GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Sun's back! And though you wouldn't call today warm, things are heading in that direction after the low pressure system that was in control the last few days moved out last night. Today: sunny, highs from the mid 50s to around 60, winds from the northwest. Down to the low 30s tonight.Nature red in tooth and... Actually, in this case it's all-white and there's no blood, but the result's the same. In Etna, Marty Downs spied a long-tailed weasel in its winter coat in the back yard—just before it dove under some flagstones, flushed a chipmunk, then caught it by his feet. Contains young guy commentary. (Soundtrack note from Ted Levin: Technically, ermines are short-tailed weasels, "a beast of the north," he writes. This one's long-tailed, "which range from southern Canada into Peru" and are large enough to tackle a chipmunk—or "to the consternation of farmers, very small piglets.")Dartmouth library workers seek to unionize. Taking heart from the recent organizing success of grad students and of undergrad dining workers, about 35 library workers on Tuesday announced the plan, reports The Dartmouth's Charlotte Hampton. The notion has been in the works for at least a year, says acquisitions supervisor Tim Wolfe, spurred by budget cuts and stalled promotions during the pandemic. “It’s about a system of promotion and advancement that is uniform and fair...and it’s about having a seat at the table," he says. Adds book conservator Lizzie Curran, "I think there’s a culture of administration making decisions that affect us, without us.” 240-unit apartment complex pitched for Sykes Mountain Ave. The four-story, four-building development would go up on 24 acres between Hickory Ridge and Lily Pond roads in WRJ, reports the Valley News's Patrick Adrian. It's being proposed by longtime developer Earle Simpson and two partners from Venezuela with family in the region. In a discussion Monday, Hartford's planning commissioners focused on the impact on nearby homes. “These neighbors have enjoyed what seems like thousands of years with no neighbors in their backyard,” said one. “And now you are going to add a big neighbor.”Witness says pleas for help from Springfield VT inmate who died Monday were rebuffed by guard. The 46-year-old inmate from Rutland, David Mitchell, had twice received medical attention that morning, reports VTDigger's Ethan Weinstein. In the hour before he died, a man lodged nearby tells Weinstein, “It got to the point where he was panicking and crying, begging to be taken to the hospital." Instead, the man says, an officer told Mitchell that if he kept complaining he'd be sent to solitary confinement. Corrections commissioner Nicholas Deml says there is no evidence the situation was mishandled.NH expands Medicaid dental coverage, but in the Upper Valley, providers are scarce. In fact, writes Nora Doyle-Burr in the Valley News, there's only one clinic in the region currently accepting NH Medicaid for adults, in Claremont. Ironically, the state's benefit expansion (to cover fillings, cleanings, and X-rays, as well as extractions and surgery) will actually cost some patients an option, since WRJ's Red Logan clinic did accept NH Medicaid patients as underinsured, but now won't, though it'll keep existing patients. The Mascoma Community Health Center hopes to reopen its dental clinic later this year.SPONSORED: Whole person health at Integrative Medicine at APD. Integrative Medicine at APD combines traditional medical care with centuries-old healing arts to help decrease stress, strengthen the immune system, reduce pain, and speed recovery. We offer massage, acupuncture, cupping, energy healing, and craniosacral therapy. Find contact information, providers, and more here. Sponsored by Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital."His kindness should not have surprised me, given the humane warmth of those furry lines." In Seven Days, cartoonist Alison Bechdel pens a tribute to fellow-cartoonist Ed Koren, who died at home in Brookfield last Friday, in the way she knows best: as a cartoon.Stage? Song? Tommy Crawford does both, in equal measure. Right now, the VN's Alex Hanson notes in a profile, the actor and singer-songwriter is music-forward, with his April of Saturday residencies at Sawtooth Kitchen. Crawford, who co-founded the NYC-based theater and music collective The Lobbyists, first became a presence in the region in Northern Stage's Only Yesterday, then as one of the leads in Once. He and his wife, Sarah Elizabeth Wansley, moved to the Upper Valley in 2021; right now, they're working on a play with music based on interviews with farmers in the region.Why you really want to know what you're doing if you ski Tuckerman Ravine. Things have been getting dramatic there, as this post of an an epic wipeout off the Headwall a few days ago suggests. A commenter claiming to be the guy wrote, "That's me, never doing that again." This, by the way, after a snowboarder went off the same cliff, hit a rocky ridge, and fell into a hole at the base of a waterfall—an accident that had the potential to be fatal, though in this case he climbed out using ice picks and hiked out on his own.In court testimony, NH education secretary sidesteps defining "adequate education." Which will make things interesting, since as Ethan DeWitt points out in NH Bulletin, the lawsuit in question, known as the ConVal case, hinges on that question: "How much must the state pay to provide a constitutionally adequate education?" In his testimony Tuesday, Ed Secy Frank Edelblut said that the state's administrative rules defining what's required to graduate are not necessarily what the state constitution requires—and that the responsibility for defining that lies with the legislature. The trial is expected to last into May.