GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Put a cold front and a light disturbance together and you get... today. It'll be cool, with a chance of showers all day and night. Socked in all day, temps only into the mid-50s, winds from the east. Down to around 50 tonight. What the light can throw at you.
A double rainbow, for instance, last Thursday in Chester VT. "We pulled over and sort of danced around below the rainbow—the double reminded us of our first," writes Rosie Greenstein of her and her husband, Lewis, "soon after arriving at Sigalame Secondary School, Samia, Kenya, where we were Peace Corps teachers" in the '60s.
And Friday morning's fresh slant on the mist, from Scribner Fauver in Meriden, the season's waning cherry tomatoes in the foreground.
Hanover nightlife goes underground with Sawtooth Kitchen. The combo food destination and music/performance space is the brainchild of developer Jay Campion and his son, Kieran, reports John Lippman in the Valley News. It's planned for the space underneath what used to be the Dartmouth Bookstore (and before that Campion's Sporting Goods), from Main Street back to where EBA's used to be. “We’re going to run the gamut in terms of performing arts,” says Kieran Campion, who worked as a theatrical agent in Chicago. “My aspirational plan is to build a home for artists in the Upper Valley."Dartmouth crime stats plummeted during pandemic. On Friday, the college released its annual "Clery" report, the crime data compendium required by federal law. The college reports for two "campuses"—in Hanover and DHMC. Reported incidents at DHMC were negligible, except for 22 disciplinary referrals for drug law violations. On the main campus, incidents dropped considerably: There were 10 reported rapes in 2020, compared to 33 in 2019 and 39 in 2018; 4 burglaries, compared to 14 the year before; 85 disciplinary referrals for liquor law violations, compared to 249 in 2019... Scroll to p. 70 for the numbers.VT tax credits will boost projects in five UV towns. In all, the state awarded $3.6 million to 28 downtown revitalization projects around the state, reports Alex Hanson in the VN. Among them: $86K to Jonah Richard's efforts to rejuvenate the old post office on Fairlee's Main Street; $80K to bring Dan & Whit's in Norwich up to fire code (which could ultimately bring its second floor back to full capacity); $54K to renovate the old diner on Rte. 110 in Chelsea; $56K to the Strafford Historical Society's plan to restore the old Masonic Hall in S. Strafford; and $302K to two projects on Springfield's Main Street. "We know what they go to. To tea." That line from poet Gwendolyn Brooks is part of the new, Kishka-specific art installation at Kishka Gallery in WRJ, which Susan Apel visited Friday night. Artist Untitled Queen extended the gallery's unique floor design up the walls, then added art, much of which, Susan writes on her Artful blog, "constitute[s] a love letter to reading and text." It runs through October. Meanwhile, just down the street at WRJ's other new gallery, Tourist, co-owner Chad Etting and Brooklyn-based artist Corey Presha have teamed up to play with words and images.Springfield Hospital "inching toward financial stability." The 25-bed hospital, which declared bankruptcy in 2019 and emerged last December, now projects a $1.8 million loss in FY 2021, reports Liora Engel-Smith in VTDigger; that's compared to $9.6 million in FY 2019. Cost-cutting, including staffing, and a pandemic rebound in patient volume have helped the bottom line, a spokesperson says. But the Green Mountain Care Board, which oversees the state's hospitals, is pressing Springfield to make far-reaching changes in how it operates—and, reports Engel-Smith, casting doubt on the hospital's survival.UV farms tackle slashing carbon emissions. In the VN, Report for America member Claire Potter (who has quickly made herself indispensable for well-reported, eye-opening stories) looks at the efforts by Stephen Leslie and Kerry Gawalt at Cedar Mountain Farm (on the grounds of Cobb Hill CoHousing in Hartland) and Norah Lake, at Sweetland Farm in Norwich. Leslie and Gawalt are focused on managing soil health, trying to recreate "the forest ecosystem that first made Vermont’s soil fertile," Potter writes. Lake is trying to electrify and shift to renewable energy as much as possible. “It really is doable," Lake says."On a peak leaf weekend, traffic on the legendary Kancamagus Highway may be more reminiscent of a Los Angeles freeway than some quiet road in a poem by Robert Frost." That's writer Joyce Maynard in the NYT. So she takes off for some less-travelled roads to see New Hampshire's foliage, with some key tips, like "Don't ever rule out marshes." It's a travel guide: the Monadnock Region; the area around Hillsborough, Bradford, Warner, and Sutton; over to Squam and Holderness; then across to Cornish, Saint Gaudens, and south to Walpole. That stretch of 12A, she writes, has "the kind of vast, sweeping