Daybreak Tuesday, 3/10/26

Mostly sunny, still freakishly warm. Clouds won’t start moving in ahead of tomorrow’s rain until late this afternoon, so we get a beautiful but melty day, with highs that could actually reach 70 and barely any wind to speak of. Down to around 40 tonight, with a low and various fronts moving into the region: The storm track is uncertain and a difference of even a few dozen miles will make a difference in what type of precipitation falls as morning arrives, but for now it looks like a chance of rain overnight. More on all that tomorrow. Except that…

Flood watch in effect in VT through Thursday. The NWS says: “Excessive runoff from snowmelt and rainfall will cause sharp river rises, likely resulting in river ice break up. Ice jams will be possible, along with rapid onset flooding. Flooding of rivers, creeks, streams, and other low-lying and flood-prone locations will be possible and creeks and streams may rise out of their banks.” Meanwhile, NH is more chill: “Ice movement has been observed with at least one jam reported on the Upper Ammonoosuc. Flood risk remains low at this time, but these areas will have to be monitored closely as we get back to active weather for the second part of the week.”

So here, for instance, is the Ottauquechee ice jam yesterday. From Woodstock’s Elm Street Bridge, by David Doubleday.

Pause for a moment of serene beauty. This is a timelapse of last week’s full moon setting over Killington, taken from Lebanon and created by Tim Lin.

Okay, back to the ice. Only this time, it’s blocking Lydia’s houseboat. Yep, in this week’s strip from DB Johnson, Lost Woods’ resident artist can’t get back to painting until her houseboat’s freed, so she recruits Henry, Wally, and a very reluctant Eddie to get chipping away.

Following police raid on troublesome Springfield VT house, state yanks occupancy permit. 78 Valley Street has been in the news repeatedly over the years, most recently last August, when police fatally shot a man during a raid there. Now it’s making headlines again, after Springfield and VT State Police on Friday (with backup from Hartford police) arrested five people, including the homeowner, on various drug and weapons charges. But then, as VT News First’s Mike Donoghue reports, VT’s Office of Fire Safety moved in and, citing fire, health, and safety violations in the two-story home, declared it unsafe, putting up red “no trespassing” placards.

SPONSORED: Celebrate the music of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen at Lebanon Opera House! Join us on Saturday, March 21 at 7:30 PM for Both Sides Now, an intimate cabaret-style performance created by and starring Robbie Schaefer and Danielle Wertz that moves effortlessly across decades and features unforgettable songs such as “A Case of You,” “Hallelujah,” “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Suzanne,” and many more. Sponsored by Lebanon Opera House.

Windsor’s Stephen Bissette named VT cartoonist laureate. Bissette, a founding faculty member of WRJ’s Center for Cartoon Studies, “first gained wide recognition as co-creator and artist of Saga of the Swamp Thing (with Alan Moore), which helped to redefine horror comics for a new era,” CCS says in its press release. His work also includes the dinosaur epic Tyrant and “collaborations on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles projects.” Norwich’s Tillie Walden, the current laureate, will pass along the title April 9 at the State House; April 11, Bissette will be celebrated at a public event at Springfield Cinemas 3 with a screening of Constantine, based on his DC Comics character.

Northern Stage’s new season. The WRJ theater company will kick things off in September with the regional premiere of the Tony-nominated John Proctor Is The Villain, about a high school class reading The Crucible and the ruckus it raises. Then come Disney’s Frozen for the holidays and the world premiere of The Getaway Driver, Deborah Salem Smith and Charlie Thurston’s play about a moment of anti-Vietnam War violence that ties two women together through the decades. Next spring, there’s Conor McPherson’s The Weir: ghost stories and more in an Irish pub. Things wind up with a musical yet to be named. Also, jazz and a semi-staged Sweeney Todd.

SPONSORED: March “Moos” at Billings Farm & Museum. “Moo” this year, the farm is open Fridays – Mondays, 10AM – 4PM in March! Celebrate sugaring season with maple tastings and maple butter-making and join in for Maple Open House Weekend (March 21 & 22). Also “moo” this month: Farm Friends Play Club, Saturdays from 10AM – 2PM, a hands-on, sensory-rich play space for kids and caregivers. Plus, enjoy Our Working Lands and Art on Barns exhibitions, horse-drawn sleigh rides (weather permitting), and everyone’s favorite: a chance to meet the Moos! Sponsored by Billings Farm & Museum.

Municipal doings. The Valley News reports on a top administrator leaving Canaan and another arriving in Fairlee.

Leb officials hesitate on developer’s plans for big Etna Road project. Jay Campion first proposed Signal Park a couple of years ago, then pulled it. Now, reports the VN’s Clare Shanahan, Campion’s back with a proposal for a 600-unit development that would include soccer fields and basketball and tennis courts, as well as a child care center and office space. He wants a TIF district to pay for infrastructure. But city councilors have raised concerns about the project itself—citing a recent hearing on developing Route 120 that drew strong public pushback—and the multi-phase approach Campion intends to take. Next up: the planning board.

