GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Getting warmer, sun and clouds, chance of showers again in the afternoon. We're at the start of a warming trend that'll see temps reach the 80s tomorrow, but for today, the highs will be a pleasant mid- or upper-70s, winds from the northwest. If there's rain it'll be spotty and the luck of the draw—many spots should stay dry. A more humid air mass arrives overnight tonight, but we'll still see lows in the low or mid 50s.Kids these days. A couple of youngsters out and about.
Just whythis little merganser chose a passing kayak to rest on is anyone's guess. Last week, as Nicola Felicetti was headed up Mink Brook, though, there it was, on a kayak coming the other direction. The paddler said it had just hopped on.
And then there's this fawn, not hanging out waiting for mom, but wandering the woods near Lyn Ujlaky's in Thetford.
Not the May 1 arrests, but the arrests last October of Gaza protesters Roan Wade and Kevin Engel, who'd been charged with misdemeanor criminal trespass after refusing to leave a tent in front of the administration building. The
Valley News
had sought those records in an effort to understand the college administration's role; Hanover police repeatedly denied the requests. Yesterday, reports the
VN
's John Lippman, a Grafton Superior Court judge "swept aside" the town's claims, ordering the town release the records
and
pay the newspaper's legal bill. Lippman details the case and the town's response.
If you kept abreast here of small-town developer Jonah Richard's occasional reports on the construction of 501 Main in Fairlee, here's an update: In the
VN
, Kate Oden profiles Sunnyside Coffee Company and owner Taryn Adamczyk, who moved the business into 501 Main a year ago after running a coffee trailer in Orford for a year. It's become one of the anchors at the north end of town, along with Chapman's. "Sunnyside does a good job of producing that ‘you’re welcome here’ atmosphere," says Orford's Gaetan DeSimone. "I feel I can go there any time of day and there’s someone there I can talk to."
SPONSORED: Double Your Impact! Help Willing Hands meet our match. Your gift through NH Gives today will be matched by a generous local donor. With the arrival of the new growing season, Willing Hands needs your help to seize the many opportunities ahead to grow and recover fresh, local produce for our community. NH Gives ends at 5 pm. Sponsored by Willing Hands.A book for when you need some calm. Becky Chambers' A Psalm for the Wild-Built involves the future, but as Still North Books' H Rooker writes in this week's Enthusiasms, "While it may be shelved in sci-fi...it is much more than the story of a monk and a stranger on the road, but rather a meditation on what it means to be human." It's kind of a road story, with a Tea Monk named Sibling Dex and the stranger they meet on the way to a remote hermitage. They talk as they walk: What is it to be human? Why would we seek out discomfort? "Every time I read it I find new resonance and new questions," H writes.Lebanon High students write, produce play on gun violence in schools and its effects on a community. 377, the title, is also the number of school shootings that took place between Columbine and April last year, when Seth Kelly and Arlo Hastings, now juniors at Lebanon, began writing. In Artful, Susan Apel checks in with them about their year's work on it, which began with research—reading books and interviews, talking to novelist Jodi Picoult about how she handled the sensitive subject for 19 Minutes, getting community feedback. The play's almost ready: It runs June 28-30 at the Briggs, in WRJ.SPONSORED: Osher's Summer Lecture Series begins July 10 and registration is open! “America’s Role in Preserving Peace and Prosperity” addresses issues affecting U.S. global leadership: autocracy and threats to democracy; climate change; human displacement and forced migration; facts vs. misinformation; geopolitics since the Cold War. The series will take place on six Wednesdays, July 10 through August 14, from 9-11:30 AM. Join us at the Lebanon Opera House or via livestream. Open to the public; register for the full series or individual sessions. Sponsored by Osher at Dartmouth.Noah Kahan will do one-night benefit concert at Champlain Valley Expo in September. It'll be the Hanover/Strafford native's first in the state since last year and is a benefit for his nonprofit Busyhead Project, which he founded last year in partnership with the VT Community Foundation, writes Chris Farnsworth in Seven Days. "I've been given so many wonderful opportunities in my career, and it really is all for nothing if I don't try and give back to the community that has supported me," Kahan says in a press release. Tix by lottery.Why are all those pine needles brown? Or orange, in the right light. White pines that appear in ill health are all over both sides of the river, and NHPR's Mara Hoplamazian reports that the root cause is fungi that are native to the region but only began attacking white pines 10 or 15 years ago. Kyle Lombard, a state forest health specialist, tells Hoplamazian the disease doesn't kill the trees—though it does stress the older ones—and that it's bad this year because last year was so wet and rainy. New needles will grow over the summer, Lombard adds, and the trees should be fully green again by August.
In Vermont, Savannah Ferreira—Lombard's counterpart—tells VTDigger's Emma Malinak that the big worry is over whether this becomes an annual problem. "If we do get successive years of severe symptoms, it can cause stress (on trees) and, over time, that can definitely exacerbate other symptoms and lead to mortality,” she says. “It definitely hasn’t been as wet as it was last year,” she adds. “So I’m staying hopeful that, next year, our trees might be able to rebound a little better.”
VT, NH ski industries report on the 2023-24 season. And despite the wretched start, it wasn't bad, at least for downhill areas.
