GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Scattered showers, a bit cooler. A fast-moving system has been barreling our way out of the west and will pass through today, with rain (at least off and on) likely this morning and pretty much certain in the afternoon. It'll all move out overnight. Winds today from the southeast, mid-40s tonight. Enjoy it. After today it gets hot.That is one intense-looking porcupine. Foraging along the water's edge, it's the first photo in a set of wildlife pics from Newbury photographer Ian Clark, along with geese, a gosling, a variety of highly photogenic ducks, and plenty of loons trying to get their territories straight. Ian's also got a separate entire portfolio from last week of toads gathering in mating season.Lyme School, facing Covid-related absences, closes for most of the week. After shutting Monday and Tuesday, it re-opened yesterday, but with significant numbers of both staff and students out it will also be closed tomorrow and Friday. "In the past, we would have gone remote for a few days, required masking for a short period, and gotten it under control," writes interim Supt. Frank Perotti in an email to Daybreak. "With the Governor and the Commissioner of Education refusing to allow us those choices we are left with closing," since staff absences make it hard to operate safely. Email at the link. Springfield VT police, facing staff shortage, struggle with uptick in shootings. Before 2022, reports VTDigger's Ethan Weinstein, the town saw five shootings in six years; it's had four since January—three on a single street, most likely drug-related. This comes at a time when the department has only five of 12 patrol positions filled, is facing the retirements of its chief and second-in-command at the end of the year, has had to shift from 24/7 patrols to on-call coverage for some parts of each day... and can only rely on the state police as a last resort because of the VSP's own staffing challenges.“Mechanic Street and Hanover Street and other quarters of the city — they beg for trees." That's Charlie DePuy, a member of Lebanon's new Tree Advisory Board, talking to the Valley News's Claire Potter about efforts to map "heat islands" around the city...and then plant trees to cool them down. Usually seen as a big-city problem, heat islands are in issue in rural communities, too, a UVM prof tells Potter, and especially affect young active people and the elderly. Air conditioning can help, but not in rolling blackouts. "Our approach is to plant trees, not to put in more diesel generators,” DePuy says.SPONSORED: In a health emergency, you need to be seen as quickly as possible by highly trained medical professionals. You’ll find friendly staff, short wait times, and trained providers at Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The same emergency physicians who provide care at APD also provide care at DHMC. We don’t want you to experience a health emergency, but we are always here for you when you do. Sponsored by APD.It started with a maimed Bible. The book in question was vandalized in 1848 and unearthed in 2019 by the Norwich Historical Society. It led director Sarah Rooker and her team to explore what was happening in town in and around that year, writes Susan Apel in Artful, and it turns out there was a lot: of divisiveness, debate about slavery, change brought by the railroad, and other unease. This has all led to a new exhibition, opening tomorrow, both about those times and displaying the work of 22 local artists responding to what that Bible represents—and in particular to its resonance in our own turmoil today."An unerring eye for how thing A might be combined with thing B to create a completely new and artful thing C." That's how Seven Days arts writer Pamela Polston describes Bradford sculptor Cindy Blakeslee, who has a new exhibition, "Circular Logic," at Satellite Gallery in downtown Lyndonville. An "unabashed dumpster diver" with an extensive background in the reuse of manufactured materials, Blakeslee "aims to elevate the stuff that others discard 'into something interesting, humorous and/or provocative,'" Polston writes—and does all that using everything from plywood sub-flooring to used woks.Got weekend plans? They might need to include a trip to Quechee. On a Saturday or Sunday morning at the Parker House, "you’ll see a long line of people filling the wrap-around porch, and they have one thing in common: They’re all hungry for donuts made by Farmer & The Bell," Gareth Henderson writes on his Omni Reporter blog. The business started as a Woodstock pop-up in December after April Lawrence and Ben Pauly had a "life-changing donut experience” on a trip to ME and decided they had to master the art. Says Lawrence, "You can’t have a bad day with a donut in your hand.""No shortage of spectacle." If you pulled into the I-91 rest area just south of the I-89 interchange recently, you might have seen a bunch of trucks being inspected. It's part of a national effort known as RoadCheck, and Overdrive, a newsletter for truck owner-operators, just spent some time with VT DMV Enforcement & Safety inspectors talking about what they've been seeing. Which once included a truck pulling in on fire, but on this visit focused more on wheel-end leaks, brakes, record-keeping violations, and drug & alcohol violations. And in the case of one truck, tires so bald they had no tread left.NH "Parental Bill of Rights" might move forward after all. House and Senate negotiators had apparently reached an unresolvable impasse on Tuesday. But now, writes NH Bulletin's Ethan DeWitt, they've been scheduled to reconvene today. "The newly scheduled negotiation meeting opens the possibility for the two sides to still find compromise," he reports. Negotiators have until 4 p.m. today to submit final reports. Stay tuned.Emerald ash borer claims another victim: Peterboro basket maker. The Peterboro Basket Co. has been around for 168 years, making baskets from interwoven strips of Appalachian white ash. Supply chain issues, trouble finding workers, and the owners' desire to retire also played into their decision, writes David Brooks on his Granite Geek blog, but they also cite the declining availability of the wood they've used