On NH’s town warrants today, taking aim at the state on school issues, games of chance, and more. NHPR’s Dan Tuohy does a masterful job of making sense of the welter of issues voters on which voters will be weighing in. A variety of articles, for instance, “call out the state government for cutting spending and shifting expenses to local taxpayers,” both on general services and calling for greater transparency on Education Freedom Accounts. Open enrollment, of course, is also a big issue. Various towns, including New London, are asking whether they should opt out of Keno or other gambling. Claremont wants voters to let it sell a vacant school building.

Invite a new Vermonter to dinner? That’s what the WRJ-based Green Mountain Economic Development Corp. is asking locals to do. For “Invite a New Vermonter to Dinner Month,” GMEDC will provide $50 meal certificates to pairs of recent arrivals (after March 1, 2024) and old-timers—defined for these purposes as anyone who lived in the state before March, 2024—as long as they live in Orange or Windsor County and eat at a restaurant in one of those counties. The project’s funded by a grant from the state. Runs through March 31 (or as long as funds last). Oh, breakfast and lunch are okay, too. You’ll find details and how to apply at the link.

Oops. Reason #5,628 for why you shouldn’t try skiing through a ring of fire unless you’re a total pro at it. The guy (Norwegian skier Mathias Birkelund) is okay. Though maybe a little wiser?

The Tuesday Crossword. It’s time for your little morning brain warmup with the Tuesday “mini” from Dartmouth librarian and puzzle artist Laura Braunstein. And if you’d like to catch up on past puzzles, you can do that here.

Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak.

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HEADS UP
Rollins Chapel pipe organ concert by Henry Danaher. The organ is quite something, what with its 3,937 pipes, and Danaher, the Dartmouth College organist, will give a noontime concert featuring the two long-lost organ chaconnes attributed to J. S. Bach last year, as well as two works by Vermont composer Kathy Wonson Eddy: "Mist in the Valleys" and "Toccata and Offertory: in Paradisum”.

Technigala at Dartmouth. Dartmouth’s DALI Lab, where students build real-life projects for businesses and organizations, throws a celebratory showcase each term of student-built technology and design projects that pulls in hundreds of attendees. It’s your chance to explore innovative work from interactive apps to creative hardware builds. 6 pm in the Engineering and Computer Science Center.

Calvacade of Bands at Lebanon Opera House. Band students from Grantham, Plainfield, Lebanon Middle, and Lebanon High Schools all take the stage—first by school and then, at the end, all together. 6:30 pm, no charge.

At the Howe Library, Ted Levin and Erin Donahue: “Trail Cams and The Promise of Sunrise”. Every other week for the past four years, Ted and Erin have teamed up in Daybreak to pair video from one of Erin’s trail cams in E. Thetford with Ted’s comments about the natural world they reveal. They’ll talk about that process, what they’ve seen and written about, and Ted will share passages from his always lyrical writing in his book, The Promise of Sunrise. 6:30 pm in the Mayer Room and online.

Oona Metz and Unhitched at the Norwich Bookstore, with Allison Moir-Smith. Metz’s new book is subtitled, the essential divorce guide for women, and it’s a departure from the legal and financial guides that are out there: Metz, a Boston-based therapist, writer, and speaker, offers emotional guidance for everything from deciding to end a marriage to coping during separation, co-parenting, and navigating life after divorce. She’ll talk with Hanover High grad and fellow therapist Moir-Smith. 7 pm.

The English Concert at the Hopkins Center. The London-based baroque orchestra, led by harpsichordist Harry Bicket, joins forces with the NYC-based Clarion Choir and an array of soloists for a performance of Handel’s rarely heard opera concert Hercules. They’ll be performing it this weekend at Carnegie Hall, so this is your chance to get in on the ground floor. 7:30 pm in Spaulding, with a 6:30 pm pre-show talk at the Top of the Hop by Dartmouth lecturer Rowland Moseley introducing the work.

The Tuesday poem.

As nature abandons her creatures
to the risk of their dull urge and specially
protects none of them in den or nest,
we are no dearer to the primal ground
of our being. It dares us.
Only that we, still more than bird or beast,
go with the dare, want it, sometimes even
(and not from self-interest) are more daring still
than life itself is. A breath more daring. 
This makes for us, beyond all protection,
a kind of surety, there where the gravity is at play
of the pure forces. And what finally protects us
is just our unprotectedness, and that we turned it so,
into the Open, just when we felt it threaten.
So as somewhere, at the furthest circumference,
where the Law grazes against us,
to say to such unprotectedness, “Yes.”

— by Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Michael Lipson (yes, Daybreak’s multi-talented poetry editor).

See you tomorrow.

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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt      Poetry editor: Michael Lipson    Associate Editors: Jonea Gurwitt, Sam Gurwitt

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