GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Clouds and sun to start, then showers. What's actually most striking is the temperature drop this afternoon, which goes from the low 70s to around 50 in the span of a few hours. That's because of a robust cold front coming in from the northwest, bringing with it not just rain and wind gusts but the possibility of downpours and maybe a thunderstorm. In the front's wake, things get cold and blustery through tonight and tomorrow. Lows tonight around or below 40.Why did the bear cross... Actually, the real question is, What was on the other side? Another bear somewhere in those Grantham woods, reports Terri Munson, but the trees were too thick to get decent footage of them together.Crash, fire shut down I-89 between Sharon and Bethel. It happened yesterday afternoon after a northbound car braked to avoid an object in the road and was rear-ended by the car behind—which then caught fire. The northbound lanes were closed for a couple of hours. No one was injured. WCAX footage of the fire at the burgundy link, Valley News photographer James M. Patterson's aftermath photo and writeup here.Upper Valley fruit crop devastated by last week's cold snap. Despite a nightlong effort to protect her plum, apple, and pear trees, Sweetland Farm owner Norah Lake wrote CSA members, "this event was just too cold to save the crop." In the Valley News, Frances Mize reports that Sweetland, in Norwich, may have lost most of its fruit for the season. Same picture at Riverview Farm in Plainfield, Mize writes, where the freeze may have destroyed the entire apple crop; Poverty Lane is still assessing things. Says Lake, “It’s going to be a pretty hungry year, both for humans in the local fruit scene and wildlife in the woods.”Coming soon to a key Fairlee corner: a new restaurant. And even sooner: food trucks. That's because the group of investors who've gradually been remaking that end of Main Street just closed on the long-abandoned Evans Express Mart on the corner of Main Street and 25A over to Orford. "This is a key piece for our overall revitalization of downtown," says Travis Noyes, one of the co-owners of Chapman's General. The group is talking to prospective restaurateurs. For now, Shiloh's Easy Eats, a food truck, will get the space Saturday-Tuesday starting June 3rd; other trucks will rotate through.Meanwhile, in Randolph, a new tapas-style spot. The wonderfully named Short Notice will open early next month at 29 North Main, which is becoming something of a restaurant incubator: It's where Kuya's was before it moved to become Kuya's at One Main. Lucas Battey, who grew up in Chelsea, and Randi Taylor, who's from California, met while traveling, and Short Notice's menu will reflect their globe-trotting days: possibilities like garam masala meatballs with yogurt sauce or roasted carrot fries with tahini and herb dressing, writes Jordan Barry in Seven Days. It will be open for lunch through dinner.Newbury VT gets its day in court. True, it's had a few already, but yesterday's was before the VT Supreme Court, where justices heard the town's appeal of a lower court ruling that it must allow a juvenile facility to go ahead. As VTDigger's Erin Petenko writes, the argument focuses on what kind of facility: whether it "should be defined as a 'juvenile detention center'...or a 'group home' for children with disabilities, which would limit the town zoning board’s right to prevent its development." The justices peppered both the state's and the town's attorneys with questions; we'll know about a decision when they post it.SPONSORED: The new state-of-the-art Patient Pavilion has opened at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. This new building allows us to deliver high-quality, patient and family-centered care to more people than ever before. Patient rooms are equipped with the latest technology, such as remote clinical monitoring communication tools, smart care boards, and telehealth equipment. Upgrades are also being made throughout the academic medical center. The new pavilion is part of Dartmouth Health’s continued investment in the health of our communities. Learn more here. Sponsored by Dartmouth Health.Thetford's Jake Guest enshrined in the Vermont Ag Hall of Fame. The Hall named its 2023 inductees yesterday, and there, among the three lifetime achievement winners, is Jake Guest, who with his wife Liz spent nearly four decades running Killdeer Farm in Norwich (it's now Valerie Woodhouse and Eli Hirsh's Honey Field Farm). A founding member of the Northeast Organic Farming Association, Jake also helped found the Norwich Farmer's Market and, more recently, the nationwide Real Organic Project. He counts the Killdeer employees who've started their own farms as his greatest contribution to VT ag."Seafaring is the OG of remote work." At the moment, Vershire's Justin Willeau is far from the sea, in Germany working on counterterrorism and other efforts in Africa as part of a Navy deployment. But before settling in Vershire (and starting its weekly coffee bar and beer exchange—don't worry, both are continuing without him) he was a submariner, accustomed to being out of touch for months on end. Now, he's decided to stay in touch, launching a Substack newsletter, Sailor Stories—or, as he puts it, "A Vermonter's take on national security and global affairs." His latest is at the link.A steppe bison skull. A chunk of fiberglass cave. The makings of a giant glowing earth globe. All of those are pieces of a new exhibit that arrived at the Montshire on the back of a semi and have painstakingly been put together into "Under the Arctic: Digging into Permafrost," which opens Saturday. The exhibit, the museum says, "looks at climate change through the lens of a thawing Arctic"—in addition to ice-age fossils and models of ice cores, its centerpiece is a walk-in replica of the Western Hemisphere’s only permafrost research tunnel, which is in Fox, Alaska and operated by CRREL.SPONSORED: Do you want to go solar but can’t because your home or business site is too shady? Or too small to cover your electric needs? Or maybe you live in a rental house or apartment or condo? Norwich Solar is offering the chance to go solar for