GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Before we start, a huge thank you! Last week, I made one of just a few requests for contributions that occur each year. I never know what to expect, but the response to this one was great: Scores of you signed up for monthly contributions or sent along one-time support, a good number for the first time. It was heartening—and a reminder that Daybreak can only exist because of a community of people who care about the Upper Valley, Vermont, and New Hampshire. I'm deeply grateful: You are a model of what's possible. And if you didn't contribute then but want to now, here's the link. What is this "mid 70s" you speak of? Yep, for now, anyway, we're back to temps fit for humans. The front that dropped through yesterday is trailing cooler and dryer (at least until tonight) air, and we get highs today in the low or mid 70s, along with partly sunny skies before clouds start to build ahead of a new front that's off to the northwest right now. It'll bring us a chance of rain starting this afternoon and lasting overnight. Down to the mid 50s tonight, as well.
By the way, Lebanon reached 100° on Tuesday. It's the first time the city's ever hit that mark—and it set a daily, monthly, and all-time heat record all at once, WCAX reports.
Putting things in perspective. Two photos that came in this week do just that.
The first is from last weekend's Quechee Hot Air Balloon Festival, where Phyll Perry went for the first time ever. It won't be her last, she says. Not when you can see balloons like this!
"We grow them big in Etna," Gary Johnson writes. "This morning, out to do some yard work, presented a bit of a challenge. The light was just right to illuminate a 7-foot-plus-diameter spider web, with bridging filaments well in excess of ten feet long. I’m 6’4”, so it was a bit intimidating. Catching birds, night stalking neighbors, or the random bat?" You'll want to expand the pic.
It's time for Dear Daybreak! With a quartet of pieces from readers about Upper Valley life. There's Kira Parrish-Penny on listening to crickets and slowing down. Danny Dover, spurred by a recent Daybreak item mentioning ancient roads, sends in his poem on what a communal search for them tells us about finding our way. Liz Pippin Carey writes in about her mom, Pat, doyenne of the Lyme Country Store. And Jon Kaplan casts his mind back to what it was like in those last days before school got out for summer. And one note: No Dear Daybreak next week—next Thursday's issue will be crowded.Stretch of I-91 South will close for a month as cliff work continues. In a community meeting yesterday evening, VTrans officials announced that the southbound lanes between Bradford and Fairlee will be closed from July 26 until the end of August, reports Daybreak summer reporter Duncan Green. Once again, southbound traffic will be re-routed to Route 5 at Bradford, then back onto the highway in Fairlee. This summer's work will remove loose rock, then stabilize the cliff face with dowels and mesh with a 50-year design life. Northbound traffic will face periodic rolling roadblocks.A hot Upper Valley topic: parking. For starters, the Hartford Selectboard on Tuesday opted to put off amending the town's parking ordinance, reports Emma Roth-Wells in the Valley News—thus delaying the installation of parking kiosks it's already purchased. Some residents argue that a vote five years ago against using a local option tax to buy meters was a vote against charging for parking. Town officials argue the need for metered parking has been settled. Meanwhile, Roth-Wells writes, Enfield has updated its parking ordinance, Woodstock is raising its parking fees to $1.50 an hour, and Hanover plans to review its rates.
SPONSORED: Join Willing Hands for a Garden Talk today! It's the start of the Willing Hands Garden Walk & Talk series. Join us this afternoon at our River Road Garden in Norwich for a behind-the-scenes look at the role this piece of land plays in feeding the community. Learn about the location’s history and what it takes to grow all that food. Attend just the talk, or stay to get your hands dirty planting potatoes afterward. Learn more and sign up at our Events page. Sponsored by Willing Hands.The Wall That Heals rolls into Claremont. The three-quarters-size replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial arrived in sections on a 53-foot-long trailer on Tuesday, accompanied from Andover, NH by 126 vehicles. Yesterday, volunteers spent a good bit of the day assembling it into its 375-foot-long, 7½-foot-tall grandeur for its stay in the city, which lasts until Sunday afternoon (see Heads Up below). In the VN, Patrick O'Grady recounts how city council member William Limoges came up with the idea to host it—and how hundreds of volunteers showed up to make it a reality.
Well, that didn't last long: Silver Lake State Park swimming area reopens. As you'll remember, the beach in Barnard was closed Tuesday because of a positive E. coli test. But yesterday, reports the VN, a second test came back showing safe bacterial levels, and the swimming area's been reopened. It's a reminder that in the heat of summer, conditions change daily.
Like, a cyanobacteria bloom on Little Lake Sunapee was added Tuesday to NH's Healthy Swimming Mapper, along with the blooms reported Monday in New London's Pleasant Lake.
And Vermont's Cyanobacteria Tracker (which, unlike NH's version, does not track things like fecal coliform), is now active.
