Daybreak Thursday, 4/23/26

Sunny. We’re looking at a dry, pleasant day, with overnight clouds pretty much gone this morning and temperatures rising into the mid 50s. Dewpoints today will be low, and with gusty winds from the northwest for a good bit of the day, that has the fire people somewhat on edge. Clear and cold tonight, with lows around or below freezing.

Ducks of all sorts, raptors, loons, and herons. Photographers Jim Block and Ian Clark have both been busy watching the birds of early spring.

It’s time for Dear Daybreak! This week’s collection of dispatches from readers starts off with Jim Alberghini’s contemplative photo of the Connecticut at the start of the day. Then we get a poem about mud season’s grasping qualities, by Dave Celone. And finally, Lyn Ujlaky’s mini-essay about coming to terms with the flock of wild turkeys that’s made itself at home nearby.

Bank records detail “patterns of questionable spending” by Windsor sheriff’s dept. under Ryan Palmer. For instance, reports Alex Ebrahimi in the Valley News, those bank statements—which he obtained under a public records request—show a monthly charge from a Swedish music and sound effects platform (Palmer has a side gig as a DJ) plus “payments for Amazon deliveries, hotels, food and flowers, as well as cash and check payments directly to Palmer himself.” As Ebrahimi notes, the sexual misconduct charges Palmer faces grew out of a state police investigation into the department’s finances—though the VSP has been mum on that. Ebrahimi details what the bank records show, including $30K at Amazon and $40K on hotels and restaurants.

“Wonderful and magical things can happen in a bookstore.” And this weekend, if you’re especially game, you can visit the Upper Valley’s five independents (Norwich, Yankee, Still North, Left Bank, and Cover to COVER) as part of Independent Bookstore Day on Saturday. In Artful, Susan Apel lays out the basics (and adds: “If five bookstores plus celebrations is just a little beyond your time and energy, let’s agree that visiting even just one bookstore on Saturday would be a sacred act”) and tells the story of the time she literally stumbled into… well, better to let her tell it. Also, she draws attention to the HanUnder art festival, starting today (more down in Heads Up).

Also this weekend: madrigals. As Seven Days’ Amy Lilly writes, the madrigal concerts Filippo Ciabatti is directing for Upper Valley Baroque Friday and Saturday will be “the first for which [he] is responsible for programming, musician selection and directing. The music is ‘very specific in terms of skills needed from the musicians,’ Ciabatti explained. ‘I wanted to wait for the right group.’” That’s because, Lilly writes, madrigals were written as “highly experimental secular songs for a small group of singers whose voices weave and combine in often unexpected and ever-changing chords.” Friday’s show in Hanover is sold out, but Woodstock’s on Saturday has tix.

SPONSORED: Eat what you LOVE! Join Sweetland Farm’s CSA and bring joy to your kitchen! Our Free Choice and Farmer’s Choice shares offer all the seasonal veggies you already love, plus new ones you’ll love to try. Grown on conserved land using radically sustainable practices, reducing your carbon “food-print” has never tasted so good! Weekly recipes and newsletters, 2 acres of pick-your-own gardens, and frequent events, with multiple pickup days, on-farm pickup or in-town delivery, and a member discount in our farmstand provide convenience and affordability. We’d love to be your farmers! 742 Rt. 132, Norwich. Sponsored by Sweetland Farm.

Helping along the spring migration. Tuesday night last week was warm and wet—or as amphibian lovers call them, a Big Night, when frogs and salamanders head by the thousands from their winter hangouts to the pools where they breed. Often, they have to cross roads to do this, and volunteers around the Upper Valley turn out to help them get across safely. One of them is the Lebanon Conservation Commission’s Chris Johnson, and Valley News photographer Alex Driehaus was right there with him that evening. In this video short, she documents his work—and zooms in on a couple of the frogs and peepers he helped.

