GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Heads Up: No Daybreak tomorrow. Back with CoffeeBreak on Wednesday morning.
Sunny, warm. We’re back to a few days of warmer-than-normal conditions on the back of air moving in from the south, and today we’re looking at mostly sunny skies, highs in the mid 70s with lows tonight in the mid 50s. However! There’s a series of weak cold fronts moving in from the west, bringing with them a chance of showers that may start up overnight, and could last (off and on) for several days. Says the weather service: “It`s not really going to put a dent in anything, but it should at least slow the deepening drought conditions.”
Views. One inspiring, one sobering.
Here’s the sweeping autumn view from atop Gile Mountain in Norwich on Saturday, after Julia Noreika and colleagues hiked up following a class at DHMC: “What an incredible view after being inside all day,” she writes.
And here’s what the drought’s done to Gulf Stream in Woodstock, by Pomfret Road. “It’s always been a favorite spot for the grandkids to throw rocks into the water,” writes Dawn Niles. “Now, lots of rocks. Just no water.”
WRJ’s Amtrak platform gets an upgrade. In a new Daybreak photo essay, Eric Francis reports on the $1.8 million project to replace the old platform with a new, 300-foot-long concrete version—”a long-overdue refresh of the passenger platform, which had been a featureless beach of asphalt since 1973,” Eric writes. The platform will be higher, making it easier to step onto the Vermonter on its twice-a-day stop at the station, though mobility-impaired passengers will still need a lift. “The new concrete is going to create a much better loading surface,” says the project’s supervisor. At the link, Eric details the project, with plenty of photos.
And while we’re on the subject, here’s Steve Taylor’s look back in the Valley News at the sunset of the steam-train era in WRJ—the last one to pass through was Central Vermont engine number 6208 in 1957, one of the “behemoths that had powered the crack passenger run between Washington and Montreal since before World War II…. Disappearance of steam locomotives would change White River Junction and West Lebanon like nothing until the arrival of the interstate highways in the 1960s.” Taylor describes what happened next.
Sweetland Farm car theft mystery solved, party invite accepted. Between those two parts of the headline is a poignant story from John Lippman in the VN. Back on Sept. 14, the Norwich farm’s store manager, Shelagh Harvard, discovered her car had been taken in the middle of the night. Surveillance footage showed an elderly man in what appeared to be pajamas shuffling about the property (here via the VT State Police). Harvard’s uncle, renowned mountaineer Andy Harvard, suffered from Alzheimer’s, and she thought she recognized the signs of dementia. She put the word out and on Thursday, got a call… Lippman describes events, and the lovely result.
SPONSORED: Join Willing Hands for Our Fall Open House. You’re invited to celebrate a year of impact with Willing Hands at our annual Fall Open House! Join us this Thursday, Sept. 25, from 4:00 to 6:00 at our Norwich facility. Tour our warehouse, garden, and grounds, and meet our team. Enjoy refreshments, connect with the community, and learn all about our volunteer-powered programs making a big impact on food insecurity in the Upper Valley. Learn more and RSVP at the burgundy link or here. Sponsored by Willing Hands.
Chaotic and speedy vs. disciplined and controlled. That’s Northern Woodlands’ Jack Saul describing the contrasting flights of sulphur butterflies and dragonflies in this autumnal equinox (today, 2:19 pm) “This Week in the Woods”. Dragonflies in particular are remarkable: “they can fly upside down, backwards, and sideways; stop and hover; and change directions on a dime”; as a result, “researchers estimate that they succeed in 95 percent of their attempts to catch prey.” Also out there this third week of September: eyelash cup fungi on rotting wood.
What it takes to screen first-run movies in a small-town theater. For decades, Pentangle Arts has been presenting first-run films at the Woodstock Town Hall Theatre most weekends. Now it’s cutting back, and its board is “engaged in ongoing discussions about the future of cinema screenings” there, writes Tom Ayres in the VT Standard. The big challenge with first-runs, explains Pentangle director Deborah Greene, “is that if you want one on an opening weekend, you often have to agree to screen the film for up to an entire month….We just don’t have the audience for that. You’re immediately going to lose a lot of money.” Ayres dives into the challenges and alternatives.
