GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Partly to mostly cloudy, chance of showers. That low pressure's still out there, and there's a disturbance coming through that could bring a bit of rain today. Mostly, though, we'll see a mix of sun and clouds this morning, with the cloudiness growing somewhat in the afternoon. Highs today around 60, winds from the south, down into the upper 30s by dawn.It's all in the light...
Hitting this spider web in Thetford, from Robin Osborne;
And these trees... As Alex Torpey explains, "After a week of being in Texas I went out for a walk in Vermont to immerse myself in New England, and just thought the light was catching these at a particularly beautiful angle!"
And peering over the valley fog and distant hills from Corinth, by Lois Jackson.
Veteran helicopter pilot dies in Croydon crash. Carl Svenson, 73, of Loudon, was a pilot for 50 years, NH Fish & Game wrote in a press release yesterday. He had taken off from Croydon Sunday evening headed for Rhode Island when his longtime employer, Pembroke's JBI Helicopter Services, lost track of his craft on radar. Emergency crews responded to the area around Pine Hill Road Sunday night, and early yesterday morning they found the wrecked helicopter and Svenson's body. He was the only one on board; the crash's cause is under investigation.Target plaza death not suspicious. A police investigation into the death of a woman found in her car in the West Leb plaza yesterday afternoon drew heated social media attention "due to its high-visibility public location," the Valley News reports—Lebanon chief Phil Roberts tells the paper the investigation “revealed no suspicious activity.” He added that a tent was erected around the car to create privacy for family members at the scene and to help officers conduct their work without interference.A musical heads up. Two of them, actually. As Susan Apel notes in Artful, UV Baroque's "Choral Gems" concerts Oct. 21-22 are sold out, but they've opened up their final dress rehearsal Oct. 20, so you can watch artistic director Filippo Ciabatti conduct a complete run-through and then work with the Upper Valley Baroque choir and instrumentalists from Continuo. And this week, Upper Valley Music Center launches "A Little Lunch Music," a monthly concert at UVMC in Lebanon: Thursday at noon, it'll be harpist and new UVMC faculty member Rachel Clemente. Susan fills in the details at the link.Here in the Valley's Tuesday Jukebox: "When I was touring, Tuesdays were for playing poker in hotel rooms." That's fiddler and music dynamo Jakob Breitbach talking to Seven Days' Chris Farnsworth about why bands are happy to come on a Tuesday to play in the series, which is at Hanover Strings these days. The two talk over the event's genesis, its format—a Vermonter paired with a touring musician or band, with Breitbach asking them about their musical lives—and what's next. He's been working with DJ and Conniption Fits member Stevens Blanchard on how to extend the show's reach.SPONSORED: Whaleback's Fall Flannel Fest is on Thursday! Whaleback Mountain is celebrating 10 years of running as a non-profit thanks to the unwavering support of our community. On Thursday, Oct. 12 we'll celebrate this milestone at our biggest fundraiser of the year, Fall Flannel Fest. More than just a fundraiser, it’s a chance for us all to come together and revel in our shared love for Whaleback Mountain. Join us Thursday at 6 pm for an evening of togetherness, festivity, and giving back, complete with food, drinks, live music, and an amazing silent auction. Sponsored by Whaleback.Out there in the woods this week: Among other things, writes Northern Woodlands' Elise Tillinghast, young striped skunks are leaving their families and striking out on their own. "Like most other members of their weasel clan, skunks tend to be solitary, although they are known to den up together in winter burrows sometimes," she adds. Also to be found this second week of October: the resinous polypore fungus and the enchantingly named spangled-winged thread-waisted wasp—which digs false burrows to lead predators astray.And also: crowned slug caterpillars. Which, as one commenter on Mary Holland's Naturally Curious blog notes, looks like it could live undersea, not on the ground. But there they are—like many other slug caterpillars, Holland notes, vibrantly colored as larvae, pretty dull-looking as moths. Not dull looking at all: those frilly hairs that surround them, which sting.SPONSORED: Randall Balmer to lecture at the Hanover UCC Church. Dartmouth professor and noted author Randall Balmer will celebrate the publication of his new book, Saving Faith, with a lecture on Sunday, Oct. 15th at 4:00 p.m. at the Church of Christ at Dartmouth College, 40 College Street in Hanover. There is no admission charge to hear his talk, "The Crisis of Christianity in America". Sponsored by the CCDC.150 years ago: warm September days (but also the first killing frost), plus plenty of rain. You may remember that each month, the VT Historical Society's Alan Berolzheimer checks into the diary kept by Norwich farmer Ebenezer Brown—and sets it side by side with his own record of the month just passed for the Norwich Historical Society. Back in 1873, Ebenezer was working hard to get wheat, hay, beans, and other crops in and keeping tabs on the cider press. This year, no frosts... but there was smoke from Canadian wildfires, the edge of a tropical storm—and those dang jumping worms.It's a bit late, but Mt. Washington gets first measurable snow of the season. Though barely: 0.3 inches atop the mountain on Sunday, reports NHPR's Todd Bookman. Usually, he notes, the first real snowfall arrives in September; the October average is 19 inches all told. But still: "As I look out towards the northern portion of the state, I can see fall foliage,” weather observer Alexandra Branton told him yesterday. “The leaves look pretty orange, so it is an interesting contrast: the winter conditions on the summit, and the fall conditions down in the valleys.”In NH, a move to change how children are taught to read. You may remember last week's Seven Days story about how some teachers in VT have come to the conclusion that a generation of schoolkids has been failed