GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Mostly sunny to mostly cloudy, depending where you are, with a slight chance of showers. Basically, the farther west you are in VT, the drier and sunnier it will be; the farther east in NH, the greater the chance of showers and maybe a thunderstorm in the afternoon. Highs will range from around 70 into the mid-70s. Lows again in the mid 50s.Lupines! They're everywhere.
In Strafford, by Anita Onofrio;
In downtown Lyme, from Janice Fischel;
And up at the Skiway, by Ellen Bettmann.
Plainfield, Newport, Croydon reckon with road damage from Saturday's heavy rains. Damage was especially intense to Grantham Mountain Road in Meriden, reports Patrick Adrian in the Valley News, where flooding from some three inches of rain that fell over a couple of hours "washed out over 300 feet of road material, including asphalt, with crevices of as much as 10-feet deep in some places." In Newport, about 150 feet of Sand Hill Road were washed away, and town manager Hunter Rieseberg reports another half-dozen roads were affected. Croydon saw damage to at least three roads, Adrian writes.Hartford, other VT towns with combined EMS/Fire departments face soaring ambulance calls—and bills. Fire Chief Scott Cooney puts the problem in a nutshell: “EMS is a guaranteed way for someone to gain access to the medical system. Unfortunately, it is the most expensive way. The offsetting revenue doesn’t nearly cover it," he tells VTDigger's Kevin O'Connor. In Hartford, 70 percent of the department's 2,637 calls the past year were for EMS, compared with just 2 percent for fires; 80 percent of the expense went unreimbursed. Springfield and other towns and cities saw similar percentages, and departments see no relief in sight.SPONSORED: Coming to the Dartmouth Green this summer! Direct from Buenos Aires, Cachitas Now! kicks off the Hop’s free summer concerts on the Dartmouth Green on June 28, with a mix of Argentinian cumbia. The series also features Afro-Indigenous Garifuna music and dancing on July 13, and Ukrainian folklore band DakhaBrakha on August 1. Grab a friend and come dance under the summer skies! No tickets required. Learn more at the burgundy link or here. Sponsored by the Hopkins Center for the Arts. Former New London Hospital doc, DHMC resident pleads guilty to Medicare fraud. Dr. Steven Powell, who worked at New London Hospital for over 15 years, including a stint as chief medical officer, pled guilty in April to submitting more than $1.9 million in false claims for medical devices to be sent to Medicare beneficiaries with whom he had no physician-patient relationship, reports John Lippman in the VN; the fraud occurred after he left the hospital to go to work for a Connecticut company. Powell had also been chief resident in DHMC's departments of internal medicine and psychiatry, Lippman writes.Just as your cat likes jumping up on things to get a view, so do bobcats. Like the one on a fallen tree in this week's This Week in the Woods. Also out there this fourth week of June, Northern Woodlands' Elise Tillinghast writes: little wood satyrs—which are not the creatures of Greek myth, but rather early summer forest butterflies; common yellow wood sorrel; common milkweeds—with their promise of monarchs later in the summer; common yarrow, a hardy flower that decorates ground other wildflowers would spurn; and spittle bugs.There's a new trail in Orford. It's the Stonehouse Mountain Trail on privately owned conserved land, writes Gary Moore in the Caledonian Record (possible paywall), and though Stonehouse Mountain is a good bit shorter than its better-known neighbors Cube and Smarts, "it is well worth exploring," Moore writes. The Upper Valley Land Trust hasn't entirely finished the trail, but it's got plans once that's done, UVLT's Jason Berard tells Moore, with hopes ultimately of connecting the Connecticut to Smarts by way of the Clay Brook Trail, the Lyme Town Forest, Stonehouse, and the Mountain View Conservation Area.SPONSORED: Kick off Bookstock with Artistree's UNBOUND vol. XI Exhibit Opening Reception: Thursday, June 22nd | 5:30-7:30pm. Artistree Gallery's annual exhibit of "everything a book can be," featuring artists' books and other forms of Book Art. Come enjoy live music and light refreshments and then catch the opening night of God of Carnage at the Grange Theatre at 7pm! Sponsored by Artistree.A little drive away, an Edvard Munch exhibit worth your time. And it's not only Susan Apel who says that in Artful, but former AVA Gallery director Bente Torjusen, who worked at the Munch Museum in Oslo in the '60s and '70s. The new exhibit at the Clark Institute in Williamstown, MA, focuses on Munch's landscapes—an extensive selection of work he did in the half-century following The Scream. It is, Torjusen says, "long overdue," and includes hard-to-see works from private collections. This is its only stop in the US and will be at the Clark into October before it heads to Europe.Smoke from Canadian wildfires: "People should not think of this as a one-and-done thing." For Dartmouth News, Morgan Kelly talks to geography