GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
A tad warmer, clouding up as the day goes on. We get one more day of high pressure, with a mix of sun and clouds, highs right around 40, and a calm wind shifting today to come from the north. Those building clouds are coming in ahead of our much-ballyhooed first real snowfall, which is likely to start up sometime overnight. Looks like it could get ugly after that, at least around here, but we'll have a clearer idea tomorrow."There's beauty in power." So writes Janice Fischel, and certainly, when the water's just right upstream of the Wilder Dam, there's symmetry. And a lot to look at.The Exit 19 northbound on-ramp? Still closed. It's been a week, which is about how long NHDOT said it would take, but late yesterday the City of Lebanon sent out an alert that per NHDOT, the ramp won't open "until paving and curb installation is completed." No word on when that will actually be.Orange County sheriff asks for recount. Republican incumbent Bill Bohnyak, who on Election Day trailed his challenger, part-time Orange County sheriff’s deputy George Contois, by 100 votes out of over 13,000 cast, yesterday petitioned Orange Superior Court for the recount, John Lippman reports in the Valley News. The court has 10 business days to set a date for candidates' representatives to gather with the county clerk for the recount.The problem with toppling forest blocks. "A house site set back in the woods seems innocuous enough to us humans," writes Li Shen in Sidenote. However, she writes, because house sites and long driveways break up wildlife corridors that allow animals to move between foraging grounds, wintering areas, and breeding habitat, they can be "starkly life-altering" for animals. VT is losing forest cover, and towns are supposed to address forest cover in their town plans—but, Li writes, Thetford—and no doubt many other towns—"has yet to re-write the relevant bylaws to encourage these initiatives."A “melting pot of food cultures." That's how Randolph's Patty Burns describes Filipino cooking to Nicola Smith. In the VN, Smith profiles Kuya at One Main, which you may remember launched toward the end of September with a soft opening, and its owners, Patty and her husband, Travis. They met in California while working as bartenders, burned out on the hustle, and moved to Randolph, where Travis grew up. Now, Smith writes, diners are making their way to Randolph from far away not just for Thai food from Saap, but for Kuya's lumpia, liempo, a Filipino banh mi... and burgers and fish tacos.SPONSORED: The Railway Children, A Holiday Musical Adventure, begins November 22 at Northern Stage. The joyous holiday tradition returns to Northern Stage this season with the world premiere of The Railway Children, a new musical adaptation of the beloved British children’s novel, reset in White River Junction. A knock on the door on Christmas Eve, 1929, sends a young family away from the city to a small Vermont railway town and on the musical adventure of a lifetime. Celebrate the holidays with The Railway Children, a holiday treat for the whole family, 11/22-1/1. Sponsored by Northern Stage.It's not just about the velvet. If you're out in the woods in the fall and see what looks like shredded bark on a small- or medium-diameter tree, you may be looking at a buck rub. On her Naturally Curious blog, Mary Holland writes that as testosterone builds up in bucks as breeding season approaches, the velvet on their antlers dries and sheds—and they rub it off on trees. But they're not just sprucing up, Holland writes. They're also advertising themselves—skin glands on the forehead create pheromones that pass along social status and age, and "suppress the sex drives of younger bucks."More on Dartmouth's plans for Oak Hill. In the VN, Ray Contois fills in some details on the college's plans to change and upgrade its Nordic trail system in time for the 2025 NCAA championships. There will be 5 km, 3.75 km, 3.3 km, and 1.4 km overlapping loops, along with snowmaking and lights for three kilometers of those new trails. The snowmaking in particular will be welcome, Dartmouth women's coach Cami Thompson Graves says. “Probably half the time we’ve hosted (Winter Carnival) recently, we’ve gone to Craftsbury. The other half...we’ve been (at Oak Hill) shoveling trying to make it happen.”The art in politics. "This is a Renaissance painting," both NHPR news director Daniel Barrick and NH Bulletin's Ethan DeWitt tweeted yesterday, about Stephen Porter's striking Granite Memo photo of officials in Concord recounting House ballots from last Tuesday's election. You get their intensity: A lot is at stake. After day 1, which included a flip in Democrats' favor in Manchester (by a single vote; there may be an appeal), the House stands at 202 Republicans and 198 Democrats, with 20 House recounts left to go.In NH, Republicans choose Jeb Bradley as Senate president, Dems re-up Donna Soucy as minority leader. Bradley, the longtime majority leader, was nominated to move up to the top post to replace Chuck Morse, who gave up his seat for an unsuccessful primary run against Don Bolduc for US Senate. Bradley, who started his working life as a street magician, moved to NH from Switzerland in 1981, writes Ethan DeWitt in NH Bulletin. The GOP caucus has not yet announced who will replace him as majority leader. Democrats, meanwhile, chose Soucy—a former Senate president—to lead them.Eversource wants NH officials to advise it during dicey power auction. They say no thanks. Eversource last week warned regulators that it's seeing "a breakdown in the competitive market" among energy suppliers and that it might not get enough offers at next month's power auction to supply its customers' needs—or if it does, the price may be too high. So it wants the PUC, Consumer Advocate, and state energy dept to sit in on the auction to "help them make decisions," reports NHPR's Mara Hoplamazian. This would be wholly inappropriate, say the DOE and Consumer Advocate Don Kreis.SPONSORED: Getting ready for Thanksgiving? Chapman's Provisions is now open in Fairlee, VT. We have partnered with the best local farms to stock your favorite meats, cheeses and organic vegetables. Our pantry is overflowing with a carefully curated selection of our favorite snacks. And our new craft beer cave is perfect