GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Well, hey! Sun! And it'll be mostly dry. High pressure's headed this way, with much more sun than clouds once the fog clears, though temps won't get much above 70, if that. Winds from the northwest, down to around 50 tonight.Got a moment? See that maroon "Yes, I count on Daybreak" button down below? It's simple: Daybreak exists only because 1 in 7 of you keep it going. If you find your day or week doesn't feel complete without the photos or the Vordle or the news or the news quiz or the stuff to talk about with your friends and family and colleagues, and you'd like to see Daybreak persevere and grow, hit the burgundy link at the start of this item or the button below and check out the options. The rest of today's Daybreak will wait patiently.Look, up in the sky! I know, we did it the other day, but it never ceases to amaze...
Like, the tendrils of cloud above Chester, VT last week, eerily alive-looking, from Amanda DeRoy.
And yesterday morning's sky above S. Royalton, which drew this from Jenn Megyesi: "You know what the mariners say when this is the scene at 0615 hours!"
Thetford Academy, the Chandler, West Fairlee club win facilities grants. The money is part of $300,000 overall just announced by the Vermont Arts Council to "enhance, create, or expand" buildings that house the arts. TA is getting $18,000 to help it upgrade digital projection, sound, and lighting in the Martha Rich Theater; the Chandler, in Randolph, landed $19,196 to overhaul its "audio amplification environment"; and the W. Fairlee Community Club is getting $4,371 to put in an ADA-compliant restroom.Local high school principal makes National Book Awards longlist. Norwich's Kenneth Cadow, principal of Oxbow High School in Bradford, is also a writer. His first novel for young adults, Gather—based in no small part on his experiences working with rural teens in Thetford, Randolph, and Bradford—is out Oct. 3. And yesterday, reports The New Yorker, it landed among the ten books vying for this year's National Book Award for Young People's Literature. "Cadow’s debut novel portrays a challenging coming-of-age in rural Vermont with warmth, humor, and insight," Kirkus wrote last month.Leb teen arrested for stealing semi in W. Leb, trailer in St. Albans. The 17-year-old, reports WCAX, took the cab—which belongs to WRJ's Eastman Trucking—from a yard in West Leb on Tuesday night, then drove to St. Albans and hitched it to the trailer part of a tractor-trailer, which he then drove south to the Waterbury rest stop on I-89. Eastman employees tell WCAX they were able to track the rig through its GPS and found it yesterday morning; the teen was asleep in the driver's seat. They disabled the truck until police arrived. The VSP is releasing no other details about the suspect due to his age.Three former lawyers who now pursue the arts in the region. "Maybe it’s because I spent most of my life as a lawyer and law professor, now writer about the arts, that I find myself bumping up against people who have chosen a similar path," writes Susan Apel in Artful. So she profiles three of them: Elliot Burg, a former former legal aid attorney who's now a photographer; longtime environmental lawyer and activist Gus Speth, who's now a poet; and Hanover's Coralea Wennberg, who worked at Dartmouth and VLS, then took a watercolor class that made her decide she needed to paint full-time.As monarch butterflies prep to fly south, NH researchers attach tiny tracking devices. They're part of a national effort to understand the monarch migration to central Mexico, reports NHPR's Olivia Richardson, and the trackers help them keep tabs on the food and rest stops the insects make along the way—the goal being to figure out if there are ways to buttress monarchs' odds of migrating successfully. NH Audubon researcher Diane De Luca notes that one monarch last year made it 60 miles, to MA's Lynnfield Marsh, in a day. "That's a pretty significant travel for a small butterfly,” she tells Richardson."We get some very hard core loon fans." Tiffany Grade is a biologist with NH's Loon Preservation Committee who leads loon cruises, and when NHPR's Rick Ganley joined her on Squam Lake the other day, there were several cases in point on board. “[Alice] said, what do you want to do? And I said, 'Loon cruise.' I didn't even think about it," says one visitor. Loons still face stiff challenges, Ganley notes, but "if humans can cause loon numbers to decline, maybe more thoughtful human action can help bring them back."NH jail superintendent: "Jails and prisons were not designed to be hospitals, health care providers, detox centers, and mental health providers.” And yet, Cheshire County's Doug Iosue tells Annmarie Timmins in NH Bulletin, the state's correctional facilities are increasingly being asked to do just that—and the taxpayers to pay for it. Jails and prisons have seen health care costs skyrocket, as medication prices rise, they encounter older and sicker inmates, and they become the provider of last resort for people with opioid use disorder and mental health needs. Timmins explores the issue around NH.New Covid vaccines coming to NH, VT. Supplies of the updated vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna are starting to arrive this week, after the FDA and CDC approved them Monday and Tuesday. In both states, they'll be available at pharmacies, health centers, and medical offices. The Concord Monitor's David Brooks and Vermont Public's Liam Elder-Connors detail what to expect in each state.In VT (and, around here, NH), a performing arts season "loaded with shows...to suit virtually every taste." Despite VT's floods, "there's a celebratory air about Vermont theaters this fall," writes Dan Bolles atop a roundup by Seven Days staff of upcoming highlights. And there are a lot of them, from Momix's Alice in Burlington to Pueblo musician Robert Mirabal at the Chandler next month to Quebec aerial circus troupe Flip Fabrique in Lyndonville. Along the way, they also call attention to two Hop shows: choreographer Richard Move's Herstory of the Universe@Dartmouth next week and Johnny Gandelsman's This is America the week after.