GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
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Here's the pastel morning light in Lebanon the other day, from Christina Chamberlain.
And the sky in the still waters of the Ompompanoosuc in Norwich, from Susan Arnold.
Hartford to close VA Cutoff Bridge for two weeks in October. As you know if you've used or passed by the bridge that ties Route 14 in Hartford Village to Mill Road/VA Cutoff Road on the other side of the White River, a new bridge has been under construction. Starting Monday, Oct. 14, crews will close the old bridge (except to pedestrians) so they can tie in the new bridge—and its realignment toward Christian Street. Detours will use the US Routes 4 & 5 bridge in WRJ (map at the link). The new bridge is scheduled to open Oct. 28.In WRJ, Cappadocia Café opening tomorrow. People are already milling about inside Vural and Jackie Oktay's companion to the Tuckerbox, with its Turkish flatbread menu, along with pastry and other quick bites (or sips). But it's a soft opening, Susan Apel writes (briefly) in Artful. The official opening is tomorrow. "Obviously, my mission is check it all out, sample the wares, and get back to you," Susan adds.
Meanwhile, at greater length, Upper Valley Thrives. That's the new name for the Lyme Health and Wellness Fair, which is on Saturday. In Artful, Susan gives a good look ahead at what has become a thriving, region-wide wellness event "that welcomes the entire Upper Valley to gather, dance, and learn something new about how to tend and befriend their health." Food, music, the arts, salsa and other dance, and everyone from Caldwell Law offering advice on elder law to the Humane Society, UVAC, and Northern Stage will be around.
SPONSORED: Transit History Exhibition Opening October 12th. Come to the opening of "40 Forward: A History of Advance Transit" at the Kilton Library on Saturday, Oct. 12th from 10:30 am to noon. Discover the fascinating story of how public transit has transformed the Upper Valley. Explore engaging exhibits including a history timeline, photos, and artifacts. Learn about the impact of community. Enjoy family-friendly activities like story time, arts and crafts, and delicious brunch fare. Come celebrate 40 years of growth and community! Details at the burgundy link or here. Sponsored by Advance Transit.Decaying fungi > Insects > Birds. Which is how Tig Tillinghast got his photo of a young hairy woodpecker in this week's "This Week in the Woods". Also out there this fourth week of September: peaceful miner bees (Andrena placata) "heavily loaded with late-blooming aster pollen" and goldenrod. And did you know that there's a variety of white goldenrod that grows in the East? Also called silverrod, "we often find it growing singly or in small groups, with flies and small bees crawling on its flowers.""We live on a rotating, orbiting planet. Nothing stays the same for very long." Ted Levin was out on Hurricane Hill in WRJ yesterday morning, tallying the life he saw: Virginia creeper, hay scent fern, warblers and a golden-crowned kinglet, a crowd of warblers that converged on aspen, "gathering chilled, green caterpillars, their vestigial relationship with the Northeast all but ended." It's all change, he writes in his newsletter: "Mountains wash away. Rivers change course.... And today, the bottom fell out of summer—out of tee shirts and sandals, the sweet songs of thrushes."SPONSORED: Lebanon Opera House presents stunning circus arts from Québec City on Saturday, October 5. See the US premiere of "Ghost Light: Between Fall and Flight" from Machine de Cirque, the thrilling Québec City-based circus company known for its jaw-dropping acrobatic feats. The show’s central prop – a spinning teeterboard – propels the acrobats toward each other in the euphoria of flight and the inevitability of the fall. Family-friendly pricing. Sponsored by Lebanon Opera House. Getting lost in Lloyd Kahn's books and "imagining your own off-grid cabin, or surf shack, or truck-bed camper." Kahn is 89 now and, maybe more than anyone, as the editor of Shelter, the guy who put his mark on how a generation or two think about how to live close to the earth "without sacrificing comfort or style." That's how the Norwich Bookstore's Sam Kaas puts it, and in this week's Enthusiasms, he tells us why he's such a fan. Impossible to summarize, except for this: "When I think about how I’d like to be in the world, now and as I grow older, I often think of Lloyd Kahn."Dartmouth-led study looks at the Antarctic ice sheet's prospects. Over the long term, they're dismal. Studies of the ice mass tend to pay attention to what's going to happen in this century, which still has plenty of years left, and they find gradual ice loss. But "that consistency falls off a cliff after 2100," writes Morgan Kelly for Dartmouth News about a study led by Thayer's Hélène Seroussi. The study finds that melting glaciers could increase global sea levels by as much as 5.5 feet by 2200, and some of its projections suggest a near-total collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet by 2300.Census Bureau finds more than half of NH renters are "cost-burdened." In other words, they spend over 30 percent of their income on rent alone. And that has ripple effects, NHPR's Daniela Allee reports, including greater trouble building the wealth needed to buy a house—which in turn builds more wealth. Renters' median income, the Census Bureau found, is $53,816—less than half homeowners' median and far short of the $73,000 