Daybreak Tuesday, 4/28/26

Sunny to start, still warm. We’ve got another lovely morning, though clouds will build in over the day as a disturbance riding along an area of low pressure heads this way. There’s no rain in the forecast for today, though we’re due a gusty afternoon with winds from the southeast, and with dry air still in place there’s some concern about fire danger. Meanwhile, temps will get to about 70, with lows tonight around 40.

Did they read the sign? That’s Keith Quinton’s question about these two horses along Wolfeboro Road in Hanover.

“Couldn’t your work go on secretly without you knowing?” In DB Johnson’s Lost Woods this week, Henry’s nonplussed by Wally wanting to go remote and use AI for his blog. But not as nonplussed as when Auk and Eddie bring bad news about his boat.

And speaking of boats… The public boat launch at Crystal Lake in Enfield will be closed through the end of May, reports Liz Sauchelli in the Valley News, as crews work to fill a large hole in the submerged lake-bed end of the ramp. “When people backed their (boat) trailers down, they dropped the tires off the end into the hole, making it difficult to pull back out,” NH Fish & Game’s Garret Graaskamp tells Sauchelli. The work will involve creating a temporary dam, she writes, then filling the hole and topping it with concrete planks so that the surface is “armored,” as Graaskamp puts it.

Claremont mayor and state rep switches from Democrat to Republican. Dale Girard, who holds both posts, announced the move yesterday on Facebook. “I want to be clear—this is not a reflection of any issue I have with Democratic Party leadership,” he wrote. “However, during my time serving as a Representative in Concord, I came to realize that my personal ideologies did not align as closely with the party as I once believed.” His mayoral role is non-partisan, but the switch boosts the GOP majority in the House from 214-178 to 215-177. Girard was the only House Democrat this year to back a bill to let students and others carry firearms on college campuses.

SPONSORED: Don’t miss The Spitfire Grill. We the People Theatre comes to the Eclipse Grange Theatre April 30–May 17 with this moving and intimate musical. Set in a town much like ours, it’s a story of second chances, unexpected friendships, and the healing power of connection. Where new beginnings find a home. Our productions often sell out so make your plans now—get your tickets before they’re gone! Sponsored by We the People Theatre.

Flowers the color of rotting meat. Which may be why, Mary Holland writes on her Naturally Curious blog, the early spring wildflower blue cohosh draws flies as its primary insect visitor. Humans have been drawn to it, too. “Native Americans treated a wide range of afflictions with Blue Cohosh, including gallstones, fevers, toothaches and rheumatism. The most common use of its rhizomes, or underground stems, was as an aid to speed and ease childbirth,” Mary writes, though she notes that while midwives reported using it regularly a quarter-century ago, it’s deployed less frequently now “due to the risk of severe complications.”

SPONSORED: This Friday, May 1, celebrate the Montshire Museum of Science's Golden Anniversary at the Glitter & Gold Gala - tickets on sale now! Can't attend? Support the next 50 years of science in your community with a $50 raffle ticket. The top prize is a stunning pair of 18k yellow gold and emerald earrings valued at $4,800, from Von Bargen's Jewelry. Donations, reservations, and well wishes gratefully accepted! Sponsored by the Montshire Museum of Science.

NH AG’s office investigates Vail Resorts over sales tax. The company, which owns Wildcat Mountain, Attitash, and Crotched Mountain, and operates Mount Sunapee, has been charging NH residents a 3.2 percent tax for its multi-resort Epic Pass—imposing a sales tax in the famously sales-tax-free state. The investigation, says Gov. Kelly Ayotte, is aimed at enuring “New Hampshire is America’s best place to ski — sales tax-free.” As the Union Leader’s Kevin Landrigan reports (possible paywall), the company is trying to streamline things by charging a single tax across all states.

At Kingdom Trails, “We were running forward with an idea…to accommodate visitors that didn't exist anymore.” That idea was a welcome center at the popular mountain biking destination in Burke, dreamt up back when it was seeing 150,000 riders a year. But these days, writes North Star Monthly editor and publisher Justin Lavely, ridership is half what it once was, mostly because Canadians are staying home (politics, pandemic, and new trails in Quebec). As a result, he writes, “The organization that once struggled to manage a crush of visitors has spent the last two years learning to live without them.” The welcome center is off the table, KTA’s cut staff, local stores and restaurants are adjusting—and everyone’s feeling less pressed.

