Daybreak Friday, 7/17/26

Sunny. For starters, it’ll be a pretty smoke-free day—until a plume arrives again sometime this evening or tonight. Before then, though, we get a cloud-free morning, a few clouds arriving this afternoon, temps reaching about 80 and then dropping into the low or mid 50s overnight. A warm front followed by a cold front will bring a chance of showers and thunderstorms Saturday, before things start drying out Sunday.

As summer ripens. “Puberty is a storm for teenagers,” writes Ted Levin about Erin Donahue’s trail cam video. “But what if it returned each year, like a season? For whitetail bucks, September brings this annual metamorphosis. As nights lengthen, darkness pours more melatonin into their veins, which in turn swells the tide of testosterone. Blood recedes from antlers, bone hardens beneath velvet—then velvet shrivels, dries, is stripped away by rubbing. The rut stirs. For now, though, bucks drift together in silent brotherhood—bachelor bands roaming, antlers surging skyward, an inch (or more) each July week. Conflict sleeps. The wheel turns: camaraderie, then combat, then mating ... before returning to the peace of high summer.

And as blueberries ripen… In fact, Jenny Sprague writes in this week’s Edgewater Farm CSA blog, “for the foreseeable future all afternoons into evenings will be spent in the blueberry fields, where the crew will fill up pint after pint as the sun sets while hopefully guzzling down buckets of water.  It’s hot out there yall.” And there’s more good stuff on the horizon: corn’s shoulder-high, though, as Jenny notes, so are the weeds. Meanwhile, there’s still all that broccoli and cucumber, so this week, home chef and Kitchen Sense writer Mitchell Davis has recipes for a Charred Broccoli Salad, Thai Basil Fish Cakes with Cucumber Relish, and a Thai Cucumber Salad. Eat well!

Rabid bat found in Royalton. The positive test, reports Sofia Langlois in the Valley News, marks the seventh confirmed case in a bat in VT this year, and the second in the Upper Valley (a bat in Strafford tested positive in February). “Since wild animals move and interact with each other,” says a notice put out by the state health department, “a rabid animal detection means there is circulation of the virus and a risk of rabies from wildlife in the greater town area. All residents are urged to take steps to protect humans and domestic animals from rabies.” Langlois runs down rabies numbers in both states, as well as advice, including from Royalton Police Chief Loretta Stalnaker.

Norwich bows on public records request. As Langlois also writes in the VN, back in May retired lawyer Chris Katucki, who among other things writes the Norwich Observer blog, sued the town over a highly redacted set of emails between selectboard members and between board members and the town manager. He could have reviewed them without charge in Tracy Hall, but Katucki has ALS, which made that impossible; Town Manager Brennan Duffy agreed to provide redacted documents digitally for $550 to cover staff time and pay. On Wednesday, Langlois reports, the board voted to honor what one member called Katucki’s “reasonable and lawful request for public documents” and get him the unredacted emails for free.

What to do with yourself? Literally. Daybreak points you to lots of events, of course, but Monday-Thursday it’s day-of and Thursday afternoons it’s the coming weekend. So what if you want to plan ahead? There’s the VN’s calendar, but several Upper Valleyites are trying to rethink what a regional calendar looks like: one brand new, one re-newed, and two that started up within the last year. Check them all out and see what fits.

“I love what I do,” says 62-year-old Pizza Hero chef. Chris Beaucher moved to NH to escape the press of a much busier life, first running his own spot in Marblehead, MA, then working in corporate kitchens, writes Marion Umpleby in the VN. Eventually, he bought a used Manchester NH bus, retrofitted it (complete with dough press—he ”flattened Pizza Hero’s first 4,000 dough balls by hand,” Umpleby writes. “After that, he realized that, if he wanted to maintain the use of his wrists, a dough press was in order”—and two wood-fired ovens). These days he parks outside Protectworth Brewing in Newport, NH. And though people compare his pizza to New Haven’s, he says his dough is slightly stiffer and cooked at a lower temp.

This week in the woods: punctuation marks and poults. Northern Woodlands’ Jack Saul notes that just one-quarter of wild turkey poults survive the first month of life, so it’s a treat to see them now, in the second week of July, out foraging with their moms. Also dining out, “on sap and rotting fruit as well as carrion and scat,” are question mark butterflies, named for the markings on their wings. Jack explains how they differ from comma butterflies. Another butterfly—the meadow fritillary—moves “in quick, jerky flight; they may get tantalizingly close to the observer but touch down only occasionally and for frustratingly short periods.”

Hiking and Biking Close to Home: Oak Hill Natural Area, Hanover. This multi-use land is open to all users—and, the Upper Valley Trails Alliance notes, hosts the group’s STOAKED 12k trail race. The 15.6-mile trail network is groomed for skiing in the winter and makes for great hiking and biking trails in the summer, with a network of single-track mountain biking trails popular with all skill levels. Parking is free in the lot on Oak Hill Drive just before entering Storrs Pond Recreation Area.