people who would otherwise not be able to participate in renewable energy! Join our new community solar array and sign up for the amount of clean energy you need through net metering. This offer is available for residential and business customers in the Green Mountain Power service area. Contact us for more info. Sponsored by Norwich Solar.What's that singing in the woods? In this week's Enthusiasms, the Norwich Bookstore's Carin Pratt draws our attention to one of the coolest apps out there: Merlin, brought to your phone by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Oh, sure, it's got bird photos, but those are only good if you can see your ID quarry long enough and well enough to use them. Where it shines is its ability to identify birds by their song. Just let it listen for a bit, and the IDs pop up: indigo bunting, magnolia warbler, oh, and that's a hermit thrush... "I cannot think of a better way to start a morning," Carin writes. "After coffee, of course.""Review of genealogies, other records fails to support local leaders’ claims of Abenaki ancestry." That's NHPR's headline on an extensively reported piece by Julie Furukawa (with some help from VT Public's Elodie Reed) wading into the debate sparked by Quebec's Odanak First Nation over who and who does not get to call themselves Abenaki. What it comes down to, Furukawa reports: The Odanak have genealogies thoroughly vetted by the Canadian government, while the people representing Abenaki bands in NH rely on what they call oral tradition and a Canadian scholar calls "family lore." Read the whole thing, including NHPR's intriguing apology at the bottom.Just because you can go 171 mph on a motorcycle while intoxicated doesn't mean you should. Christopher Unghire, of Port St. Lucie, FL, was first clocked by New Hampshire state trooper Sunday going a leisurely 120 mph in Exeter before he accelerated up to 160. By the time he got to a second trooper, he was doing 171—and the NHSP has the radar photo to prove it (on their FB page). Unghire was busted and charged with Reckless Driving, Reckless Conduct, and Aggravated Driving While Intoxicated.Raise a pinkie. Or maybe a fist. Genteel it’s not. Over in New Ipswich, NH, what seemed like a charming idea for a business—afternoon tea in a 19th century house surrounded by gardens—has caused an uproar. In the WSJ (gift link), E.B. Solomont writes about Silver Scone Teas, which grew from a sweet hobby to a thriving business (in 2022, more than 120 guests came for Mother’s Day). Neighbors are not amused. Opponents have cited streets jammed with cars, a stone wall modified against code, and spotted turtles put at risk. Town officials declined to shut the business down; now there’s a lawsuit.Last week's freeze? Yep, it was bad everywhere. “In my 25 years of working with fruit crops in Vermont, I have never seen frost or freeze damage this extensive," said Terence Bradshaw, who teaches at UVM Extension, in a press release. Some crops may recover, Colin Flanders writes in Seven Days, but all in all, orchardists, vineyardists, and farmers are gritting their teeth. "It's just a really sad week," says Kendra Knapik, president of the Vermont Grape and Wine Council.With more winter power outages a sure thing, VT regulators want utilities to up their communications game. Or as one Wardsboro resident told a GMP exec when the utility held a meeting there last month, "You call in and they say, ‘Yeah, just go on the web, and you can you do this and do that,' and I’m like, 'There is no web, there is no internet.'” The challenge utilities face, Howard Weiss-Tisman reports for VT Public, is how to get the word out to residents and businesses increasingly reliant on electricity when there is no power, many live where cell service is patchy, and it could take many days to get service back.“The frisky atmosphere resembles a trippy intergenerational village fete.” Complete with summer frocks, musicians, smiling families, and … worms. For some reason, journalist Frankie Adkins couldn’t get a bite from established media outlets when she pitched an article on the annual Worm Charming Championships in Falmouth, England. (Though The Guardian saw the appeal.) On Twitter, you can read about the methods and the madness of humans trying to gently lure worms out of the grounds. It’s strictly catch and release, so once the teams have presented their results for counting, back to the earth they go.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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Heads Up
Starting today and running through Friday, Sustainable Woodstock has an online screening of Judith Helfand's 2018 documentary, Cooked: Survival By Zip Code. She looks at the 1995 heat wave in Chicago that killed over 700 people—but not indiscriminately. The deaths were concentrated on the city's South Side, with its high rates of poverty. As one reviewer writes, "Asking how we can stop people from dying...when the temperature crests into dangerous levels is important, but asking why people die when it gets this hot is far more complex."
And if you've just got to go hear live music and don't mind a drive, there are two possibilities tonight: At 7 this evening up in St. J, Catamount Arts brings Cape Breton fiddling superstar Natalie MacMaster and her husband Donnell Leahy (who's from a mixed marriage—his mom grew up in Cape Breton and his dad in Ontario; the family lives in Ontario now) to the stage at St. J Academy. And over in Plymouth, NH at 7:30 tonight, the Flying Monkey's got Blues Traveler—jam band vets, Billboard toppers, rockers and classic blues aficionados, uncorking a show filled with 36 years of recordings and live shows.
And if there's no way you're getting in a car...
You can still charge into your day with both. Here are Natalie MacMaster on piano and Donnell Leahy on fiddle a few months ago, but the clear star is their daughter Mary Frances, who at 14 is a step-dancing, piano-playing, fiddling triple threat,
And most of a continent and a quarter-century away,
in 1997,
the year of a legendary tour featured on their new album, Live and Acoustic.
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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