GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
"Backdoor cold front." That's a front that comes in from the east or northeast (unlike typical fronts from the west), and it's what we've got arriving later today. We'll reach 80-ish before it does—probably mid-afternoon—and then temps will start dropping and we'll face a slight chance and then a chance of rain through the rest of the day and evening and night and morning and... Low 50s tonight.First you go, "Awww...." Then you invest in some serious fencing. There are six little woodchucks in the family that's moved in on Tiffany LaGrange's place in Royalton, though she's only been able to get five on film at once. Clearly, though, they like to hang out together.Fire calls interrupt Enfield/Canaan Memorial Day parade. Twice. First, reports L.A. Wetzel in the Valley News, it was a lawn mower fire down Grafton Pond Road, which sent four Enfield trucks off from the parade route and scrambling down Route 4A, sirens blaring. Then, just after the parade turned onto Main Street, the fire alarm at Jake's Market & Deli on Route 4 was tripped. That sent Canaan crews over, arriving to a parking lot "packed with customers and parade onlookers, trucks with boat trailers and motorcycles filling tanks with gas," Wetzel writes. Nothing amiss was found.Vandalism aimed at NHPR journalists includes home in Hanover. In case you missed it over the weekend, late Thursday night NHPR broke the story that police in Hanover, Concord, Hampstead, and Melrose, MA are investigating instances of bricks being thrown through the windows of the current or former homes of NHPR News Director Dan Barrick and reporter Lauren Chooljian in April and on May 21. In the Melrose case, the vandal also spray-painted “Just the beginning!” in red on the home. Police in the towns are coordinating investigations, but beyond acknowledging that have stayed mum.Goose Pool? There's a 31-foot-tall dam built in 1918 that makes Goose Pond in Canaan and Hanover the "great pond" that it is, and it needs repairing, Claire Potter wrote in the VN over the weekend. The dam is cracked, water is seeping through and could eat away around it—and a dam bust could be catastrophic as far away as Lebanon. So the state is going to lower the pond 22 feet starting next year, Potter reports, and hope that it can complete the work needed in a year. Alternatives that wouldn't require lowering the water level would take years longer and cost far more.A "staccato line that seems to zip across the page." Last Thursday marked the 60th anniversary of Brookfield cartoonist Ed Koren's first appearance in The New Yorker, and the magazine tweeted out a congratulatory thread featuring several of his choice cartoons over the years. But not, oddly, his first. That was supplied by his daughter, Sasha, who herself tweeted, "I am so lucky to have grown up watching him work, obsessing over composition, the expression of scraggly face, and how best [to bring] the idea and the joke to life."SPONSORED: Free music festival in downtown Lebanon this weekend, Friday-Sunday! Join Upper Valley Music Center for Sing & Play Festival, a free participatory event celebrating our local music community. Enjoy performances, jams, sing-alongs, a family-friendly DJ Dance Party, and buskers performing on the street (musicians: sign up for a slot!) Whether you’re a musician or music lover, we welcome the whole community, with a special invite to families and seniors. Sponsored by Upper Valley Music Center.11 years. It's taken that long to bring the new “Leonardo da Vinci: Machines in Motion” traveling exhibit to the Montshire this summer. The exhibit, which opened Saturday, features some two dozen models of machines da Vinci invented, writes Liz Sauchelli in the VN, built using materials like wood, metal, rope, and leather that would have been available to the Renaissance inventor. They include a printing press, an ornithopter, even a working robot—plus pages from da Vinci's notebooks, which show how "problem-solving can be elegant," says the Montshire's Katie Kalata Rusch.