RABBIT RABBIT, UPPER VALLEY!
We get to dry out for a bit: sunny, heating up. High pressure is starting to arrive, and though it'll still be humid, it shouldn't be as bad as yesterday—though even so, highs today will reach the upper 80s, maybe 90 toward the south. This morning's fog will dissipate in the sun, which will be with us the rest of the day—though there's a faint chance of scattered light showers this afternoon. Winds today from the northwest, lows tonight in the mid 60s.We got off lightly last night. There was definitely some heavy rain that fell in the storms that came through late yesterday: WMUR reports up to four inches in Grafton County. The main impact was a couple of flooded-out sections of Route 25 in Piermont and a section of 25C in Piermont. As of this morning, according to New England 511, the roads are back open, with the stretch of 25C from Indian Pond Rd to Echo Ln Road down to one lane alternating.News from up north. In photos, at least.
From Lyndonville, site of some of the heaviest rain Monday night and Tuesday morning, photographer Herb Swanson sends in this pic of his road (with Dartmouth News's Charlotte Albright in the background). "We are stuck with no power and not sure when our road will be repaired," he writes. "So much destruction in a very short time!" (See below for a VTDigger story on that.)
And from Newbury, VT, photographer Ian Clark devotes his latest blog post to a loon family album: at first, two parents, a chick, and an egg—and then, on his return visit, two chicks, swimming, eating, napping on mom's back...
In Woodstock, "It was complicated before. It's even more complicated now." As Liz Sauchelli reports in the Valley News, Woodstock voters went opposite ways on short-term rentals Tuesday. Townwide, voters opted to overturn an ordinance crafted by the selectboard imposing a cap and a fee structure; in a floor meeting, village voters opted to uphold an identical ordinance. In theory, the Village ordinance takes effect today, but, says Municipal Manager Eric Duffy, "We will not be enforcing any particular ordinance until we have more guidance from our attorneys." Stay tuned.Live music at Springfield prison: "Worst case, it gets you out of your unit. Best case, you hear something life-changing." Quechee musician and composer Julian Calv and the Upper Valley sextet he leads, the Non Prophets, played a gig recently at the prison—a first for the state correctional institute and for the Non Prophets. As Ken Picard writes in Seven Days, the concert was a memorial to incarcerated men who've died at Southern State in recent years, part of a creative project funded by the Quakers' New England Yearly Meeting. "The music seemed to have an almost hypnotic effect," Picard writes.SPONSORED: Do you have old or unwanted jewelry lying around? The price of gold is again nearing an all-time high, and now might be the best time to cash in! Dutille's will evaluate your items and give you a fair, no-obligation offer for immediate payment or to use as trade towards another piece or a custom design. Easily schedule an appointment, message us on Facebook or Instagram, text/call us at 603-448-4106, or visit us at the burgundy link or here. Sponsored by Dutille's Jewelry Design Studio.Long before there were bees and butterflies, there were beetles. And, writes Elise Tillinghast in Northern Woodlands' "This Week in the Woods", they've been serving as pollinators for some 150 million years. She delivers a near play-by-play on a red-shouldered pine borer making its way across a stump toward some fungi. Also out there as we move into August: thin-leaved sunflowers, violet coral fungus (it changes color as light conditions change), and the plants known as ghost pipe and pinesap, which depend on mycorrhizal fungi rather than photosynthesis.Speaking of pollinators, there's such a thing as a "pollinator highway." Or at least, writes Kate Kampner for UVM's Community News Service, there will be if a loose-knit network of volunteers across 18 states, including VT and NH gets its way. The idea, Kampner writes, is to make it easy for pollinators to get from food source to food source by planting gardens of native, non-invasive plants and flowers—and rethinking lawns. Kampner writes about ongoing efforts in western and northern towns in the state. Meanwhile, Lebanon's got its own version going on, with pollinator gardens in six spots around the city.SPONSORED: Craving a bit of that Sundance Film Festival creativity? Enjoy a mix of fiction, documentary and animated shorts that are funny, sad, inspiring and full of strong characters. The Hop is screening seven specially curated shorts from the 2024 Sundance Film