GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Mostly sunny. They say. Yesterday turned out to be kind of a sun-bust, but odds are looking good today as high pressure builds in for a brief visit. Skies will grow mostly clear as the morning goes on, highs in the mid 70s, lows a nice keep-your-windows-open low 50s, light winds both day and night.Stop and sip a minute. Cup plants are hardy perennials that can grow six (and sometimes nine) feet tall and are attractive to flying wildlife for everything from their ability to hold water to nesting to nectar. From Sharon, Mike Zwikelmaier sends in this butterfly atop a cup plant.Also striking: Jennifer Hauck's photo in the Valley News today of Jack Myers painting a barn at Meeting House Farm overlooking the valley above Norwich on Union Village Road. His family's prepping for a gathering later this month at the historic farmstead.Plainfield loses police chief, down to a single officer. Anthony Swett, chief since 2021, has stepped down, reports John Lippman in the VN. Swett had been at the center of what Lippman calls "a jam" with the town for the last few months, after Selectboard chair Eric Brann resigned over an unnamed personnel matter. Onlookers back in June told Lippman it involved a break in the friendship between Brann and Swett after Swett "allegedly misled him about the nature of a relationship he was having with a former town employee." Brann eventually reversed course. Officer Rob DePietro now runs the department.SPONSORED: Help someone today! At Hearts You Hold, the Upper Valley-based nonprofit that supports immigrants, migrants, and refugees by taking the time to ask them what they need, we're flooded with requests as summer takes hold. At the burgundy link or here, you'll find requests from people from all over the world who need clothing, shoes, even beds while they try to make a life here. Including a former farmworker in Grafton County who now prepares and sells homemade food to farmworkers and has been looking for help with pans and lids. Sponsored by Hearts You Hold."Don’t let the page count scare you: this book absolutely soars." Lev Grossman's new novel, The Bright Sword, checks in at over 600 pages, but in this week's Enthusiasms, the Yankee Bookshop's Kari Meutsch writes that this follow-on to the legends of King Arthur pulls you in regardless. It follows a young man who's dreamed of joining up with Camelot—only to get there and discover that Arthur's dead and all that's left of the Round Table are the "leftover knights, the individuals that no one has heard of."Out there in the woods: feathers. There are still hermit thrushes, red-eyed vireos, and other birds singing in the woods around us, writes Elise Tillinghast for Northern Woodlands—and they're molting, or shedding feathers. Because "the act of discarding old feathers and growing new ones is energetically costly," Elise writes, late summer's a good time, since it's between breeding and migration seasons. Also out there this week: bears, birds, and other wildlife chowing down on blackberries and black raspberries; and pollinators—like the black-and-yellow lichen moth—drawn to stands of goldenrod.Speaking of wilderness search and rescue... Well, we were yesterday, anyway, and that item about the issues rescuers face in the Whites (and wish hikers were more aware of) brought in a reminder that the Upper Valley has its search and rescue team. The Upper Valley Wilderness Response Team began nearly 30 years ago at Dartmouth's medical school, but is independent now. Its members, all volunteers (like most search and rescue teams), train regularly for wilderness response in both states in all conditions. Volunteering is a serious commitment. "We get called out at all hours of the day and night, in all kinds of weather on any given day of the year," they note.