minimum to affordably rent a two-bedroom apartment in the state. One sign of hope: the Fed's interest-rate cut, which could boost supply and cut rents, at least over the long term.NH really needs plow drivers. In 2020, reports WMUR's Adam Sexton, NHDOT had 95 open positions in its winter maintenance workforce. This year, it's got 200—a 29.2 percent vacancy rate. This isn't the state's problem alone, Sexton notes. "We're losing people right now to retirement and different higher-paying jobs, things like electricians or plumbers or other trades," Manchester's deputy director of public works says. "We're losing them at a faster rate than we're replenishing them." One step: NHDOT is asking the Exec Council today for $3.5 million for recruitment and incentives.What's it like in VT's sole women's prison? The facility in S. Burlington is 50 years old, and the state wants to build a new one. VTDigger's Ethan Weinstein took a tour. And while he found some women who worry that spending on a new prison could divert funds from support programs, he also found people—staff and prisoners alike—who echoed the staffer who told him, "This building is not fit to house people, to have people living in it and working in it." Or as one inmate put it, “Treat people like people and (they) will act like people. If you treat them like caged animals, (they) will act like caged animals.” Environmental group sues VT on carbon pollution. The Conservation Law Foundation has been threatening the move for months, arguing that the Agency of Natural Resources uses flawed modeling to claim the state's on track to meet 2025 carbon reduction goals set out in a 2020 law. Yesterday, reports Seven Days' Kevin McCallum, it made good on its threat in superior court—and argued that ANR head Julie Moore hasn't acted with the urgency the law requires. Moore counters that in 2022, the state passed aggressive regs on clean cars and trucks, aiming for all-electric by 2035.Over the border, "cozy café-bakeries and bistros, on-farm pubs, and gracious vineyard restaurants." Taking one for the team, Seven Days' Melissa Pasanen toured Québec's Eastern Townships on the prowl for good places to eat. She focuses on the Brome-Mississquoi region, between Montréal and the townships due north of the Upper Valley. She checks out a café in Sutton; the Ferme Cidricole Équinoxe, a cidery and on-farm pub in Farnham; and Restaurant Ôma at the Vignoble du Ruisseau winery in Dunham, a new spot created by star chef Hakim Chajar. One word for fall: reserve ahead.59,705. Outdoor basketball courts. From the air. And you know what? It's pretty darn cool. The Pudding's Matthew Daniels pulled together satellite images of every outdoor court in the US—and made them searchable by town, state, and even color. Turns out, while not every town in the Upper Valley has a hoops court, a lot have at least one. That little round bubble in the top left of each photo takes you to the Google Maps satellite view, and from there you can go to Google Maps itself to see just where it is you're looking at. And hey, Brooklyn Park, MN? That's some eye-catching courtage you got there.
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!
Najeeb, class of '25 at Dartmouth, is also a Hood intern, and she'll be talking about
the exhibition she's curated, "which seeks to challenge stereotypes and celebrate the strength, beauty, and legacy of Islamic art and the Muslim community."
Hawkins, a composer, pianist, and organist, has collaborated with a stunning array of musicians around the world; Bynum, a cornetist and leader of the Coast Jazz Orchestra at Dartmouth, likewise. Their tour together features new compositions from both, and is their first extended work as a duo. 6:30 pm.
Two years to the day after Sack, who went to Dartmouth, married Matt Goldstein, their daughter Havi was born. And not long after that, they learned that Havi had Tay-Sachs Disease, a genetic disorder that destroys nerve cells. Sack's new book,
Fifty-Seven Fridays
, charts the weeks from Havi's diagnosis to her death—and the couple's path to facing profound loss. Sack will be in conversation with Dartmouth government prof Lisa Baldez. 7 pm.
Cybenko, who specializes in AI, computer security, neural computing and other high-end systems, will talk about AI and how it's evolved, the challenges AI systems face, and then lead a conversation sparked by audience members' questions and concerns. In the Draper Room at the Center at Eastman, 7 pm.
Moorhead, who's a local, has two collections out:
Every Small Breeze,
published last year, and this year's
What I Ask
, which focuses on "concern for our environment in the age of climate change." 7 pm.
"Case’s gift as a songwriter has long been her ability to burrow small moments into your consciousness,"
Pitchfork
mag once wrote. And then, of course, there's her voice. The current St. J-area resident has a new memoir coming out
and
a Broadway musical in the works (
). Tonight at 7:30, and there are still tix left, though not many.
Pentangle Arts and Sustainable Woodstock are streaming Karen Akins' Vermont-based 2023 documentary about noise pollution, which tells the story of her family's relocation from TX to Stowe—and their discovery that it wasn't as bucolic as they'd hoped, beset as it was by a variety of noise nuisances unregulated by the state—but acutely felt by her fellow residents.
Well, yeah.
Neko Case.
, off her 2022
Wild Creatures
album.
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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