views foliage seekers typically travel north to find.""Sorry to be the bearer of bad news." That's NH consumer advocate Don Kreis, but yeah, it could also be Daybreak. In his latest column, Kreis writes that in NH, electric and natural gas bills are about to go up dramatically. Why? "After a long period of historically low wholesale prices for natural gas, our reliance on this source of energy is finally catching up with us," he writes. Meanwhile, in the VN yesterday, John Lippman noted that his survey of the Upper Valley's propane and heating oil suppliers suggests, "It’s going to be a long, cold winter and heating fuel prices are likely to have homeowners steaming."Wait. Now we have to worry about epizootic hemorrhagic disease? The virus affects white-tailed deer, and in VTDigger, Jackie O'Brien writes that VT Fish & Wildlife is worried it's making its way into the state: Outbreaks have been reported in Hudson Valley counties that border Vermont. The disease, which takes about seven days after infection to show up and can kill a deer in less than a day, is transmitted by midges—you know them as no-see-ums—and does not affect humans. Fish & Wildlife is looking for any reports of dead or sick-looking deer.Early Vermont "is all around us, but it is far from where we live." It was only about 15,000 years ago, writes Mark Bushnell in his latest "Then Again" column for VTDigger, that the Laurentide ice sheet—which covered Canada and much of the northern US for millennia—retreated to the southern border of VT (and NH). It took another 2,500 years to lay the state bare. Remnants of that tundra can be found on VT's highest peaks. Eventually, animals and trees showed up—and, around the same time as trees, humans, "the latest in an almost unimaginably long line of generations to make their way...""I walk the streets of New York City and photograph strangers." Could be poetry or the opening line of a noir mystery, but it's actually how photographer Dimitri Mellos describes what he does. He's the "series winner" of the Street Photographers Foundation 2021 awards. Photos from around the world, all of them a reminder of the beauty and power of serendipity—and how sometimes (check out Subhran Karmakar's winged dog) you don't know what you've got until you get home and start scrolling through your camera.
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This evening at 7, Northern Stage has an intriguing online "community conversation" on the docket. As you know, it's just finished its production of Million Dollar Quartet, about the early days of rockabilly. Meanwhile, Houston's Ensemble Theatre is in the midst of its run of Respect: A Musical Journey of Women, tracing the evolution of women's emotional voice in American society punctuated by Top-40 songs. "When we look at the history of popular American music, where is the line between appreciation and appropriation? As we celebrate the history of Rock n' Roll and Motown, how can we investigate and uplift the artists whose music inspired a movement but whose names did not make it to the marquee?" the two theater companies ask.
Also at 7, Ciné Salon continues its inquiry into trailblazing film historian and archivist Robert Haller in an online conversation (and screening) with Pip Chodorov, a film prof at Dongguk University in Seoul, who'll be presenting a world premiere of A Love Letter to Robert, by Amy Greenfield and a look at Haller's 2001 avant-garde film series, Galaxy.
And anytime, you can check out CATV's video of what happened at AVA Gallery's live event, The Mudroom, which sold out for its in-person incarnation last month, with storytellers riffing on "I Didn't See That Coming." Also, CATV has partnered with OSHER to stream and broadcast the latter's Summer Lecture Series, one lecture per week—starting today with Tuck Dean Matthew Slaughter's talk, "Is the American Dream Sustainable?" They're by donation, which will go to support both key Upper Valley organizations.
One day, Scottish fiddler Adam Sutherland messaged his friend Kevin Henderson, also a fiddler, who lives in the Shetland Islands. Attached was a fiddle tune in an audio file. The night before, Sutherland had dreamt that Henderson taught him the tune; had that actually happened, he wanted to know. "I didn't recognize it at all," Henderson later said. So he wrote one in response. Here's The Nordic Fiddlers Bloc, Henderson's trio with Norwegian fiddler Olav Luksengård Mjelva and Swedish fiddler Anders Hall—combining three rich fiddling traditions—on "Adam's Nightmare."See you tomorrow.
Daybreak Where You Are: The Album. Photos of daybreak around the Upper Valley, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the US, sent in by readers.
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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Writer/editor: Tom Haushalter Poetry editor: Michael Lipson About Rob About Tom About Michael
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