Festival on Saturday, Aug. 3 at 7 pm at the Loew Auditorium. Driven by innovation and experimentation, the Short Film Program seeks out filmmaking's most original voices from around the world. Sponsored by the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth.Thetford's Peter Graves makes the Vermont Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame. The new inductees were announced Monday and will be celebrated at Killington in October. Graves, the announcement notes, is "known as the voice of skiing in America," with a four-decade career as a race announcer and sportscaster covering alpine, cross-country, snowboarding, ski jumping, and freestyle skiing in pretty much every venue imaginable: Olympics, World Cups, local ski hills. Also in this year's class: Vermont Ski + Ride's Lisa Gosselin Linn; snowboarder Kelly Clark; safety researcher Carl Ettlinger; and others.The Karibbean expands to West Leb. Maybe you've eaten their jerk chicken or another of their Jamaican or Haitian dishes. And chances are good you've at least seen owners and chefs Balvin Bowen and Carline Roberge at the Lebanon, Norwich, or Hartland farmers markets, or at their first spot in downtown Lebanon. Now, reports the VN's Liz Sauchelli, the couple has opened a second spot, in a former Rymes Propane office on Main Street in old West Leb. The spot includes a full kitchen and seating for 16 customers. Sauchelli dives into the pair's history, popularity, and challenges ahead.Out of a side gig in the Tuck School kitchen: Tamarind Heads. When Sashi Kumar was at Dartmouth, he worked in the kitchen for Jim Giberson, who was director of dining services at the time. As a student project, Kumar developed a business plan for a tamarind-based barbecue sauce—and now, five years later, writes the Globe's Ann Trieger Kurland (via MSN, no paywall), the and Giberson are in business together. Their W. Bridgewater, MA company crafts a set of sauces using the sweet-sour flavor of tamarind as their base. "The flavor hasn’t broken out here, so that’s why we launched the company,” Kumar says.As more NH parents choose to go the school choice route, how do you measure success? In a wide-ranging look at both Education Freedom Accounts and charter schools, NHPR's Sarah Gibson talks to parents who are home-schooling or have put their kids into charters or religious schools, then zooms out to try to get a sense of what difference they're making in kids' lives. Choice advocates say you should gauge their effectiveness by parental satisfaction; skeptics point out that studies show little difference in test scores with public schools—though it's hard to "make direct comparisons between public charter schools and traditional public schools," Gibson notes.Climate change in the Whites, by the numbers. Recently, the Appalachian Mountain Club, the Mount Washington Observatory, the US Forest Service, and Hubbard Brook Research Foundation put out a fact sheet based on observations at four sites, including Mt. Washington and the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, dating back to the 1930s. The takeaways: yep, the air is getting warmer—winters have warmed 5 degrees F; summers are getting wetter—2.6 to 5.8 more inches of rain over the last 64 years; intense precipitation is increasing; and at two sites, maximum snow depth has dropped.Why does Vermont keep flooding? That question tops Patrick Whittle and Michael Casey's AP story noting this week's flooding and that of two weeks ago and last year's—and the likelihood of more to come. They cite a range of factors: a warmer atmosphere's ability to hold more moisture—“This essentially gives storms more fuel," says Dartmouth's Jonathan Winter; the state's mountains and deep valleys; a history of manipulating rivers; and a system of old, outdated, and sometimes crumbling dams. It presents "a flooding conundrum that state and federal officials are scrambling to resolve."“I was screaming and crying for help...and all I could see were just waves of water carrying things.” In VTDigger, Ethan Weinstein tells the story of Leena Aly, a fourth-year dental student living in a tiny house on Red Village Road in Lyndonville, just down from Herb Swanson's road (up top). Sometime between 2 and 3 Tuesday morning, she awoke to find a torrent undermining the home, knew she had to get out, stepped out into water, and was sucked into it. She grabbed for branches, but “every time I hung onto something, it would just break. It was literally just coming unbound from the bottom..." It's an epic tale."It was like a train coming down": In a hard-hit Lyndon neighborhood, the road is "literally a canyon." VT Public's Peter Hirschfeld