GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Still mostly cloudy, but warmer. There's humid air from the south still flowing into the region, which could bring the occasional light drizzle—especially, hmmm, over eastern VT and into NH—but mostly today we're looking at clouds (which could part a bit in the later afternoon) and temps getting into the high 60s. Winds from the southwest, mid-50s tonight.Now for a bigger member of the deer family. Yesterday brought us an actual deer, bobbing for apples. Today? A young bull moose ambling across Rick Karash's yard in Eastman on its way to the lake, apparently to stop and take in the view.Norwich town manager, selectboard agree to part ways. In a special meeting of the board last night, it reached a "separation agreement" with Town Manager Rod Francis setting his last day in the job as Nov. 7. Francis and the board have struggled with an exodus of town employees—including most of its public works and police departments—since last year. "Rod has acted honorably and professionally during his tenure despite a personal cost resulting from what the Selectboard respectfully finds has been an unwarranted level of negative public sentiment and scrutiny," the board writes in its press release.Meanwhile, Norwich officials' response to a toxic leak into Blood Brook leaves some residents unhappy. The issue, reports Ray Couture in the Valley News, is an "asphalt emulsion leaching [from] paved-over wooden planks" on a bridge on Moore Lane, a short road near the edge of Huntley Meadow. The town has contracted to install a containment system may or may not work, Francis says. Meanwhile, alarmed residents argue that the treated planks will just continue to leach the emulsion. “Eventually, this bridge has to come down and everyone knows it,” nearby resident Peter Orner tells Couture.Hanover landlords grapple with complaints from tenants. Students living off campus have been struggling with everything from mold to bat and rodent infestations, reports Sydney Rawie in The Dartmouth, and their landlords are having trouble keeping up. “Just for the most basic of things, we have to beg people to show up. Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, painters, cleaners,” says Jolin Salazar-Kish ’88 of KKC Properties Realty. She adds that the company is “trying to get rid of the stuff that is ‘cosmetically challenged,’" hoping to replace it with the denser housing now allowed under new zoning regs.Lebanon's diversity commission wants to hear your experiences. The commission, which started this year, wants to get a handle on how people who live, work, shop, dine, and play in the city have experienced it. They're looking for feedback (survey at the burgundy link) from people "along a spectrum of identities—racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, age, gender, sexuality, language, ancestry, and more"—on whether they've been treated with less courtesy or respect than others, or in other ways discriminated against, and how the city might go about reducing discrimination. More on the commission here.SPONSORED: Paid care provider opportunity with rent-free housing in the Upper Valley. A young man with Down syndrome is seeking an additional part-time home care provider. The ideal candidate will work with a skilled support team to provide supervision, while working to ensure a steady and consistent quality of life for an active lifestyle. On-call overnight support needed a few nights a week. This position includes full-time, rent-free housing. A valid driver’s license is required. Non-smoker. Hourly rate of $20-$25 plus benefits.Good Neighbor opens Lebanon clinic. The ribbon-cutting took place last week at the WRJ-based free clinic's new space in the small shopping plaza at the corner of Hanover Street and 120. It allows the organization to shift its satellite clinic from APD: Says Good Neighbor director Dana Michalovic in yesterday's press release, "This expansion will place a free clinic close by other important services, such as the LISTEN food pantry, and is also located on the local bus line, hopefully reducing patient transportation hurdles.”Westboro Rail Yard: an elegy for what was. Or at least, in the distant past, when no less a personage than Daniel Webster heralded the 1847 arrival of the railroad in town, and in the 1920s and '30s, when the West Leb yards were where coal-fired trains were repaired, sanded, loaded, and otherwise tended to. In the VN, Dan Mackie casts a look back at those days—when you didn't hang the wash out if the wind was from the wrong direction—and at the decades of neglect and washed-out plans that followed. Now, finally, it may become parkland with river views. "That strikes me as a worthy use," he writes.
