Daybreak Monday, 10/5/26

Getting sunny. Yes, we’ve started the day under clouds, but sun should show up at some point this morning. That’s despite a cold front coming through west to east, which brought us this morning’s showers and will add in gusty winds this afternoon, along with cooler temps in its wake. Highs today around 60, lows tonight in the upper 30s (and heads up: frost Tuesday night).

Just a reminder: NHDOT planned to close the I-89 southbound off-ramp at Exit 20 (that’s West Leb) today between 8 am and 5 pm to “facilitate granite curb installation.” Weather permitting, the closure will last just for today, and it’s the usual detour: down to Exit 19, then back up.

And speaking of back-ups… Today’s photos come from Eric Francis, who spent the weekend watching crews take apart and then replace the span over Maple Street in WRJ, right down from Hartford Town Hall, to repair the damage done by a garbage truck that slammed into the bridge back in February. With traffic at the bridge down to a single alternating lane, backups spread throughout WRJ and West Leb. But the real drama, as Eric’s photos suggest, was up on the trestle itself. And there’s good news: As of last night the work was ahead of schedule, and engineers were optimistic traffic might be able to flow more freely today.

Peppers! They’re abundant out there at farmstands, and on her blog for Plainfield’s Edgewater Farm, co-owner Jenny Sprague is waxing rhapsodic about habanadas and jimmy nardellos: “I can not stress enough how perfect these peppers are,” she writes. “The habanadas are smoky and sweet, and the jimbo roast beautifully…” For his recipes, Kitchen Sense writer Mitchell Davis goes for pepper steak (seriously: a pound and a half of Jimmy Nardellos, Carmens, Habanadas…), a fine-looking early fall smokey Southern-style mess of collard greens, and lemongrass chicken with Thai basil.

In Woodstock, “prolonged conflict over municipal decisions is affecting public participation, ordinary government work and neighbors’ lives.” That’s the subhed on Erin Scott’s look in the Standard at the divisions that have marked the town this year, most recently over the selectboard’s appointment of two new members to fill vacancies. Talking about that Sept. 15 meeting, one resident notes, “Nearly every agenda item the selectboard raised was immediately met with negativity… [It] gave me a feeling of helplessness.” Scott looks at conflict in public meetings and on Woodstock’s streets, and at the issues that underlie it.

In the tales of lives lost, the story of the new Quechee Gorge Bridge barriers. Though a lot of the work on the bridge over the last three years involved structural rehab, the Valley News’s Sofia Langlois notes that the bridge also now sports nine-foot-high barriers that “hold the hope of community members who want to mitigate the enduring tragedy of suicides at Vermont’s deepest natural canyon.” Over the dozen years before construction began, police responded to 79 suicide-related incidents at the gorge; seven people died. Langlois tells three of those stories, and how they helped drive the state’s response in steel. In crisis? Call or text 988 for immediate support.

SPONSORED: The internationally acclaimed Apple Hill String Quartet returns to Upper Valley Music Center on Saturday, Oct. 17! With works by award-winning Swedish composer Andrea Tarrodi, a world premiere by Broadway artist Cenovia Cummins, a nod to the popular Studio Ghibli film music of Joe Hisaishi, and Ludwig van Beethoven’s timeless classic String Quartet in A Major Op. 18 No. 5, this is a concert you won’t want to miss. Saturday, Oct. 17 at 4 pm, at the First Congregational Church of Lebanon. Tickets are $30, and available online now at the burgundy link or uvmusic.org. Sponsored by Upper Valley Music Center.

The upcoming UVLists, from the list organizers’ perspective. As you know, news broke Thursday night that Vital Communities and the group of listserv moderators and organizers known as UVLists, Inc. had reached an agreement for a handoff from the former to the latter. Later on Friday, UVLists went up with a few details of what’s coming, including that the lists will be sponsored by ECFiber and they’ll start fundraising early next year. “Our target is to automatically move all current subscribers to the new list platform by the end of October, unless they opt out,” the list organizers write. More information will go out to current subscribers at some point.

