GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Mesoscale Convective System. That—larger than a mere storm—is what's been headed this way from the upper Midwest for the last few days. It's falling apart, but the weather folks say there's at least a chance for strong to severe storms to develop right around here. So there's a potential for thunderstorms and heavy rain, most likely late this afternoon, and a flash flood watch is in effect through this evening. Temps today into the low 80s, but it'll be humid so will feel warmer. Things calm down overnight, mid 60s.As you know, nature has moods. From peaceful to... not so peaceful, as today's crop of photos reminds us.
We'll start at one end, with fawns in Lyme, from Susan Hewitt;
Then move on to this tree on the Eastman Golf Course, stripped by lightning during the storm, Mark Arnold believes, that rolled through late last week;
And finish up with this scene in Tunbridge, best described by Elisse Gabriel: "While taking photos of the various lilies that have bloomed around our garden (yellow, pink, orange, red), I happened upon this spider munching a honeybee atop a Black-Eyed Susan." Elisse identified it as a crab spider; Ted Levin specifies: a color-morphing goldenrod crab spider, which likes to hang out on flowers.
VT State Police looking for missing northbound AT hiker. Robert Kerker, 67, of Rhinebeck, NY, had been checking in with his family weekly as he made his way up the northern half of the Appalachian Trail, but the last time they heard from him was July 9—just ahead of the storms—when he was in Killington. His family reported him overdue on Monday. Kerker is 5' 10", weighs 150 pounds, and has short white hair and a beard. He goes by the trail name “Steady Eddie," the VSP says in its press release, which also includes a photo. Anyone with information should call the Rutland Barracks as 802-773-9101.Hopkins Center re-do switching gears this summer. The multi-year, $89 million project to refurbish and expand Dartmouth's marquee arts venue is entering a new phase, the college's communications office writes, as the project shifts from demolition to work on the foundation. Though there's still destruction to go: workers began dismantling the roof of Alumni Hall in June, but removing the concrete beams won't occur until early next month, which will involve bringing in a large crane. As it turns out, you can see what's going on behind those barriers in front thanks to two webcams overlooking the site.SPONSORED: Typing at a computer from 9 to 5? Performing repetitive tasks on the job? Dr. Diane Riley of APD Orthopaedics offers carpal tunnel release with UltraGuideCTR and ultrasound guidance. With this minimally invasive technique, most patients return to work and normal activities within three to six days. Learn more. Sponsored by Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital.Reminders that "the Upper Valley is home to theater of national scope." That's Valley News arts writer Alex Hanson on two productions now under way. One is the New London Barn Playhouse's run of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, with Kennedy Caughell in the lead—a role she was prepping for the musical's national tour just before the pandemic shut it down in 2020. The other is NOISE, the Hop's "joyful celebration of the possibilities of music,” as the center's director, Mary Lou Aleskie, puts it, which opens tonight at Northern Stage (more below). “We want the world to know, and the country to know, that we have what it takes to make original work,” Aleskie tells Hanson.It's a tough job, but someone's got to do it. Upper Valley VT/NH Musings blogger Dave Celone has set himself the task, at least once a year, of visiting a creemee stand and then reporting on what he found. Last year it was Silloway Farm in Randolph Center. This week: Gladstone Creamery in Fairlee. He went for the unadulterated maple creemee ("a full-on 5 star rating"); his son for maple bacon hard ice cream ("heaven on the tongue"). I say, if they're doing a maple/coffee twist that day, just shut everything else out of your mind.SPONSORED: Opera North presents Rodgers & Hammerstein's Carousel July 27-30. Don't miss your chance—Sunday's performance is sold out! Carousel captures the longing of carnival barker Billy and millworker Julie pursuing love through life and loss. With guest artist Maureen Brennan as Mrs. Mullin/Starkeeper. “If I Loved You,” “June is Bustin’ Out All Over” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone” are songs of clambakes and conflict, consequence and redemption. Carousel, Rodgers once said, was his favorite. For info and tix, hit the burgundy link or go here. Sponsored by Opera North.20 acres. Of greenhouses. That's what North Country Growers has planned for Berlin, NH, reports Michael McCord in NH Business Review. The project will grow salad greens and other vegetables for a regional market and employ 80 people full time, once it's up and running. It's also designed for energy efficiency: "Rainwater and snowmelt will be collected from the greenhouse roof and used for irrigation," McCord writes, "while thermal energy produced during power production can be stored in thermal storage tanks and utilized other times of day."Want an easy way to track NH air quality? Yeah, with Canadian wildfire smoke such an ever-present issue this summer, you probably do. And as Hadley Barndollar writes for NH Bulletin, the state's Department of Environmental Services has you covered: a map that shows real-time monitoring data for both ground-level ozone and particle pollution, updated every hour. Barndollar's explanation at the burgundy link, map here.With intense rains, dam safety is setting off alarms in both VT and NH. Both states' dam infrastructure is being stress-tested this summer, and there's real reason for concern.
