GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
The good news: Rain likely. But also maybe severe thunderstorms. Weather will arrive in two phases today: a chance of showers this morning, possibly some clearing around midday, then a chance of thunderstorms this afternoon. A lot will depend on how much of a break in the clouds we get. If things heat up, the odds of serious weather this afternoon go up. So... rain possible all day and night and a chance of thunder throughout the afternoon and evening. But also: maybe some sun, humid, highs in the low-mid 80s.Which makes this seem like a good day for some floral brilliance. Rich Cohen is a Norwich photographer who essentially does portraits of flowers. When his neighbor grew some spectacular peonies this spring, it was only a matter of time before some of them wound up on his light table. They look like jellyfish, his wife says, but I dunno. Maybe nebulae? Or, you know... peonies.Tar spill closes Route 11 in Springfield; mostly contained. Some 1,500 gallons of the material being used on a Pike Industries paving project spilled from a malfunctioning hose, reports NBC5's Jack Thurston. State crews and the Springfield Fire Department worked quickly to keep it from reaching a brook alongside Route 11. "Not anywhere close to 1,500 gallons has made it into the waterway," James Donaldson of the Agency of Natural Resources says. "My estimate, based on just the visual back here, is probably less than 10 gallons." The equipment operator was taken to the hospital with burns on his arms.Norwich Selectboard to fill vacancy. Claudette Brochu, who was first elected in 2018 and re-elected in 2020 and this past March, stepped down yesterday because she's moving out of town. “Everything happened rather quickly," she tells the Valley News's Darren Marcy. The board tomorrow night will discuss appointing a replacement until an election can be held. Brochu's resignation comes in the midst of heated debate in town over staff departures from the public works and police departments and what some residents contend is a lack of "transparency" on the selectboard.Not one, but two two-spotted lady beetles! "I was really excited. I ended up photographing them for so long that my phone died," the VT Center for Ecostudies' Julia Pupko tells VTDigger's Emma Cotton. That's because the two lady beetles that showed up in Pupko's net last month had been thought to be extinct in the state—the last was documented in 1996. Her discovery came in the midst of a VCE push to learn whether some dozen species of lady beetles that in some cases haven't been seen since the 1970s are, indeed, gone.SPONSORED: Advance Transit is hiring! Want to join a committed team that offers a crucial community service? Know someone who does? Advance Transit provides free public transit for Upper Valley communities in VT and NH and is currently hiring drivers. Enjoy competitive pay, great benefits, a friendly workplace, paid time off, and a driving schedule with no nights, no weekends, and no holidays—which means more time for family and yourself. PLUS, drivers with CDL and passenger endorsement receive a $6,000 signing bonus! Apply at the link or email Bekka Cadwell. Sponsored by Advance Transit. Prouty busts record, raises nearly $5.5 million. Some 4,000 cyclists, walkers, rowers, golfers and volunteers took part over the weekend in the first in-person version of the annual Cancer Center fundraiser since 2019, Dartmouth Health reports in a press release. "Sunshine and comfortable summer temperatures contributed to the festive mood as participants walked or cycled through neighborhoods and roads in New Hampshire and Vermont, rowed on the Connecticut River, or played 18 holes at Eastman Golf Links in Grantham," the Center writes. Last year's event raised $4.1 million.How Rumney became a climbers' mecca. If you've been by, you probably know: Rumney Rocks, on the slopes of Rattlesnake Mountain, can pull hundreds—if not thousands—of climbers on a prime weekend, writes Wayne King on InDepthNH. The first recorded climbs seem to have been made in the '60s, and by the late '80s, the area was popular enough to be included in Ed Webster's Rock Climbs in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. That in turn led to tension with the landowner, which led to the Rumney Climbers Association... which led to climbers buying the land for the US Forest Service.
Meet the NH man who cleans latrines on the high seas. The jokes write themselves—the USS Constitutional, clearing the poop deck, manure lure—but Captain Bob Gibbons would rather you didn’t. Nevertheless, NHPR’s Todd Bookman climbs aboard Gibbons’ Royal Flush, a craft equipped with pump and 400-gallon tank, to see up close how sewage is emptied from boats along the Seacoast. The job isn’t as thankless as it sounds: the lobsters and oysters we enjoy are grateful. The hardest part, says Gibbons, is carefully docking up against each boat—much like a mid-air refuel, only in the other direction.