From Strafford: infused cider. In Owen Campbell’s garden, writes John Freitag in The Herald, you’ll find Hatch chile peppers, tulsi (holy basil), perilla, chamomile, strawberries, rhubarb, lemon verbena, roses, hops, coriander, beets, and ginger. Campbell uses them for the ciders he makes for his Old City Farmentation, which he’s toted to various festivals around VT this year, as well as the Woodstock and Chelsea farmers markets. He uses only apples he’s picked by hand from his own and others’ trees; he began farming about a decade ago, when his grandmother, Kay Campbell, offered him the use of an acre of her 118-acre farm. Freitag tells the whole story.

SPONSORED: Work for the Arts! Interested in a career in the arts? The Hop is hiring creative, collaborative individuals for full and part-time positions in event management, facilities and communications. Join a fun team! Learn more and apply at the burgundy link or here. Sponsored by the Hopkins Center for the Arts.

For Upper Valley pet owners, “Even a basic exam and vaccinations can be unaffordable.” That’s RayLynn Bradigan, executive director of the Upper Valley Humane Society, talking to Kelly Burch in the Valley News. Those costs, driven by rising charges from vendors and, Burch writes, by the increasing takeover of the industry by private equity, are forcing some people to forego care for their pets, local clinics to try to cut costs, and humane societies and other nonprofits to try to boost their ability to offer low-cost care. Even the Haven, Burch writes, is holding quarterly exams for clients’ pets with volunteers from Sugar River Animal Hospital in Grantham.

At Dartmouth, Rauner Library adds a 1300 Magna Carta to its collection. It was created just not that long after the original royal charter of rights was sealed by King John of England, and the rare books and documents library’s special collections head, Jay Satterfield, tells The Dartmouth’s Lasya Sangana that the library bought it from a dealer (as opposed, say, to last year’s arrival of a first edition of the Federalist Papers, which was a gift). At the link, Sangana talks to Satterfield about the Rauner’s eclectic collection, dictated in part by curriculum needs, by endowments (there’s one solely for polar research), and by what’s for sale. And hey, if you’ve got some original Dante…

In Grafton, thanks to Angus Gorman, there’s a 10-mile network of nordic trails you could use “for your entire life, all the time, and not give a dime.” Gorman, who chairs the town planning board, began working on the Isinglass trails—which cross his own and other private landowners’ land, as well as NH Forest Society lands—four years ago, writes Liz Sauchelli in the VN. Gorman laid them out—“My trails are a full spectrum of ability level, to the point far beyond what you would ever encounter at a Nordic center in difficulty,” he says—and he and volunteers maintain and groom them for skiing. Sauchelli describes how they came about, and what it takes.

The Monday Jigsaw: Fenway Park, 1912. “Our puzzle is the park five months after it opened, photographed from the grandstand on September 28, 1912,” writes Cam Cross on his Curioustorian blog. “The wall is not green. It is a billboard, twenty-odd advertisers painted edge to edge…” Cam’s been going to games there since the mid-’70s, most recently for the wild card series with the Yankees (the Sox lost that game 3-2 on their way to a complete shutout), and has a fine photo of Fenway these days, from behind home plate.

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

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HEADS UP
At the Top of the Hop, Robert MacFarlane talks about Is a River Alive? The great British outdoors and nature writer talks about “what flows from the recognition of rivers as having lives, deaths and rights. By means of story and reportage as well as history, [his lecture] will trace some of the complex, contested histories of de-damming and river-rights movements.” 5:30 pm.

In Woodstock, The Maltese Falcon. Pentangle Arts screens John Huston’s landmark 1941 Humphrey Bogart film, a noir masterpiece, with Bogart as Sam Spade trying to find his way through a web of lies to a bird—and laying the groundwork for Bogart’s future classics and Sydney Greenstreet’s career as a character actor (often paired with Peter Lorre, who also stars in the film, along with Mary Astor). 6 pm at Woodstock Town Hall Theatre.

At the Strafford Library, Bethel’s Mary Anderson reads from and talks about Meeting Mary Badass: Healing Dissociation Through Adventuring. The first woman to through-hike the AT in winter got her start in her 60s, hiking the Continental Divide Trail. She has also hiked, biked, skied and paddled the entire length of Vermont, including skiing the Catamount Trail in one winter, and hiked some 22,000 miles in all. She’ll talk about it all at 6:30 pm. No link.

And for today...

Well-known Stockbridge-based musician Bow Thayer has a new album out, Ninevah, which pays tribute, among other things, to Lake Ninevah, down in Mt. Holly, VT. Here’s the song that does it: “Fireflies.”

See you tomorrow.

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