GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Showers likely, getting downright warm. Maybe. The system that brought us last night's weather is scattering ahead of approaching high pressure, and with it the cold air that was trapped near the surface may give way, too, letting warm air above us reach the ground. But the weather folks are hedging their bets. So... There's a chance of fog this morning and showers later this afternoon, with temps (hopefully) rising quickly from the 30s into the lower 60s. Guess we'll find out. Down into the upper 30s tonight, with dry air moving in overnight."It felt like a UFO might pop out at any moment!" Depending on where you were, you might have caught Tuesday morning's intriguing cloud formation overhead—a mottled sky with an eye-catching bright opening. Taylor Haynes sends in this brief video from Dothan Road in Hartford.Accosting strangers—on a quest for self-improvement. Ryan Alu is a Dartmouth computer science grad student who's become known as "The Corner Guy" because, as Tasman Mullins puts it in this installment from Dartmouth's "Tell Me a Story" podcasting class, he stands on corners around Hanover "and does weird stuff." Spending a week dressed as a Teletubby. Flirting. Asking strangers to stare at him. A few years ago, Alu explains, he "committed to practicing the things I'm not good at." So Mullins asks him: Why was he so unhappy with himself? And how could his stunts change that?Gas-siphoning mystery may be solved. Remember that incident in Cavendish Sunday where someone siphoned off diesel from the town garage—but left the pump running? Well, on Monday, reports Ethan Weinstein in VTDigger, state police found 35-year-old Mitchell Horton in a truck matching the description of a vehicle involved in the case with “what appeared to be a pump to collect fuel” and “multiple fuel containers.” Horton, who last summer was accused of stealing a shuttle from the DHMC parking lot, turned out to be driving a truck that had been reported stolen the previous week.Fairlee's Jonah Richard becomes a voice for other developers in small towns. If you've read Daybreak for a while, you've met Richard through Brick + Mortar, his newsletter documenting his his struggles to build multi-unit housing in Fairlee. In Seven Days, Anne Wallace Allen profiles Richard, his plans for Fairlee—he, three cousins, and a family friend intend to remake the area around Chapman's, which the family has owned for generations—and in particular, his efforts to take on the regulatory and financial roadblocks that stand in the way of small developers trying to build housing in Vermont.SPONSORED: Ring in the joy of Easter at St. Thomas! Join us this Holy Week for the drama of Christ’s life, death and resurrection. Foot washing on Maundy Thursday; reverencing the cross on Good Friday; the Easter Vigil bonfire on Holy Saturday, and bells and an egg hunt on Easter day. All are welcome–no exceptions–to worship, love, serve and grow. View the full schedule of services and learn more here. Sponsored by St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Hanover, NH.Jersey Mike's Subs going into old Pier 1 space on 12A in West Leb, subletting to new tenants. “I look at West Lebanon as potentially being the No. 1 location in the entire company,” Bedford, NH-based franchisee Chris Brown tells Justin Campfield in the Valley News. The owners of the Staples Plaza, where the new sub shop will be located, didn't want to break the Pier 1 space up, Brown tells Campfield, so he's doing it himself, creating three or possibly four retail spots. The project, Campfield writes, will "fill one of the largest remaining vacant spaces in the [12A] corridor."Entirely volunteer-run, free and open to anyone. A decade or so ago, the Bethel Revitalization Initiative set out to rebuild community and connect neighbor with neighbor. One strategy: Bethel University, which in its first year offered 18 courses taught by residents, on subjects they knew. In Seven Days, Rachel Hellman writes about the wild success of the university—this year, more than 50 courses were taken by close to a thousand students: bee-keeping, sushi-making, climate change, logo design, addressing racism—and why learning from your neighbors goes far beyond the curriculum. "It becomes a thing, an event, not just, 'I'm going to get a coffee.'" Justin Willeau moved to Vershire in 2020. Looking for ways to settle in—he grew up outside Chicago and served in the Navy for 16 years—he started a Saturday-morning coffee bar in the VerShare-owned Church-Orr House and a Thursday evening beer exchange. On