RABBIT RABBIT, UPPER VALLEY!
Just a reminder that there'll be no regular Daybreak next week or the week after. However, it would be a pleasure to have you sign up for Daybreak Diversions—a weekday-morning newsletter with some vintage items of fun stuff (and some new ones thrown in for kicks), music, and, of course, the Vordle—that will fill the void during those two weeks. More info at the burgundy link.Aaahhh... High pressure's building in, drying things out and keeping the skies mostly sunny (once the fog clears) but temps a bit cool for the next couple of days. Highs today low 70s, lows down into the 40s, winds from the north.The skies... got pretty dramatic on Saturday evening. Here's:
The Ompompanoosuc after the rain, by Amanda DeRoy;
Etna right around the same time, from Brenda Silver;
And the rainbows that appeared over Sharon, also at that time, from Michael Livingston.
“It’s not really about the thing on the table. It’s about the people across the table.” That's Ian Struckhoff, founder and owner of Hanover's The Fourth Place, talking about the feature he shares with West Leb's Black Moon Games: providing a place where the customers also build their own community. In a new Daybreak story, Matt Golec—who, in addition to being a writer is a game player and designer—writes that while both spots offer a place where, say, you can take on all comers as a character in Star Wars: Shatterpoint or dive into Magic: The Gathering, they offer more, too: connection and like-minded spirits.Missing Dartmouth grad student found. You may remember that last week, Hartford police sought the public's help finding Daniel Brooks, a 26-year-old recent graduate from the college's masters in literary studies program whose family hadn't heard from him in several weeks. In an update yesterday, the HPD noted that Brooks has been located out of state, and was "found to be safe and in good health."Embankment washout causes Norwich to close road off Route 5; a handful of residents vacate. The move came after flooding July 10 after an embankment supporting Hemlock Road, off Route 5 by the Ompompanoosuc River, collapsed and the roadway split. Tenants in a couple of the houses along the road have had to move, Patrick Adrian writes in the VN. The town is looking at creating a temporary access road until full-on repairs can be made, but that would require a nearby landowner to give a temporary easement. In all, repairs are expected to cost about $1.1 million.Getting an earful. If you happened to read the VN nine days ago, you probably noticed an intriguing pairing of articles: Frances Mize's profile of new Dartmouth President Sian Beilock, which noted the lengths she's gone to meet with and talk to a broad swath of the Dartmouth and Hanover communities, and Jim Kenyon's column upbraiding Beilock for advertising for a housekeeper and personal assistant, which, he wrote, suggested she was out of touch with her new community. Kenyon's column "elicited a robust response," the VN's editors write. That would be one way of putting it. Letters at the burgundy link.SPONSORED: Last chance to see the largest Vermeer exhibition in history! Due to popular demand, the Hop is giving an encore presentation of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam's blockbuster exhibit on film on Sunday, August 6 in the Loew Auditorium at 4pm. The film gives an exclusive behind-the-scenes view of this once-in-a-lifetime event celebrating Dutch master Johannes Vermeer’s enduring artistry, with valuable insight provided by curators and scholars. Sponsored by the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth."A sing for fun." Over four Wednesdays this month—starting next week on Aug. 9—the Choral Arts Foundation of the Upper Valley is bringing back its "Summer Sings" series. Born of desperation during the pandemic, the series has outlasted its origin, creating singalongs—open to anyone, though knowing how to read music and sing in a group is a plus—led by the directors of four local vocal ensembles. Things get going next week, Liz Sauchelli writes in the VN, with Dan Falcone, director of the North Country Chordsmen and VoxStars, leading “Broadway Hits & Barbership Bits." Full schedule and details here.In Vershire, an effort to document Ely Mine history before Superfund cleanup gets underway. At its peak, reports WCAX's Rachel Mann, the old copper mine employed some 800 people; with cleanup not slated to begin until next year, archeologists are grabbing the chance to learn more about them. "What we’re really interested in is the lives of the miners and the industrial operations, which there isn’t a lot of information about relative to certain areas,” VT state archeologist Jess Robinson tells Mann.“The archeology is really going to ground truth a lot of what we think we might know—or overturn things.”
