GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Slightly warmer, maybe a slight break in the clouds for a bit, rain later. Things start off with a chance of drizzle, then we get a short break before a new round settles in sometime this afternoon. It will start as rain for much of the night and then, toward daybreak, turn to freezing rain, sleet, and eventually, m snow. More on that tomorrow. For today, temps reach the low 40s, with winds shifting to come from the north this afternoon. Down to about 30 overnight.Winter's patterns. (Checks watch). At least, it's supposed to be winter...
In E. Thetford, Robin Osborne writes, "I don’t know how to explain exactly how these came about, but the recent combination of rain-then-ice-then-snow-then-wind has left these beautiful imprints of leaves and sticks all over the roads and driveways up here in Thetford. I don’t think I have ever seen anything quite like this before."
And along the Ompompanoosuc in Post Mills, Bill Keegan last week came across an almost-complete 30-foot ice circle and filmed its rotation as the rest of the river flowed past. Here's a photo from a few days later with him next to it, so you can get a sense of its size.
Roger Blake, former Norwich selectboard chair, found dead in Connecticut River. Blake, whose house fronts on the river, had been out in his yard on Monday afternoon, raking. Around 5 pm his family noticed he hadn't come in, found his rake halfway down a steep embankment, and, worried he'd fallen, called for assistance. Teams from Hanover, Norwich, Hartford, and Lebanon responded, as did NH Fish & Game's dive team. They called off the search around 8:20 pm Monday, then resumed it yesterday. Blake's body was found around 10 am, downriver of his house, reports Fish & Game.
Blake, 74, ran Blake's Garage in WRJ for nearly two decades. He was a stalwart in Norwich, both during his years on the selectboard and as a volunteer. As word spread around town yesterday, the Valley News's John Lippman writes, "Norwich residents recalled a community member who embodied the best of New England’s small-town, help-your-neighbor values." “He didn’t want a ‘thank you.’ He wanted to be an example [who] showed others when you saw something that needed to be done that you took ownership of it and care for it," Sarah Rooker, director of the Norwich Historical Society, tells Lippman.
He avoided the limelight, but it found him in the summer of 2021, when he, his wife Ellen, and their daughter and granddaughter were passengers on the balloon from which Post Mills balloonist Brian Boland fell to his death. Under terrifying circumstances, Blake managed to land the balloon safely. He was both shaken up and reflective the following day, when Valley News reporter Anna Merriman was able to speak to him about the experience.Probably the most thorough reconstruction of those events and the Blakes' ordeal was by Yankee Magazine writer Ian Aldrich in a profile of Boland.
The move, instituted at the end of December, comes in anticipation of a proposed 16.5 percent cut to the sheriff's department budget, reports Ethan Weinstein in
VTDigger
. The budget is overseen by the county's assistant judges, who say in a statement that "simply put, the current mechanism for funding [dispatching] services represents an overreach of authority on the part of the County.” Sheriff-elect George Contois, who takes over Feb. 1, declined to comment on his plans.
Events began about an hour after midnight yesterday morning, when state police on I-93 in Manchester attempted to stop a car for speeding. The driver, 40-year-old Ryan Sharkey, led police on a pursuit through Hooksett, Bow, Concord, Hopkinton, and Warner, twice driving head-on towards state troopers, the NHSP says in a press release. He eventually crashed on a curve in Warner, was taken to Concord Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, and charged with multiple offenses, including aggravated driving while intoxicated.
Those are some of the questions posed by "Blindness," the lead story in Shruti Swamy's 2021 short story collection,
A House is a Body
. In this week's Enthusiasms, essayist, novelist, and writing teacher Peter Orner focuses on "Blindness"—Swamy is a former student of his—to explain why it's impossible to explain why a piece of writing works. And why, he writes, "I’m dubious of anybody who claims to possess some absolute knowledge of how literature works." Fair warning: He's in a mood.
John Broderick, former NH Supreme Court chief justice and now director of external affairs for Dartmouth Health, has a new book on what he's learned over six years speaking with middle- and high school students about mental health. He tells the
Valley News'
s Nora Doyle-Burr he believes "adults have over-structured children’s lives and made them overly competitive, which has the effect of making young people afraid to fail, made it difficult for them to make decisions and lowered their resilience," Doyle-Burr writes.
