GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
A quick heads up: No Daybreak Monday-Wednesday next week. Back as usual on Thursday the 23rd.Cloudy but warmer. Well, here we are in mid-February and towns are starting to post roads, rivers are rising, sap is flowing.... South winds today are bringing in even warmer air at all elevations as well as gustiness this afternoon and overnight. But first, there's a slight chance of rain hitting sub-freezing roadways first thing this morning—keep an eye out. Cloudy to start, some sun and sky eventually, and temps reaching the low 50s. Down to about 40 tonight.Snow buntings four ways. And all in one pic, too: front, back, left side, right side. "These were our first-time sightings of this uncommon visitor to our region, granting them life-bird status for us," write Skip Jenkyn and Laurie Greenberg from Hanover."The essence of quiet competence." It's been three decades since Norwich's town clerk, Bonnie Munday, first started working at Tracy Hall—and 28 since she was first elected to the post she's retiring from this year. That headline quote, Demo Sofronas suggests in a profile in his About Norwich newsletter, could be about her work as clerk, which has involved everything from digitizing town documents to steering elections through the pandemic. But it's actually deputy fire chief Matt Swett talking about her work as an EMT for two decades. Sofronas explains it all, with photos.Tabletop gaming in the UV: "It’s really cracked into [the] mainstream." That's Black Moon Games owner Tony Vandenberg talking to Laura Koes for her Valley News piece on the expanding tabletop scene in the region. Black Moon has outgrown its original space in downtown Leb and last Friday shifted to a bigger spot on 12A. In Hanover, Ian Struckhoff's The Fourth Place provides what he calls "a social space, a café with a small comic store, a small game store and a pop culture store, plus a lot to do.” At least two area libraries, the Howe and the Royalton Memorial Library, have game nights, as well.Landaff, NH? Hanover, NH? How Dartmouth ended up in these parts. Gov. John Wentworth favored Landaff, longtime NH radio and tv personality Fritz Wetherbee says on WMUR's "New Hampshire Chronicle." But, standing on the corner of Main and E. Wheelock, Wetherbee recounts the story of how Dartmouth came to be and why the Rev. Eleazer Wheelock preferred Hanover. The town and college "have been so closely associated with one another that many think [they] were founded at the same time, and that's almost true," he says; the first settlers arrived five years before the college.SPONSORED: The Vermont Institute of Natural Science is looking for camp instructors! Our dedicated Camp staff is invested in helping young people develop the life skills necessary to be a positive force for their community and the environment in a fun, exciting summer of exploration and adventure. Various positions are available! Employment is seasonal, full-time from mid-June through late-August. This opportunity is open to new high school graduates (ages 18+), college students, and other educators. Sponsored by VINS at VINS Nature Center in Quechee, VT."Seventy-eight small pieces of art and an excellent tool for answering questions and solving problems." The Norwich Bookstore's Emma Nichols is a tarot card enthusiast, and in this weeks Enthusiasms she explains why. "You don't need to be psychic, you don't need to believe in the supernatural, in fact, you don't need to know anything about tarot to benefit from it," she writes. Instead, pulling cards is like journaling or meditation, a chance "to come at a problem or situation from a different perspective."And some Vermont museums that, in their own way, also offer a different perspective. On her Happy Vermont blog, Erica Housekeeper gives a quick tour of eight eye-opening museums around the state—including WRJ's Main Street Museum and Windsor's American Precision Museum. She also profiles the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, UVM's Fleming Museum of Art, the American Museum of Fly-Fishing (with parts of its collection dating back to the 16th century), the VT Ski & Snowboard Museum, the Vermont History Museum, and, of course, the Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium.SPONSORED: Tickets are almost gone for Saturday's Cirque Cabaret! But there are still a few left for an elegant evening of indulgent fun Feb. 18, as Cirque Cabaret comes to Northern Stage's Barrette Center in a benefit for Upper Valley Circus Camp! This is a show people will be talking about long afterward, featuring a lineup of remarkably talented up-and-coming artists from all corners of the circus world. See the future of the circus arts in a small, intimate setting...all for a good cause! Pre-show champagne reception by Brownsville Butcher & Pantry. Sponsored by UVCC, suitable for all ages.Not just big cities: It's buyer—and venue—beware for show tickets in NH, too. Directors of the state's bigger venues, writes Annmarie Timmins in NH Bulletin, are facing angry customers who bought at extreme markup from online sellers masquerading as the venue itself—sometimes having purchased tix for seats that had already been sold legitimately. “Somebody’s being duped into buying that ticket, and we get all the shrapnel from it. We get all the blame... not the third-party person that’s in some other state doing this,” says the director of the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord.Sununu proposes boosting school spending, state salaries. In his budget address yesterday, reports NHPR's Josh Rogers, NH's governor laid out his hopes for $14.9 billion in state spending over the next two years, up nearly $2 billion from the last biennium. He's calling for an additional $200 million in school spending by rejiggering the education funding formula, as well as doubling the budget and expanding eligibility for Education Freedom Accounts. He's also proposing a 10 percent pay boost for every state employee in the budget's first year, and 2 percent the year after. A more detailed account from the Boston Globe's Amanda Gokee and Steven Porter here (paywall)."The only thing that should be secret about elections is how you mark your own ballot.” Last week, NH Secy of State David Scanlan (a Republican) and VT Secy of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas (a Democrat) sat down with Hanover Town Manager Alex Torpey for a wide-ranging conversation about running elections, building trust, building civic participation, and finding ways to boost voters' knowledge about candidates and issues. At the burgundy link, Torpey summarizes, but the full 90-minute