GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Maybe showers, but hope's on the horizon. Yesterday's weather is in no hurry to leave, but off to the west there's high pressure angling to arrive tomorrow. For today, more clouds than blue and maybe some light rain, temps reaching the mid 60s and lows tonight around or below 50. Maybe later today and certainly overnight, clouds should start moving out. Winds from the west.Explorers in the night. A mom bear and her cubs in Diane Church's yard, just checking things out—including the cat enclosure.Hiker helped off Mt. Cube after falling and hitting head. It's actually the second time in six weeks this has happened. On Sunday, a 51-year-old Massachusetts woman tripped on the North Spur Trail from the south to the north summit; a rescue crew from NH Fish & Game along with fire departments from Orford, Thetford, Lyme, Hanover, Canaan, Enfield, and Haverhill responded to help her make her way down. In the earlier case, in August, a 70-year-old NH man slipped on his descent, and eventually had to be carried out.Goose Pond will see water drawdown starting next month as dam repair is set to begin this winter. The drawdown, reports Frances Mize in the Valley News, will begin Oct. 9 and lower the pond's water level by a foot a day until it's 22 feet below normal and about a quarter its normal size. “People who live on the lake will no longer be living on a lake,” says Michael Riese, president of the Goose Pond Lake Association. But cracks were discovered in the dam in 2014, and the state's dam bureau also worries about its wooden floodgates. The state put the repair project out to bid last week.NH hands out $713K to 77 schools for robotics; the only one in the Upper Valley is the Enfield Village School. The grants, says the department, are for up to $14,850 and are going to schools either to expand existing robotics programs or to create new programs that don't yet have robotics teams. Enfield's elementary school will get $2,978, which will help its robotics teams expand to include a Lego component and provide money for stipends to engage parents in helping run them.At area farms, the rain's producing a mixed bag for pumpkins. WCAX's Adam Sullivan spent time yesterday with Riverview Farm's Nancy Franklin in Plainfield and the Crossroads Farmstand's Aanan Merritt in Norwich, and both detail the challenges that rainfall has produced: At Riverview, some fields have produced healthy pumpkins, while others, with heavier soil, have been tough on specialty varieties, like winter squash. At Crossroad, Merritt tells Sullivan that the moisture has made it tough to cure pumpkins in the field and avoid stem rot—though as Sullivan notes, "there's no shortage [of pumpkins] here."SPONSORED: It's the Upper Valley Circus Collective's 2nd annual Fall Fest! Enjoy a fun-filled and relaxing day of circus workshops, art & crafts, a reading area for kids, delicious local food, music, dancing, and a live circus show by Cirque Us! This event is fun for the whole family and all proceeds will go directly to funding UVCC's school programs for the 2023-24 school year. Ages 5 and under are FREE! September 30th beginning at 2pm behind the CCBA in Lebanon. All fun! No experience required. Sponsored by UVCC.Out there in the woods this week: Chicken of the woods and bear's head tooth. As Northern Woodlands' Elise Tillinghast writes, the first is prized by foragers for its meatiness and lemony taste (and as she also writes, "never eat a wild mushroom unless you 100% know what it is"); the second has "a really weird...name for a fungus that resembles a frozen waterfall." But it is decidedly cool looking. Also: a beautiful pic of an American bittern in flight, by Tig Tillinghast; and "the season’s creepiest plant, white baneberry, aka doll’s eyes."The moth may be nondescript, but the caterpillar? That's a different story. Take the hag moth—it's a dull brown, writes Mary Holland on her Naturally Curious blog. The caterpillar stage, on the other hand, is known as the Monkey Slug, and it's got three pairs of long “arms," three shorter pairs, and looks vaguely like a tarantula (handy if you're trying to avoid being eaten). Also: It glides on suckers. Also, based on the pic: That is one weird-looking caterpillar!NH candidates for governor lay out their stands on issues. It's early yet—the filing deadline's not until next June—but NH Bulletin's Ethan DeWitt is up with a look at former state Senate president Chuck Morse and Kelly Ayotte, the former AG and US senator, both Republicans, and Democrats Cinde Warmington, a member of the Exec Council, and Joyce Craig, mayor of Manchester. They lay out their top priorities, what their first budget proposal would look like, where they stand on school funding and "education freedom accounts," the opioid crisis, abortion, climate change—and what distinguishes them from the others and from outgoing Gov. Chris Sununu.NH Secy of State sets last day to change party affiliation. Apparently there's a presidential primary in NH next year, though its actual date is still a mystery. What's not a mystery is the deadline for changing