And Bill Bartlett, who owns Bartlett’s Blueberry Farm in Newport, NH, tells NHPR's Mara Hoplamazian that the kind of warm weather we've been seeing lately stresses them out. Blueberries need up to 1000 hours below 45 degrees, and warm spells are problematic. “We've had a few cold days, so now these plants start thinking, ‘Oh, I got to get my gloves out and my mittens on,’” Bartlett says. "Then all of a sudden we hear we have 50, 60 degrees again. That is not good for not only blueberries, but many other plants that live here in the northeast.”
NH's "housing and homelessness crisis is reaching a tipping point." That's what eight of the state's mayors, including Claremont's Dale Girard, told Gov. Chris Sununu in a joint letter yesterday. The state's services, they wrote, are inadequate and "are not meeting the needs of communities across the state." They asked for several immediate steps, including boosting the number of shelter beds. In response, writes InDepthNH's Nancy West, Sununu yesterday afternoon cited NH's investments in the issue and assailed the letter's "tone and misleading content."In case you were wondering why NH still relies on a coal-burning power plant... Merrimack Station, in Bow, is New England's last coal-fired plant and the target of repeated protests by climate activists. These days, it works at only about 10 percent capacity. The Granite State News Collaborative's Scott Merril and Jill Patel dig into its history and current status: It's around because it's a "peaker" plant, "meaning the station is only used during the hottest or coldest days of the year when the grid is stressed and in need of extra power." Why does that work financially? The region's grid manager pays to keep it on hand.What's on tap after the NH legislature convenes today? Plenty, though there won't be any leadership drama—that was all settled last year. In NH Bulletin, Amanda Gokee, Ethan DeWitt, and Annmarie Timmins run through the issues, from energy to abortion to school funding and Education Freedom Accounts, that will come up in this session. DeWitt also digs deeper into housing and child care, both of which confront the state with tough choices, and which are getting special committees. Oh, and as NHPR notes, there's a bill to make May 3 Old Man of the Mountains Day, marking the date it collapsed.Vermont to close walk-in Covid, flu vaccine clinics. They'll shut down at the end of January, reports VTDigger's Erin Petenko, after the state health department saw low demand in recent months—including in December, when clinics remained open in the evening. Vaccines will remain available at doctors' offices, pharmacies, and some community-run clinics—though Dartmouth health equity researcher Anne Sosin tells Petenko that the public clinics filled geographic gaps and strengthened a "battered" health system as a whole.Silents, please. In the new year's haze, you might have missed Public Domain Day 2023 on Jan. 1. Works from 1927 are now free for anyone in the US to copy, perform, and share. That may seem insignificant, but, writes Jennifer Jenkins at Duke Law School, “the public domain is a repository of our history—a record of all of our culture.” This year’s entries are delicious: the final Sherlock Holmes stories, A.A. Milne’s Now We Are Six, and movies from 1927, the year talkies began sounding the death knell for silent films. There’s hope that the few silents that haven’t disintegrated can now be digitized and saved.The Wednesday Vordle. If you're new to Daybreak, this is the Upper Valley version of Wordle, with a five-letter word chosen from an item in the previous day's Daybreak.
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It's the first Wednesday of the year, and Vermont Humanities has three online First Wednesdays events to kick things off, all starting at 7 pm. The Norwich Library and Norwich Bookstore are sponsoring a talk by Canadian author David A. Robertson, who's a member of the Cree Nation, about his middle-grade series of novels, the Misewa Saga, and the role that traditional stories and themes play in his writing. Meanwhile, UVM student and kayaker Jordan Rowell and filmmaker Duane Peterson will be talking about Rowell's 120-mile paddle of Lake Champlain in 2021 and his and Peterson's film about the challenges the lake faces; and Rick Winston, co-owner and manager of Montpelier's Savoy Theater will show clips from and talk about 15 films that tackle immigration and the themes—like assimilation and discrimation—that grow out of immigrants' experiences. Whichever you choose, you'll need to register for the link.
Also at 7 and also online, the Vermont Historical Society launches a four-week "Winter Trivia" series (with a championship round in February). Tonight it's Vermont Geography, next week Vermont Nature, then Vermont Symbols and Famous Vermonters. No cost to watch or participate in the initial rounds (though if you're playing, you'll need two screens).
A day's pause on music. Back as usual 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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