Daybreak Friday 5/28/21

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Heads up: No Daybreak Monday — we all need Memorial Day off, right?Now comes the real cool. There's a low pressure system coming in from the Ohio Valley, bringing a chance of rain this afternoon and evening and a likelihood later tonight (chances higher the farther south you go), and with clouds building in and cold air aloft, we won't make it out of the 50s today. It's even possible there could be snow on the highest peaks. Things won't get quite as cold tonight as they did last night, but still: bundle up.Vistas with attitude. Just a reminder, as if you needed one, that we live in a remarkably beautiful place.

"Why do you write in a swamp?" Hard to believe, but Lebanon author and illustrator D.B. Johnson is half a year into Lost Woods, his no-longer-new-but-definitely-still-fresh comic strip about the residents of a patch of forest...somewhere. As he does every week, he provides a full week's worth: Scroll right to see what happens next or left to catch up on previous weeks. And if you've missed a week (or more), check out the archive and synopsis behind the three little parallel lines at the top right.Dartmouth, Colby-Sawyer expand vaccine requirements to employees. At Wednesday's "Community Conversation," Dartmouth Provost Joe Helble said the college is finalizing plans to require that all employees, as well as students, be vaccinated, probably before the start of the summer term. The Valley News's Nora Doyle-Burr reports that 54 percent of the on-campus community and 42 percent of the entire Dartmouth community is fully vaccinated. Meanwhile, Colby-Sawyer's mandate, which includes all employees as well as commuter and part-time students, takes effect Aug. 1.SPONSORED: Stories from the heart. LISTEN is a not-for-profit in the Upper Valley with the sole purpose of helping our neighbors in need, whether it's with groceries, a hot meal, heating or housing help, counseling, or other situations related to poverty. We want to share just a few of the hundreds of stories from people we helped this winter. The maroon link will take you to a short video that will warm your heart! If you would like to know more about our programs, please visit our website. Sponsored by LISTEN."It was a nightmare." April Salas is Hanover's sustainability director, and when the town decided to move toward greener energy a few years ago, the first step was to figure out how much energy it and its residents were using. It should have been easy, Amanda Gokee writes in NH Bulletin; instead, the town got such messy data from Liberty Utilities it had to spend $30K just to make it usable. Which is why Salas, state consumer advocate Don Kreis, and others are pushing for a statewide data platform, now before the Public Utilities Commission, that would standardize information from energy providers.Dartmouth vigil draws over 1,000 students, with Hanover's permission. The Tuesday night vigil for the four undergrads who have died this academic year was the largest in-person event the college has held during the pandemic, according to director of institutional events Jim Alberghini. He and other college officials met with Town Manager Julia Griffin May 21, reports The Dartmouth's Daniel Modesto, to argue the vigil's importance to students. The town approved an outdoor activities permit on Monday—"with some significant concern about crowd management," masks, and social distancing, Griffin noted. “Us kids all thought he was alive and up in the woods somewhere. We just couldn’t bring it to our minds that he burned himself.” And, says Dwight Jarvis, who was 9 the year Romaine Tenney set his farmhouse on fire as I-91 came through Ascutney, sometimes they would leave plates of food in the woods in case he was out there. With her customary ear for detail, the NYT's Ellen Barry tells the Tenney story—the whole thing, from the highway's construction to the meetings around taking down the Tenney tree to its actual removal and locals' "fiercely protective" attitude. (Thanks, CJ!)Police officers in high schools? We The People survey respondents say "Nope." By a three-to-one margin, in fact. Those results, from the 485 people who answered WTP's  question on the issue in its local news quiz last week, come in the wake of the Lebanon school board's decision Wednesday night to keep its school resource officer in place at Lebanon High. In this week's news quiz, in addition to all sorts of questions that test your knowledge of recent local events, you can weigh in on the minimum wage in VT and NH."Finding the breath” in drawing. Those words come from cartoonist Harry Bliss, known for his New Yorker cartoons and, recently, collaboration with Steve Martin. Bliss lives in Cornish, and in Junction mag, Hazel-Dawn Dumpert profiles both him and his spot. Bliss wound up there a few years ago after visiting—"As soon as I got to Plainfield, I thought this feels really good," he tells Dumpert—and has created a residency for graphic artists to stay in a small guest house on the property. For his part, Bliss found inspiration for his turn to cartooning in a Charles Addams collection he picked up in a rare books store.Where are all the red-eyed vireos? There were plenty last year, writes naturalist and author Ted Levin, but he's not hearing them around this spring. Levin is in the course of moving from Thetford to Hartford, which gives him plenty of excuses to put off packing and go outside. Or, as he just did, look through a new report on "global abundance estimates" for thousands of bird species. Fourth on the list are barn swallows, estimated at 1.1 billion. "A billion barn swallows," he muses, "coursing over the fields of