GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Daybreak is brought to you this week with help from E.C. Brown’s Nursery and Landscaping’s Big Pre-Winter Sale. All plants (Perennials, Trees, Shrubs, Grasses, and Vines) are 50% off now through this Friday, Oct. 30th. Come for the year’s best prices! 3782 Route 113, Thetford Center, (802) 785-2167. Learn more here!
Partly to mostly cloudy, a tad warmer. Yesterday’s high pressure has moved offshore, and in its wake is coming an area of low pressure, which will bring us more clouds than yesterday. Even so, the air is warming, and we’ll see highs in the mid 50s today, with overnight lows around or above freezing.
Early morning. Today, two very different photos of Mascoma Lake. There’s the moment a boating couple glided past Sharon Beaufait’s camera on the fog-shrouded water early Sunday morning. And Peter Tannenbaum’s photo of the moment of sunrise yesterday—in black and white, which makes the clouds absolutely pop.
WRJ rail car hiss turns out okay. All sorts of nasty and sometimes explosive chemicals make their way along the White River Junction rail tracks, so when someone heard a hiss coming from one of the tanker cars alongside the buildings on North Main Street yesterday, the Hartford Fire Department’s hazmat team scrambled. Eric Francis did, too, and photographed Captain Jack Hedges, with self-contained breathing apparatus, climbing to the top of the car to check things out. The railcar contained carbon dioxide, and was venting in the heat of direct sunlight—as it’s designed to do.
Time again for Sketchbreak! For this week’s visit to the creative mind of an Upper Valley cartoonist, Noah Mease dives into the materials he could find at rePlay Arts to construct a whimsical little scene at WRJ’s upcoming Gory Daze parade. In case you’re new to it, Sketchbreak is a bi-weekly comment on life in these parts by a rotating crew of cartoonists. Hit the image or the link above.
The Valley News loses its last newsroom veteran. Liz Sauchelli, the paper’s community and calendar editor and longtime community reporter, is leaving after Friday, she’s told colleagues and contacts. Sauchelli joined the newspaper fresh out of college in 2012 as a night copy editor and has been a steady presence in its pages with her stories about local nonprofits, community life, and townspeople’s concerns, as well as her regular roundups of holiday events. Her departure caps a remarkable string of exits by experienced editors, writers, and photographers. Managing editor Allison Rogers says the paper’s current young staff will see two new reinforcements next week and two more later in the month.
Nonprofit pulls Claremont affordable housing plan. Southwestern Community Services had hoped to build a 172-unit affordable housing complex behind the Hannaford supermarket off Washington Street, reports Patrick O’Grady in the VN, but after objections by nearby residents at a September meeting, it’s scrapped the idea. “We certainly wouldn’t want to move forward with anything that had a lot of pushback from the community” the Keene-based group’s director tells O’Grady. The group is still hoping to build affordable housing in Sullivan County, she says.
SPONSORED: Have dinner with the Upper Valley Trails Alliance! UVTA will be donning our finest trail-worn flannel for our 2026 Annual Dinner, and we want you to be there! Help us celebrate 2026 trail projects, highlights, and accomplishments alongside fellow trail supporters and lovers. We’ll give you a peek behind the scenes at UVTA over a three-course meal served with plenty of humor. Join us on Thursday, November 12 at Lake Morey Resort from 6-9 PM. Get your tickets before November 5. Sponsored by the Upper Valley Trails Alliance.
An Old West town “where fate deals the cards ruthlessly.” It could be pretty much any novel about frontier life, but this one happens to be by the experimental novelist Robert Coover, and as Kate Oden notes in this week’s Enthusiasms, Ghost Town—despite its classic premise of a lone outsider riding into town—is a “twisty” version of the classic genre. “There is colorful dialogue in highly exaggerated patois,” Kate writes. “There is vivid violence. The style is almost purple, but it elevates the action, like a series of instrumental solos, instead of taking you out of it”—with an ending, she adds, that is “a scenic detour through a fabulous imagination.”
VT State Police charge Corinth woman with reckless endangerment after boyfriend’s death. That move was announced last Friday—eight months after 25-year-old Jeremy Kawalec died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound after an argument with his girlfriend, Donna Guillette. As Sofia Langlois reports in the VN, Guillette at the time told her, “I don’t think anything in that moment would have helped. He wasn’t himself.” But the VSP in its release Friday writes, “During the argument, Guillette introduced a firearm to the situation knowing that Kawalec was expressing intentions of self-harm,” placing it near him. Langlois details the case.