by an approach to reading that essentially has them guess words based on context—rather than learning to sound them out. In NH, reports Ethan DeWitt, lawmakers are considering requiring schools to abandon that flawed approach and emphasize phonetic-based instruction instead. As in VT, reading proficiency as measured by statewide tests has been dropping.Faced with likelihood of more outages, GMP wants to put a battery in every home. In a filing with state regulators yesterday, reports the NYT's Ivan Penn (gift link), the utility said its plan to build grid resilience by dramatically expanding its home-battery program, as well as burying wires and strengthening overhead cables, would be cheaper than building new power lines. “We don’t want the power to be off for our customers ever,” CEO Mari McClure says. If regulators approve, Penn writes, it might take until 2030 to reach most homes; the TV-sized batteries would be controlled by the utility.VT: Buy Local! Only not if you're a filmmaker. Sure, there was a lot of hoopla about Beetlejuice returning this summer, but that was an exception, notes VT Public's Mae Nagusky on the latest Brave Little State. Even the Netflix hit Wednesday, set in VT, is filmed in... Romania??!! "Are you kidding me?" says actor Luis Guzmán, who stars in the series and lives in Vermont. The problem, Nagusky explains: VT's one of a minority of states with no film tax credits. She talks to Guzmán, filmmakers Jay Craven and Chad Ervin, and others about why it matters, the days when VT was a destination, and more.“Sort of a wild summer camp for a bunch of very smart, very strange people.” The A-listers of the Algonquin Round Table who made the trek to Neshobe Island on VT's Lake Bomoseen in the 1920s and '30s seemed fine with the rustic accommodations year after year. Margaret Mitchell, Noël Coward, Irving Berlin, Laurence Olivier, Vivian Leigh, Harpo Marx … VTDigger’s Sam Gale Rosen and historian Mark Bushnell talk about summers filled with creativity and the characters who brought it, including Dorothy Parker, “who often wore nothing except a gardening hat.” Current owners Davene and Jerry Brown want to preserve the history and the memorabilia of those times.A forest split in two: one side ablaze, the other lush… for now. Tran Tuan’s photo of a forest fire in Vietnam is runner-up for Weather Photographer of the Year 2023. The winner: a lenticular cloud encircling a volcano in Chile, formed “when air flowing over the ground encounters an obstacle,” says Francisco Negroni. The four-minute exposure captured stars tracking across the skies. And on Germany's Fichtelberg Mountain, Christoph Schaarschmidt needed more than a good eye to capture an ice-cloaked weather station; he needed fortitude. “It was about -14 degrees that evening, with strong winds.”The Tuesday Vordle. Hey, it's working this morning! With a word from yesterday's Daybreak.
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Today at 4:30, Dartmouth's Irving Institute launches a series of events as part of Climate and Energy Week with a panel discussion, "Navigating the NH/VT Energy Transition: Stories from Practitioners." Four locals—Hartford Energy and Sustainability Coordinator Dana Clawson; Jeannie Oliver, who runs the NH Community Loan Fund's program to help residents of mobile home communities acquire and operate them; Tad Montgomery, the City of Lebanon's longtime energy and facilities manager; and Jeff Grout, Intermunicipal Regional Energy Coordinator at TRORC—will talk about what things look like on the ground. In Room 80 of the Irving Institute.
Today at 5 pm, the Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies departments at Dartmouth will hold the first of two joint public discussions on events in the Middle East. Both will be livestreamed as well as in-person. They will be moderated by Egyptian academic Ezzedine Fishere, and include Jewish Studies chair Susannah Heschel; Middle Eastern Studies Prof. Jonathan Smolin; Visiting Prof. Bernard Avishai; and Tarek El-Ariss, chair of Middle Eastern Studies. Livestream link here. The second gathering will be on Thursday.
Also at 5 pm, Vermont Humanities presents a talk at the Quechee Library by film historian Rick Winston, "Red Scare in the Green Mountains: Vermont in the McCarthy Era." Winston, longtime co-owner of Montpelier's film-buff mecca Savoy Theater, published a book of the same title in 2018, in which he pulled together a series of stories detailing how the state—supposedly insulated from the excesses of the time—in its own way took part in them (the Bethel postmaster, for instance, intercepted mail meant for China expert Owen Lattimore). He'll be telling some of those stories.
At 6:30 this evening, Jack Lowe, founder and director of the British theater company curious directive (which mashes science and theater) will be at Ramunto's in Hanover with computer science prof James Mahoney for "Science Night"—free beer and pizza and a conversation about the cutting edges of AI research, after which Lowe and an actor "will turn the science into theater on the fly, creating a short treatment for a new play inspired by the Artificial Intelligence concepts that were discussed."
At 7 pm, Still North Books & Bar hosts novelist (and editor of The Believer) Daniel Gumbiner, reading from and talking about his latest, Fire in the Canyon. The book, set in California's Gold Country, explores how one farm family and their neighbors—grape growers, winery owners, sheep farmers, musicians, and others—navigate the reality that a wildfire could break out at any moment and take it all away.
And at 7 pm, Here in the Valley's Tuesday Jukebox spins into Hanover Strings with Burlington-based singer-songwriter Jesse Taylor and Montana-based singer-songwriter Andrew Brozak (who'll also be at King Arthur on Saturday afternoon from 2-4). Jakob Breitbach will be hosting, and for more info about the series, see above.
And the Tuesday poem...
The birds have vanished down the sky.Now the last cloud drains away.We sit together, the mountain and me,until only the mountain remains.—
From "Alone Looking at the Mountain" by
, translated by Sam Hamill.
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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