Earth! Now that would be a sight—birds of the wind, graceful and free."Hiking close to home: the Vermont Institute of Natural Science trails. The Upper Valley Trails Alliance points to what it calls "an incredible network of trails" at VINS (though you'll need to pay admission). Most notably, there's the Forest Canopy Walk, a fully accessible elevated walkway meant to mimic a bird's perspective high in the treetops. But the trail network continues throughout the grounds and surrounding woodlands, including a wheelchair-accessible trail to a viewing platform by the Ottauquechee River. For longer hikes, the trails connect to Quechee Gorge and the state park bordering VINS."As we were eating supper my wife saw the garden cart go by our window on the back of [a] pickup." The cart had held clay flower pots that a Hartland resident put out for people to take; the cart itself wasn't included in the offer. So he made a new sign asking for the cart to be returned. It wasn't. Then, the other day, he saw a car pull out of the driveway. Going out to check, he found a new, four-wheeled cart with a note inside: We saw your sign and wanted to help. In a post on the Hartland listserv (sorry, no link), he thanks the mystery donor and adds, "The cart is a great help in moving gardening materials around.""Divisive concepts" measure moves forward in NH Senate, with changes. As approved by the House, the bill focused on barring schools from teaching that one race or gender is inherently superior or inherently racist or sexist. Yesterday, a Senate committee amended it to include a range of characteristics—so that, for instance, "a school could not teach that able-bodied people are inherently oppressive against disabled people," Ethan DeWitt writes in NH Bulletin. GOP members also added language they contend would allow teaching "the historical existence" of notions such as structural racism. NH judge dismisses youth center class action suit; will allow individual claims to go forward. More than 300 men and women claim they were raped or physically and sexually abused by staffers at the state youth detention center from 1960 to 2018. On Wednesday, Merrimack County Superior Court Judge John Kissinger ruled that a single class action is “too unwieldy," the AP reports. But he also ruled that one victim could sue the state after the statute of limitations had passed because at the time of his release he did not understand that "institutional negligence" was in part at fault, a point others will take up.Canadian firm expects to buy Koffee Kup, Vermont Bread. Mrs. Dunster's, based in New Brunswick, announced its planned purchase of the Burlington-based bakery and its Brattleboro subsidiary yesterday after getting state approval for up to $1.8 million in incentive funding, reports VTDigger's Kevin O'Connor. The company beat out East Baking, a Massachusetts firm, for the sale. Koffee Kup and Vermont Bread were shuttered at the end of April by a New York-based investment firm that had bought them at the beginning of April, putting some 250 employees out of work.The oldest living veteran in VT; an infantryman at the Battle of the Bulge; a Navy pilot trying to land on an aircraft carrier at night... They're just three of the six VT WWII veterans Steve Goldstein profiles in a Seven Days article detailing their stories. Fewer than 800 WWII vets survive in the state, Goldstein writes. What Jim Carr of Bellows Falls remembers most is the cold at the Battle of the Bulge; for Shelburne's Dick Austin, it was the never-ending anxiety of landing on a pitching deck; for Bennington's Leney Barclay, it was watching the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay.What does "grace" mean to you? That's what local writer and writing teacher Joni Cole asks debut novelist JoAnne Tompkins, a former lawyer and mediator who's seen some of the worst that humanity can dish out. Cole has launched a new podcast, Author, Can I Ask You?, in which she talks to writers—including, this week, her first poet—about themselves and about writing. "I want to interview authors near and far (we sure have a lot of talent right in our own backyard) who are fun and easy to talk with and smart and quirky and down to earth and...they seem like they'd make me laugh or think," she explains.How to make a concert grand disappear. Did you see the NYT's story last week about a card trick known "the holy grail of card magic"? Its creator, David Berglas, is now 94, and he's also famous for a 1954 trick at the annual dinner of the Toboggan Club of Great Britain, in which he made a grand piano vanish, seemingly before the audience's eyes. A few years ago, he explained it on camera. It will take ten minutes of your time, but it's so much fun: a riveting discourse on creativity, the art of distraction, and the epically meticulous planning a dedicated magician puts into creating one remarkable moment.

Last numbers for May.

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Sometimes you just need to go pop before the weekend. So here's Sly & the Family Stone's "Everyday People,"

, Jack Johnson and Paula Fuga, Jason Mraz, Yo-Yo Ma, a host of celebs (Paula Abdul, Forrest Whitaker, Misty Copeland, Bernie Williams, and others) and hordes of kids in the Kennedy Center's Turnaround Arts program at schools around the country.

(Thanks, KrH!)

Have a fantastic Memorial Day weekend! See you Tuesday.

Daybreak Where You Are: The Album. Photos of daybreak around the Upper Valley, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the US, sent in by readers.

Want to catch up on Daybreak music?

Check out the Spotify playlist generously maintained by Sarah and Nelson Rooker.

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