“The single most important thing is to let go, to experience it, to see what happens to you.” For more than a decade, Alex Brown, theater critic for Seven Days, has traveled to playhouses across the state. Colleague Dan Bolles speaks with her about why, in the age of streaming everything, we should experience live theater. Because, she says, we are “seeing something that's only going to happen one time.” And if you want to understand, as she does, how any live performance works, Brown suggests asking yourself how it compresses time. “How long does it take for Romeo and Juliet to fall in love?”Got plans for Saturday? Feel like a drive to Rutland? Because that's the only way you're going to get to see a 700-pound whoopie pie. It's being whipped up by Killington's Dream Maker Bakers for the town's second annual Whoopie Pie Festival—last year's entry by Dream Maker was a measly 543 pounds, but they're trying to work their way toward beating the record held by S. Portland, ME, which notched a 1,062-pound version in 2011. Notes Gordon Dritschilo in the Rutland Herald, "The giant whoopie pie will be weighed at 4 p.m. before being served to the public."Leopold Mozart's Hunting Symphony as it was meant to be. Because the well-trained guest artists at a recent Danish Chamber Orchestra performance hewed to the composer’s vision, writes Cathy Free in the Washington Post (gift link). Leopold, Woofgang’s father, included live dogs in 18th century performances of his piece, so, “I immediately had the idea that I should try to perform it once in the original version,” says conductor Adam Fischer. Cookie, Sophus, and Sica, who had to win their spots by auditioning, demonstrated a talent for barking and being silent on command, and the big night went exactly as planned. Includes video. (Thanks, CA!)The Thursday Vordle. With a word from yesterday's Daybreak.
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Well, today's the day. There are town fairs, country fairs... and then there's the Tunbridge World's Fair. Which opens this morning at 7 (gates) with its first event at 8 am: the Ox Open Log Skid in front of the grandstand. For the next four days, you can get your fill of goats, cows, sheep, oxen, horses, pigs, poultry, pretty much every conceivable flower, fruit, or vegetable that can be grown on a farm or in a garden around here, crafts, rides, so much fair food, music, shows... Logistics at the link above, schedule here. Runs 'til 8 this evening, 7 am to 9 pm tomorrow and Saturday, and 8 am to 5 pm Sunday.
Today at 4:30, Dartmouth's German and history departments host... well, not your typical German and history lecture: Berlin historian Sebastian Conrad on "Bodybuilding and Muscular Manliness—Towards a Global History." Conrad, who holds the Chair of Modern History at the Free University of Berlin, traces the emergence and evolution of bodybuilding from the start of the twentieth century. In Haldeman 041.
And at 5 pm, what you might consider the start to the Hop's fall season gets underway as Telluride at Dartmouth opens with American Symphony (also at 7:30 pm). Both shows may be sold out of Matthew Heineman's look at Jon Batiste's 2022—fame, chart-topping work...and a recurrence of his partner's leukemia. But it's always worth a call, since tickets sometimes become available: 603.646.2422. In the Loew.
It's Feast and Field night at Fable Farm in Barnard, and this evening (gates at 5:30, music at 6) BarnArts brings in Balaklava Blues. There's no way to outdo their description, so here it is: "Balaklave Blues are folk-noir trench-fighters on the cultural front of Ukraine's battle for democracy and freedom. They mix thousand year-old polyphonic traditions with personal stories and sounds of revolution and war that blend folk motifs with contemporary expressions of power, vulnerability and trauma, all amid a swirl of stunning techno visuals and beats. Think Dakha Brakha remixed by A Tribe Called Red and then played live by Thom Yorke fronting Portishead."
At 7 this evening, Still North Books and Bar in Hanover hosts a reading and conversation with three poets: Bill Carty, Paul Hlava Ceballos, and Matthew Olzmann. Carty, a Dartmouth grad who now lives in Seattle, has a new collection just out, We Sailed on the Lake. Ceballos, an echocardiographer who also lives in Seattle, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for his collection, banana [ ]. And Olzmann, no stranger to this section, teaches at Dartmouth and is the author, most recently, of Constellation Route.
Also at 7, The Mudroom is back at AVA Gallery for its 10th anniversary live storytelling event, this time on the theme of "The Big Event." Advance tix are sold out, but you might be able to score some at the door.
Since it looks like a good day to get outside...
Let's just acknowledge that Yo-Yo Ma got out there first, with his cello, set up by a stream in the Great Smoky Mountains,
Can you imagine hiking along that path in the background and suddenly coming upon this?
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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