"It is okay to turn back." This past weekend, nearly 300 people hiked peaks in New Hampshire as part of a fundraiser for hiking safety and search & rescue teams to honor 19-year-old Emily Sotelo, who died last November while trying to climb Mt. Lafeyette. Overall, the fundraiser's pulled in some $90,000, and yesterday, NHPR's Julia Furukawa talked with Sotelo's parents, Olivera Bogunovic and Jorge Sotelo, about both the fundraiser and their own draw to keep hiking. "I want her to continue living through things that she liked to do," says Bogunovic.Not a record you want to break. But there it is: This year, reports NHPR's Adriana Martinez-Smiley, NH is on track to see the highest number of cyanobacteria blooms ever reported. It's already broken the record for the most advisories ever issued in one month, back in June. Partly, the state's Kate Hastings says, it's because there's more awareness and therefore more reports. But more development around water bodies and climate change—with more downpours that flood lakes and ponds with more nutrients—are also responsible. In case you didn't bookmark them last time, You can find NH's Healthy Swimming Mapper here, and VT's Cyanobacteria Tracker here.NH schools and teachers appear to be turning around pandemic learning loss. This Ethan DeWitt story in NH Bulletin slipped past me last week, but it's well worth noticing. State data, he reports, show that students in third to eighth grades and in 11th grade are learning "at a faster rate of acceleration" in math and English language arts than students in the same grades were doing in 2019. They haven't quite reached the same level of proficiency, but they're catching up, DeWitt notes. Full school-by-school data is coming in the fall.Early figures suggest VT flooding especially hit affordable housing—and now, the people it displaced are having trouble finding new rentals. About 10 percent of the state's manufactured home parks are in floodplains, reports VTDigger's Lola Duffort, and denser, more affordable development tends to be in town and village centers—which were often built in river valleys. Even affordable housing developers, Duffort writes, can have trouble finding affordable land on higher ground—and, in the past, tended not to think about the impact of climate change."The floodwaters were still rising. A gentleman was flushed out of his car and was clinging to a hot tub...." Swift water rescue teams train "intensively and persistently" pretty much year-round for events like the floods that hit VT last month, writes Fran Lynggaard Hansen in the Brattleboro-area weekly, The Commons. Mostly volunteers, the teams under the direction of southern VT's Rescue Inc. spent days finding and rescuing people who'd been stranded—or worse—by the flooding. In the hot tub case, in Ludlow, the team could only get within 9 miles, then walked and swam until they got a ride from a fire department. When they finally got there, the man was clinging to a tree.Mountains. That, in a nutshell, was the topographic feature most responsible for VT's recent flooding, Ethan Weinstein writes in VTDigger: In general, "as moving air hits the Green Mountains, it rapidly cools as it rises, often triggering precipitation." Unlike Irene, when the winds came from the east and the rains most affected towns east of the Greens, July's winds were moving in multiple directions. Erin Petenko's map shows the effect pretty clearly—boosted by terrain prone to flash flooding, settlement patterns that magnified the human impact, and, as VT Public's Brave Little State pointed out while Daybreak was away, a history of human activity that made streams more powerful."Borderline witchcraft." You remember Mark Rober, right? He's the former NASA engineer and very popular science and engineering explainer on YouTube who'll be enshrined forever for his backyard squirrel mazes. But these days he's on to other things, including, back in June, spending some quality time being tracked by a scent-trailing German Shepherd named Zinka and her handler, Shay. He tries every dodge he can think of, including a crowded college campus. Let's just sum it up by saying that if a trained Shepherd is on your scent, you might as well just give it up. But you'll really enjoy learning why.The Tuesday Vordle. With a word from yesterday's Daybreak.
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It's going to be a beautiful evening out there, so really: There's no reason in the world why you shouldn't be on the Dartmouth Green at 6 pm, when DakhaBrakha brings its beguiling, high-energy blend of world music rooted in Ukrainian folk tradition to the outdoor stage, thanks to the Hopkins Center. The band calls their music "ethnic chaos" and both words are apt, but so are "striking harmonies" and "influences from trance to dance to scatting to nature" and "it'll be hard to sit still." If you've never heard them, you owe yourself. If you have, you already know why you'll be there. No charge, no tix.
Meanwhile, up on the Fairlee town common at 6:30, the town brings in The Belaires—and promises, "You just can’t sit still with this band… it’s dance, dance, dance." Music of the '50s, '60s, and '70s.
At 7 pm, the Thetford Arthouse Cinema screens Jane Campion's The Piano: a young Victorian-era woman, a pianist (Holly Hunter), "washes up in New Zealand for her financially arranged marriage to a well-intentioned but clueless farmer (Sam Neill). His foreman (Harvey Keitel) is not clueless," as organizer Art Kahn writes. In the Martha Rich Theater at Thetford Academy.
Also at 7 pm, Still North Books & Bar in Hanover hosts essayist Natalie Beach in conversation with author and Dartmouth writing prof Alexander Chee. Beach shot to online stardom in 2019 with a 7,000-word essay for The Cut about her unkempt relationship with Caroline Calloway, a writer and influencer "who became famous for playing a role somewhere between performance artist and scammer," as Adrienne Gaffney put it in Elle recently. Now she has a debut collection out, Adult Drama and Other Essays, about her own life and observations: her summer job as a landscaper, real estate sales, abortion clinics, low rise jeans. One no-doubt future essay that's not in the book: Beach, who lives in LA, was visiting New Haven, CT, where she grew up, hoping to deliver a copy to her high school writing mentor; when she and her family arrived, no one answered; they eventually found her teacher unresponsive on the floor. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
And the Tuesday poem...
My Mother Hoped
To take her sewing machine
Down to her grave,
And I believe she did that,
'Cause every now and then
It keeps me awake at night.— by Charles Simic. (Thanks, LQ!)
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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