“Mysterious” places to visit in the White Mountains. Okay, Outside is stretching things a little bit for the season. Still, the five spots it cites aren’t your run-of-the-mill destinations. There’s the ghost town of Livermore, for example, whose remains are barely still visible down Sawyer River Road off Rt. 302. There are the remains of the Douglas B-18A bomber that crashed into the flanks of Mt. Waternomee in 1942, which you can hike into. There’s the Barney and Betty Hill UFO marker in Lincoln. There’s Profile Lake, below where the Old Man of the Mountains once jutted. And there’s Mt. Chocorua, “home to the haunting legend of the Pequawket Chief Chocorua.”
As the twin states prep for next week’s elections, different vibes. Or, at least, different coverage.
In VTDigger, Shaun Robinson writes that on Monday, both Gov. Phil Scott and Secy of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas “urged Vermonters to turn down the temperature amid an uptick in what one called ‘heated’ confrontations between voters and local city and town clerks about the integrity of next week’s general election”—fueled, Copeland Hanzas said, by “misinformation that’s coming out of Washington, D.C.” She also noted that mail-in voting numbers are down somewhat from recent years, possibly because voters are less confident that mailing ballots is reliable. Robinson also outlines the state’s contingency planning for Election Day.
In NH, meanwhile, everything’s chill. Well, not totally, but despite a testy national backdrop, NHPR’s Todd Bookman reports, the head of the NH AG’s Election Law Unit tells him, “I am optimistic this is going to go well. I suffer from maybe crippling optimism. But we have no indications that anything should kind of go awry.” Of course, on Election Day, “50 to 60 state prosecutors will fan out across New Hampshire to visit polling locations and attempt to manage any complications that may emerge,” Bookman notes. In Hanover, town clerk Tracy Walsh says she’s not anticipating problems over student IDs, since students usually bring other forms of ID and campus groups have been putting out information on the ban that’s currently in place.
“Like Wordle, but for art history.” Anthropeum is a new game that offers up 10 objects from the Metropolitan Museum’s collection and asks you to drop a pin on a map and pick a point on a timeline to guess where and when they came from. Creator Matthew Chu, a college student, pulls entries from the Met’s open-source database, and specifically includes underrepresented art and artifacts. “That’s the point,” Chu tells Emma Gometz in Scientific American. “You see something that you don’t recognize, and you don’t know what it is and you get it completely wrong, but then you go and you learn about what culture created that.”
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak.
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HEADS UP
At the Howe Library, “Upper Valley Women Speak: Why We Hunt.” As they write, “For the past 20+ years, nationwide the number of hunters has declined, but the number of women hunters has increased. However, in most states, deer numbers are out-pacing their reduction by hunters.” The conversation, among four women who hunt from Norwich, Enfield and Cornish, will be joined by instructors Lorri Menard of NH Fish & Game and Nicole Meier from VT Fish and Wildlife to talk about programs for women. 4 pm in the Mayer Room and online.
At the Hop, the Jesse Taitt Trio. Pianist Jesse Taitt, drummer Tyson Jackson, and bassist Greg Loughman offer up a free evening of jazz at the Top of the Hop.
At the Howe Library, a discussion with the creators of A Family Enslaved. The graphic history, created by the Dartmouth and Slavery Project and the Center for Cartoon Studies' Applied Cartooning Lab and based on primary sources, tells the story of a family enslaved by Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth’s founder, and looks at slavery in 18th century New England. 6 pm in the Mayer Room and online.
At Still North Books & Bar, Jordan Ritter Conn with American Men. Conn, an experienced journalist and the author of 2020’s The Road From Raqqa, spent five years talking to four men about their lives—all very different—and how they navigate them. One of those men, Ryan King, is an amateur MMA fighter from the Akwesasne Mohawk territory who in the book struggles “to come to terms with both his sexuality as a closeted gay man and his draw toward barroom violence.” He’ll join Conn for a conversation about the book. 6 pm.
At the Norwich Bookstore, Dr. Raj Panjabi and Safer: A Playbook. Panjabi, a specialist in public health and disease, served as a senior adviser in the Biden White House on global health security and biodefense. His new book draws on his own experience navigating crises to lay out a playbook for both institutions and individuals. He’ll be talking it over with local author Matt Hongoltz-Hetling. 7 pm.
Comedy “double-dippin’” at Sawtooth Kitchen in Hanover. It’s a Valley Improv/standup comic mashup, with local standups performing, then Valley Improv creating sets based on what they just saw. 8 pm.
And for today...
The harmony-intense Celtic vocal trio Aniar, who are from the very far west of Ireland and usually like to film there, though in this case they’re in Dublin. They’ve been attracting attention of late: “There’s a renaissance happening with trad music and the Irish language at the minute, which we reckon is the reason that the songs we sing in Irish are so popular,” says one. Here’s “Anach Cuan.”
See you tomorrow.
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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Poetry editor: Michael Lipson Associate Editors: Jonea Gurwitt, Sam Gurwitt
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