On return to NH, Temple Grandin has a message: The world needs people who think differently. Grandin, famed for her work on handling livestock humanely and her activism on autism, went back to the Hampshire Country School in Rindge yesterday to talk to students—and especially neurodivergent students—about the possibilities ahead of them. In the Globe, she talks to Amanda Gokee about how crucial her time with horses and livestock at the school was to her growth as a teen. And Gokee looks at the school itself and how it instills in its small group of students the expectation that they will thrive, as one mother puts it, rather than see themselves as problems.

Times New Roman bites the dust on official NH website. In fact, reports David Brooks on his Granite Geek blog, no typeface with serifs—”those little lines attached to strokes in letters”—can be uploaded to Transparent NH after today. It’s part of a suite of changes (no underlining, no using postal abbreviations like NH in the middle of a sentence). All of this is because new accessibility guidelines that were added to the Americans With Disabilities Act have just kicked in: As Brooks explains, they’re “a big deal for people whose ability to gather sensory inputs—mostly sight but also hearing in some circumstances—are different from levels that most of us regard as standard.”

Why the Act 181 rollback in VT will likely happen: “Something that seemed unfathomable a month or so ago seemed inevitable by the second week of testimony.” That’s Corinth farmer and writer Neil Ryan, talking to Kevin McCallum in Seven Days. Testifying to legislators about the act’s tiers that favor development in urban areas and seek to limit it in rural areas, he told them, “Rural Vermonters—and I speak for a lot of them—increasingly view a tiered framework as one that creates first-, second- and third-class citizens.” McCallum charts the movement toward repeal in the legislature—especially as Democrats’ fears about this fall’s elections grew.

Not your everyday upstate NY sight. Here’s Sarina Heffernan, who lives in Albany, describing Tuesday morning: “Around 6:30, I told my son to go outside and start the car up and he came back in the house and he’s like, ‘Mom, there’s a bear in a tree!’ I’m like, ‘What…a bear in a tree?’ So, I go run out to the front and there’s a bear in a tree.” The bear was a young male who’d wandered into the neighborhood and was chilling in the tree limbs. City and state animal control officers gathered and shot the bear with a tranquilizer dart; he hung on for an improbably long time before dropping into the net the officers held—and was then taken to the Catskills and released.

“It felt like playing dodgeball against Mother Earth.” In 2022, after seven years of calm, NASA picked up signals that Kavachi, one of the world’s most active undersea volcanoes, was stirring. Three years later, filmmaker Devon Massyn traveled to the remote Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean to film the eruption’s active phase. “We heard her long before we saw her,” he says in a short video that went up recently. With drone footage and dramatic narration, he paints the scene: steam explosions, plumes of volcanic gas and ash, and roiling seawater. Flashes of light—the effect of 2000 degree F lava hitting seawater—and random eruptions add to the majesty.

The Thursday Crossword. It’s puzzle constructor Laura Braunstein’s “midi”—and your chance to get embroiled in words for a few minutes. 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.

Daybreak doesn't get to exist without your support. Help it stick around by hitting the maroon button:

THERE'S SOME GREAT DAYBREAK SWAG! Like Daybreak tote bags, sweatshirts, head-warming beanies, t-shirts, long-sleeved tees, the Daybreak jigsaw, those perfect hand-fitting coffee/tea mugs, and as always, "We Make Our Own Fun" t-shirts and tote bags for proud Upper Valleyites. Check it all out at the link!

HEADS UP
Dartmouth’s Dickey Center hosts “War in the Middle East - Stakes and Outcomes”. It’s a conversation between Emmy-winning journalist Kim Ghattas (a Beirut native who’s a former BBC reporter and now a contributor to The Atlantic and The Financial Times and a visiting prof this spring at Dartmouth) and Dickey Center director Victoria Holt. They’ll cover the current state of the wars in Iran and Lebanon and what may lie ahead. 4:30 pm in Haldeman 41 and livestreamed.

