GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Still cloudy, a tad warmer. That low pressure's in no hurry to leave, though it's trudging eastward today, bringing a slight chance of showers first thing; it'll start to break up overnight. Mostly cloudy again today, highs in the lower 60s, winds still from the south. Down to the mid or low 40s tonight.A bog in fall. Feels like we could all use something soothing today: Here's Peter Bloch's video of Danbury Bog, off Route 4 southeast of Grafton (and northeast of Wilmot), with the trees in full splendor, the surface calm, and the drone views putting it all in perspective.Trail Break leaving WRJ, will open Quechee spot in the spring. That news comes by way of Emily Saltzhauer's piece in The Dartmouth about restaurants struggling with labor shortages. In Trail Break's case, owner Topher Lyons says in an email, the move is more about what he calls "a long-term play": The popular WRJ spot will close toward the end of November, then open seasonally in the old Dana's By the Gorge (and, most recently, the Dewey's Mills Café) opposite the visitors' center in May. Lyons, reports Saltzhauer, also plans to add another food truck for his still-growing catering and events business.Here's guessing that Trail Break spot in WRJ won't be empty for long. In an email, building owner Matt Bucy writes: "I intend for Trailbreak’s space to remain a restaurant. I own a lot of the essential equipment (hood, fire suppression, refrigeration, gas lines, hot water system, etc) and it has always been my goal to have at least one public venue in each of my downtown buildings. Thankfully, I’ve had strong interest in the space as a restaurant. Since word got out that Trailbreak was leaving I have been pitched a few ideas. But, at this point I can’t say anything certain." (No link.)Developer: former Brookside Nursing Home could become school, apartments. Mike Davidson, who's redeveloped everything from the former College Cleaners plant in WRJ (it's now apartments) to the former Roy's Service Station in Lebanon (it's now Lucky's) to the former Leb Junior High School (apartments), bought the former nursing home on Christian St. in Wilder in August, reports Patrick Adrian in the Valley News. Workers have begun touching up the building's exterior, but Davidson has been vague on his plans, telling Adrian it could become housing with 30-40 units, or a school.Hop details new performance spaces. For one thing, writes the college's communications office, there'll be a glass-walled music recital hall between the building's facade and the Hanover Inn, capable of hosting "classes, student presentations, and guest artists who are performing for ticketed events"—and will free up Spaulding, which was often used for rehearsal space before the building closed for renovations. Also coming: a new dance studio—when the building opened in 1962, director Mary Lou Aleskie notes, the college had no dance troupes—and a reimagined Top of the Hop.SPONSORED: Little Shop of Horrors Is still the best musical Off-Broadway! Artistree Collaborative Theatre (ACT) presents Little Shop of Horrors! The show opens on Thursday, October 19 and runs through October 29. A deviously delicious Broadway and Hollywood sci-fi smash musical, Little Shop Of Horrors has devoured the hearts of theater-goers for over 30 years. Reserve your seats now! Sponsored by Artistree."My phone sure never gave me a line like, 'Fine skies for foliage stroll-iage.'" And as the Norwich Bookstore's Sam Kaas points out in this week's Enthusiasms, his phone would be hard-pressed to match the 80 percent accuracy rate The Old Farmer's Almanac claims—though there's a bit of dispute about that. What doesn't waver, he says, is his purchase of the Almanac around this time of year. "I don’t make plans based on [its] predictions," he writes, "but I take a tremendous amount of comfort in flipping through these thin, newsprint pages, looking at and imagining the month, or the week, or the year ahead"—especially in a world "that often feels uncertain."Could there be a GMO chestnut tree? That's certain to be one of the questions at Salt Hill in Lebanon on Saturday, when the VT/NH chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation gets together, writes David Brooks in the Concord Monitor (the site you see, by the way, is a placeholder until their new website's up and running). Brooks dives into the ins and outs of the tree developed by SUNY with a gene that neutralizes the fungal toxin that pretty much wiped out the American chestnut. It's ready for release into the wild—USDA's said okay, but the EPA has yet to weigh in.SPONSORED: Rain, Rain, It doesn’t just go away! The Upper Valley Lake Sunapee Regional Planning Commission is holding free workshops on what residents & small businesses can do to soak and slow rainwater. Why? When rain falls and fails to soak in, it does not stop at the property line—it keeps running, picking up pollution and potentially causing harm to life, environment, and property. For areas of Lake Sunapee (Wilmot 10/14), Sugar River (Claremont 10/17), and the Upper Valley (Enfield 10/19). Bring general & site-specific questions! Register for a recording. Sponsored by UVLSRPC.New addiction recovery center opens in Lebanon. TLC Family Resource Center, which runs a similar program in Claremont, is opening the doors to its new center on Hanover Street this month, reports Nora Doyle-Burr in the VN. Its goal, TLC's Dan Wargo tells her, is to create a community and environment that give people the support they need "by wrapping them around other people working on bettering their lives." The center will not provide therapy or treatment, Doyle-Burr writes, "but aims to serve as a bridge to help people seeking support as they recover from substance use disorders."Dartmouth astrophysicist: In STEM fields, women are still "undervalued and under-highlighted." So Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil tells NHPR's Rick Ganley as they talk about a new online exhibit, "Reimagining Women in STEM," that features her, among others. It's a good bet Mutlu-Pakdil's the only person in the Upper Valley with a galaxy named after her; she's currently studying the faintest galaxies in the universe to try to understand galaxy formation. "When I was very little," she tells Ganley, "I didn't have much role models. So I don't want [the] next generation to feel this way."Honoree Fleming, slain Castleton