for your post-Thanksgiving football-watching needs! Chapman's General: proudly serving the Upper Valley for nearly 150 years. Sponsored by Chapman's General.Going behind the numbers on connectedness in VT. There's a new "social capital" study by a Harvard-connected big data nonprofit called Opportunity Insights that suggests that "the more people you’re friends with in a higher social class, the more likely you are to end up in a higher class than you grew up in," as Erin Petenko writes in VTDigger. On the whole, VT (and NH) score high on the share of high-income friends among low-income residents. Petenko explores ways that people of all backgrounds still cross paths in the state—highlighting the Craftsbury General Store. You can dig into both states' counties here—on economic connectedness, social networks, and civic engagement."We don't like to talk about class here in Vermont... But it turns out if you ask people about class, they have a lot to say." Especially if the asker is Erica Heilman, who has a way of getting people to open up. In the first of a five-part Vermont Public series on class in the Northeast Kingdom, she talks to Kytreana Patrick, who works at Olney's General Store in Orleans. Patrick describes herself as working class and says she doesn't have friends who aren't working class. "When you're born, your destiny is almost set forth for you, depending on who raised you," she tells Heilman in a deep, frank conversation.Brattleboro transforms graffitied wall into eye-catching mural. The retaining walls lining High Street were an eyesore: if not a drab gray, they were often tagged with explicit messages. Jamie Mohr, who directs a local arts org, envisioned a better use for this concrete canvas. VTDigger’s Kevin O’Connor reports on how Mohr raised the funds, eked out approval from the selectboard, and enlisted the hands of ArtLords, a group of resettled Afghan artists, to create an instantly iconic gateway to the community. Says one of the project’s designers, “The mural is the best thing to happen in this town in a while.” The cost of arugula? It's been going down in VT. A head of cabbage? Way up. Vermont's Agency of Agriculture Food & Markets has a new "dashboard" that uses three years of pricing data from farmers markets, producers, and others to track what's happened to prices for fruits, vegetables, beef, pork, poultry, and eggs since 2019. It's a little clunky—you have to navigate from item to item—but it's got all sorts of little mysteries. Like, why has the price for a head of garlic held steady, but dropped for a pound of garlic? Meanwhile, a pound of pork tenderloin is less than in 2019, but overall, beef prices are up.Here’s mesmerizing drone footage of this year’s Burning Man at night. Few things give off “you had to be there” vibes quite as strongly as the annual gathering in NV’s Black Rock Desert. So a time-lapse video of the pop-up city as it sprawls to life is like watching it through a window—a window onto a vast, glittering futurescape. What starts out looking like the set of Mad Max ends up like a scene from Tron. The light show alone leaves you believing there really is nothing quite like it on earth—and the closing shot, a cool effect that rolls it all up in a globe, renders it a world unto its own. Thanks, ML!The Tuesday Vordle. With a very fine word from yesterday's Daybreak.
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At 6:30 this evening, the Etna Library hosts NH Preservation Alliance community preservation expert (and Grafton NH resident) Andrew Cushing for a conversation about tips and tools for researching the history of your old house. Via Zoom.
At 7 pm, the Norwich Bookstore brings in several contributors to Our Better Nature: Hopeful Excursions in Saving Biodiversity, a joint effort by several VT-based nonprofits. Through a series of essays, the book tells the stories of Vermonters who are working to save half the Earth—or, at least, a chunk of the state—from degradation. Leading the conversation: Alicia Daniel, who directs the Vermont Master Naturalist Program; George Schenk, CEO of American Flatbread and a farmer; Curt Lindberg, the book's co-editor and founder of the Vermont Alliance for Half-Earth; and moderator Tom Roberts, former executive director of Vital Communities.
Also at 7 (or, actually, at 7:10), the Hanover Conservancy presents NH Audubon’s senior biologist and raptor project leader, Chris Martin, talking about all the work that's gone into bald eagles' comeback in the Connecticut River Valley. It's online (you'll need to register for the Zoom link) and will be followed at 8 pm by the Conservancy's annual meeting.
The Hop brings its fall season to a close this evening with two performances. The first, beginning at 7:30, is the Handel Society. The chorus will be accompanied by full orchestra and guest soloists Mary Bonhag, Sophie Michaux, Gene Stenger, and Christopher Talbot. They'll be be performing Mozart's Te Deum (written when he was 13) and Coronation Mass, as well as Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. In Spaulding.
Then, at 8 pm in the Moore Theater, it's the fall dance showcase, hosted by the Dartmouth Dance Ensemble. A panoply of troupes and styles—Ujima, Sugarplum, Street Soul, Sheba, Raaz, the Dartmouth Classical Ballet/Wild Things Dance Workshop, House of Lewan, Big Green Irish Dance, and Fusion—take over the stage for two hours movement artistry. No charge, but you'll need a ticket.
And the Tuesday poem...
Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream!For the soul is dead that slumbers, And things are not what they seem.Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal;Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, Is our destined end or way;But to act, that each to-morrow Find us farther than to-day.Art is long, and Time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave,Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave.Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead!Act,— act in the living Present! Heart within, and God o’erhead!...Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate;Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.
— From
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
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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