SO GREAT TO SEE YOU AGAIN, UPPER VALLEY!
And boy, you people sure got spoiled last week. (Well, okay, if we ignore that little blip of a weekend...) Yesterday's remarkably fine weather continues for another day, though with more clouds than yesterday and a chance of showers tonight from a front that's taken shape over the Adirondacks. Mid-70s today, more clouds than sun this afternoon, zephyrs from the south, perfect mid-50s sleeping weather tonight.Speaking of perfect nights... Here's the Strawberry Moon rising over Lake Fairlee last week, by John Pietkiewicz.Stunned bald eagle brings WRJ to a halt. On Sunday morning, motorist Michael Copp came on a bald eagle lying motionless in the middle of Maple Street. It's possible, Copp told reporter Eric Francis, that the eagle was struck by a car as it was trying to grab a nearby dead squirrel. Copp had heard that giving a raptor a towel can help it stand, so as the eagle stirred he threw it a sweater he had in his car—and sure enough, the bird pulled itself upright. Police arrived to block off traffic and wait for help from VT Fish & Wildlife... but the eagle had ideas of its own. Eric's Daybreak story and photos at the link.Dartmouth to eliminate loans for undergrads, expand scholarship grants instead. The move takes effect day after tomorrow with the start of the summer term, President Phil Hanlon announced in a speech to alums Saturday, and is aimed at helping families with an annual income of more than $125,000 who receive need-based financial aid (families earning less than $125K already get financial aid with no loan requirement). More than 65 families committed over $80 million in gifts, the college says, to support the effort to join other Ivies in eliminating loan requirements in undergrad financial aid.CATV lands state grant to create community space for media arts. The effort, known as Junction Arts & Media (or, from now on, as JAM), will be housed in the former Newberry Market space under the Briggs Opera House and aim to offer everything from media art installations to performances to education and workshops on video, podcasting, and media in general. The $30K grant—which depends on CATV raising another $15K on its own—will outfit the space with production equipment, livestream capacity, and the ability to expand outdoor cinema. Press release at the link.
SPONSORED: da Vinci at the Montshire! Explore da Vinci’s inventions brought to life at the special exhibition, "Leonardo da Vinci: Machines in Motion" this summer at the Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich. The celebrated thinker's innovations paved the way for the invention of many modern machines and devices. Now, visitors get a chance to see and touch the early forms of his machines—and to set them in motion during this renowned international exhibition’s first visit to northern New England. Sponsored by the Montshire Museum of Science.Let's just do a little catching up... with some stories you might have missed over the past 10 days. Like:
Upper Valley diners face tough times, Alex Hanson wrote in the Valley News over the weekend. Unable to find the staff he needed to open the Public House Diner in Quechee Gorge Village for the summer, Andrew Schain has opted to shut it down. Meanwhile, Hanson writes, the daughters of the owner of the Tumble Inn in Claremont, who died last year, are trying to reopen it, and Janice Neil, who runs the cafe at the Dartmouth Skiway, has a lease-to-own agreement to try to get the Fairlee Diner, shuttered since April, reopened. Hanson adds that the Hartland and Windsor diners are both "bustling."
Gov. Chris Sununu signed that affidavit ballot bill into law—the one he'd originally questioned—and within a few hours a coalition of groups led by Marc Elias, the DC-based super-lawyer who repeatedly defeated GOP efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in court, filed suit. They argue the law interferes with Granite Staters' right to vote and would violate a state constitutional requirement that town election officials report election results within five days of the election.
Long Trail Brewing has been bought by Harpoon's MA-based owner. In the deal announced on Friday, Mass. Bay Brewing Co. will acquire the Long Trail, Otter Creek, and Shed brands, which will now be brewed at the Harpoon brewery in Windsor, and will operate the Long Trail Riverside Pub in Bridgewater. WhistlePig Whiskey will take over the Otter Creek/Shed brewery in Middlebury.
And speaking of beer... You know those snap-on plastic carriers for craft beer cans that you worry might not actually be recyclable? Lots of recyclers do in fact reject them, but there's this new effort called the Vermont Can Carrier Reuse Program to get them back into the hands of small brewers, and a bunch of Upper Valley retailers—including Brownsville Butcher & Pantry, Huggett’s, Dan and Whit’s, Mike’s in Hartland, the Co-op Food Stores, the Woodstock Farmers Market, and Woodstock's Village Butcher—are now taking them back. (Thanks, MG!)
VT regulators once again cut the net metering rate to rooftop solar owners. The decision by the PUC on Friday will slightly lower the rate paid to owners of new solar systems when their installations feed energy back into the grid, Kevin McCallum reports in Seven Days; it's the sixth time in six years the commission has taken that step. PUC members argue that high reimbursement rates raise electricity costs for everyone; solar backers say the PUC is making solar less affordable to everyone but the wealthy.
And Woodstock's struggles with remaining affordable to people who actually live there featured in a look by Seven Days' Anne Wallace Allen and Chelsea Edgar at towns around Vermont that are trying various approaches to boosting mid-priced housing. Allen writes about the town Economic Development Commission's moves to encourage owners to convert short-term rentals to long-term leases or add accessory dwelling units—and notes that local renters are taking matters into their own hands, like writing directly to second-home owners asking if they'd be willing to sell.
