Daybreak Friday, 9/4/26

Heads Up: No Daybreak Monday. Back on Tuesday with CoffeeBreak. Have a great Labor Day Weekend!

Sun’s back! Eventually, once the fog clears and the clouds lift. We’re going to go back and forth over the next few days, with sun today, a mix of sun and showers tomorrow, then sun on Sunday and Monday as high pressure works in for a bit. Highs today will be in the upper 70s and tonight’s low will be in the mid 50s, but then temps will cool slightly over the weekend, with highs in the lower 70s and overnight lows dropping into the 40s.

Charles Darwin never met a striped skunk. “Had fate guided Darwin to skunks,” writes Ted Levin about Erin Donahue’s latest trail cam video, “he might have added another arrow to the quiver of natural selection. Skunks are a living proclamation of aposematism—bold warnings painted in fur. Like fingerprints, no two striping patterns are quite the same. Where mountain lions, jaguars, wolves, and bobcats haunt the landscape, skunk stripes are enduring signals—bold and stark. Little variation. Against the poor olfactory capabilities of the great horned owl, skunk spray is powerless, so where owls rule the shadows, white stripes are reduced—better not to be seen. Without predation pressure, stripe patterns vary like moonlight dappling through leaves.”

“In the fields the ABUNDANCE JUST PEAKED.” Things get a little crazy on area farms as fall approaches. “Tomatoes, peppers and melons are ripening daily, the greens continue to pump out new leaves and I swear the winter squash just doubled in size,” Edgewater Farm’s Jenny Sprague writes in this morning’s CSA blog. And home chef and Kitchen Sense author Mitchell Davis is there with two recipes to deploy right now: Indian Eggplant in Peanut Sauce (developed by Madhur Jaffrey “to echo a classic Hyderabadi vegetarian dish without the fuss, I’ve been making my own version of this tasty eggplant dish for years,” he writes), plus Refrigerator Pickled Beets.

Valley News sees two more departures. Longtime photographer James M. Patterson and civic affairs reporter Clare Shanahan are moving on from the paper. With that turnover, a newsroom that numbered 14 last fall is down to six (including staff writer and deputy editor Molly Hughes, who arrived recently). At the link, a look back at some of Patterson’s work over his more than two decades at the newspaper; hints about where the Valley News and its parent company, Newspapers of New England, may be headed; and a statement from VN publisher Rich Wallace saying new hires will arrive soon and pushing back on concerns about how the paper will be edited.

“Mystery animal terrorizing New Hampshire neighborhood after attacking 3rd person”. We’ve gone national! That’s the NY Post headline yesterday about those animal attacks in Centerra. People mag: “‘Unusually Aggressive’ Mystery Animal Attacks 3 People in New Hampshire, Including an Intense Incident Caught on Camera’”; USA Today: “Video captures unknown animal that's been randomly attacking people…

SPONSORED: Take a trip back into the Labyrinth with Lebanon Opera House! Join us on Wednesday, September 16 at 7:30 PM for Jim Henson’s Labyrinth: In Concert, a celebration of the iconic film’s 40th anniversary with a screening like you’ve never seen before. Watch the movie you know and love while a live band performs the full soundtrack in sync with Bowie’s legendary vocals. Grab your fellow babes with the power and get your tickets — we can’t wait to see you there. Sponsored by Lebanon Opera House.

Behind the move away from screens at one Upper Valley school. The Herald’s newest reporter, Wilder Grimes, goes deep into why The Sharon Academy didn’t just ban cellphones during school two years ago, but is now barring personal computers and strictly limiting use of the school’s laptops. Blake Fabrikant, dean of students at the high school, says he hopes “teachers go back to teaching foundational skills with pen and paper…[and then] add the computer as an extra benefit to their education.” “We’ve done school before, you know, without heavy reliance on screens, and so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” he says. “It’s not like we’re in uncharted territory.”

A look at the underside—literally—of the long-running Royalton Bridge Project on I-89. The rehabbing of the bridge over the White River, VT 107, and the New England Central Railroad tracks has been under way since the spring of 2024, and is due to wind up in 2028, writes Ken Liebeskind for Construction Equipment Guide. Crews from the Franklin, NH firm of Beck & Bellucci have been replacing bridge decks, repairing structural steel, repairing deteriorated portions of the concrete substructures, and more; the northbound bridge is done, while work continues on the southbound bridge. Includes an inventory of the equipment being used. Screed machines, anyone?

School bus goes off the road in Pomfret. The Pomfret-Teago VFD is up with photos of yesterday afternoon’s crash, which happened at about 5:15 at the corner of Howe Hill and Pomfret roads. The fire and FAST squads responded, along with Woodstock Ambulance—and then Sabil and Sons, which pulled the bus out of a field. There were no students on board, and the driver was taken to the hospital and released.

