GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Cool, showery. It’ll be getting less cloudy as this afternoon wears on, but even so, there’s a chance of showers all day and into tonight as low pressure moves through from the west. Interestingly, today’s highs will be warmer the farther north you go: around here, mid 60s. Lows tonight in the low 50s.
Encounters of the loon kind. From Grafton, NH and Newbury, VT, two great sets of loon stories.
For starters, there’s Peter Bloch’s video from Grafton Pond of first a family and then what he calls an “asylum” of loons (hard to come by the etymology of that term: earliest reference I can find is from 2006). The video itself is, as always, beautiful, but you’ll want to do yourself a favor and read the long version of Peter’s story about how it came about. “What I had experienced with 15 loons seemed so surreal,” he writes, “so mindblowingly awesome. I actually started to laugh out loud almost hysterically.”
And up in Newbury, where Ian Clark has been following the loons on three different ponds, there’s been all sorts of family drama: one loon mom apparently chased off her pond by an intruding female; a dad and his hungry adolescent; youngsters practicing takeoffs; a male loon fighting off an intruder (on a different pond from the first)—twice; and all told with a series of photos any one of which would be worth your time.
Longstanding Windsor town manager to retire. Tom Marsh took up the position in 2011, and he’s been the face of town government pretty much ever since. He told the selectboard when he signed a new contract in 2023 that it would be his last, reports Liz Sauchelli in the Valley News: He’ll be 66 next month and “I want to retire when I have my health,” he says. He arrived the month Tropical Storm Irene hit, and a lot of his focus in the years since, Sauchelli writes, has been on improving infrastructure, upgrading the town’s equipment and services, and selling its features—both natural and manmade—to residents and outsiders. He plans to step down next June.
In a Bradford, VT warehouse, “a world of roadsters and rallies, Grands Prix and grands crus, art deco elegance and Jazz Age abandon.” Or, more simply, Bugattis. The day Meg Noonan visited Scott Sargent’s repair shop for her profile in Yankee mag, there were 22 vehicles worth roughly $40 million altogether in various states of repair. How Sargent, who grew up in Fairlee, got to the point where billionaires occasionally helicopter in to consult with him on their cars is a thoroughly Upper Valley story, and Noonan tells it engagingly. It all began, Sargent says, with an old Briggs & Stratton lawnmower his dad gave him when he was six. (Thanks, SW!)
“The first time I saw a stranger’s corpse was one summer night in 1992…” And the amazing thing is that journalist and writing prof Jeff Sharlet’s Enthusiasm this week isn’t even about that opening line. He was a young writer for the San Diego Reader, and that’s his subject: the heyday of the Reader and the country’s other alternative weeklies, with their nearly lost world of exceptional writing by people “who loved cities as cities”—longform journalism, as he puts it, “of lingering in a place just to see how it is.” He gives examples, including a recent Seven Days piece; across the decades, they grab you by the collar and make you sit still, rapt in the flow of words.
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Some NH GOP leaders call for Karen Liot Hill to resign or be impeached over use of state email address. In particular, reports the VN’s Clare Shanahan, they object to the lone Democrat on the Exec Council using her state email to seek plaintiffs for a lawsuit against NH’s newly enacted voter ID law, which requires voters to provide photo ID or a notarized application when applying for an absentee ballot. GOP lawmakers charge her effort is “maladministration and malpractice in office.” Liot Hill counters that she’s “concerned” about the bill’s impact and that the legislators are trying to “distract and deflect from all of the bad bills they have been passing.”
NH is underfunding special ed, judge rules. Superior Court Judge David Ruoff’s Monday ruling follows the state Supreme Court’s July decision holding that the state is also spending less than it’s constitutionally required to on regular education—and it will “resonate with school districts across the state contending with increased special education costs and less state money to pay them,” reports NHPR’s Annmarie Timmins. Ruoff noted that of the $2,100 schools get for each special ed student, most of the money goes to evaluations, leaving little for actual education.
Though Ruoff’s decision was actually broader than special ed. As Ethan DeWitt writes this morning in NH Bulletin, it came in a case brought by a group of taxpayers who’d argued that because the state underfunds public education in general, taxpayers in “property-poor” towns shoulder an unconstitutionally high tax burden. Ruoff agreed: for both special and general ed, “school districts must rely in part on local property tax revenues, assessed at varying rates, to bridge these funding gaps.” Like the Supreme Court six weeks ago, he’s leaving it up to the legislature to come up with a solution.
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VT’s governor pushes back on federal “sanctuary” designation. Two weeks ago, the US AG’s office put out its new, much-reduced list of jurisdictions it believes “impede enforcement of federal immigration laws.” Vermont was on it (Hanover and Lebanon, which were on an earlier, much larger list, were not). Yesterday, Gov. Phil Scott responded with a letter to AG Pam Bondi saying the designation “has been made in error” since Vermont “does not have any law or policy that impedes the enforcement of federal immigration law” and doesn’t impede any public agency from complying. VTDigger’s Auditi Guha has the story (and the letter).