Deface public property in NH, go to jail. Well, maybe. A measure signed into law earlier this month by Gov. Chris Sununu increases the penalty for vandalism from a max $1,000 fine to a Class A misdemeanor, which carries with it a $2,000 fine and the possibility of jail time. The change comes after a string of incidents at State House Plaza in Concord, reports NH Bulletin's Ethan DeWitt, including stuff hanging off statues, graffiti, chalking up the State House, and hatchet attacks on trees on the State House grounds.In VT, demand is strong for early primary ballots. People have been able to vote absentee for a couple of weeks now, Bob Kinzel reports for Vermont Public, and already there have been 34,000 ballots requested statewide, compared to 3,500 in pre-pandemic 2018—though it's a far cry from 2020's 68,000 at this point in the pre-primary window. Town clerks tell Kinzel they think familiarity, a bucketful of contest races, and the chance to spend some time with the ballot researching candidates have all factored in.With disappearance of widespread testing, wastewater data in VT is "the best we have"—and most of it is murky. In theory, writes Erin Petenko in VTDigger, there should be info from 10 wastewater plants around the state. Yet on the CDC website and in state reports, Petenko writes, "the actual data showing viral levels and change over time is muddled and variable. In the past week, there was no data at all for the 10 participants in the program." The state doesn't know why; municipal officials were unaware it was missing; the CDC isn't sure what's up; and neither is the contractor collecting the data."Can we say that about our enemies? That life is bigger than just the issue we’re interested in? That people are bigger than the view they hold?” That tough question—urging people to act like soccer stars who give their all in a game then "get up and shake hands"—comes from former Marlboro College religion prof Amer Latif, talking to the 60 VT high schoolers gathered at the Governor’s Institute on Global Issues and Youth Action. Latif's answer, writes VTDigger's Kevin O'Connor: "You engage with the action but you don’t judge the other person.”Inside the making—and infinite remaking—of the OED. The task of creating the 3rd edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is, in every sense of the word, enormous. But ask its editors if they find it overwhelming, as the New Stateman’s Pippa Bailey does in her (ahem) definitive piece on the dictionary’s story, and you’ll hear instead, “It’s exhilarating.” As social media expands our language—"for the OED lexicographers, the goalposts aren’t so much shifting as sprinting away from them," Bailey writes—the editors reside in a place of historical curiosity and impartiality. They aren’t bothered, for example, by our hyperbolic use of the word “literally”—which first occurred in 1769.Luck at least twice over. British hiker Harry Shimmin's video from over the weekend is a fine example of why things go viral. He and eight other tourists were touring the Tian Shan mountains in Kyrgyzstan when Shimmin heard ice cracking behind him. He turned to see a glacier collapse, spilling a massive wall of ice and rocks into a gully—that funneled them right toward the cliff edge where he stood. With an overhanging rock to his side, he decided to keep filming, just past the moment you hear his "Oh God, oh dear God." If it had happened five minutes later, he writes, the party would have been wiped out.The Tuesday Vordle. For you newcomers: This is the Upper Valley version of the Wordle, using a word related to an item in yesterday's Daybreak.
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Starting today and running for the next two weeks, Sustainable Woodstock and Pentangle Arts host an online screening of Youth v Gov. Christi Cooper's 2020 documentary and piece of activist cinema follows 21 teenagers, organized by the legal non-profit Our Children’s Trust, who in 2015 sued the US Government and the Obama administration in a case that came to be known as Juliana v. United States, arguing that government action has violated their constitutional rights by undergirding climate change. The case was dismissed by the US Court of Appeals in 2020; the plaintiffs are still hoping to amend their complaint.
Today at 4 pm, Dartmouth math and computer science prof and New Yorker writer Dan Rockmore peers into the near future at the expanding ability of machines to write, and asks, "What might that mean for literature and literary studies?" In-person in Haldeman Hall 41.
Starting at 6:30, Fairlee Arts continues its weekly Concert on the Common summertime series with the John Lackard Blues Band. Lackard, Vermont born and bred, got his taste in music after his dad brought a honky-tonk piano and some records home—he took up the harmonica at five, a 12-string acoustic guitar when he was nine, and made his first professional stage appearance at 15. He's been playing the blues on stage ever since.
Also at 6:30, but definitely a different pace, the Hanover Conservancy's Adair Mulligan and NH Fish & Game fisheries biologist Ben Nugent talk about the state's efforts to restore and protect wild brook trout habitat and how the Conservancy's efforts to protect the Mink Brook watershed have helped the brook trout population there. In-person at the Howe and also online via Zoom.
And the Tuesday poem...
Call the roller of big cigars,The muscular one, and bid him whipIn kitchen cups concupiscent curds.Let the wenches dawdle in such dressAs they are used to wear, and let the boysBring flowers in last month's newspapers.Let be be finale of seem.The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.Take from the dresser of deal,Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheetOn which she embroidered fantails onceAnd spread it so as to cover her face.If her horny feet protrude, they comeTo show how cold she is, and dumb.Let the lamp affix its beam.The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
— Wallace Stevens, "The Emperor of Ice-Cream". And just in case you want some help with this one,
for the Poetry Foundation about what he calls "one of the most famously elliptical poems of the 20th century."
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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