GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
I know! But don't get used to it. It'll be a fantastic day to be outside, once the fog and clouds go away: There's high pressure and dry air aloft, and we're getting into the low or mid 70s today, with plenty of sunshine and calm winds for much of the day. Clouds return tonight ahead of a cold front making its way from the west that'll bring us a chance of rain by daybreak. More tomorrow.All around us, prepping for winter...
Like this porcupine in Norwich that photographer Lisa Lacasse noticed in an apple tree. "I’ve seen deer on hind legs grabbing an apple and bears will often visit apple orchards," she writes, "but I didn’t realize that porcupines love them too!" They do... especially as they're trying to fatten up for winter.
Meanwhile, up around Newbury, Ian Clark paid what was likely his last visit to the loon families he followed all summer. One has already left, he writes, probably to another pond where they'll stay until the ice starts forming—though he did find a great blue heron warming up for the day. At another pond, lower in altitude and warmer, he found an adult already changing into winter colors, and a chick in winter plumage and able to get airborne... though its landings could use some practice.
The Bradford-based weekly changed hands last weekend, writes Anne Wallace Allen in
Seven Days
, when Michelle Sherburne and her husband, Rodney, took over the paper from former owner Connie Sanville. Sherburne started working at the paper, which has 2,500 print and 550 online subscribers, out of high school. Sherburne decided to buy it after a pair of brothers from MA and TN expressed interest in taking it over. "If you’re going to have a local paper, you have to have local people running it,” she says. “Otherwise it’s a newsletter full of canned copy.”
At opposite ends of town, WRJ moves to add housing.
For one thing, the Selectboard Tuesday night approved a zoning change for 32 acres across from the VA that would allow for multi-unit residential development, reports Ray Couture in the Valley News. That's the land that has all those hotels on it; its current zoning only allows for "light industrial and commercial use," and the change has the support of groups in town hoping to boost workforce housing.
Meanwhile, down by the bridge to West Leb, the development of Prospect Street will continue with a 42-unit affordable housing project, reports Rose Terami in the VN. Known as Riverwalk, the project will be put up by DEW Construction and The Braverman Co. (DEW also is responsible for the Prospect St. building that houses state offices and the neighboring commercial building); once the housing project's complete, ownership will shift to affordable housing developers Twin Pines Housing and Evernorth.
"Over the course of two decades, small shifts in Hartford's land-use regulations have had an outsize impact," writes Rachel Hellman in
Seven Days
. Loosening restrictions on parking requirements, building size, and downtown growth have all contributed to boosting housing. Other towns around VT are taking note, Allen writes. Fueled by the housing crisis, towns that for decades have resisted change are moving to allow compact downtown development and make it easier to approve duplexes, triplexes and ADUs.
It took Dartmouth 12 years to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 27 percent, the
VN
's Frances Mize tells Vermont Public's Mary Engisch, leaving scant time to reach the 50-percent-reduction goal it's set for 2025. Engisch caught up with Mize to talk about the college's hopes of tapping geothermal energy for heating and cooling. Dartmouth is "getting the hard press" to reduce emissions, Mize says, recounting its failed effort to switch to biomass. It's all "just a testament, from what I've seen in my reporting, to how complex it is for an institution to decarbonize," she adds.
That's the question for Kieran Campion, whose new subterranean restaurant, bar, and performance venue just opened in Hanover—it's underneath Still North Books & Bar and My Brigadeiro. "It's the coolest building in town," Campion says. Though lots of thought has gone into the space, the venture is also takeout-forward: "We think that takeout is not going away," Campion says. As for what he would eat... well, let's just say that one of the kitchen's features is a Henny Penny pressure-fryer that can crisp up the parts from eight chickens in 15 minutes.
Satirist Andy Borowitz will take the stage at the Hop next Tuesday (
this morning), and in the
VN
, Alex Hanson talks to Borowitz about his new book,
Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber
; the challenges of writing about politics that "renders even the best-educated among us capable of voting like dopes"; and why small-town democracy as practiced in places like Hanover—Borowitz and his wife, journalist and author Olivia Gentile, moved there during the pandemic—offers an antidote.