A VT crossing guard’s zine goes viral—and frees her to make the art she likes. Artist Christine Tyler Hill has been working as a crossing guard in Burlington since 2023, because “she thought would be a good way to learn about her neighbors,” writes Amy Lilly in Seven Days. It also turns out to be a fine way of noticing clouds, which now show up in her monthly zine, “The Cloud Report,” a 4-by-5.5-inch, eight-page booklet with a quirky array of content and, always, a view of the sky. She started small, got attention from an Instagram video, and then in March, the WSJ wrote about her. Now she’s got 3,000 people forking over $8/month and… well, you can do the math.

“The most profoundly un-American thing about the state of Vermont”? It’s dead last in fast-food joints. You probably know where the state comes in first: maple syrup production, winter Olympians per capita, “sleep health,” eating fruits and vegetables. But Sabine Poux and the team at Brave Little State wanted to know why VT is last in national fast-food chains. The main reason: a concerted effort—starting in the 1970s—to keep them out. Which, it turns out, just means a longer commute for a Big Mac. “Vermonters like fast food just as much as people in other states. We just don’t want it to look like we do.” Poux describes both the resistance and, as one academic puts it, being “closeted fans of, you know, McNuggets and Crunchwrap Supremes.”

And a cilquiffed to damianto 1890 Farm House to you, too. So, okay, the new AI-driven website Flipbook.page still has a few quirks to work out. Still, it’s fun to play around with. “We wanted a computing experience full of rich beautiful visuals made just for us, generated just in time,” write its creators. You enter a term—in this case, Billings Farm—and (with a little patience) an illustrated image appears, generated by “an agentic web search and the image model's own world knowledge” and annotated with information that you can (with a little patience) keep drilling down into. Just hit “clear” in the top bar for your own search; don’t expect 100% accurate drawings.

The Tuesday Crossword. It’s ace puzzle constructor Laura Braunstein’s little mini puzzle.

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

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HEADS UP
Dartmouth’s Rockefeller Center hosts Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee for “In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us”. Both teach politics and public policy (as well as ethics, in Macedo’s case) at Princeton. As part of Rocky’s “Law and Democracy" speaker series, they’ll be talking over the public and political response to the pandemic with Dartmouth political scientists Herschel Nachlis and Brendan Nyhan. 5 pm in Rocky 003 and livestreamed here.

At the Hop, “A Hamlet Audio Experience with Sharon Washington and Daniel Kyri”. As the Hop writes, “MakeBelieve's revelatory new take on Shakespeare's iconic tragedy drops you inside the fractured mind of the prince. Produced and directed by Jeremy McCarter and with breathtaking binaural sound design by Tony-Award winner Mikhail "Misha" Fiksel, this is Hamlet as you've never heard it before.” Washington (more film, stage, and TV credits than could possibly fit here) plays Gertrude; Kyri (Chicago Fire) plays Hamlet. They and producer Emilia LaPenta will be on hand to talk about bringing the classics to life in the 21st century. 5:30 pm, Daryl Roth Studio Theater.

Counterpoint and “Act of Remembrance” at the Norman Williams Public Library in Woodstock. The Montpelier-based chorus sings works by Holst, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Pete Seeger, and others as a way of “exploring the ways we mourn and honoring those whom our communities have lost to the COVID-19 pandemic. The music will be interspersed with poetry readings.” 6 pm, no charge.

At the Howe Library in Hanover, “Celebrating the 250th: The Native Americans' Revolution” with Colin Calloway. The Dartmouth historian and author of key books on Native American history will give a talk on Native Americans’ experiences and the “different meanings of freedom for Indigenous peoples” during the time of the American Revolution. 6:30 pm in the Mayer Room and online.

Vermont Public screens Best Day Ever at Billings Farm & Museum. Ben Knight and Berne Broudy’s 2025 documentary follows adaptive mountain bikers Greg Durso and Allie Bianchi “as they tackle the daily challenges of disability — and find joy, connection, and belonging in Vermont's mountain biking community.” The film also focuses on the completion of a fully adaptive trail network in Richmond. Bianchi, Broudy, and the Trust for Public Land’s Shelby Semmes will be on hand to talk about it all. 6:30 pm.

At the Woodstock History Center, “How the Working Class Home Became Modern”. Architectural historian Thomas Hubka (you may remember him from Big House, Little House; Back House Barn: The Connected Farm Buildings of New England) has a new book on how the homes of working-class Americans evolved in the half-century between 1890 (think kerosene and outhouses) and 1940 (electricity, bathrooms, and dining rooms). He’ll talk about how that transformation came about. 6:30 pm.

The Tuesday poem.

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

— “A Noiseless, Patient Spider” by Walt Whitman.

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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