There are 1,200 dams dotting the state of Vermont, Kevin McCallum and Derek Brouwer write in Seven Days, both major ones and modest neighborhood ones, and they "came under unfathomable pressure" in this month's storms. Federal data shows 63 of them are in poor condition and pose high or significant hazards if they fail—and it won't reassure you to know the Union Village Dam, Wright Reservoir Dam in Hartford, and Middle Brook Dam in W. Fairlee are among them. McCallum and Brouwer look into what the data says, the structural issues facing dams and the competing demands facing dam managers, the state of the state's dam safety program, and the slow-moving effort to remove "deadbeat dams." "We can't dig our way out of 200 years of river manipulation in a mere five or 10 years," says one dam consultant. "This flood has once again shown us the problem is huge."
Meanwhile, writes Amanda Pirani in NH Bulletin, NH has about 2,600 dams, about 176 of which would pose significant hazards if they failed—and 56 of those are in poor or unsatisfactory condition, according to a 2022 AP analysis. Most of them are state-owned. The state has allocated $35 million in federal funds toward repair projects.
Those are preliminary figures based on calls to the state's 2-1-1 system as of late Tuesday, Kristen Fountain and Lola Duffort report in
VTDigger
. And though the full extent of the damage won't be known for some time—and Vermont Emergency Management hasn't yet verified the data—it's enough to suggest that the damage "will be at least comparable, and perhaps even greater, than what was suffered during Tropical Storm Irene," they write.
That's how a lobbyist for New England Central Railroad—the freight company that owns a lot of the track Amtrak's Vermonter uses—describes the work that went into repairing track damaged by flooding. His company actually got off lightly compared to lines used by Green Mountain Railroad—especially in Ludlow and East Wallingford—but repairs there have been moving quickly, as well, writes
VTDigger
's Shaun Robinson. “We’ve got a lot of folks that haven’t been home—or, you know, have been home minimally—in the last couple of weeks,” says VT Rail System president Selden Houghton.
Slate Ridge legal maneuvering steps up a notch as Daniel Banyai appeals to VT Supreme Court. You probably remember that a few weeks ago, a state environmental court ordered Banyai's arrest for failing to dismantle unpermitted structures at his gun training facility in Pawlet. That arrest hasn't happened, reports VTDigger's Emma Cotton: first, because the Rutland County Sheriff and Pawlet disagreed over whether he had jurisdiction, now because Banyai's attorney wants the court to stay the arrest order until the Supreme Court can review the appeal. Here's the Bennington Banner on the state of play in Pawlet."Four days to mark the night his father swore him in as president might strike [Calvin] Coolidge as a lot of commotion." But as Mary Ann Lickteig writes in Seven Days, like it or not, VT's only president is going to get his due next week in Plymouth Notch. And then some, what with a gala dinner, the premiere of a documentary, and no fewer than five reenactments of the event itself. Which took place early the morning of Aug. 3, 1923, when then-VP Coolidge was visiting home and the news arrived—relayed by the husband of Bridgewater switchboard operator Nellie Perkins—that Warren G. Harding had died in San Francisco. Lickteig chronicles the events, both then and next week.One look is all it takes. Stephen Wiltshire is a stunningly talented British artist whose pen and ink drawings of cities can stretch to 30 feet wide. These are no rough outlines. Drawings of Tokyo, Brisbane, New York, and other cities include fine details of architectural elements, landscape, and landmarks. Most remarkable is that Wiltshire, an autistic savant, draws with such accuracy after a single look, because he’s able to memorize entire cityscapes in the space of a helicopter ride, often just 20 minutes. Wonder World, an Australian YouTube channel, has a short video on how Wiltshire created his New York cityscape. The Thursday Vordle. With a word that's not from yesterday's Daybreak.