educator, remembered for her "intelligence coupled with empathy." In the years before she was found shot on a rail trail not far from the VSU-Castleton campus, Fleming had returned to the research in cellular biology she'd pursued before becoming an administrator, writes Tiffany Tan in VTDigger. But in Castleton, Tan reports, she'll be remembered as a role model for first-gen college students and for her empathetic support for students who, like her, grew up poor. Since Fleming's death Thursday, police have received hundreds of tips but, reports WCAX's Calvin Cutler, say they still have no suspect or motive.VT launched a grant program in August to help farmers hit by flooding; most are still waiting. In all, writes UVM student Charlotte Oliver, reporting for the university's Community News Service, 147 agricultural businesses have applied for aid, 41 have been approved so far, and 28 have gotten paid—often far less than their losses. “We continue to have a long way to go,” Ag Secy Anson Tebbetts tells Oliver, adding that the agency has recently taken on new reviewers to speed up the application process. Farms, Oliver writes, are turning to local help, including the Hardwick-based Center for an Agricultural Economy.“If somebody else can do it, I can, too.” A burgeoning commercial wine industry in VT is prompting amateurs to stomp some grapes themselves, writes Jordan Barry in Seven Days. Some hobbyists buy grapes from local growers, others commit to the five years or so it takes for their own vines to mature. Once you have the grapes, says Anne Whyte, co-owner of Vermont Homebrew Supply in Winooski, startup costs to bottle wine aren’t high. As with cider and beer, personal taste guides the final product. It might take practice, though; one hobbyist says her first gallon was “barely drinkable but not vinegar.”Tempted? The few ordinary varieties of apples in supermarkets are fine in a pinch, but in the fall, in New England, we are spoiled for choice. In Food & Wine, Alexandra Domrongchai highlights 85 of the more than 7,500 varieties, pointing out the best for dessert, saucing, baking, and cider, “an exquisite array of sizes, shapes, textures, flavors, and uses.” Many are sourced to Scott Farm Orchard, a Landmark Trust property in Dummerston that’s been growing apples since 1791. Like Knobbed Russet, which “resembles a potato, but a bite reveals crisp, juicy, flesh erupting with sweet-tart flavor.” Check farmers markets, too, for unusual and antique varieties.Why you really don't want to get a hippo mad at you. A pair of wildlife photographers from Florida were in Botswana's Okavango Delta, where they stopped to film a lone hippo, as Bill Klipp describes it, "doing what Hippos do, lounging in the water, snorting, staring at us, twitching his ears, rolling over, rising up and down with an occasional yawn and short rushes through the water. We speculated that he was kicked out of the larger nearby pod due to bad behavior, and boy was that right." Calm, kinda cute, and then suddenly: very much not. "Luckily," Klipp writes, "only the vehicle was injured."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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Today at 1 pm, the Norman Williams Public Library hosts Woodstock police chief Joe Swanson for a talk on "Cyber Security: Risks and Resources". Swanson will take a look at internet and phone scams, and talk about best practices to avoid being taken. If you'd like to go, they'd appreciate an RSVP.
Starting at 5:30, the New England School for the Arts in Lebanon holds an opening reception for "Luminous Instruments," an exhibition by CT-based photographer Harold Shapiro (for three decades, he headed up the photography department at New Haven's Creative Arts Workshop). His work "plays with light [from many small spotlights] and long exposures to infuse the images of a large range of musical instruments with dynamism"—an effort, he once said, to meld the beauty of the instruments with contemporary art. Shapiro will give a talk about the project at 6:30.
At 6 pm, former US Rep. Liz Cheney will give a talk on defending democracy as the keynote address for Dartmouth's yearlong Democracy Summit, a collaboration between the Dartmouth Political Union, the Rockefeller Center, and the Dickey Center. Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who served as vice chair of the House Jan. 6 Committee and lost her congressional perch as a result of that and her opposition to former President Donald Trump, will talk about it all in her speech, "An Oath to Defend Democracy." Sold out in-person, link to the livestream at the link.
At 7 this evening, Vermont Humanities will present a livestream of poet and jazz archivist Reuben Jackson's talk in Newport, VT, "Melodic Wanderlust: Duke Ellington’s 'Far East Suite'." The suite, by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, is somewhat misnamed: It was inspired by the Ellington Orchestra’s tour of the Middle East and South Asia in 1963, though when it was released a few years later it included a piece with roots in the orchestra's 1964 tour of Japan. Jackson will talk about its history and the music itself, which won a Grammy in 1968.
Also at 7, Sustainable Woodstock is hosting an online presentation on the White River Land Collaborative, the effort sparked by Flying Dog Farm's Shona Sanford-Long to transform the historic 200-acre Holstein Stock Farm in Tunbridge into a hub for sustainable ag, forest stewardship, and other land-based activities. The evening will start with a 15-minute documentary on the project, followed by a Q&A.
And this evening at 7:30, Northern Stage kicks off its '23-'24 season with the first night of previews for Selling Kabul, Sylvia Khoury's intricately constructed thriller—and Pulitzer finalist—about an Afghan former interpreter for the US military hiding from the Taliban in his sister's apartment while his pregnant wife is about to give birth. "If I still bit my nails I would have no nails left now," the NYT's reviewer wrote when it debuted in 2021. Opening night is Saturday, runs through Oct. 29—and tomorrow night is Afghan community night, for members of the region's Afghan community and Upper Valley neighbors who sponsor refugees.
And to start us out today...
You probably figured this was coming: We'll turn to Duke Ellington and
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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