In Orange County, a high-profile contest for a VT State Senate seat. Amid the region's state legislative battles this fall, none may be generating more interest than Republican John Klar's effort to unseat longtime Democratic State Sen. Mark MacDonald. Klar, a Brookfield farmer and former gubernatorial candidate, has been highly critical of the Randolph schools' approach to racial equity and to transgender rights and, writes Ethan Weinstein in VTDigger, has used that battle "as his campaign’s clarion call." Klar is betting on a social media campaign to best the MacDonald campaign's door-knocking.Black servicemen's experiences in and after WWII. That's the subject of Dartmouth historian Matthew Delmont's new book, Half American, and last week he discussed it with Walter Isaacson on PBS's Amanpour and Company. Though segregated in "every aspect" of their service, Delmont says, Black soldiers were crucial to the war, especially the Army's supply effort—without them, "Americans couldn't move, shoot, or eat." They discuss the Tuskugee Airmen, Black newspapers' prescient alarm-sounding about Hitler, and how returning servicemen helped stoke the Civil Rights movement.Behind a bumble bee's lip. Turns out, there's a lot going on: mandibles, maxillae, taste sensors, the tongue... all of them, writes Mary Holland in Naturally Curious, "adapted to grasp, shape and collect food." Most bumble bees have only a few weeks left to live, she writes, but until we get a killing frost, they'll be putting all that apparatus to work "gathering pollen and nectar for themselves and their colony."NH "falling short" in providing effective legal defense to poor defendants. That's the conclusion of a new report by a Boston-based nonprofit requested by the state Judicial Counsel. In NH Bulletin, Annmarie Timmins reports that the council's director has taken one bit of the report's advice, requesting $4 million to fund "a backup public defender office" that would expand the number of attorneys for indigent defendants. But she has rejected a recommendation to expand her own staff, as well as one that the council become an independent state commission to avoid potential conflicts of interest.Note to towns: Stock up on road salt. In a case of "better safe than sorry," the VT League of Cities and Towns is telling members that, after a division of the Teamsters rejected a White House-brokered deal with rail companies last week, it wouldn't hurt to pack in salt now in case of a strike. It's not that VT freight companies will be affected, reports Keith Whitcomb Jr. in the Rutland Herald, but that carriers bringing salt cars from mines in NY and OH to VT-based carriers could be. Says the VLCT's director, "If it’s easy enough for you to top off your salt, why wouldn’t you right now?"Meanwhile, if you haven't gotten your wood in yet... well, you might be out of luck. Demand is up across the board, reports VTDigger's Juliet Schulman-Hall—not just for firewood, but for wood stoves. And prices, fueled by the costs of labor, transportation, kiln-drying, and competition from paper mills, are rising, too. “We haven’t seen the supply increasing, so that just creates supply versus demand issues—a shortage,” Danville wood supplier Sam Desrochers tells Schulman-Hall. Meanwhile, high fuel prices and government incentives have wood-stove suppliers scheduling installations into January."Adventuresome sound portraits." In the New Yorker, Sarah Larson turns a spotlight on radio producer Erica Heilman and Rumble Strip, her podcast and occasional piece for VT Public. The "quietly extraordinary exploration of life in Vermont," Larson writes, is one of the best podcasts she's heard. Heilman's wide-ranging curiosity, slice-of-life subjects, and unassuming approach that lets others tell the stories she's interested in produce "the rare kind of documentary art that connects and edifies without bumming us out."And speaking of the New Yorker, Bill McKibben got it wrong. At least, that's what writer and commentator Bill Schubart believes. Writing in VTDigger, Schubart says that McKibben's piece last month praising several stalwarts of the state's media for producing serious local journalism "is a dewy-eyed vision, in most cases at odds with reality." It's not that VTDigger, Seven Days, WDEV and others don't do so, he writes, but that VT is no exception to the national trend of weeklies, major papers, and local tv stations being weakened by private equity and chains. He offers details—and even some signs of hope.Ahhh. There's nothing like sitting by a waterfall. Without going outside. TJ Macias of the McClatchy news service has been mining the Zillow Gone Wild FB feed, and in Huntington, VT, has zeroed in on a $360K two-bedroom that happens to have both a waterfall and a pond in the living room. It went on the market last week. (Note: the pop-ups and ads are annoying—just get past them, or go right to Zillow.)It's that time of year: The 2022 Comedy Wildlife Photo Award finalists are out. Meerkats clowning, wallabies kicking around, elephant seals just plain tuckered out, a duckling navigating turtles, an Alaskan salmon that's got better ideas than getting eaten... and much more.The Tuesday Vordle. With a word from yesterday's Daybreak.
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This evening at 7, the Norwich Bookstore hosts Vermont novelist and poet Beth Kanell and Lebanon's Roberta Berner, former director of the Grafton County Senior Citizens Council, talking about Frankly Feminist, a new collection of short stories from Lilith magazine written by Jewish women. Kanell is a contributor to the book, whose stories about women's "realities of life and love," as Kanell puts it, span the globe, time periods, and themes.
And at 7:30 this evening, the Hop brings "Intimo Farruquito" to the Spaulding stage. Farruquito is Juan Manuel Fernández Montoya, son of a flamenco singer and a flamenco dancer and grandson of the famed flamenco dancer known as El Farruco. In a New York appearance a few years back, the NYT wrote at the time, he "proved that he is one of today’s superlative dance artists. He’s slender, handsome, taut; he transfixed attention just by standing, walking, raising an arm." This new show brings together a cast of dancers, musicians, and vocalists to distill the origins and history of flamenco.
And the Tuesday poem...
In the deep falldon’t you imagine the leaves thinkhow comfortable it will be to touchthe earth instead of thenothingness of air and the endlessfreshets of wind? And don’t you hearthe goldenrod whispering goodbye,the everlasting beingcrowned with the firsttuffets of snow? And the wind pumps itsbellows. And at evening especially,piled firewood shifts a little,longing to be on its way.
—
by Mary Oliver.
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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