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It's Thursday, and Feast & Field in Barnard this evening (gates at 5:30, music at 6) brings in Tommy Crawford and a brand-new band for the occasion: Marcus Copening on drums, Ben Kogan on bass, Jen Freise on fiddle. There'll actually be two separate sets: The one starting at 6 is geared toward families and kids, with traditional folk tunes and original songs that, among other things, draw from Tommy's experiences as a dad (in other words, they're not just for kids); and then a mix of original fiddle tunes, Tommy's previous singer-songwriter work, and new songs from the VT Farm Project—the forthcoming musical about farming in VT and the Upper Valley. There's a big tent, so it's rain or shine—but check the website anyway just in case thunderstorms get out of hand.
This evening at 7, the Sunapee area's Summer Music Associates present one of the more unusual chamber music groups around: the saxophone sextet The Moanin' Frogs. Running through the sax family, soprano to bass, the conservatory-trained ensemble will play a wildly eclectic program, Bach and Mozart to Ellington, Chuck Berry, and Freddie Mercury, based loosely on music on the "golden records" sent into space aboard Voyagers I & II. At New London's First Baptist Church.
Also at 7, the Norwich Bookstore hosts poet Emma Wynn, following up on last night's gathering at the Main Street Museum with a solo reading from The World Is Our Anchor, poems that explore "the legacies of human brutality—to the natural world, other animals, our children, and ourselves."
At 7:30, the Hop's new musical, NOISE, opens its four-day run at Northern Stage. In creator César Alvarez and Obie-winning director Sarah Benson’s Hop-commissioned work, a group of musicians decide that society is broken and set out to make music that models a society they actually want to live in. “It ends up being a sort of raucous ‘band-practice-at-the-commune’ exploration of togetherness,” Alvarez, who teaches music at Dartmouth, tells Dartmouth News's Aimee Minbiole. With a cast and crew both from NY and the Upper Valley. Also tomorrow at 7:30, Saturday at 2 and 7:30, and Sunday at 2.
Also at 7:30, the Canaan Meetinghouse Reading Series closes out its season with poet Vievee Francis and fiction writer Asako Serizawa. Francis, who teaches at Dartmouth, is the author of four books of poetry and has been winning acclaim for her most recent collection, The Shared World. Serizawa, who's won two O. Henry Prizes, and a Pushcart Prize, among others, is the author of Inheritors, a collection of stories that trace the twisting history of a Japanese family over 150 years, from 1868 to the 2030's. In the Canaan Meeting House.
At 8 tonight, the Lake Morey Resort keeps its free summer concert series hopping with Burlington-based soul and acoustic singer-songwriter Kat Wright. Tiki bar, beer (from Burlington Beer Co.) and wood-fired pizza(from 6-8 pm) available for purchase. On the resort's front lawn.
And finally, whenever you feel like it, check out JAM's highlights for the week: Laura Savidge's look at Upper Valley Habitat for Humanity and what it takes for volunteers to build a house; Riverfolk's packed return to Northern Stage's Courtyard Theater last week; a Bookstock panel on the history, challenges, and rewards of film-making in VT featuring veteran filmmaker Jay Craven, film historian Rick Winston, and JAM's Samantha Davidson Green; and the pro-level music video created and produced over five days by JAM Camp's young musicians and film crew at Tuck's Rock Dojo.
And for today's music:
Sinead O'Connor, 1966-2023.
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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