“Sometimes I worry, if Constantin Brancusi was standing in front of our building, would he get mad?” That's Hood Museum director John Stomberg, talking to The Dartmouth's Sofia Ratkevich about "Bird in Space," the slender golden sculpture capturing a bird in flight in the Hood's front window (for now). The work was cast from the famed Romanian sculptor's models decades after his death, Ratkevich writes. "So, how does a rare sculpture, crafted by one of the most famous modernist sculptors of his time, appear in Hanover, N.H., in the window of the Hood?" she asks... Then answers the question.A chunk of bread, a dragonfly... Hey, whatever works. Black-crowned Night Herons fish at dawn and dusk, writes Mary Holland in her latest Naturally Curious post. And they'll do everything from stand stock still waiting for prey to swim by to swimming themselves in search of food (they're pretty omniverous) to using bait to attract fish.A hint that NH's bats could be starting to recover. Back in 2017, NH Fish & Game biologist Sandi Houghton tells the Monitor's David Brooks, the annual Bats Count citizen science project logged a single site with over 300 bats. Last year, there were four of them, Brooks writes, "although the limitations of citizen science means we can’t say for sure" that populations are recovering from the devastation of white nose syndrome. Houghton adds that this winter biologists found several sites with a tiny handful "of a species that we haven’t seen for a decade. It’s not hundreds but it’s something, a small encouraging sign.”Five towns. That's all that got moved from one NH congressional district to the other in the map released Friday by the "special master" appointed by the NH Supreme Court to step in after the legislature failed to come up with a plan that could garner Gov. Chris Sununu's signature. The map was drawn to minimize changes to the districts in effect for the past decade, reports NH Bulletin's Amanda Gokee, while still meeting the constitutional requirement that districts have essentially equal populations. Oral arguments before the court on this latest plan are due to start this morning.Locals in the running for VT statewide offices. The filing deadline was Thursday, and, at least "in broad strokes," writes Seven Days' Kevin McCallum, the contests are taking shape. One of the two marquee races, of course, will pit US Rep. Peter Welch of Norwich against former US Attorney Christina Nolan for the US Senate. Woodstock state Rep. Charlie Kimball is in a four-way race for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor. And Bradford Rep. Sarah Copeland Hanzas is in what amounts to a three-way contest for secretary of state. McCallum sketches out the August primary ballot.Elnu Abenaki will lead project to study Bellows Falls petroglyphs. The carvings in bedrock along the Connecticut by Great Falls "depict over a dozen minimalist faces, some featuring what look like horns or antennae," writes Ethan Weinstein in VTDigger. The $37K grant from the National Park Service—plus another $12K local match—will fund two years of research. The Elnu are one of four Abenaki groups recognized by VT but not the feds—and, writes Weinstein, the new funding drew a worried response from Odanak Abenaki in Canada, who have criticized state recognition of the four groups.2.2 kilometers, barefoot. Oh, and we should add: High in the air along a 3/4-inch-wide slackline. Last week, French wire walker Nathan Paulin set a new world tightwire record for his nearly 1.4-mile walk from a crane to the famed abbey of Mont Saint-Michel. "At times it was much harder than I imagined," he tells Agence France-Presse, "and at others it was easy... It's a very intense experience." Next? He says he'd like to walk between the Eiffel Tower and the Montparnasse Tower in Paris. That's 2.7 km. AFP has last week's footage.The Tuesday Vordle. Sponsored today by Hearts You Hold, the Thetford-based nonprofit that supports immigrants, migrants, and refugees by asking them what they need, from clothing to bicycles to computers. Learn more about the many requests waiting to be funded.
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Caught — the bubble in the spirit level, a creature divided; and the compass needle wobbling and wavering, undecided. Freed — the broken thermometer's mercury running away; and the rainbow-bird from the narrow bevel of the empty mirror, flying wherever it feels like, gay!
— "Sonnet," Elizabeth Bishop's final poem. This brings to an end the May poems about... well, "may," as in permission. Bishop "was ambivalent about her gayness, and wanted the last line to be read as merely joyful," writes poetry editor Michael Lipson. "So the poem exemplifies both her caughtness and her self-permission at the same time." That theme of "a creature divided" ran through Bishop's life, writes Lloyd Schwartz, co-editor of the
Library of America
volume devoted to her,
and its meaning.
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 and writers who want you to 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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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Writer/editor: Tom Haushalter Poetry editor: Michael Lipson About Rob About Tom About Michael
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