Pomfret gets a town administrator. It’s a sea change for the town: “For the past 265 years, the business of the town government has been delegated to the selectboard,” writes the VN’s Sofia Langlois, citing selectboard chair Ben Brickner. The five-member board has managed the town as volunteers, “meaning their other jobs and responsibilities can slow things down.” Now, reports Langlois, Mariel Luna—who moved two months ago from San Antonio, TX—will handle the day-to-day tasks. “Luna stood out because of her versatile experience in municipal government, said Brickner, especially her experience with grant writing and contract approval.”

A Peruvian theater troupe’s production of Hamlet is coming to the Hop—in Spanish, using actors with Down syndrome, and placing “humanity at its core.” “It’s not that it uses Hamlet as a jumping-off point to explore humanity. It’s like this show is a riff on Hamlet,” the Hopkins Center’s Samantha Lazar tells Armita Mirkarimi in the VT Standard. The show premiered in Peru in 2019, Markarimi writes, and has toured more than 50 cities worldwide—including a highly successful run in NYC, which helped bring it to the Hop’s notice.

Correction. How do these brain freezes happen? That was, of course, US Sen. Maggie Hassan who visited the Enfield Village School the other day as Molly Hughes rightly reported in her VN story and the accompanying photo made super plain—not Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, as I wrote yesterday. Thanks to all of you who pointed it out with grace and (mostly) understanding.

Hiking Close to Home: Balch Hill Natural Area, Hanover, NH. Balch Hill provides easy terrain with moderate inclines and walking routes to the summit ranging from 0.3-1 mile from every direction, says the Upper Valley Trails Alliance. It also features diverse natural communities, including the abandoned pasture at the summit and forests on the Hill's slopes, with pines, hardwoods, and hemlocks. Take in the first hints of fall foliage at the summit, with views of Moose Mountain, Mount Ascutney, and Gile Mountain.

Daybreak’s Upper Valley News Quiz. Were you paying attention this week? Because we’ve got questions! Like, just what are those 40-some rail cars sitting on a siding in Ely, at the northern end of Thetford? And do you remember what’s on display at that tiny museum sitting on the front lawn of KIS Thrift in Wilder? You’ll find those and more at the link. Meanwhile, here’s NHPR’s New Hampshire quiz, while Seven Days’ Vermont quiz is here.

Nonprofit acquires VT news group. This may be a big deal. The National Trust for Local News, which is already transforming the local news landscape in three states—CO, GA, and ME—is taking over the VT Community Newspaper Group, which owns the Stowe Reporter, the News & Citizen of Lamoille County, and three other weeklies. It’s the nonprofit’s first foray into VT; it owns three papers in ME, including the Portland Press-Herald, and dozens in GA and CO, reports Seven Days’ Aaron Calvin. The Trust has a history of expanding once it enters a state; CEO Tom Wiley tells Calvin it has no such plans at the moment, but he ”didn’t rule out future acquisitions.”

At “all the swing dances, all the PTA meetings…all the art fair judging”: Norman Rockwell. Though the artist’s paintings are “widely considered to represent Anytown, USA,” writes Alice Dodge in Seven Days, many of them are modeled on the southern Vermont town of Arlington.” And a Shelburne Museum exhibit, she makes those roots explicit, telling the story not only of Rockwell’s years in Arlington, but of the models—many of them kids—he used, and the wider circle of artists and others he cultivated. Dodge gives the stories behind some of his works, and notes that several of the people who served as models will be at a Sept. 26 panel discussion at the museum.

Hiding behind an air conditioner to capture a prize-winning photo. The 2026 Audubon Photography Awards are out, and while most competitors head to the wild to snag the perfect image, Nick Parayko focused on his own backyard for a winning photo of a Tennessee Warbler. Jacqueline Burke took advantage of a deep shadow in a Florida cove to highlight the “pale plumage and pink wings” of a Roseate Spoonbill. (The judges awarded it a grand prize, calling it “a Flemish painting on steroids.”) Francisco Castro Escobar’s Lesser Horned Owl (“the ghost of the desert”) also won a grand prize for its “perfectly calculated depth of field and impeccable composition.” 

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

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HEADS UP

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And for today...

Kalos, the compelling Celtic roots band made up of Ryan McKasson (violin, viola, voice), Eric McDonald (guitar, mandolin, voice) and Strafford’s Jeremiah McLane (accordion, piano, voice), has a new CD out, Tamarack. They’ll be touring the mid-Atlantic next month and the west in November to back it, but won’t get anywhere close to hear until early December. So until then, fittingly, here’s a swooping “Pretty Good Friday” (plus “Ladybug”), filmed at the Chandler.

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