With Sununu's signature, NH food assistance gets a boost. As Amanda Gokee writes in the Globe's Morning Report (no paywall), the bill the governor signed last week to give qualifying NH families access to federal summer meals funding almost didn't happen: the NH House cut state funding for it, before reversing course in May. The federal program is aimed at giving families a $40 monthly grocery-buying boost when kids aren't in school and getting school meals, but it can actually run for any three months during the year. Since the state still needs USDA approval, officials now expect it to start up in the fall.In midst of pandemic, NH outpaced the nation in deaths related to suicide, drugs, and alcohol. That's the conclusion of a new report from a national health research group, reports Annmarie Timmins in NH Bulletin. The Trust for America’s Health looked at trends from 2021-2022 and found, among other things, that opioid deaths in the state grew 13 percent, compared to 1 percent nationwide. Deaths due to synthetic opioids (including fentanyl) skyrocketed 20 percent; nationwide, the average was 4 percent. Overall, the report found, NH saw 1,014 deaths in 2022 from suicide, alcohol, or drugs, a 10 percent jump.Turtle smuggler charged, could face up to 10 years. Remember how, back at the end of June, a Chinese woman was busted for trying to smuggle 29 eastern box turtles in a duffel bag in a kayak into Canada? Last week, reports Chloe Jad in VTDigger, the feds charged her with “attempting to export merchandise contrary to law”; the charging documents note that agents got suspicious when they discovered she'd rented an Airbnb on the southern shore of Lake Wallace, in the US, while her husband had rented on the opposite shore in Canada. Jad details the case against Wan Yee Ng.VT House Speaker to Lt. Governor: "Offering feminine hygiene products in an office and seeking out women to let them know about the availability is not acceptable." That was a line in a January, 2023 letter from Speaker Jill Krowinski to Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman, just obtained by VTDigger. Digger's Sarah Mearhoff reports that the letter—and a verbal warning—came after at least two lawmakers complained that Zuckerman had offered them access to menstrual products in his chief of staff's office, located across the hall from the women's rest room in the Statehouse. In interviews Monday, Zuckerman said he wanted to be a “very inclusive, welcoming lieutenant governor.”For former Republicans, Democratic primary in Vermont is "where the action is." That's Peter Duval, who ran in the 2022 GOP gubernatorial primary, explaining to VTDigger's Sarah Mearhoff why he's opted to go for the Democratic nod for the same office this time around against Esther Charlestin, who has the state party's backing. Same deal with Jason Tuthill, who's running as a Democrat for state Senate in Windsor County—and twice ran as a Republican against Peter Welch, first for the US House, then for the US Senate. "People are just really deep in their tribalism," he tells Mearhoff.In an Arctic poppy seed and the eye of an unknown insect, UVM scientists find evidence of a melting Greenland ice sheet. The researchers discovered them in a 1993 core sample taken from the center of the sheet and 2 miles below its surface. Their work builds on a 2019 study using core samples taken near Greenland's coast that found the ice sheet there had melted 400,000 years ago. The new study, UVM says in a press release, suggests the entire island greened within the last million years—and that "the giant ice sheet is more fragile than scientists had realized until the last few years."That's a heck of a photo bomb. Remember that viral photo of the Olympic surfer appearing to float above the water with his board floating next to him? A humpback whale just one-upped it by breaching as Brazil’s Tatiana Weston-Webb and Costa Rica’s Brisa Hennessy were out in the water Monday waiting for a wave.
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We may be the middle of nowhere to everyone else in VT and NH, but
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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!
The summertime free "Music on a Hill" series in S. Pomfret adds poetry into the mix, as poets Partridge Boswell and Peter Money, along with guitarist Nat Williams, mash things up:
Andalusian ballads, blues, rock, folk, reggae, hip hop, Americana, jazz
, spoken word.
The Lakes Region rockers cover everyone from Tom Petty and Van Morrison to Backstreet and The Meters. Starts at 6:30 pm.
The Nashville-based duo of guitarist, keyboardist—and occasional Jimmie Dale Gilmour upright bass player—Mike T. Lewis and vocalist MaryBeth Zamer focus on Americana, blues, and, as a reviewer once put it, "things over on the folky end of the continuum"—but with Zamer's seriously bluesy voice. Mascoma Enfield Lions Club
will be on hand with their food truck. Free, outside the Stone Machine Shop, vending at 6, music at 7.
The Tony and Pulitzer winner and genuine cultural phenom is a musical about a group of young artists and friends trying to survive and create in NYC's East Village under the shadow of HIV/AIDS. Lots of adult themes—death, loss, sexuality, hardship—as well as joy and love. 7:30 pm tonight, runs through Aug. 18.
And to get us going this morning:
Yann Falquet, whom you may have seen on stage at the New World Festival in Randolph, playing with the ace Québécois trio Genticorum. He's got a new album out,
Les Secrets du Ciel (The Sky's Secrets)
, that includes a lovely tribute to legendary Vermont fiddler Pete Sutherland, who died in 2022. The band includes Allison de Groot on banjo, Trent Freeman and Quinn Bachand on fiddles, viola and mandolin, Robert Alan Makie on bass, and Falquet playing guitar and Québécois foot-percussion.
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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