prof Justin Mankin and DHMC pulmonologist Laura Paulin about the smoke that affected the Northeast and Midwest recently—and that could return. Mankin explains the atmospherics of what happened—a combination of high pressure, unusually warm temps, dry air, and winds—and how "this event indicates that no place is immune." Paulin talks about the health impacts of small airborne particulates, and why outdoor exercise when it's smoky is a bad idea.Before you can sell bug-free firewood, you have to make it bug-free. Which is why the state of New Hampshire has a huge walk-in kiln behind the Department of Corrections Retail Showroom in Concord, writes David Brooks in the Monitor. Logs go in for an hour and a half at 160 degrees, then are bagged and distributed for sale at state campgrounds—thus making it possible for the state to urge campers not to bring their own wood, with its likelihood of importing pests. The program, Brooks writes, creates about 35,000 bags of firewood per year, or nearly 300 cords.Meanwhile, it's summer, which means we're going to be reading about cyanobacteria blooms. They aren't automatically toxic, but can get there if they're dense enough. And with climate change, they're getting worse: On May 16, reports Adriana Martinez-Smiley for NHPR, NH issued its earliest-ever cyanobacteria advisory (and put out an alert for Eastman Pond in Grantham last week). There are efforts, Martinez-Smiley reports, to help homeowners around lakes cut down on their contributions to blooms. You can find NH's Healthy Swimming Mapper here, and VT's Cyanobacteria Tracker here.“A bunch of guys woke up one morning and they said to themselves, ‘The world doesn’t appreciate how stupid we are, so let’s go break something.'" That's sculptor Chris Miller, who carved the face of Hephaestus, the god of volcanoes and stone, that sits atop Millstone Hill in Barre. Over the weekend—and just a week before Barre's popular RockFire festival—vandals damaged the Hephaestus sculpture and toppled two of four granite columns dating back over a century. Barre police say two juvenile males are persons of interest, reports WCAX's Katharine Huntley.VT attorney general goes after Monsanto. And Charity Clark is taking an interesting tack, writes Emma Cotton in VTDigger: suing the agrochemical giant for the damage to schools caused by its manufacture of PCB-containing products such as paints, caulks, dyes, fireproofing substances, and more. Clark's suit also cites damage to the state's natural resources—and alleges that Monsanto knew as early as the 1950s that its products were toxic. A spokesperson for Bayer, which owns Monsanto, says in a statement that other parties produced and were responsible for PCB-containing products in VT.“As a kid, he’d sleep with his arms wrapped around a surfboard.” Luke Shepardson, raised on the North Shore of Oahu, is an electrician-turned-lifeguard with the nickname Casual Luke. Supporting a family in that increasingly unaffordable paradise is tough, writes Gabriella Paiella in GQ Sports, so missing his lifeguarding shift was not an option. On the day of the elite Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational, held only when the waves are suitably mountainous—which means just 10 times in 40 years—Shepardson reported for work, took a break to compete against the top surfers in the world, and …The Tuesday Vordle. With a word from yesterday's Daybreak.Daybreak doesn't get to exist without your support. Help it keep going by hitting the maroon button:
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Today at 5:30, the Lake Sunapee Protective Association presents a conversation about the lake's future, with Laura Knoy, former host of NHPR's The Exchange, talking to lake scientists Kathleen Weathers of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and Elena Bennett of McGill University. In Wheeler Hall at Colby-Sawyer.
At 6 this evening in Wilder, Here in the Valley's Tuesday Jukebox offers a sort of mini-preview of Riverfolk, which will be at Northern Stage in July. Three Upper Valley singers and songwriters—Allison Fay Brown, Andrew Brozek, and Tommy Crawford—will be up on the Wonder Stage of Wilder for an evening of "Songwriters in the Round." RSVP to [email protected] for address and parking instructions.
This evening at 7, the Norwich Bookstore hosts mystery writer Sarah Stewart Taylor reading from and talking about her latest Maggie D'Arcy novel, A Stolen Child. This fourth book in the D'Arcy series, out this month, finds her settling into life as a police officer in Dublin—where she's suddenly on the track of a murdered model's missing toddler.
And the Tuesday poem...
I always wanted to be a saintbut I thought I’d be one of the miserable ones sainted by pain burnt alive insidea brazen bull instead I weep openly at obnoxious beauty cello music comes in from blocks away and I lose it completely there is a word for these fits of incomprehensible delight I said it last night when my mouth was full of cake
—from
by
.
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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