GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Clouds moving in. Then snow overnight. Things will warm up a bit today as a low pressure system approaches from Lake Ontario and winds shift to come from the south: We'll head from the low teens first thing this morning up to a bit above 30 by early afternoon—while this morning's sunny skies cloud over. That low pressure's moving fast: It's forecast to cross VT and NH into the Gulf of Maine in about 12 hours starting tonight, and will dump from 2-5 inches, highest amounts in the mountains.
And some more winged color. This time, a purple finch. Leb's Liane Avery writes, "Although it is New Hampshire's state bird and I've lived about 30 of my years here in NH, I don't think I've ever seen one in person until last week, when two pairs of male and female purple finches came to visit our feeder." She also discovered that the purple finch is NH's state bird in part because in 1957 Hanover State Rep. Robert Monahan, a forester at Dartmouth, crafted the bill naming it—which, after some legislative maneuvering, beat out another rep's effort to name the "New Hampshire Hen." More on that here.Longtime Rivendell Academy head steps down amid district turmoil. Keri Gelenian held the job for 14 years, until Monday. As rumors began circulating that the school board had declined to renew his contract, reports the Valley News's Christina Dolan, parents and teachers at a packed Feb. 6 district school board meeting told members that forcing him out “would dissolve the glue that holds this community together," in the words of one teacher. The bi-state district has been roiled by a plan to close one of its elementary schools; teachers and staff "report low morale and a lack of responsive leadership," Dolan writes."Thank you for your patience": DHMC emergency room stretched thin. Dartmouth Health has put out an unusual video from CEO and president Joanne Conroy. Facing staffing challenges and a surge in respiratory illnesses, the hospital's emergency department, like others in New England, is seeing overcrowding, she says. While people in urgent need of care—heart attack victims, say—will get it quickly, others will take longer. “If you must be admitted to the hospital, there are waits, sometimes for up to 24 hours, for inpatient beds,” she says in the video. And adds that the hospital's working on it.As Chelsea primary care doc moves on, some former patients wonder where to turn. The case of Laura Barber, who was fired from her job at the Chelsea Health Center—part of Gifford Health Care—in December, offers a starting point for Nicola Smith in the VN to look at rural primary care in general. Barber's landed at Little Rivers Health Care in Bradford and some patients will follow her there, though it's a schlep. There's a shortage of docs, nurses, and support staff in rural NH and VT, Smith writes, in part because primary care doesn't pay as well as specialties, in part because other issues—cost of living, child care—are keeping younger doctors away.SPONSORED: Human trafficking is on the rise in New Hampshire and across New England. Learn how you can help at a one-day educational conference, sponsored by Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital, on Saturday, March 30. Free to healthcare providers, educators, social workers, first responders, and anyone working with youth. Register at the burgundy link or here. Sponsored by APD.As White River Indie Film festival debuts, an up-by-the-bootstraps local film kicks things off. Custodian, which premieres tonight at the Briggs in WRJ, was made on a shoestring by Loren David Howard—guitarist for the band Chodus and an apprentice editor at Walpole's Florentine Films, home of Ken Burns. In the VN, Alex Hanson writes, "As exciting as WRIF might be, the best part of the festival is the encouragement it offers to up-and-coming filmmakers"—in this case, the support and $1K it gave Howard after he won last year's "pitchfest." Local filmmaking runs on "DIY energy," Hanson notes.What you'll find after the Fairbanks Museum's new annex opens on Saturday. It's taken over eight years and $7 million, but then, the three-level, 6,000-square-foot Tang Science Annex "represents the largest expansion of the museum since its founding" in 1889, writes Ken Picard in Seven Days. Fittingly, it will focus on the two fields for which the Fairbanks is best known: astronomy and meteorology. With exhibits that include illustrations by Norwich's David Macaulay, it's the museum's bid to match the hands-on experience at the Montshire and ECHO Leahy Center: "We wanted to have that same level of excellence for what we do," the museum's Anna Rubin tells Picard.SPONSORED: Northern Woodlands seeks its next executive director. The Center for Northern Woodlands Education, a voice for forest stewardship in the Northeast, is looking for the right candidate to succeed our current executive director, who will step down later this year. We publish the popular quarterly magazine Northern Woodlands, as well as "The Outside Story" weekly ecology series and special publications. Our office is located in Lyme. For more information, please see the full job posting at the title link or here. Sponsored by the Center for Northern Woodlands Education.Annals of Upper Valley fraud. There were developments in two federal cases involving fraud against Upper Valley firms this week.