In this week's Enthusiasms, the Norwich Bookstore's Carin Pratt heartily recommends
Act of Oblivion
, Robert Harris's tale of Cols. Willam Goffe and Edward Whalley, who signed the death warrant for King Charles I in 1649 and, 11 years later, fled once the Royalists regained power. Pursued by "the megalomaniacal [but fictional] Richard Nayler, clerk to the Privy Council," they eventually wound up in New Haven, hiding with the help of sympathizers. Harris juxtaposes their story with the events that led to their flight.
Granite Geek
’s David Brooks calls it “crazy-sounding,” but as the planet continues to heat up, maybe it’s worth a shot. A Plymouth State prof is spearheading a project to install 235 upward-facing mirrors in a large field and measure to see if, yes, reflecting the sun back into space will have a cooling effect on the ground, at least at a local level. To have any large-scale impact, mirrors would need to cover 10 percent of the earth—which isn’t feasible. But as one of many similar heat-reflection efforts, it might make a difference.
One VT county back to "high" Covid levels, according to CDC. Bennington County's rate is the first time a county in the state has hit that mark since June, reports Erin Petenko in VTDigger. Rutland County is at "medium," while the rest of VT still is "low." Overall, the state yesterday reported 638 cases in the past week, compared to 550 cases the week before, with 45 hospital admissions for Covid in the past week, down from 52 the week before.“Human towers” in Catalonia are as incredible as they sound. Maybe your childhood “human pyramids” were impressive, but did they include dozens of your fellow countrymen and reach 43 feet high? Every two years, write WaPo’s Annabelle Timsit and Morgan Coates, Catalans pack a stadium to participate in the centuries-old tradition of scaffolding themselves upward into what they call “castells.” A typical castell, starting with a dense, wide base of support on the ground, rises six to ten levels, finally scaled and summited by the smallest on the team: a child. The photos are something else. (Gift link, no paywall.)The Thursday Vordle. With a word from Tuesday's Daybreak.
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Today at 5:30 pm, Dartmouth's Rockefeller Center brings in former NH Secretary of State Bill Gardner, who spent nearly five decades in the post—the youngest ever to hold it when he was elected in 1976, and the longest to serve in the office when he retired after nearly five decades. He and government prof and state Rep. Russell Muirhead will hold a conversation on "Trusting Our Elections: Making Democracy Work Amid Election Deniers, Misinformation, and Stolen Election Conspiracies." In-person in Rockefeller Center 003 as well as livestreamed.
At 7 this evening, Hop Film presents From Cairo, Egyptian filmmaker Hala Galal's documentary about two women carving out space for themselves in Cairo—all while Galal has to confront her own challenges and fears as a working single woman in the city. Galal will be at the screening to present it.
"In Sirocco," says renowned cellist and innovator Abel Sellaocoe, "we connect folk traditions of the world through the idea of a wind that travels from the Sahara across Southern Europe." This evening at 7:30, you get to hear what that sounds like, as the equally innovative group of musicians and artists known as the Manchester Collective arrive on the Spaulding Auditorium stage at the Hop with Sellaocoe and the other members of his band, Chesaba: Sidiki Dembélé and Alan Keary, for "Sirocco." Selaocoe's original compositions for solo cello, along with Stravinsky and Haydn, and folk music from Denmark, Mali, Ivory Coast and South Africa. I know there's no music this week in Daybreak, but if you're looking for a fix, check out the Sirocco arrangement of the old Norwegian tune, "Old Reinlender."
And at your leisure, check out JAM's highlights for the week, which include UNH doctoral candidate Dana Green's talk on the story of the remarkable Shaw Monument at the Saint-Gaudens Historical Site in Cornish; NYT writer Karen Crouse back in 2018 at the Norwich Bookstore, talking about her book on why she believed the town was able to produce an outsized number of Olympic athletes; this summer's Dan & the Dinosaurs show on Here in the Valley's Wonder Stage of Wilder; and influential federal Appeals Court Judge Laurence Silberman's talk at Dartmouth (two weeks before his death last Sunday) on free speech and the threats it faces.
See you tomorrow.
The Hiking Close to Home Archives. A list of hikes around the Upper Valley, some easy, some more difficult, compiled by the Upper Valley Trails Alliance. It grows every week.
The Enthusiasms Archives. A list of book recommendations by Daybreak's rotating crew of local booksellers, writers, and librarians who think you should read. this. book. now!
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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