GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Getting sunny, a bit cooler. Those clouds hung around longer than expected yesterday, but with high pressure moving in they've been moving out. Breezes from the south with a high in the low 60s, and skies will be mostly clear overnight, which means we'll be dropping to around or below freezing.Otters! Among his other pursuits, Thetford's Tig Tillinghast has been keeping tabs on a group of otters in these parts, and the last few days has been lucky enough to find them hanging out in the water. Including a mother bringing a fish to her cubs—though the cubs were hidden in a reed bed where they were "very noisily munching," he writes.Along with Vital Communities, Quechee's Global Village Foods lands $200K award to expand local sourcing, institutional buyers. The money will allow Mel and Damaris Hall's company, which prepares ready-to-eat "culturally relevant" (often African-inspired) meals and has been a mainstay of Upper Valley Everyone Eats, to develop a regional farm-ingredient supply channel. In particular, it will work with a New Hampshire-based nonprofit that supports immigrant farmers, and with Sodexo, the French food giant that runs the UVM dining halls. The award comes from the Boston-based Kendall Foundation.School buses in two area school districts get federal boost to go electric. The White River Valley (which includes Strafford, Sharon, Tunbridge, Royalton and Bethel) and Windsor Central (Woodstock area) districts each will see $1.185 million from the EPA, reports Frances Mize in the Valley News. That will be enough to buy three electric buses and install charging infrastructure. Each bus is about three times as expensive as a diesel bus, Mize writes, "but over the life of an electric bus, schools might save as much as $36,000 in fuel costs" and greenhouse emissions will be about 97 percent lower.Guess who'll win: the side that says "Here are the facts, here’s the data, here’s the statistics," or the side saying, "I held the dying baby in my arms"? The power of a good story may be the key lesson that writer and humorist Andy Borowitz passed along to a Dartmouth writing workshop last week, as Matt Golec writes for Dartmouth News. Borowitz, who lives in Hanover and pens satire for the New Yorker, was a guest at the workshop, organized by senior lecturer and author Charles Wheelan. Who also weighed in: "A lot of what I emphasize is get to the point really quickly,” Wheelan says.Drifting with the deer. When he was 19, Geoffroy Delorme slipped into the woods around Louviers, France—and spent the next seven years living there. Deer Man, his memoir of that time, was published this year. "This is not survivalism for its own sake, not Alone in France," Jared Jenisch writes in this week's Enthusiasms. Instead, it's a slow melding with the forest, learning both to survive and, over time, to live with and among its animals—in particular, the roe deer with whose lives Delorme intertwines his own. It is, Jared writes, "a quiet tapestry of natural history, survival writing, lament, and communion."In case you're wondering what the new S. Royalton public art installation looks like... You may remember that "Passage," a double work by artists Elizabeth Billings, Evie Lovett, and Andrea Wasserman, was finished last month in a century-old railroad underpass. In Artful, Susan Apel offers up a daytime photo of the underpass and a link to a nighttime pic of "River," a set of mirrored hemispheres that line the passageway and light up at night. The trio of artists, Susan writes, just finished a year-long residency at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center.NH hospitals see rise in children with RSV. Ordinarily, reports NHPR's Paul Cuno-Booth, respiratory syncytial virus starts to spread later in the season. But some hospitals report they're seeing a surge now. This mirrors other states, though so far hospital capacity in the Granite State hasn't been strained. In part, Cuno-Booth reports, the problem is that young kids were less exposed to viruses during the pandemic, and so have had less chance to build some immunity. But hey, spare a thought for our neighbors to the north, who are dealing with RSV and a severe shortage of children's pain reliever.NH has been sending dead animal teeth to Montana for decades. It’s not as ghastly as it sounds. Granite Geek’s David Brooks (republishing an article from 2019) learned that every year the state’s fish and wildlife department ships off hundreds of extracted deer, moose, bear, and bobcat teeth to a lab in MT, where they’re analyzed, Brooks writes, as “part of data collection that helps biologists judge the health of certain game species.” From calcified buildup on a tooth they can determine the animal’s age, which guides population management strategies. VT is also asking hunters to collect deer teeth.Rental application fees are illegal in Vermont... but that doesn't seem to be stopping landlords. The law barring them has been around for a couple of decades, writes Tik Root in VTDigger, but an investigation found that "rental fees remain rampant." The fees range from $20 to $100 or more, and several rental companies tell Root the money goes toward background and credit checks—but the platform they use insists on calling them "application fees." There's disagreement on whether the law applies to background and credit checks; VT Legal Aid contends all fees related to an application are illegal.Here's a new worry: Will Killington have enough snow for the World Cup Nov. 25? The Women's World Cup tour is a regular Thanksgiving weekend visitor to the mountain, but warm temps of late have erased whatever snow the resort was able to make, and the next week will see 50s and 60s during the day, 40s at best at night. The snowmaking team, reports WCAX's Kevin Gaiss, estimates it will take 100-150 hours to create the amount the event needs; FIS officials are due Nov. 16 for an inspection. The World Cup has already had to cancel some events in Europe due to lack of snow.Europe is farther north than you think…and other common geography errors. Quick: point in the direction of South America. If you pointed due south, you would be in the middle of the Pacific. In fact, longitudinally, the entire continent lies to the east of Florida, and it’s closer to Africa than it is to Houston. This immersive “StoryMap” by John Nelson undoes a few big misconceptions about our orientation to other continents. We tend to think of Europe as our temperate counterpart, but look again: its “northiness” puts it more in line with Canada. Follow the same latitude west from Rome…and you’ll hit Chicago.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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T-shirts, tank tops, and, of course, coffee/tea/cocoa mugs. It's all available thanks to Strong Rabbit Designs in Sharon. Check out what's available and wear it or drink from it proudly! Email me ([email protected]) if you've got questions.