SPONSORED: Trade your old jewelry for cash or something new! Do you have unwanted jewelry, gold/silver coins, or watches lying around? Schedule an appointment to bring your items to Dutille’s in downtown Lebanon for a free, no-obligation evaluation. We’ll make you a fair and top-of-the-market offer for immediate payment—or you can trade the value toward a new piece or custom design. Call or text 603-448-4106 or visit the burgundy link or here. Sponsored by Dutille's Jewelry Design Studio.Maine man gets DUI charge after driving onto Bradford VT foot bridge. Yesterday afternoon, the VT State Police report, the 70-year-old South Paris, ME resident drove down a walking trail at the end of Cottage Road and then tried to drive across a narrow foot bridge. His vehicle "broke through the wooden bridge and caused extensive damage"—officers found it partially hanging off the bridge. Police and firefighters helped the man out of the car and noticed signs of impairment—he was taken to DHMC and cited. A wrecker service will retrieve the car this morning.Bid to impose moratorium on new NH landfills won't move forward. Along with a new site evaluation committee, the moratorium was among Gov. Kelly Ayotte's proposals for the budget this year. They made progress in the state House, report NHPR's Mara Hoplamazian and Julia Vaz, but got watered down in the Senate, and will die with the session. John Tuthill, a member of A Better Claremont, which has been fighting a proposed construction waste site, says he's okay with that: “The House stuck to their position. The House bill was a good bill. The Senate bill, in my opinion, was basically an industry bill.”Just hours ahead of showdown budget vote, Ayotte says agreement reached. The NH legislature is due to meet today to vote on the state's two-year budget, in the midst of an ongoing face-off between the GOP leadership and GOP Gov. Kelly Ayotte. But in a statement released shortly after 6 pm yesterday, reports NH Bulletin's Ethan DeWitt, Ayotte said she and legislators had been able to "reach a compromise"—though she provided no details. "The agreement could provide an exit route" for lawmakers, DeWitt writes, away from a veto and possible special session. But as he explains, today will produce drama: there's opposition both to the budget and to a special session if it fails.Mixed picture emerges on twin state federal funding for schools. It's supposed to arrive by July 1 for a whole range of services. This year, though, administrators have been on tenterhooks about what will happen.
On the one hand, as the NH Department of Education announced this week, it received preliminary allocations from the feds for a variety of purposes, in some cases in amounts exceeding what came in last year: $46.3 million for supplemental support for students and professional development for teachers, for instance, compared to $44.6 million last year. Funding for career and tech schools, special ed, and other programs arrived, as well.
On the other hand, Alison Novak reports in Seven Days that while VT's allocations under those particular titles appear to be on track, $11 million in funding under a different set of titles—Title II and Title III—to pay for teacher training and instruction for English learners has been hung up; the Trump administration has proposed eliminating that funding entirely. Some schools have leftover funds they can turn to, Novak writes, but others "may have to reallocate money from other sources or cut programs."
Diving head first into the maelstrom of a legislative session. Let's just note up front that Hannah Bassett's profile in Seven Days of two freshman VT legislators—Republican Michael Boutin from Barre and Democrat Shawn Sweeney from Shelburne—is long. But if you're even remotely interested in this year's legislative session (see: education) or in what it's like to find your bearings as a citizen legislator, do check it out. It's a lesson in the intricacies of legislative maneuvering, in the keen frustration of holding high hopes for impact but little power, and in how rookie legislators learn not to be rookies.And you think our weather’s been tough! Heat, shmeet. Some 600 million miles away, on Jupiter, two massive storms are racing around the planet. And we can get a view of them because in Stockholm late last year, Peter Rosén, an amateur planetary photographer, started tracking two tiny dots that appeared on Jupiter just months apart. Using thousands of still images uploaded by other citizen scientists from around the world, he's created a fantastic video. His description of the process is technical; Jeremy Gray at PetaPixel has a helpful writeup on Rosen’s process.But there's still plenty of drama here on Earth. Can there actually be a photogenic tornado? Stormchaser Aaron Jayjack says yes: Last week, a tornado rolled through farm country in the Nebraska Sandhills for over an hour, and Jayjack caught the entire thing on camera—then edited those 77 minutes down to a single one-minute timelapse. Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday's Daybreak.
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As you saw above, the three-quarter-scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial with
the names of all 58,281 men and women who died in the Vietnam War, will be in Claremont at Monadnock Park until Sunday at 2 pm. It's open 24 hours a day before then. Welcome ceremony today at noon.
. The Colombian folk-rock trio is led by Isabel Ramirez Ocampo, born in the central Colombian city of Manizales, on vocals and guitar, along with bassist Miguel Velásquez Matijasevic and drummer Camilo Bartelsman. Their specialty: songs about their country's current challenges. Gates and food at 5:30, music at 6.
Kim A. Snyder's documentary, a hit at Sundance, follows a clutch of librarians, educators, and ordinary Americans on the front lines of culture-war efforts in Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and elsewhere to ban books from school and other libraries—sometimes facing off against other members of their own families. 7 pm in the Loew. And if you can't make it,
The talk is from last fall, but timely: Princeton's Seyed Hossein Mousavian and Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institute on the complex Iran-Israel relationship. Then there's
Take Flight,
a JAM original documentary series about a group of intrepid Lebanon High students assembling an airplane—and engaging local and state government on the questions it raises. And finally, Hartford Middle School student Kai Snyder Hamalainen's documentary on his school's Boys’ Group and their conversations about... being boys.
And for today...
Brazilian
bandolin
(mandolin) master Hamilton de Holanda with his trio, tenor saxophonist Chris Potter, and the audience singing along, last fall at
Dizzy’s Club at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Here's "Mantra da Criação".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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