for all this time. Brooks notes that "three species of wasp are being tested in New Hampshire and elsewhere that may enable ash trees to return in future decades."Meanwhile, tourism in NH has more than rebounded. In the Monitor, David Brooks writes that pent-up travel demand has brought out-of-staters back in force: NH saw a 43 percent boost in in visitors and a 35 percent increase in spending above pre-pandemic levels during the three chief tourist seasons in 2021. And that was in all regions of the state. Tourism officials say the top activities last fall were "scenic drives, dining, shopping, visiting State Parks, hiking, wildlife watching, and visiting breweries.”As VT pulls back on daily data reporting, Covid levels are "High." Yesterday was the final day for the state's Covid dashboard—instead, the health department is shifting to weekly "surveillance reports." Erin Petenko, VTDigger's data reporter, walks us through what the new metrics measure, what they mean—and what information they don't provide. And in place of the daily numbers the state provided, Digger will be stepping in with its own dashboard based on the underlying data still being provided by the state, as well as a weekly recap of the surveillance reports.It’s a jog, but the NE Kingdom stretch of the Silvio O. Conte Refuge sounds splendid. Seven Days’ Anne Wallace Allen’s offers such rich descriptions of the plants, wildlife, and wetlands of this protected habitat, you might imagine it’s undiscovered country. Far from it. These quarter-million acres, “once home to the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation,” writes Allen, have endured a logging industry that wiped out most of VT’s forests a century and a half ago, and now are the focus of a project to restore native plant diversity, which will also help to build resilience to climate change.How a carousel, made by many hands, revived a small town. It’s a feel-good story that, in a cynical age, seems too good to be true. Closer to fairy tale, since it involves several magical, beautifully colored animals. In the very real place of Albany, OR, writes Atlas Obscura’s Rebecca Deurlein, a community’s heyday had passed when, in 2002, Wendy Kirbey decided what it needed was a carousel. Over the better part of the next two decades, Kirbey and a dedicated group of volunteers hand-carved every animal, restored a century-old carousel mechanism, and brought their dream—and town—to life.The Thursday Vordle. Whew! Everything's back to normal...
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It's opening day at the Lebanon Farmers Market starting at 4 pm today. Produce, meat, crafts, and an unusually generous bounty of prepared foods—plus live music and a bracing cross-section of the Upper Valley. In Colburn Park until 7 pm every Thursday.
At 6 this evening, the Chelsea Library is hosting a reception and film screening for its current exhibit, "The Quarry Project: A Collection of Photographs" by Julia Barstow. They'll also be showing a film about the project, At The Edges of Us by Lukas Huffman, at 7pm. The project, six years in the making, is a site-specific dance/theatre piece at the Wells Lamson quarry in Websterville, VT, one of the oldest, deepest granite quarries in the country. Hannah Dennison, choreographer and mastermind behind the project, and a few members of the ensemble will be on hand to discuss it.
Also at 6 pm, Dartmouth Idol and the Gospel Choir join forces in the Hop's Alumni Hall for a celebration of Dartmouth Idol's 15th anniversary. Past Idol and Gospel participants will share the stage to show that they haven't lost a beat.
For the first time since the pandemic began, Valley Improv—our local improv troupe—is taking on new members. Auditions happen once a year (in more normal times) and they're this evening, starting at 6:15, at the outdoor pavilion behind CCBA's Witherell Rec Center in Lebanon. No need to prepare anything: Just wear comfortable clothes.
At 6:30 pm, Dartmouth's English Dept. presents the Cleopatra Mathis Poetry and Prose Series, which tonight lives up to its name with readings by essayist Emily Bernard and poet Nicholas Regiacorte. Bernard, who teaches at UVM, s the author of Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine, named one of the best books of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews and NPR and winner of the LA Times's Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose. Regiacorte directs the creative writing program at Knox College in Galesburg, IL. His first poetry collection, American Massif, is just out. In-person in the Sanborn Library.
And at 7 this evening, online, Grantham's Dunbar Free Library presents an NH Humanities lecture by longtime journalist Jim Rousmaniere, "How Fresh Water Has Shaped New Hampshire." Rousmaniere, who cut his teeth covering economics for The Baltimore Sun before becoming editor of the Keene Sentinel, is the author of the 2019 book Water Connections—What Fresh Water Means to Us and What We Mean to Water, and tonight will be talking about the ways in which water affected the development of New Hampshire, and vice versa.
Miko Marks may have grown up in Flint, MI, singing with her cousins, steeped in the fervent gospel of the charismatic church to which her family belonged, and joining her high school's madrigal choir, but she was also drawn to country music. "People don't realize that Black people, we were watching
Hee Haw
too," she told NPR last year. "We listened to the
Grand Ole Opry
. Even though we were in Flint, Mich., this was a part of our culture and our base that we brought with us." So for a time in the mid-2000s she tried to go the mainstream route in Nashville—but found the barriers too tough to surmount. Now, however, back in San Francisco (where she'd been living), she's become part of a wave of Black women making waves in country and Americana circles. Here she is with her band, The Resurrectors,
"
This felt like an opportunity to take a song of his and reclaim it through my own voice as a Black artist," she writes.
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 and writers who want you to 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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