Daybreak’s Upper Valley News Quiz. Were you paying attention this week? Because we’ve got questions! Like, how much did the Prouty raise this year? And what highly unusual sequence of events befell two hikers on Mt. Kearsarge? You’ll find those and more at the link. Meanwhile, here’s NHPR’s New Hampshire quiz, while Seven Days’ Vermont quiz is here.

With Kelly Ayotte’s signature, NH voters to decide on local school district tax caps. The bill the governor signed on Wednesday requires that “the local tax cap question be added to ballots across the state, as part of a Republican-led effort to rein in the cost of public education,” reports the Globe’s Steven Porter (no paywall). The votes will come in November, and districts where at least 60 percent of voters district-wide back it will be subject to an inflation-adjusted tax cap for two years, as well as a limit on central office spending. Critics, writes Porter, argue that the new law “distracts from systemic flaws in the state’s K-12 school funding model.”

Ben & Jerry’s Foundation may shut down at end of year. That will happen, the foundation announced Wednesday, unless it wins a court battle with Ben & Jerry’s corporate owner, Magnum Ice Cream Company, a spinoff of Unilever. The foundation gives grants internationally but also about $600K a year in mostly small grants to VT groups like the Ascutney Mountain Audubon Society and the Norwich Community Collaborative. The foundation, reports Ian Curry in Seven Days, says the loss of its funding is political. Magnum says a review found “clear conflicts of interest” on the foundation’s board, as well “a lack of governance and financial controls.”

Bit by bit, the Velomont Trail is taking shape—with accessibility in mind. “New trail construction is finally ramping up after years spent on permits, plans and public input,” reports VT Public’s Nina Keck of the planned 485-mile multi-use trail. “And organizers say they're focused on ensuring the Velomont is accessible for everyone.” Says VT Huts and Trails’ Angus McCusker, “It’s not a huge lift to just be mindful when we’re trying to build trail or improve trail to think about the adaptive rider.” That means not just changes the banks on turns, but widening bridges, and putting in new ramps at spots like the Chittenden Brook Hut. Keck details what’s going into the work.

Cue the cosmic sweet tooth jokes: There’s sugar between the stars. Well, a sugar, anyway. Erythrulose, a sugar found in raspberries and self-tanners, has been detected in the interstellar medium, researchers report. “This is the very first sugar to be detected in interstellar space, and it is important because it tells us that these sugars are more common than we previously thought,” Izaskun Jiménez-Serra, a study co-author and an astrochemist at the Center for Astrobiology in Spain, tells one interviewer. “It opens the possibility for life to develop on other worlds in a similar way as it did on Earth.” Smithsonian’s Sarah Hashemi rounds up the reporting.

Italian design soars on the wings of the biggest paper airplane ever. At the University of Pisa, a group of students were convinced that “with the right method, even a piece of paper could become real engineering,” reports Andrew Paul in Popular Science. At 23 feet long, with a whopping 65-foot wingspan, launching the paper plane was not easy (like, crash-your-body-into-a-low-padded-wall not easy). But the students triumphed, flying the plane 200 feet and breaking the 2013 Guinness World Record for the largest paper airplane ever. A pair of videos document the process and the flight, in Italian but with boundless exuberance you don’t need to translate. 

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

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HEADS UP

As always, you’ll find a long list of things to do this weekend, from singer Hayley Reardon in Woodstock this evening to The Junction Dance Festival’s WRJ showcase and poet Wes McNair reading in Wilmot on Saturday (note: he’ll be at town hall, not the library) to Rhiannon Giddens both on the Spaulding stage and simulcast on the Dartmouth Green on Sunday—plus lots more—in the Weekend Heads Up.

And two things that didn’t make it in there:

And for today...

The Cameroonian-born singer Irma Pany—she performs using just her first name—was just 12 when she wrote her first songs, in French and English. She moved to France at 15, came to wide notice as a singer by posting videos to the early YouTube, and now is headed out on a world tour (in smaller venues) next year that will take her to Africa, around Europe, Brazil, Tokyo, and at least NYC and LA in the US. Her catchy song “Black Sun,” she told an interviewer, came about when she was messing with a tapped rhythm on her guitar and decided to use it for a piece she’d written “about the chaotic moment when you try to free yourself from your own barriers and self loathing. When you try to stop being your own enemy and learn how to love and be kind to yourself. I called it ‘Black Sun’ because it’s a moment when you are simultaneously the darkness and the light, the victim and the savior.”

See you Monday for CoffeeBreak.

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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt      Poetry editor: Michael Lipson    Associate Editors: Jonea Gurwitt, Sam Gurwitt

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