HanUnder Arts Festival gets under way. This year, the three-day festival showcases the work of students not just at Dartmouth but from other colleges and universities as well, with an astounding array of everything from visual art to poetry to modern classical music to carnatic music to magic to aerial arts to Americana. Often in the Top of the Hop but also in various other Hop venues. At 5, 7-ish, and 9:30 pm or later, today through Saturday. Check the tiles at the bottom of the link for each time slot’s location and lineup.

Dartmouth’s Ethics Institute hosts Juliet Schor for “The Future of Work and the Four Day Week Movement”. Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College who’s an expert on consumer society, work, the sharing economy, and more, will talk about her findings on companies that have moved to four-day work weeks. “What really surprised me,” she has said, “was that people feel so much more productive, and the companies are saying people are more productive, too.” 5 pm in Rocky 003.

Tom French and John Morton at Still North Books & Bar. French’s new memoir, The Gap Years: Climbing, Skiing, and the Journey Back, was published last week. It recounts his experiences over the three years after he retired from a career in business and decided to return to his more youthful pursuits: adventure travel, xc ski racing, and mountaineering (including two Everest expeditions, one of which made him the first climber to approach the mountain through the remote Makalu Barun region). He’ll be talking it all over with Thetford xc and biathlon great John Morton. 7 pm.

At the Norwich Bookstore, Thomas Ames, Jr. and The Pocketguide to Eastern Hatches. Ames was a commercial photographer and then a teacher at Canaan’s Indian River School, but he’s known among anglers for his fly-fishing guides to insects of the Northeast. His new guide “examines how hatch-matching patterns and techniques have evolved” and offers “easy-to-follow pattern recipes, detailed descriptions, and illuminating photographs of both the natural insects and their artificial imitations.” If the weather cooperates, there’ll be grilling and demonstrations on the lawn. 7 pm.

Hop Film screens The Voice of Hind Rajab. Kaouther Ben Hania’s film was an Oscar nominee this year for Best International Feature: It’s a docudrama about the efforts to rescue a five-year-old girl in Gaza who was trapped in a car that was under fire. The film “blends the actual phone recordings, which went viral several weeks after this incident, with dramatizations of the emergency workers racing against time to coordinate paramedics who could save” the girl, Hind Rajab. 7 pm in the Loew Auditorium.

Sam Robbins at The Flying Goose in New London. The Nashville-based singer-songwriter has been a regular visitor to the Upper Valley. He “adds a modern, upbeat edge to the storyteller troubadour persona,” the Flying Goose writes, and has gained recognition from extensive touring and as one of the six 2021 winners in the Kerrville Folk Festival New Folk competition.” 7:30 pm, call for reservations.

And anytime, you should check out JAM’s highlights for the week: Journalist and novelist Sue Halpern talks over her novel What We Leave Behind at the Norwich Bookstore; a chance to see Greg Stott and Nick Natale’s The Last Ice: Glacial Lake Hitchcock on your own small screen; and the closing of Chico Eastridge’s Videostop II installation, when they invited actor John Griesemer “to watch a screening of The Time Keepers of Eternity. A movie he's in, but has never seen, nor heard of.”

And for today...

Punch Brothers, the bluegrass quintet put together two decades ago by mandolinist Chris Thile, is about to come out with its first all-instrumental album—The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers—which is also the first to include fiddler Brittany Haas, who joined the band in 2023. Recorded in Guilford Sound’s studio in southern VT, the album is “the result of what feels to me like our deepest but also most joyful exploration of the American string band in the twenty years we’ve been making music together,” Thile says in a press release. The first song just dropped: “New Bike”, which is about exactly that. With Chris Thile on mandolin, Chris Eldridge on guitar, Noam Pikelny on banjo, Paul Kowert on bass, and Brittany Haas on fiddle.

See you tomorrow.

Looking for all of the hikes, Enthusiasms, daybreak photos, or music that Daybreak has published over the years? Go here!

And always, if you’re not a subscriber yet:

Written and published by Rob Gurwitt      Poetry editor: Michael Lipson    Associate Editors: Jonea Gurwitt, Sam Gurwitt