At 4 pm today, AVA Gallery hosts an ink-painting demonstration by renowned Korean artist Park Dae Sung, whose "Ink Reimagined" traveling exhibition is on display at the Hood Museum. As the Hood writes, "Featuring paintings of enormous scale and refined technique, Park’s ongoing contemplation of ancient landscapes and objects asks the viewer to rethink modernity via tradition." The event is standing-room-only and will be followed by a book signing and then a reception.
From 6-8 this evening, 400 luminary candles will line the paths on a section of the Dartmouth Green for a “Walk of Remembrance" organized by Dr. Kathy Kirkland, director of palliative care at Dartmouth Health, and Kristen Johnson, volunteer supervisor at the Byrne Center for Palliative and Hospice Care. There will be music, as well as contemplation. “We’re trying to create a space where anyone who has experienced any kind of grief and loss—and we all have really over the last few years—can come together,” Kirkland tells the Valley News's Liz Sauchelli.
At 6:30 this evening, Northern Woodlands magazine launches a new series of lectures with a talk by Robert Goodby, "12,000 Years Ago in the Granite State." An anthropology prof and past president of the NH Archeological Society, Goodby is author of A Deep Presence: 13,000 Years of Native American History. He directed the excavations of four 12,000-year-old Paleoindian dwellings at the Tenant Swamp site in Keene, and will be talking about the very long history of Native American presence in the region. At the Lyme Congregational Church.
This evening at 7, author Gregory Maguire will be at the Norwich Congregational Church as part of Vermont Humanities' First Wednesdays lecture series—presented tonight by the Norwich Bookstore and the Norwich Library. The author of Wicked and the series that followed, along with some 18 standalone novels, short fiction, nonfiction, and, most recently, The Oracle of Maracoor, Maguire will be talking about his “revisionist history” of L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels and plenty more.
Most other First Wednesdays lectures tonight are in-person in other towns, but also at 7, writer, town meeting advocate, and Middlesex VT town moderator Susan Clark will give an online talk about the Slow Democracy movement, in which ordinary people mobilize to find local solutions to local problems.
And also at 7, the Dartmouth Political Union and the satirical Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern present "Politics Parodied," a panel on current political satire with Mike Gillis, chief writer for The Onion (and Dartmouth '12), stand-up comedian and media activist Jeremy McLellan, and Evan Sayet, conservative comedian and creator of The Right to Laugh – a night of Conservative Comedy. They'll be talking about their experiences as comics and satirists, the role of humor in politics, and their own brands of comedy. In the Loew Theater (first come, first served) and online.
And to launch us into the day...
When he was growing up in Sebokeng, a township near Johannesburg, South Africa, Abel Selaocoe would take the train to Soweto with his brother for cello lessons. The trains were packed, so he would remove the bridge and the endpin from his cello so he could hold it close and take up as little room as possible. It's fair to say those days are over. Selaocoe—whom you may have seen at the Hop last month with the Manchester Collective—has in the last few years come to be seen as one of
the
rising stars in the classical music world—in part for his musicianship, in part for his ability to blend genres, even, in part, for his voice, which he uses to great effect when he performs. His first album,
Where is Home
, came out a couple of months ago, and one of its anchors is his arrangement of "Ibuyile I'Africa / Africa is Back," which he recorded with Yo-Yo Ma and an ensemble of musicians and singers.
(Thanks, CC!)
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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