Looking around the “re-imagined” Hop. If you were at the Telluride film festival recently, you’ve already gotten a taste, but the official opening isn’t until next month. In the meantime, the alumni office has a photographic tour of the various open spaces, practice and recital halls, theater spaces, and more.
In S. Royalton, a longtime principal goes back to teaching. Doug Heavisides started out teaching English at Hartford High, then moved on to become director of the Hartford Area Career and Technology Center for nearly a decade, and then principal of The Wilder School, the district’s venue for students with autism or severe behavioral challenges. But now, he’s back teaching English at White River Valley High. In the VN, Lukas Dunford profiles both the man everyone who knows him refers to as H and his voyage from self-described “handful” growing up in Hartford to challenger of educational orthodoxies to empathetic, dependable—and surprise-filled—school presence.
In Springfield, VT, police work with local agencies to “lower the potential badness of what’s going on.” You wouldn’t expect to find a police chief hanging drywall as part of his job, but as VT Public’s Liam Elder-Connors explains, he found Jeffrey Burnham helping rehab an apartment to make it inhabitable for a single parent with five kids who was about to be evicted from another apartment. It’s part of an effort in Springfield and other towns to create what’s called a “situation table” to coordinate responses to individuals and families who face multiple challenges—drug use, mental illness, potential loss of housing—before they spiral. He looks at how it’s going.
In Nashua, NH, country club shooting takes one life, injures two. Police arrested a former club employee Saturday night, after he allegedly opened fire, killing a 59-year-old Nashua resident who was trying to shield his family and sending two others to the hospital, one in critical condition. Four others, in the club’s restaurant or at a wedding down the hall, were injured “during the chaos that followed,” report the Union Leader’s Zachary Marano and Dean Shalhoup. At a press conference yesterday with NH AG John Formella, Nashua Police Chief Kevin Rourke,said officers found the suspect, later identified as Hunter Nadeau, 23, in a neighborhood near the country club.
Here’s a drought silver lining: Low Champlain lake levels yield intriguing artifacts at Sand Bar State Park. Among other things, reports Seven Days video journalist Eva Sollberger in her latest episode of “Stuck in Vermont”, archeologists recently found pottery and other items dating back 1,000 to 1,400 years. An earlier dig at the site had found stone flakes, like flint and quartzite, that came from Pennsylvania, Maine and Northern Labrador in Canada, “indicating that the Indigenous residents were trading and connecting with people from far-off places.” Sollberger spends time with the UVM crew as they uncover what’s there before it becomes a stormwater basin.
The Monday jigsaw: Sachem Village circa 1946. What’s now a single development for grad students and their families out near Campion Rink began in two spots as post-war housing. One was near the Thayer School on the Dartmouth campus, the other by Hanover High, and the Norwich Historical Society’s Cam Cross has a jigsaw of an aerial view of the latter at the link—as well as other aerial views, a brief history, and a video that includes both housing developments in 1946, all at his Curioustorian blog page.
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from Friday’s Daybreak.
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HEADS UP
Jazz guitar concert in West Leb. Upper Valley Music Center teacher Draa Hobbs and West Coast guitarist John Stowell join forces for a 1 pm concert today at the Kilton Library.
And since there’s no Daybreak tomorrow, you might want to know about two events: at 4:30 pm tomorrow, the Etna Library hosts an all-ages talk, story-hour, and garden creation focused on the monarch butterfly migration; and at 7 pm, the Norwich Bookstore hosts Boston-based Zen teacher Julie Seido Nelson talking about her new book, Practicing Safe Zen.
And for today...
Acoustic guitarist Diego Barber and German composer and vocalist Theo Bleckmann with Scarlatti’s ethereal Sonata in B Minor.
, Scarlatti Sonata in B Minor Kk. 87 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hogATS-yCY8
See you tomorrow.
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