GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Sunny, quiet. Today will be a bit cooler than yesterday (ahead of a coming Friday-Saturday warmup), with highs around the freezing mark. Modest winds from the west, and with clear skies, we’ll be down in the single digits overnight.
George. Remember Ted Levin’s post last week about the barred owl(s) he’s named George? Well, photographer Jim Block spent a few hours last weekend photographing him/her, and George leads Jim’s latest blog post with a really excellent series of portraits—followed by a pine siskin and goldfinches on the wing. Also in the mix: some downright psychedelic photos of the Frost Lights at Dartmouth’s Winter Carnival, portraits of people working on Carnival’s ice sculptures (and of the sculptures themselves) and plenty more.
It’s time for Dear Daybreak! This week’s collection has just two items in it: Scribner Fauver’s beautiful shot of a Meriden sunrise filtered through an old apple tree; and Lyn Ujlaky’s essay on Titan, a 70-pound rescue dog of mixed ancestry and how he came to inhabit her household. He’d arrived at his foster home “a hot mess,” appearing out of the night mist infected with sores and completely hairless—and became a story of the “selfless work of others” and his own unbreakable determination, Lyn writes. If you’ve got a good Upper Valley anecdote or entertaining story or bit of local history, please use this form to pass it along or email me at [email protected].
Truck strikes rail trestle by Hartford Town Hall, displaces track. Police say yesterday’s noontime accident happened after a Casella Waste driver apparently forgot to lower a hoist mechanism on his truck, reports Eric Francis for Daybreak (with photos). It shut down Maple Street as crews cleared the truck and hydraulic fluid; the 71-year-old driver was taken to the hospital. As rail employees inspected the trestle and track, the force of the impact became clear: It bent an I-beam, sheared off bolts, and dislodged 50 feet of track. Crews worked into the night on repairs, but it won’t be clear until this morning whether they were enough to make the track safe for freight trains.
Pickup hits plow truck, shuts down I-91 South in Thetford. Yesterday morning, the VT State Police report, a VTrans truck was plowing in the highway’s passing lane when a Ford F150 driven by 20-year-old Ronin Moulton of Groton, VT rear-ended it. Moulton “suffered serious injuries” and was taken to DHMC. The plow truck driver, Thetford’s Angela Pero, and a passenger were unharmed, though the truck had “moderate rear damage.” Troopers also issued a ticket to a motorist who was recording the crash scene on a cellphone while driving past. The southbound lanes near the Thetford exit were closed for about two hours.
SPONSORED: Last chance to get the best discount on a Crossroad Farm CSA. Sign up by the end of February to take advantage of our 10 percent discount on CSA memberships. Shares can be redeemed at the farm in Post Mills and at the Norwich farmstand. They don't expire and can be used to purchase everything Crossroad carries, including hanging baskets, vegetable starts, fresh fruits and vegetables, and a wide assortment of products from other local farms. Learn more and act now at the burgundy link or here. Sponsored by Crossroad Farm.
The Tuckerbox comes to the big screen. Jim Zien’s new documentary about the downtown WRJ anchor, Meze on Main Street: A Love Story, will debut next week at the White River Indie Festival, and in Artful, Susan Apel tells its backstory. It grew out of a class Zien took at JAM—but far outgrew the course’s eight-week duration, as over four years Zien—with the help of JAM executive director and film editor Samantha Davidson Green, dove into Vural and Jackie Oktay’s stories, their families’ stories, the disastrous flood that almost destroyed the restaurant, the community’s response, and more. It screens a week from today at the Briggs—with a post-show lunch at Cappadocia.
For small maple syrup producers, Bethel collective is a lifeline. Cory Krieg, a sugarer and electrical engineer, launched the Vermont Maple Farmers Collective in the teeth of the pandemic to help small family farms that also sugar compete with the big players. It started with five farms and has grown to a dozen, including farms in Strafford, Sharon, and Randolph. All use wood to boil sap. In the Boston Globe last week (link goes to a PDF, so no paywall), Ann Trieger Kurland profiled Krieg and the platform he created, which sells the farms’ syrups direct to consumers. And word’s out: In an email, Krieg writes that more farms would like to join as demand grows.
SPONSORED: Be part of an evening of light and peace with the St. Thomas Choir’s Lenten Evensong. This special service features the U.S. premiere of the serene St. Martin’s Service by English composer Lucy Walker, one of the UK's most exciting emerging voices in choral composition. Join us for a glorious evening of choral music, scripture, and prayer as we journey deeper into Lent. Sponsored by St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Hanover.
Family of Corinth teen killed in crash shows up for driver’s arraignment—but he doesn’t. “Close to 20 family members of Kaylee Bailey, the 16-year-old Corinth teen killed in October while riding her dirt bike, stood in the snow outside Orange Superior Court in Chelsea early Wednesday morning wearing matching shirts with her picture on them,” writes the Valley News’s Alex Ebrahimi. They were there because Kyle Hunt, the man charged last week in Kaylee’s death, was due in court. But as it turned out, the state’s attorney had delayed things, waiting for more information—but no one, neither from the prosecutor’s office nor the state police, had notified the family.
NH will ask state Supreme Court to overturn its Claremont decisions. Those 1990 landmark cases established that the legislature “has a constitutional obligation to provide an ‘adequate’ public education by funding its schools,” writes Ethan DeWitt in NH Bulletin. But in a filing on Tuesday, he reports, the state AG’s office appeared to lay the groundwork “to argue that the amount the state funds its public schools is a political question for the Legislature and not one determined by the judicial branch or dictated by the constitution.” DeWitt lays out the state’s arguments—and how, if accepted, they would “diminish the state’s financial obligations to public schools.”