New VT retirement savings program has drawn 4,200 enrollees, most of them younger than 40. Vermont Saves launched last year, aimed at the 80,000-100,000 Vermonters who don’t have retirement plans through their jobs. It requires employers with five or more workers that don’t offer a retirement plan of their own to sign up, explains VT Public’s Nina Keck; self-employed workers can join up, too. In all, state treasurer Mike Pieciak tells Keck, 55 percent of enrollees are under 40: "Why that's so important is because when you're so young and you're saving, it really grows and compounds quite substantially over time," he adds.
Fall foliage may come early this year. Already, reports WCAX’s Abigail Saxe, colors are showing up out there, a result of the dry summer we’ve had so far. “The drought puts stress on the trees, prompting them to conserve resources... One way they do that is by breaking down the chlorophyll—that pigment that keeps them green—earlier than normal,” VT Forests Division director Oliver Pierson tells her. Though Saxe adds, “The good news is experts say the trees that produce the brightest colors—the oak, red maple and sugar maple trees—haven’t been as affected by the dry weather.” And if we get decent rain in the next couple of weeks, peak might get on track.
“I’m like that kid in the movie who sees dead people, except I see flooded houses.” That’s Two Rivers-Ottauquechee regional planner Kevin Geiger, driving around the Woodstock area with New Yorker reporter John Seabrook, pointing out houses that are likely goners the next time the Ottauquechee floods, or perhaps the time after that. Vermont, Seabrook writes (possible paywall), “is a laboratory for the study of intense rainfall in steep terrain,” and his July 21 piece—which also looks at the catastrophic flooding in the Texas hill country—takes on how little preparation states and communities prone to that kind of flooding have undertaken, and why.
Could you remember the 2,000 places where you stashed 30,000 pine nuts? A Clark’s nutcracker can, even nine months later. That bird, explains a new TEDed video, is a corvid, the “bold, brainy” family that includes crows, ravens, jays, and magpies. Jays have their own meal-planning skills: They remember what foods they buried where, and fetch the most perishable items first. More corvid brilliance: they hold funerals, recognize human faces, craft tools, strategically place nuts where they’ll be cracked by passing cars, and—perfect for northern New England—fashion toboggans out of plastic lids and whiz down snowy roofs.
A word about Throughlines. I know this will come as a blow to those of you who made it a Wednesday habit, but I’ve decided to retire the game. As you know, it was an experiment—and if the number of people playing it had grown or even held steady, it would have been worth the time it took each week to prep it. Instead, however, I watched its numbers drop steadily; it wasn’t building the sort of following that Wordbreak or the weekly News Quiz enjoy. To those of you who played it: Thank you. And to Roy Schmidt, who coded and helped bring it to life: You’re the best!
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak.
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HEADS UP
At Dartmouth: “Crossing Borders with travel writer Paul Theroux”. Calling Theroux a “travel writer” is a little like calling John McPhee a “nonfiction writer”: It’s true, but leaves out how he reshaped the field. The author of a tall pile of novels and travel books like The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express, Theroux will be in Moore Hall B03 today at 4 pm for a public lecture on the theme of crossing borders.
Brooks Hubbard at the John Hay Estate at The Fells. The Upper Valley-based touring artist continues the Newbury, NH estate’s outdoor summer concert series today at 6 pm, picnics welcome.
Footworks at the Orford Community Bandstand. The Upper Valley-based Cape Breton/Celtic trio brings the bandstand’s summer concert series to a rollicking, foot-stomping close. 6 pm.
Beecharmer, King Fischer, The Word at WRJ’s Lyman Point Park. The three bands—Jakob Breitbach and Jes Raymond headlining as Beecharmer—will be part of a “River Festival” hosted by a group of Dartmouth students that will also highlight the issues of rural resilience and flood response. Starts at 6 pm. With Breitbach on stage down the road, the regular Wednesday acoustic jam at The Filling Station will be led by “Dino” Dan Freihofer: as always, 6-8 pm, listeners welcome.
The Sidewinders at Artistree. The S. Pomfret venue’s “Music on a Hill” summer concert series continues with the jazz/funk/blues sound of Charlie Frazier, of Blues for Breakfast fame, sings and plays harmonica in this collaboration with Bessette Quartet members Doug Perkins, Eric Bessette, Andy Smith, and Matt Davis. 6:30 pm.
And for today...
The popular British singer-songwriter Katie Melua, born in Kutaisi, Georgia and raised in Belfast and London, and Lithuanian accordionist Martynas Levickis…
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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