On Monday, Chelsea Sunn of Hartford was sentenced to two years of probation and payment of $75K restitution after she pled guilty to falsely inflating the hours she worked for Blakeman's Towing and Recovery in Tunbridge. "This caused Blakeman’s to pay Sunn tens of thousands of dollars beyond her authorized compensation," the US Atty's Office for Vermont said in a press release. Sunn faced up to 20 years in prison, but prosecutors recommended against prison time, the VN reports.
Meanwhile, New Hampshire's US Attorney on Tuesday announced that Roberto Montano, who is Guatemalan, pleaded guilty in federal court to embezzling $10 million from two teak forestry projects in Guatemala run by Lebanon-based Global Forest Partners. The guilty plea caps an investigation that began in 2014 and eventually came to involve the FBI.
Current population figures are unknown, Amanda Gokee writes in the
Boston Globe
(sorry, paywall), but data from trappers collected by NH Fish & Game
in 2021 found sharply lower fisher numbers than in 1992. So UNH scientists have set out to figure out what's going on, since fishers "are embedded in the middle of the food web and reveal information about carnivores in the ecosystem," Gokee writes. One theory: rodenticides, which have been found in fishers in heavily populated southeastern NH.
275 pond hockey teams, 26 rinks, "the most fun weekend of the year"—and it's getting harder to pull off. About 2,200 players arrive in Meredith, NH each February for the Pond Hockey Classic. Only this year, it was moved from Lake Winnipesaukee because the ice wasn't thick enough. The AP's Nick Perry talked to players about warming winters—and the lure of hockey on lakes and ponds. "It's how [older players] grew up," says founder Scott Crowder. "They’d go down to the local park and pond, and strap on their skates and play all afternoon. Anybody that’s ever laced up a pair of skates, having the opportunity to skate outside just pulls at the heartstrings." Video of the tournament here.VT House passes Act 127 fix. Local school leaders remain unhappy. Like, really unhappy. The new legislation, H.850, is based in part on the perception that districts used the 5 percent tax-rate cap in Act 127 to boost their budgets. At a hearing Monday, Norwich State Rep. Rebecca Holcombe told colleagues that some of those increases came from state mandates and programs "that school boards did not get to vote on...and that we’re now about to punish them for." School officials, writes VTDigger's Kevin O'Connor, have bombarded legislators. Said one: "Trust that has been long-established with voters is now at risk." H.850 now goes to the Senate, where it may face amendments.How VT school funding got to this mess... and where it may be going. One of the big open questions when Vermonters get their chance to vote on school budgets is the political impact of all this turmoil. In a Seven Days piece exploring how Vermont got here, Kevin McCallum and Alison Novak end with one voter's comment last week to Essex Junction school board members: "I came here tonight ... to say that when I vote no for the school budget, it is not so much to be negative about your efforts, but to send a message to the legislature that the direction we're going in has to change.""I look back to when I grew up. There was rule of law. There was respect for each other. Where did it go?" That was a Morristown, VT resident at a forum on crime last month. And as residents of Chelsea and other towns know, it's not just an issue in Morristown. In Seven Days, Rachel Hellman writes that the sense "that public safety is eroding"—stoked by everything from a farmstand break-in to "execution-style murders in Eden and Troy"—is gaining political traction in VT. Stats can be hard to find, and sometimes contradict public perception. Hellman explores the issue and lawmakers' response.Mountains, mushrooms, moss, flowers, petroglyphs, historic park buildings, wildlife, trees. That’s a partial list of the subjects Rebecca Latson photographs in US national parks. “Anything and everything—whatever captures my eye and interest,” she tells PetaPixel’s Matt Growcoot. These are splendid pictures of resplendent landscapes: rainbow in the skies over Bryce, the alligatored surface of Badwater Basin in Death Valley, towering tree trunks inside Glacier Park Lodge. Latson has been to nearly half of the 63 national parks, and while she's enjoyed every one, she has favorites, each “so unique and filled with amazing photo ops, geology, and history.” Helpful tips at the end.The Thursday Vordle. With a word from yesterday's Daybreak.