Pressing matters. This week, Seven Days came out with its first full issue devoted to Vermont media since 2019. It is chock-full of stories that should be compelling to anyone who cares about how we learn about where we live. As publisher Paula Routly writes in her intro, “People are catching on to the correlation between reliable, fact-checked local information and healthy civic engagement. Better now than never!” For obvious reasons, I care a lot about this stuff, too, so today and tomorrow, I’m going to point you to five pieces (three today, two tomorrow) you should know about.
For a quick overview, Routly’s collection of “local media news that may have escaped your attention” makes for newsy and entertaining reading. She touches on everything from Mitch Wertlieb’s new sports show on VT Public to GOP Sen. Russ Ingalls’ acquisition of a chain of radio stations to the VT Standard’s life-saving creation of a nonprofit to help the Woodstock paper survive. And a lot more.
Anne Galloway, who founded VTDigger and now covers business for Seven Days, tackles what’s going on at Vermont Public—which lost $2 million in funding after Congress canceled money for public media and then made most of it back “in a rage-giving surge” from listeners. But the organization has real issues despite its size (104 employees, $61 million endowment) and devoted listenership, Galloway writes, including whether it can sustain itself for the long term without subsidies and ramp up local and hard news coverage. Galloway digs deep into the organization’s finances, leadership, and strategies.
And in a two-parter titled “As Print Journalism Declined, These Vermont Journos Adapted,” Ken Picard and Lucy Tompkins profile me and Daybreak, and independent crime-and-courts whirlwind Mike Donoghue. “In seven years, Daybreak has shown that readers yearn for curated news chosen not by social media algorithms but, as Gurwitt put it, ‘just a guy sitting by the woodstove trying to figure out what’s going to work,’” Picard writes. Meanwhile, Donoghue’s name will be familiar to you: He’s a mainstay in the Standard and about 20 other papers. As a former Free Press editor tells Tompkins, “He brings important stories to light that otherwise wouldn’t be known, especially at a time when we’ve seen an incredible pullback on state and local media.” You can see Picard in action on WCAX talking about both stories.
Beaver to moose: Autumn is not a time for sharing. An “underwater larder” is just one brilliant way beavers engineer their dams to sustain them through the winter. In the fall (dam-building season), beavers tow small, leafy branches underwater and stick them in the mud for mid-winter snacks. BBC Studios has a superb video, over and under water, of the precise work of felling trees, building canals, floating branches, and putting moose in their place. Fun fact: beavers chew only partway through a tree trunk—they can bring down a cottonwood in just a few hours—then let the wind blow it over.
The Thursday Crossword. Today, it’s puzzle constructor Laura Braunstein’s “midi”—slightly longer and harder than her Tuesday minis, but perfect with breakfast. And if you’d like to catch up on past puzzles, you can do that here.
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak.
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HEADS UP
Bond Almand talks about his Pan American bike trek at the Bugbee Senior Center. As you may remember, Almand took time off from Dartmouth to bike from the top of North America to the tip of South America. It took him 75 days (for 14,000+ miles), setting new speed records. “Bond’s story is an incredible one of mental perseverance and overcoming treacherous obstacles,” Bugbee writes. 1 pm. Open to the public.
Dartmouth’s Dickey Center hosts Michael Rubin and “Iran at a Crossroads: Economic Protest Turned Political Crisis”. Rubin, a former Pentagon official now at the American Enterprise Institute, specializes in Iran, Turkey, and the Middle East. He’ll be talking about Iran with Steven Simon, former National Security Council director for the Middle East and North Africa in the Obama administration, now a visiting fellow at Dartmouth’s Davidson Institute for Global Security. 5 pm in Haldeman 41 or online.
The Rumney Sessions at Fable Farm in Barnard bring in Mowgli Giannitti + Heavy Nettles. The Burlington-based bassist and singer “brings his all-star trio featuring some of VT's finest pickers. Firmly rooted in the Bluegrass sound, the band effortlessly flows between Celtic ballads, jazz standards, Brazilian samba, and original songs.” Doors and food at 5:30 pm, music around 6.
The Howe Library in Hanover hosts Greg Smith of The Greenland Advocate. The photographer and writer will give a presentation on the landscape, culture, and history of Greenland, “as well as an introduction to the Inuit people who live on the largest island in the world.” 6:30 pm in the Mayer Room and online.
The Dartmouth College Gospel Choir at the Hop. Under charismatic director Knoelle Higginson, the ever-popular choir’s winter concert delivers a jolt of spirituals and contemporary gospel, with soul-stirring vocals, rhythms that make it impossible to sit still, and energy that’ll send you out into the cold night aglow. 7:30 pm, Spaulding.
Kimball Union Academy debuts its production of Urinetown. As KUA Arts writes, “What do you get when you combine a twenty-year drought, a corrupt government, a greedy ban on private toilets, and one extremely self-aware musical?” Or to put it another way, “Come for the laughs. Stay for the satire. Leave grateful for indoor plumbing.” Premieres in the Flickinger Auditorium tonight at 7:30, tomorrow and Saturday same times.
The Mallett Brothers Band at the Flying Goose in New London. The Maine-based trio blends alt-country, roots rock, genre-bending storytelling “influenced equally by the singer/songwriter tradition as by harder rock, classic country and psychedelic sounds,” the Flying Goose writes. 7:30 pm, (603) 526-6899 for reservations.
And for today...
I’m With Her (Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz, and Aoife O'Donovan) fresh off winning a Grammy for Best Folk Album, on Colbert doing Paul Simon’s “The Obvious Child”.
See you tomorrow.
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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Poetry editor: Michael Lipson Associate Editors: Jonea Gurwitt, Sam Gurwitt
