliance” with NH’s Right-to-Know Law and that “Hanover knew or should have known” it was in violation.

Hiking Close to Home: Mascoma River Greenway, Lebanon, NH. It’s a perfect spring alternative while trails are still fragile—which they most definitely are, the UVTA says. This is a paved, level, 2.5-mile path right in Lebanon that handles wet conditions beautifully. Walk or bike through downtown Lebanon, enjoy colorful murals in an art-filled tunnel, and cross the scenic Mascoma River on a dedicated bridge. The trail is accessible and connects to the longer Northern Rail Trail if you want to extend your adventure. You can learn more about mud-season trails here.

Daybreak’s Upper Valley News Quiz. Were you paying attention this week? Because we’ve got questions! Like, why is Lebanon suing developer Mike Davidson? And just how many miles of piping have work crews laid so far for Dartmouth’s new heating/cooling system? You’ll find those and more at the link. Meanwhile, you’ll find NHPR’s New Hampshire quiz here, and Seven Days’ Vermont quiz here.

How Raj Bakhta’s plan for Green Mountain College went awry. The founder of WhistlePig Whiskey bought the Poultney campus of the shuttered college in 2020 with grand plans. Now, he says he wants to donate it to a religious group, preferably Catholic. What happened in those six years? In Seven Days, freelancer Brian Nearing pieces a heck of a story together. Bakhta’s not saying much, but townspeople aren’t so reticent. Bakhta “rubbed people the wrong way,” says one—”and not just because he dressed like an English aristocrat, employed lofty superlatives and chose to park his collection of luxury cars on the glossy floor of the former college gym,” Nearing writes.

An exercise in rhetorical economy—the world in a haiku nutshell. It’s the eighth year of the Weybridge Haiku Contest, and competitors were asked to shoehorn their views on nature or life in our time or hope or, in fact, haikus themselves into the traditional format of three lines of five/seven/five syllables. The competition, writes Dan Bolles in Seven Days, was started by poet and novelist Julia Alvarez; this year it drew almost 300 entries. Competitors ranged from nine to 91, which is poetic in itself. Bolles includes plenty of examples, including this, by David Weinstock of Middlebury: Sometimes tiny poems/are all we have the ears for/or stomach, or heart 

“The American people have grown skittish about answering plain questions.” Understandable when the question is: "What is the best free restaurant bread in America?" It was certainly too much for LeBron James' press person, and for Oprah's, and for Chris Pratt's... Alone among celebrities, Stephen King was brave enough to venture an answer: a steakhouse in Sarasota. Celebrities, however, are just an aside in a search that leads us to strangers in a hot tub, $525 dinners at Michelin-star restaurants, and New Yorkers’ outrage in 1912 that a hotel diner had begun charging 10 cents for bread and butter. Caity Weaver documents her quest in an Atlantic article almost as long and entertaining as the 13,000 miles she traveled to find her answer.

Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak.

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HEADS UP

Looking for stuff to do this weekend? There’s no shortage: The VSO’s casual string quartet explores “Americana Roots” at Artistree and the Hop screens Sinners tonight, Billings Farm is shearing sheep and goats tomorrow morning while there’s a CSN&Y tribute band at the Chandler and ukulele maestro Jake Shimabukuro at LOH in the evening, and ace Irish musicians Seán Gavin and Caoimhín Ó Fearghail do a house concert in Braintree. Plus a whole lot more. You’ll find it all here.

And for today...

Well sure, what the heck. Jake Shimabukuro and Kenny Loggins, “Why Not?”

See you Monday for CoffeeBreak.

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