Daybreak Monday, 3/30/26

Warm, mix of clouds and sun. There’s a warm front in place, and we will likely see temps rising into the low 60s today, with isolated spots in the lower Connecticut River Valley potentially reaching 70. Winds today are from the southwest, and things could get gusty this afternoon. Lows in the mid 40s tonight.

A jolt of color on a gray(ish) morning. Meet Eddie the peacock, who lives alongside the geese, ducks, turkeys, chickens, and pair of pea hens at Lisa Silbert’s in Hanover.

Fire breaks out at WRJ homeless encampment. Yesterday evening at around 6, a fire of suspicious origin broke out in an abandoned encampment beneath the Urban Bridge, which spans the White River near the Bugbee Senior Center. The fire itself, reports Eric Francis for Daybreak, “was confined to just one of the large piles of soiled tents, clothing, mattresses and other debris”; firefighters from Hartford and Hanover lowered a small hose designed for fighting wildfires down from a pumper truck on the deck of the Urban Bridge to extinguish the flames. Had it remained unchecked, they said, it could easily have spread. Eric’s story and photos at the link.

Coming soon to Hanover: A big debate about parking. That’s because the town is mulling a $14.9 million project to fix sewers and sidewalks and redesign the three blocks of South Main Street that run from Wheelock to Dorrance Place, reports the Valley News’s Sofia Langlois. The Molly’s/Town Hall side would lose its diagonal spaces and shift to parallel parking, while the east side would retain diagonal spots but with new engineering standards. In all, Langlois writes, the town would lose 28 on-street slots. Not surprisingly, given the town’s dismal parking reputation, business owners are leery. The proposal is due to come up for a vote at Town Meeting in 2028.

A young Bethel grad’s trip to an Oscar. Harrison Allen grew up in town, went to Whitcomb High (it later merged with Royalton), and earlier this month, won an Oscar as co-executive producer on The Singers, which tied for Best Live Action Short Film. In The Herald, he talks to Isabel Dreher about what it took to get there, including the challenges that people who don’t come from money face—”if you have a full time job because you’ve got to pay rent, you either are working overtime to do the thing you’re passionate about, or it just becomes not important, and you’re a barista”—and about the film: “Not just a good story, but a good story behind the story,” says Allen.

Nearly 40 years after they first met, Claremont friends open café. That first encounter, writes Marion Umpleby in the VN, came when Debbie Richards was 12 and Sandra Lefebvre was running Dusty’s Cafe. They joined forces again for a food truck that closed a couple of years ago and now they’ve opened Cardinal Cafe: “We figured we’d do one last fun adventure together,” Richards tells Umpleby. Its got classic diner fare, Stevens High-themed decor, and a full-on Granite State motto: “Eat Well or Die.” Umpleby checks in with diners—and tells the story of how the café “coincides with a period of newfound sobriety” for Richards.

Keeping the tradition of making wooden water pipes alive. Back in the decades before and after the start of the 20th century, blacksmiths Corydon and Orien Dunn bored logs to carry water in towns, on farms, and wherever pipes were needed. “Cedar and hemlock — kept wet — will last a long time,” Brian Lampman tells Kelly J. Sullivan in the North Star Monthly. Lampman married into the Dunn family, and he and his wife Eileen keep the tradition alive at the Tunbridge Fair each September. They use 8-foot logs and original tools—”When you’re done, it looks like a large hollowed-out pencil,” says Lampman. Sullivan describes the process and what it’s like finding old pump logs.

Lyme’s efforts to clean up properties continue after Town Meeting vote rejects funds. You might remember that earlier this month, voters nixed a $100K appropriation for cleaning up property on Dorchester Road owned by Jed Smith and his mother, Martha. “I left the meeting that day having some faith that there’s still some people around that really do care ,” Jed Smith tells the VN’s Clare Shanahan. The Smiths have been battling the town for years to clean up the property at their own pace—and to determine what’s junk and what’s not. Shanahan details the fight and what’s next, including, potentially, use of a drone to survey the sites.

In VT debate over land-use law overhaul, a “rural-urban” divide. Last week, the VT Senate passed a measure to delay implementing Act 181, the sprawling 2024 law that created new regs to buttress sensitive ecosystems. That move came in the wake of a Tuesday protest by rural landowners contending that Act 181’s regs “effectively undermine personal property rights,” writes Carly Berlin in VTDigger. “We must ask ourselves…are we protecting Vermont’s lands, or pricing Vermonters out of it?” says one GOP senator. Responds Hartford state Sen. Becca White: “Future generations may not have the same ecosystems that we have access to because of development.” Berlin describes where things stand amid the legislative maneuvering.

The Monday Jigsaw: historic Dartmouth baseball. It’s a colorized version of the 1906 team on Memorial Field taken looking toward E. Wheelock, writes the Norwich Historical Society’s Cam Cross, “before the current football stadium and Red Rolfe Field were built.” The original photo and others are on his Curioustorian blog.

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

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HEADS UP
Hop Film screens Assembly. Directed and produced by Rashaad Newsome and Johnny Symons, the film at its heart tells the story of the build-up to Newsome’s 2022 exhibition of the same name at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, which brought together video projections, holograms, sculptures, collages, music, dance, and African fractal patterns to celebrate Black and queer culture. The film, writes the Hop, “breaks new ground by centering an AI character, Being, as a fully realized entity with a rich emotional arc.” Newsome, a visiting artist at Dartmouth, will be on hand with Symons afterward to talk about it all. 7 pm in the Loew.

And for today...

Guitarist Geordie Lynd, Patti Casey on whistle, and Colin McCaffrey on fiddle at Seven Stars Arts a couple of Fridays ago for their sold-out St. Paddy’s Day Special. That’s co-host Jim Rooney over on the side in Chad Finer’s video of “Mary and the Soldier.” You can check the whole concert out here and here.

See you tomorrow.

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