Vermont's alpine areas saw 4.1 million skier visits for the winter, down less than half a percentage point from the 2022-23 season—and still above the state's 10-year average. They averaged 124 operating days—one more than the 10-year average—and an average seasonal snowfall of 199 inches, which, remarkably, was a 32-inch increase over last year, according to the VT Ski Areas Association. XC areas, on the other hand, took it on the chin. Some weren't able to open until January, and in all, the 26 cross country ski areas reported a statewide total of 202,485 skier visits, a nearly 50 percent drop from the previous season.
Meanwhile, Ski New Hampshire reports that alpine areas got 2.1 million visits, down 4 percent from the 2022-23 season. Collectively, alpine, cross-country, and tubing visits were down 6 percent. "The manic winter we had that witnessed Mother Nature giving us snow (sometimes) and then taking it away resulted in a bigger dip in year-over-year skier visits for Nordic areas,” Ski NH president Jessyca Keeler says in a press release. “Those visits...[dropped] 14% compared to the prior year."
NH towns and cities seized 4,000 properties from owners behind on property taxes over a decade. The seizures, reports the Monitor's Michaela Towfighi (here via NHPR), often affect the working poor, retirees, or those living on fixed incomes. That was the case with John Jones in Franklin, who suffered a stroke while he owed $5,097.44 in back taxes; the city council voted to take his double-wide. The rationale, Towfighi writes, is that "other property owners shouldn’t have to pay more for those who can’t pay their bills"—but a Monitor analysis shows that NH municipalities vary widely in their approach.Not your usual trip-to-the-dump story. Over the weekend, Bob Kebler of Bartlett, NH, was loading up his pickup before heading to the transfer station. "I was sort of looking at the ground and when I got to my truck, I threw the two bags in the back, and I threw them right onto three bears, a mother and cubs,” he tells the Conway Daily Sun's Daymond Steer. “The bears didn’t know I was there and I didn’t know the bears were there. We were both petrified.” Until the mom got angry. He made it to the garage when she got distracted by the cubs scampering up a tree—but didn't back off until police arrived.VT spends more per prisoner than every state but MA. That's per the data visualization site Visual Capitalist, which took a look at the huge disparities in per-prisoner spending across the US, using Census data. Massachusetts far out-spends everyone else, at $307,000—due, most likely, to high wages, and perhaps to the fact that it also has the lowest imprisonment rate in the country, at 116 people per 100K population. Coming in second: Vermont, which spends $134,000 per prisoner. New Hampshire is 21st, at $74,000. Arkansas and Mississippi are at the bottom—but at the top on imprisonment rate.What does it mean for VT to ban PFAS in personal products? That's what happened in May, when Phil Scott signed a bill barring the chemicals (and some others, too) from cosmetics, feminine hygiene products, athletic turf, cookware, and more. On Monday, VT Public's Mikaela Lefrak and Abagael Giles talked it all over at length: from why PFAS are used in makeup, tampons, rainwear and more, to the harm they've been shown to cause, to what VT's new law actually does (it goes into effect in 2026), to how the state might be able to enforce it: The onus is on manufacturers, not on retailers.The great Capitol water-dumping scandal: VT legislator makes spy-cam footage public. You remember from Monday, right? How a Bennington Democrat kept finding his tote bag soaked and finally caught his Republican district-mate on video, pouring water on the bag? Rep. Jim Carroll had initially denied Seven Days' requests to see the footage, but yesterday he relented, since the story had become public over the weekend. Two videos from March, reports Kevin McCallum (one's in the story) show GOP Rep. Mary Morrissey nonchalantly—but quickly—pouring a cup of water in Carroll's bag.Elephants reject “Hey you!” in favor of names. For some 35 years, researchers recorded the rumblings of wild female elephants and their young in Kenya. Now, the team has analyzed the recordings using AI. They’re finding, writes Gemma Conroy in Nature, that elephants seem to summon specific members of their family with a unique call. When the team played recordings back to the elephants, they reacted more strongly to their own “name” than to rumblings directed at others in the herd. Study coauthor Mickey Pardo tells the NYT (gift link), “A lot of interesting stuff is going on in the rumbles.”Roger Federer reveals he’s ‘considering turning pro’ in shock new sport on university visit. Sorry, just can't help myself. That's the headline in the UK tabloid The Sun about Federer's Dartmouth commencement speech. It's gotten lots of play internationally—but the Sun seems to be the only one to sink its teeth into his joking comments about beer pong. "Federer is now the latest fan of the sport following his trip to Hanover, New Hampshire," Ciaran Wiseman writes. "A potential switch would come after 24 years as one of the best tennis players in the world."Daybreak doesn't get to exist without your support. Help it stick around by hitting the maroon button:
We may be the middle of nowhere to everyone else in VT and NH, but
we
know what's good! Strong Rabbit's Morgan Brophy has come up with the perfect design for "We Make Our Own Fun" t-shirts and tote bags for proud Upper Valleyites. Plus you'll find the Daybreak jigsaw puzzle, as well as sweatshirts, tees, a fleece hoodie, and, as always, the fits-every-hand-perfectly Daybreak mug. Check it all out at the link!
When he was growing up in Doduma, in what is now Tanzania, Hukwe Zawose learned the music of his tribe, the Wagogo, from his father—and practiced while herding cows. He went on to become perhaps the best-known musician from Tanzania—on the WOMAD circuit, friends with Peter Gabriel and others. He died in 2003, but the Zawose family carried on. Now Hukwe's daughter, Pendo, and granddaughter, Leah, are breaking onto the scene, as the Zawose Queens. Their new album came out Friday, on the same label that first recorded Hukwe decades ago.
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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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