your party affiliation prior to voting in that primary: It's Oct. 6. This is because NH law allows only unaffiliated voters to choose a party ballot at the polling place; otherwise, you vote with the party you're registered to. And you're affiliated if you declared a party when you registered or were undeclared, voted in a primary, and then did not change your affiliation back to undeclared. More at the link.Logan Clegg trial will begin Oct. 2. At a pre-trial hearing yesterday, attorneys for the defense and prosecution, as well as Merrimack County Superior Court Judge John Kissinger agreed that jury selection in the high-profile case involving the accused murderer of Steve and Wendy Reid will begin with jury selection that day. Which, Kissinger noted, might take a while, given the amount of publicity the case has received. Manchester Ink Link's Maureen Milliken details the hearing.VT's board of ed will change how it runs meetings, after criticism. The objections, from a variety of groups including the state's Office of Racial Equity and 16 legislators (including local Democratic Reps. Rebecca Holcombe, Esme Cole, Kevin "Coach" Christie, Tesha Buss, and Elizabeth Burrows), focus on an array of problems, from daytime meetings that exclude working parents, to phone-in-only meetings that make it impossible to follow materials the board's considering, to deliberations behind a barrier that also excluded the public. The board, reports VT Public's Howard Weiss-Tisman, now says it will change how it conducts its meetings.It's fall, and young people's thoughts turn to... corn mazes. And there are a lot out there. For starters, we've got our own Upper Valley maze in Plainfield at Riverview Farm (burgundy link), designed whimsically every year by Emily Zea; this year's theme is "Animals and Apples of Riverview Farm." Elsewhere in NH, NH Mag's got a guide. And in VT, the Burlington Free Press (via Yahoo) focuses on Chittenden County but also lists two celebrated mazes it calls "worth the drive": the Great VT Corn Maze in Danville and the Fort Ticonderoga Corn Maze, which integrates history into the maze.Shall we dance? Why yes, said the raisin to the seltzer. And then let’s star in a scholarly physics paper on fluid dynamics. “In this work, experiments using fixed and free immersed bodies reveal fundamental features of force development and gas escape,” writes lead study author Saverio E. Spagnolie, a mathematician at U of Wisconsin-Madison, in his 29-page study. If you want to learn about oscillating dynamics, dive into the paper. If you just want to giggle like a kid, hit the burgundy link for the lively little dried fruit bobbing up and down in a vat of seltzer. (Thanks, EV!)The Tuesday Vordle. With a word from yesterday's Daybreak.
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Today at 12:15, Dartmouth's Dickey Center hosts Princeton economics prof Leah Boustan for her lecture, "Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success." Based on the work behind a 2022 book of the same title she co-authored, she uses both big data and individual stories to lay out a case that immigrants—both historically and currently—rarely compete for jobs with native-born workers, their children tend to do better economically, often assimilate quickly, and are a source of entrepreneurial, scientific, and creative talent.
Today at 5:30, the Sunapee area's Center for the Arts hosts historian John Moody for "Abenaki/Penacook History of the Lake Sunapee/Upper Sugar River Watershed." As the NH Humanities writeup goes, "Every town and watershed in New Hampshire has ancient and continuing Native American history. From the recent, late 20th century explosion of local Native population in New Hampshire back to the era of early settlement and the colonial wars," Moody will look at that history for the Lake Sunapee region. At St. Andrew's Church in New London.
At 6 pm, the Norman Williams Public Library and Woodstock's Yankee Bookshop host Dartmouth astrophysicist and writer Marcelo Gleiser, reading from and talking about his new book, The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity's Future. In a book that ranges across the universe and discoveries from Copernicus to the last few years, Gleiser argues that increasingly, we've lost our moral mission and compassionate focus in our scientific endeavors, and thus our ability to view earth and the life it's nurtured as rare and precious—and to shift direction in order to save human civilization.
At 6:30 this evening, the Etna Library presents Franklin Pierce U anthropology prof Robert Goodby talking about his work excavating four 12,000-year-old Paleoindian dwellings at the Tenant Swamp site in Keene—the work that led to his 2021 book, A Deep Presence: 13,000 Years of Native American History.
And the Tuesday poem...
love is a skinthat protects you,a warmth that spreadsfrom the tips of your fingersto your heartsorry — not love —glove, i meant glove
— "Love is a skin" by
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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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