podcast is a ground-level lesson from three deeply thoughtful people on key issues facing our democracy.Be an engaged citizen, NH edition. NH's Citizens Count has put together an entire Democracy Toolkit (here via NHPR and the Granite State News Collaborative) that covers everything from how you can learn more about legislative bills (and why you should care) to how to follow what happens to those bills to how to testify or take part in an online public hearing. And never doubt you can have an impact. In 2018, Citzens Count's Anna Brown writes, citizens annoyed by "invading ducks and rampaging chickens" got lawmakers to add domestic fowl to the state’s livestock trespassing law.Be an engaged citizen, VT edition. Meanwhile, VTDigger has just put out its 2023 legislative guide, a sort of citizens' toolkit for how to watch what goes on in the legislature (including links to all the committee websites), how to get in touch with your legislators (and the governor's office), and a basic, we're-not-in-7th-grade-anymore primer on how a bill becomes a law.With plans for Newbury juvenile facility on hold, VT DCF plans temporary facility in St. Albans. As Newbury voters prepare to vote on a nonbinding town meeting referendum on the state's plan to develop a secure juvenile detention facility there, the Department for Children and Families is pitching legislators on a proposal to house 15- to 18-year-olds in modular trailers joined into a single structure near the state prison in St. Albans. The facility would be used for the next five to eight years, interim DCF commissioner Harry Chen told a House committee last week. VTDigger's Riley Robinson details the proposal.“There isn’t one right way to make the great instrument. And so it’s a mystery.” One that violin and viola maker Doug Cox has clearly solved; he’s made more than 1,000 instruments over 50 years. Vermont Public’s Howard Weiss-Tisman talks to him about choosing wood—Cox prefers local maple, rather than the European woods other luthiers seek out—and why musicians from around the world travel to his studio in W. Brattleboro to discover the one instrument that is meant for them. “That’s what I want the players to feel; that this is an instrument that draws something out of them,” says Cox."It's about putting as much Vermont food as we can into the local food system." That's Eli Hersh, of Norwich's Honey Field Farm, talking to Seven Days' Melissa Pasanen about Just Cut, a program run by the Hardwick-based Center for an Agricultural Economy that buys produce from VT farms, washes, peels, dices/slices and preps it, then sells it to hospitals, school districts, and big institutions like Dartmouth and UVM. And they go through a lot of produce: UVM alone gets 1,620 pounds of diced potatoes, 634 pounds of whole or diced carrots, and 140 pounds of whole peeled beets each week.“They just don’t want the hate mail.” Which is why government officials choose to do nothing rather than deal with deer, says researcher Tara Martin. In Hakai mag, Brian Payton speaks with Martin, a prof at the U of British Columbia, who studies the devastation caused by deer in Canada’s Gulf Islands, which lack predators to keep populations in check. The situation is equally dire in the US. The cascading decimation caused by deer affects plants, trees, birds, even soil chemistry, yet communities fail to act. On Staten Island, Payton explores the options: “One thing is clear: it’s unethical to do nothing." 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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At 4 pm today, Woodstock's Norman Williams Public Library brings in musician, artist, and rare book expert Sonny Saul to talk about the new edition of Gilgamesh that he's just published, with full-color painted bas-reliefs by Don Denton. The story about the ancient Mesopotamian hero "is the first great work of universal literature," the NWPL writes, and Saul's edition is based on a comparison of past translations as well as recent excavations of megalithic structures in Turkey. "It includes historical notes and background about the society," they write, "while avoiding excessive scholarship."
Also in Woodstock and also talking ancient days, the Woodstock History Center hosts a Zoom program with Franklin Pierce U anthropologist Robert Goodby, "12,000 Years Ago in the Granite State." Goodby, author of A Deep Presence: 13,000 Years of Native American Presence, will focus on the structures and artifacts dating to the Ice Age excavated in Keene in 2009, as well as the insights they provide into the lives and society of the region's early inhabitants.
This evening at 7, the Hanover Conservancy and Hanover High's environmental club host a screening of local filmmaker Ben Silberfarb's documentary about Whitman Brook, the heirloom apple orchard in Quechee, for which Silberfarb was named filmmaker of the year at the New Hampshire Film Festival, where the film premiered last fall. The film, which explores both the place and larger questions of land stewardship, will be followed a conversation with Silberfarb and Whitman Brook's Terry Dorman and Addie Gardner.
And anytime, you can check out what JAM is featuring online this week, including UNH prof Dennis Britton, Phillips Exeter instructor Courtney Marshall, and poet L'Merchie Frazier on the African American poetic tradition, playwright and performer Alan Haehnel with an array of his most recent works, Parish Players' Shakespeare sonnet festival, classical guitarist William Ghezzie in concert, and more.
And to get us started this morning...
A narwhal. Well, not really, but one does figure in Rachael & Vilray's "Is a Good Man Real?"
I’ve never seen a narwhal, the unicorn of the sea. But if God made whales And put horns on the males, Maybe he’d put a heart in a guy for me.
Lake Street Dive's Rachael Price and Brooklyn guitarist and songwriter Vilray Blair Bolles first got to know one another when they were students at the New England Conservatory in Boston. In 2015, Bolles, who'd given up performing, decided to get back into it, and Price showed up at a Brooklyn gig to support him—and join him for some songs on stage. They kept at it, discovered they both loved pre- and postwar jazz, and eventually decided to write their own songs in the style of the Great American Songbook. Nonesuch just released their second album,
I Love a Love Song!
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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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Poetry editor: Michael Lipson Associate Editor: Jonea Gurwitt About Rob About Michael
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