her Happy Vermont podcast, Erica Houskeeper talks to Willeau about it all—including moving to VT from Africa in the pandemic. "I'm not sure I'll ever be a real Vermonter," he tells her, "but this time living here has had an impact on me, like, on my soul."Meanwhile, in S. Strafford, two ex-roller derby teammates create a pop-up consignment shop for kids' clothes. Marisa Donovan and Brooke Wilkinson met a decade ago when they skated for the Upper Valley Vixens, the A-level team in the Twin State Derby league. Now, writes the VN's Frances Mize, they've created Jenny Joy's, which has the run of Agatha's, the S. Strafford consignment store, until April 15; after that, it'll command a corner. “It makes a lot of sense from a sustainability and recycling standpoint, not to spend so much money on clothes your kids are just going to outgrow,” Donovan says."I am coming around to the idea that we should get rid of the term 'Free Stater.'" That, interestingly, was the guy who started the Free State Project, Jason Sorens, ruminating on Twitter after he lost a race for a seat on the Amherst NH planning board. In yesterday's Boston Globe NH newsletter, Steven Porter writes that in the course of the campaign, Sorens found that voters viewed him "with extra skepticism" because of his label—when, in fact, he was drawing supporters from across the political spectrum. Here's Porter's story in the Globe (paywall) about Sorens' campaign against NIMBYism.Potential new ballot machines for NH move forward; Hanover to pilot one in May. The state is seeking to replace the aging AccuVote machines used in towns statewide, and four vendors are hoping to replace them. Four towns piloted machines made by different vendors in municipal voting last month, and the devices all proved accurate, with minor hiccups, reports NHPR's Jeongyoon Han. Hanover will test a machine made by Election Systems & Software in Town Meeting voting next month, Han says. The state's Ballot Law Commission will make the final decision on which brands will be available for towns to use.In narrowly divided NH House, GOP and Dems talk budget compromise. The state's proposed budget faces a reckoning in the chamber today, and with Republicans holding just a 201-196 majority, GOP leader Jason Osborne tells NH Bulletin's Beatrice Burack, "There’s just not enough votes on one side of the aisle or the other to get it done,” given likely defections. A compromise between Osborne and Dem leader Matt Wilhelm yesterday would eliminate a proposed expansion of education freedom accounts, boost Medicaid spending, and more. There will be "plenty of debate on the floor" today, says Wilhelm.Part "crotchety northeastern bad bitch," part "hot college art teacher." At least, that's how Amelia Meath describes her friend Erica Heilman's now-familiar voice. Heilman's Rumble Strip has been running for a decade, and even as podcasting has become big business, writes Chelsea Edgar in Seven Days, "Heilman has remained resolutely small and weird, because she doesn't know how else to be." Edgar plunges into a full-on profile of Heilman at her engaging best, and of her work. "She wants people to find themselves in those who are unlike them; she wants to make meandering, kaleidoscopic stories about the stuff of ordinary Vermont life," Edgar writes.Now wait just a UTC-recalibrated, imprecisely predicted, caesium-133-atom-derived second. You already know that the times on your microwave and smart watch and car clock and grandfather’s pocket watch aren’t in sync. But someone, somewhere, must know the precise time, right? In Harper’s, Tom Vanderbilt writes magnificently about the search for the second (and fraction of a second), how measuring time is changing, and why a second is no longer just 1/86,400 of a mean solar day. It’s complicated, say the scientists. “I mean, hell, we can’t even understand half of it.”The Thursday Vordle. With a word from yesterday's Daybreak.
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Today at 5 pm, Dartmouth's Dickey Center hosts Indian newspaper columnist and political theorist Pratap Mehta, on "Democracy in India, Democracy in the World." Mehta, considered one of his country's most prominent public intellectuals, in 2021 stepped down from a teaching post at Delhi's Ashoka University, which he helped co-found and where he'd served as vice chancellor, after his criticism of the Modi government brought intense political pressure on both him and the university. Mehta, who now teaches at Princeton, will be in conversation with political scientist Russ Muirhead and Dickey Center director Victoria Holt.