“We’ll keep it going until it sells." That's S. Strafford's Melvin Coburn, talking to the VN's Jim Kenyon about Coburn's General Store. You may remember that he, his brother Phil, and their wives Sue and Shelby have put it on the market, which has gotten a lot of locals nervous. The store, says one resident, "is far more valuable than the sum of its parts," what with the post office, bank branch, and community food shelf it houses, the 250-member fuel club it runs, and its keystone role in Strafford communal life. The Coburns are asking $1.5 million and "have had a few inquiries but no offers yet," Kenyon reports."The kind of restaurant you'd want in your neighborhood." That would be Windsor's Bistro Midva, writes Susan Apel in Artful. The 20-seat spot is where Au Jus used to be, and it's owned by Chad Lumbra and his spouse, Arlanda Eržen Lumbra ("midva" means "two of us" in Slovene). Chad Lumbra was executive chef at Elixir and once worked at NYC's high-end Eleven Madison Park; the food, Susan writes, is "generous in portion, expertly cooked, presented simply in bistro style." Don't read this if you're hungry.Darling-58. Nope, not a band or a graffiti tag. It's a gene in certain grasses that seems to be effective at neutralizing the fungal toxin that causes chestnut blight. Researchers have created a chestnut tree that carries it, writes David Brooks in the Monitor, and are hoping to get federal approval to release the GMO tree in the wild. It's one of several painstaking efforts to revive the American chestnut, Brooks reports, including orchards in NH and VT (one was just planted in Windsor) of American chestnuts cross-bred with naturally blight-resistant Chinese chestnuts—which, so far, have had disappointing results.Mass. hiker dies after high-risk rescue in Presidentials. This weekend's weather in the mountains included freezing temperatures, rain, sleet, snow, and winds gusting over 80 mph, and it prompted a series of rescue calls from hikers, including one from a 53-year-old Massachusetts man. The press release from NH Fish & Game recounts a hair-raising effort by rescuers who were dropped off near the summit of Mt. Washington at 9:30 pm Saturday, headed out into ferocious winds, and found the hiker "in a highly hypothermic state" an hour later. They got him to a hospital, where he died yesterday."This was not a career move, making this show." You may have heard that Rumble Strip creator and producer Erica Heilman just won a Peabody Award—once described as "like an Oscar wrapped in an Emmy inside a Pulitzer" by Stephen Colbert—for her episode "Finn and the Bell," about the reverberations through E. Hardwick, VT after the death by suicide of young Finn Rooney. On The Vermont Conversation, David Goodman talks to Heilman about the making of that episode and others, how she approaches her work—and whether she really does record her narration for the podcast in her closet.Granite, granite everywhere. So says travel writer Walter Nicklin in The Washington Post (gift link) about Barre and its granite quarries. Barre Gray's proportions of quartz and feldspar make it "known worldwide for its fine grain, even texture and superior weather resistance," as well as especially suitable for intricate carving. Nicklin is especially taken by the Rock of Ages quarry—"I had seen many quarries over the years, but nothing like this"—and by the Hope Cemetery, "the Uffizi of necropolises," as folklorist Joseph Citro once put it. And impressively, Nicklin spells "creemee" right. (Thanks, CJ!)The Tuesday Vordle. Okay Vordlers! Back to the in-house Daybreak version. For those of you who are new to this, Vordle is the Upper Valley version of Wordle, with the five-letter word relating to some item in the previous day's Daybreak. Except, of course, that won't work today, so Vordlewiz Kevin McCurdy chose a word from yesterday's regional news.
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As part of its third-Tuesday "Tapestry Tuesdays" series, at 5:30 this afternoon the New London-area Center for the Arts is hosting an in-person talk by writer, former NHPR producer, and stone-wall builder Kevin Gardner at the New London Inn. He'll be talking about how and why New England came to acquire its thousands of miles of stone walls and how their styles emerged and changed over time.
At 7 this evening, Upper Valley mystery writer Sarah Stewart Taylor will be at the Norwich Bookstore reading from and talking about her third Maggie D'arcy novel, The Drowning Sea. This time around, the now-former Long Island homicide detective is on a remote Irish peninsula with her daughter when a Polish construction worker's body washes up below the cliffs; things, as you'd expect, get tangled.
Also at 7, Here in the Valley's Tuesday Jukebox is back with "fiddle ninja" Jakob Breitbach hosting Dan & the Dinosaurs for a summer solstice celebration. They'll be live at the Wonder Stage of Wilder—Breitbach's home with Jes Raymond—as well as livestreamed.
And just to catch up, you know summer's here when we get not one, but two live-theater musicals. Northern Stage launched Side by Side by Sondheim last week (through July 10); tonight at 8 is $20 Tuesday. The four-performer production, outdoors in the Courtyard Theater, focuses on Sondheim's work from the '60s and '70s, including songs from A Little Night Music, Gypsy, Company, Follies, and other Sondheim classics; in his review yesterday, Times Argus critic Jim Lowe calls it "a fun, funny and joyful" show. Meanwhile, the New London Barn Playhouse puts its own stamp on a classic; A Chorus Line, which also opened last week, runs tonight at 7:30 and lasts through Sunday.
The Tuesday poem
Ye glow-worms, whose officious flameTo wand’ring mowers shows the way,That in the night have lost their aim,And after foolish fires do stray;Your courteous lights in vain you waste,Since Juliana here is come,For she my mind hath so displac’dThat I shall never find my home.
— From
by Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)
And don't forget...
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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