reports on the residents of Mount Hunger Road, where much of the roadway "has been carved down to bedrock that sits 20 feet below in some spots where cars once traveled." Some residents, despite being cut off, feel confident: "We got freezers full of meat and the garden’s good, so it’s just another day in Vermont. It doesn’t bother me any," says one. But he worries about neighbors whose home was swallowed up. "They got nothing left," he says. "It’s gone."When flooding destroys private roads, homeowners may be on the hook. And the bills, writes Kevin McCallum in Seven Days, could be "in the range of tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars." "We don't know what to do," Moretown's Kevin Sweeney tells McCallum; his road was destroyed July 10 and is now a 15-foot ravine. While state and town roads will eventually get funds, private roads—in counties that meet the threshold for individuals to get help from FEMA—need to meet certain conditions. And even then, McCallum writes, "who would get money—and when—isn't clear."Longtime Vermont journalist and writer Bill Mares dies at 83. "He aspired to be more than a dilettante, and less than a ‘renaissance man,'" yesterday's obit in VTDigger runs, and he succeeded: jobs at newspapers in five states; 20 books on subjects as diverse as Marine Corps boot camp (he was in the reserves), fishing, brewing, and running; 30 marathons; two decades as a high school history and foreign policy teacher; three terms in the legislature (where he sponsored the law allowing brew pubs in the state). Diagnosed with cancer, he died Monday using VT's Act 39 Death with Dignity law.It would be worth the trek to Middlebury for this, don't you think? Next week, Emmy Award-winning director Andy Mitchell is holding a special screening for his latest film, Inside the Mind of a Dog, on Netflix later this month (following his previous Netflix flick, Inside the Mind of a Cat). The event will be at the Memorial Sports Center and Mitchell is hoping at least 220 dogs show up, so they can beat the Guinness record of "most dogs to attend a film screening," currently 219. One challenge, writes Seven Days' Leah Krason: the dogs have to put in 10 minutes of "watching time." Here's the trailer.Those St. Bernards. They're unflappable. Even flying coach. (Thanks, AFG!)
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We may be the middle of nowhere to everyone else in VT and NH, but
we
know what's good! Strong Rabbit's Morgan Brophy has come up with the perfect design for "We Make Our Own Fun" t-shirts and tote bags for proud Upper Valleyites. Plus you'll find the Daybreak jigsaw puzzle, as well as sweatshirts, tees, a fleece hoodie, and, as always, the fits-every-hand-perfectly Daybreak mug. Check it all out at the link!
The western Mass.-based group, which is led by
Brendaliz and Saul Cepeda, celebrates Puerto Rican bomba, a traditional dance and drumming practice that was championed by Brendaliz Cepeda's grandfather, who gained renown on the island for both performing and documenting the tradition.
At Fable Farm Fermentory, gates at 5:30, music starts up at 6.
Sayed Kashua, a hugely successful Palestinian Israeli writer and screenwriter—who writes in Hebrew—is teaching at Dartmouth this summer. Tonight at 7, he's curated—and will lead a post-film discussion about—episodes from two of his popular sitcoms,
Arab Labor
and
Madrasa
, and his dramatic series,
The Writer
(he also writes for the hit series
Shtisel
). In the Loew Auditorium.
Sam Shepard's late-'70s Pulitzer-winner launched his fame as a playwright: The play, as Parish Players write, "explores the ramifications of an Illinois farm family withholding a terrible secret for decades." The production, directed by Ray Chapin, features a mighty Upper Valley cast: Julianne Borger, Erik Gaetz, Alan Gelfant, Kay Morton, Jim Schley, Malcolm Quinn Silver-Van Meter, and Noor Taher. At the Grange Theater on Thetford Hill, Thurs-Sat at 7:30 pm, Sundays at 3 pm.
The resort's free summer concert series continues with the trio of LA-based blues-inspired rockers, who've been touring the east and were in Portland last night. Doors and food (pizza, food trucks) at 6 pm, music starts up at 8 pm.
It'll be at its peak this month, Billings writes. "Curated by the Woodstock Inn & Resort’s Master Gardener, Ben Pauly, and Kelly Way Gardens Manager, Taylor Hiers, this year’s Sunflower House will feature over 50 varieties... from the towering giants that reach heights of up to 14 feet, to the sweet, small blooms that stand 1 foot tall."
And to rock us into the day...
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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