And at 6 pm, the Bradford Public Library hosts a book talk by Dartmouth Spanish lecturer and journalist María Clara de Greiff Lara on Hands That Speak: Voices From the Upper Valley Dairy Farms, a collection of stories of migrant dairy farm workers in the Upper Valley, with photos by Jorge Carlos Álvarez—many of which will be on display at the library.
At 6:30 this evening, the Lebanon Opera House brings in Dance of Hope, a "youth-based arts education touring program from Uganda [that] empowers young people to explore the transformative spirit of music, dance, and storytelling." No charge (though LOH wouldn't turn down a donation to help it do more free programming), but you'll need a ticket
This evening at 7 pm, poet Richard Blanco will give a day-late VT Humanities First Wednesdays talk at the Norwich Bookstore (not St. Barnabas Church, after a last-minute change). Heads up: It's first-come, first-served, no registration; JAM is filming for later, in case you don't get in. Blanco, a Cuban-American born in Madrid but raised in Miami, was the poet for Barack Obama's second inauguration, "the first Latino, immigrant, and gay person to serve in such a role," VT Humanities notes. He is also Miami-Dade County's first poet laureate—though he lives in Bethel, ME. He has a new co-written play out, Sweet Goats & Blueberry Señoritas, about a Cuban-American baker living in Maine. He'll be speaking at Hartford High School tomorrow—in-person only for students there, but livestreamed for students anywhere in VT.
Also at 7, naturalist and writer Ted Levin helps launch the Thetford Historical Society's series of spring lectures with "Vermont’s Changing Landscape, From the Ice Age to the 21st Century.” You know Levin, of course, for his bi-weekly comments on the region's fauna in Daybreak, if not for his remarkable books, including Backtracking: The Way of a Naturalist and Blood Brook: A Naturalist’s Home Ground, but getting a chance to hear him speak is a rare opportunity. In the Martha Rich Theater at Thetford Academy.
Also at 7, Hop Film presents Cane Fire, Anthony Banua-Simon's 2022 documentary about the Hawaiian island of Kauai, its generations of plantation exploitation, and how Hollywood has been the island's "pivotal marketing arm." In the Loew.
This evening at 7:30, Shaker Bridge Theatre in Enfield kicks off its run of Slow Food,New Hampshire playwright Wendy MacLeod's comedy based in part on her real-life experience with what may have been the world's worst waiter—"He was territorial and jealous if we even mentioned another waiter, and he acted as if he were being run off his feet even though we were his only table," she once told an interviewer. Which she turned into a play about a vacationing couple excavating their life together—with plenty of input from their waiter. Runs through April 23.
Also at 7:30, the Hop presents the Coast Jazz Orchestra performing the music of composer Toby Summerfield. The music, "Never Enough Hope," grew out of a series of large, celebratory musical gatherings Summerfield organized, first in Ann Arbor, then in Chicago, "part all-star team and part family reunion." Summerfield himself will also be there, on solo guitar for his work, The Collection of Bodies of Water. In Collis Common Ground, no charge but you'll need a ticket.
And finally, anytime you choose, you can check out JAM's highlights for the week, including a series of NASA videos of Earth from the International Space Station, Vermont photographer Christopher Dant's master class on how "new" camera technology captured Abraham Lincoln from 1846 to 1865, and the concert by Upper Valley Music Center faculty last month at the Norwich Congregational Church, with music from Bach and Telemann to Chet Atkins to Metallica (on cello and piano).
And to start us off humming for the day...
The LA-based singer-songwriter-guitarist-pianist Theo Katzman is probably best known for his work with the funk band Vulfpeck—and maybe for his falsetto. He's got a new solo album out (well, if playing with an ace backing band is solo).
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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