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If you're at all into the art, craft, science, and engineering of building better and more sustainable buildings, there's a group of builders, architects, tradespeople, and construction professionals who meet to talk about it all every third Thursday at 5 pm at Salt Hill Pub in Lebanon. Today, BS & Beer Upper Valley ("BS" stands for "Building Science"—plus, well, you know) will be joined by Hanover High grad Jacob Deva Racusin, a writer, thinker, consultant, and builder focused on decarbonization of the built environment.
Here we are! Today's the day the White River Indie Film Festival gets going in earnest with a 6 pm Pitchfest at the Briggs Opera House—a chance for local filmmakers and media artists to get attention and institutional support for their project. That'll be followed at 8 by a screening of Custodian, the film by last year's winner, Loren Howard. And that will be followed by three more days of films by emerging and established filmmakers, workshops and master classes, discussions and talkbacks, an opening gala tomorrow at 5 at the Briggs, a Vampire Dance Party Saturday night at JAM, and a whole lot more. Schedule at the link above: click into any event to learn more about it.
And the Rumney Sessions continue at Fable Farm in Barnard this evening at 6 with Andrew Brozek and Eli Smith of Ramblers & Co., with a night of bluegrass, old country, and Americana.
Also at 6, Sustainable Woodstock and Pentangle Arts will host a screening in the Woodstock Town Hall Theater of River, Jennifer Peedom and Joseph Nizeti visually sumptuous tour of humankind's relationship to rivers on six continents. Narrated by Willem Dafoe, scored by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, co-written by Peedom and Robert MacFarlane (who also co-wrote Peedom's 2017 Mountain), the film looks at humans' use and abuse of rivers in a way that is "by turns celebratory, cautionary, and ultimately hopeful that we are beginning to understand rivers in all their complexity and fragility."
At 6:30 pm, the Norwich Historical Society continues its series of online talks with Windsor/Orange County forester AJ Follensbee, the Norwich Public Library, and members of the town's conservation commission, all focused on trees: the library's project last year to identify "Big Trees" around town, Follensbee on how to date trees and assess their health, and more. Register (and they wouldn't turn down a contribution) for the Zoom link.
This evening at 7, the Norwich Bookstore hosts Hartland (and Saratoga Springs) writer and independent scholar Amy Godine, talking about her new book, The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier. It tells the mostly forgotten story of Timbuctoo, a project launched in the 1840s when Gerrit Smith, a New York land baron and antislavery reformer, gave 120,000 acres in the Adirondacks to several thousand Black men from New York—in part as a way to give them the vote, since Black men could vote only if they owned land. Godine will talk about that history—and about the project's ties to Vermont, from Vermonters who supported it to Black Adirondack pioneers who eventually moved to the state. Artful's Susan Apel talked to Godine ahead of time about the book and the history she uncovered.
And anytime, you can check out JAM's highlights for this week: a conversation between Dartmouth profs Iyabo Kwayana and Misty De Berry about the "Afrofuturist sci-fi punk musical" film Neptune Frost, which premiered at Cannes and showed at WRIF in 2022; Burlington, VT playwright and poet isaiah a. hines at JAGFest 4.0 in 2020 with his piece (Re)Surface: A Poetics of Fish/Flesh; and a conversation after last year's WRIF showing of Alain Gomis' "immersive" portrait of Thelonius Monk, Rewind and Play, with JAM board member Tamara Waraschinski, Coast Jazz's Taylor Ho Bynum, the Hood's Alisa Swindell, Lechelle Gray of the Creative Discourse Group, and JAM's Jordyn Fitch.
And to bring us into the day...
We'll turn to New Orleans' Leyla McCalla, the formally trained Haitian-American cellist who was once part of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Only this time,
—a song she felt compelled to record ever since she first heard it and its refrain, “you can’t please everybody," a couple of years ago. "The heaviness of the things we carry—sometimes with pride and sometimes with shame—is something that has weighed on my mind these past few years," she says.
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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