$310 million. That's how much NH's Dept of Justice says the state could see over the next two decades from various legal settlements involving the opioid crisis, reports NHPR's Paul Cuno-Booth. How all that money should be spent, both at the state and local levels, is a pressing issue: NH saw at least 480 overdose deaths last year. Though the state is playing its plans close to the vest, Cuno-Booth digs into the discussion. Some counties aren't waiting for clarity; they're using the money they've received to pay for addiction treatment for prisoners in county jails. Includes interactive payout maps.With new executive order, Sununu wades into ESG debate. The initials stand for “environmental, social, and governance," and they're an increasingly popular set of criteria for investing. But not, Ethan DeWitt writes for NH Bulletin, with GOP politicians in New Hampshire. Legislators have taken aim at the strategy as injecting politics into what ought to be purely economic decisions. Sununu's order bars the state retirement system from investing "solely" based on ESG. Using ESG, responds a Portsmouth investor, makes sense if "you believe those factors might bear on risk, or might bear on opportunity.”A "snapshot of the emotional stakes" in NH's proposed parental rights bill. A House committee on Tuesday took up controversial legislation—a version of which passed the Senate in March—that would require teachers to tell parents about changes to a student's gender identity. Both sides rallied at the State House on Tuesday, and in the Globe's "Morning Report" newsletter yesterday (no paywall), Steven Porter writes that more than anything else, the signs ralliers carried—from “Kids need protection, not outing” to “Support parents, not secrets”—offered a distilled glimpse into each side's concerns."We thought, ‘Well, let’s stop and read some poems before we go home.’” You can do that in Montpelier right now, thanks to PoemCity Montpelier, the annual celebration of National Poetry month that, this year, has put 350 poems from Vermonters in 60 towns on downtown windows—along with readings, workshops, and for the first time, a poetry parade (really, more of an amble by a dozen or so poets). “We do National Poetry Month better than anybody as far as we can see,” one of the organizers tells the AP's Lisa Rathke. If you're not up for the drive, check out PoemTown Randolph: same idea, smaller scale.“My daughter thinks I'm a little nuts, and my wife is willing to put up with it as long as it stays in the man cave.” That’s a collector of Coleman lanterns, one of several Vermonters Seven Days writers spoke to—people who search for Grateful Dead dancing bears, Pez dispensers, mini VW bugs. Troy Wunderle, a circus performer since college—including decades with Circus Smirkus and Wunderle's Big Top Adventures—delights in collecting circus memorabilia. While some pieces are personal (“I knew the elephant that wore one of them”) with many, it’s the history he treasures. “I collect because I love stories, and all of these objects have stories behind them."You might want to put down that book to read about … books. April 23 is World Book Day, and while there is no shortage of great books to read, there is also no shortage of stories about books. Atlas Obscura pulls together eight favorites from their archives—tales of a Venetian bookbinder; about the lone remaining bookstore on a street in Mosul once filled with them; about “book women” in 1930s Kentucky, a sort of mobile library where the volumes were delivered by horseback. If you only have time to read one of these stories … well, could you make some more time?Aurora Spiralis? Okay, okay. Maybe "Cocleatus." Whatever, a baby blue spiral appeared in the midst of a dancing green aurora over Alaska last weekend. Very cool-looking—though as the AP's Mark Thiessen writes, the cause was "a little more mundane than an alien invasion or the appearance of a portal to the far reaches of the universe": fuel jettisoned by a SpaceX rocket that had taken off from California, which then turned into ice.The Thursday Vordle. With a fine word from yesterday's Daybreak.Daybreak doesn't get to exist without your support. Help it keep going by hitting the maroon button:
This evening at 6:30, the Howe Library in Hanover—along with Northern Woodlands and the Hanover Conservancy—hosts Dartmouth prof Matt Ayres for a talk on "Birds, Trees, and Insects: Weather, Climate, and Plant Phenology." Ayres, who chairs the college's Graduate Program in Ecology, Evolution, Ecosystems & Society, will talk about the impact of climate change on the rate at which plants bud, leaf out, and blossom in spring, based on a half-century of research into birds, trees, insects, weather, climate, and plants at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest. Outdoors (assuming no change in the weather) in the Children's Garden in front of the Howe, with tree & plant exploration on the library grounds afterward.
And at 7 pm, the Thetford Historical Society continues its spring lecture series with storyteller Tim Jennings presenting, "So I've Been Told....Traditional Folktales of Vermont and New England." For four decades, Jennings has toured New England, solo at first—with a lot of appearances on Vermont Public Television and VPR—then joined for by his late wife, Leanne Ponder, with whom he released several albums and featured at storytelling festivals around North America.
At 7:30, the Flying Goose Pub in New London brings in Stillhouse Junkies. The trio, based in Durango, Colorado and the Four Corners Region, describe themselves as "progressive original roots," partly because they borrow liberally from a wide cross-section of genres: bluegrass, swing, blues, West African, with a focus on storytelling—including, as they put it, imagining reality "from the perspective of a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition; a small-town bartender; a lonely miner; an imperiled cattle driver."
Or, if you feel like driving to Concord, there are still some tix left for Nickel Creek at the Capitol Center for the Arts' Chubb Theater, also at 7:30. This is about as close as the groundbreaking band of mandolinist Chris Thile, violinist Sara Watkins and guitarist Sean Watkins is getting to us on their spring/summer tour.
At 8 this evening, the Hop presents Sandeep Das and his HUM Ensemble at Rollins Chapel. Das—a tabla maestro, composer, and collaborator with the Silk Road Ensemble who's in residency on the Dartmouth campus this spring—has been working with an ensemble of musicians he's brought to campus to create Delhi to Kabul, a "celebration of the shared history" between India and Afghanistan that draws on classical music, poetry, and instruments from both countries, as well as Indian dance and Afghani storytelling. A conversation with the artists follows.
And anytime, you can check out JAM's highlights for the week, including: cookbook author Claire Saffitz talking dessert at the Norwich Bookstore; local choreographer Peggy Brightman and filmmaker Carla Kimball's film of the pandemic times performance they created in honor of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, "Our Voices, Bodies Rising" with a troupe of local dancers and poets; and a discussion with Burlington therapist Dr. Rick Barnett on the pending arrival in VT of "psychedelic-assisted therapy."
And for this morning...
Here's a different sort of Sandeep Das collaboration—on tabla with cellist Mike Block,
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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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Poetry editor: Michael Lipson Associate Editor: Jonea Gurwitt About Rob About Michael
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