GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
What, again??!! Pretty much the same deal as yesterday, today: Patchy fog, cloudy through mid-morning, then the sun will come out to sear us all. High near or above 90, heat index mid 90s, mostly ineffectual puffs of air from the northwest, and temps tonight to the mid 60s. But hey. It's not raining.Cooling sites. Here's the VT Dept of Health's map of sites open for cooling down over the next few hot days. It pinpoints not just cooling centers on the VT side (the Montshire, the Bugbee Senior Center, UVAC, and lots more) but on the NH side as well, including the Kilton and Lebanon libraries, the Leb Airport Terminal Building, and the UV Senior Center. You can zoom in on the map or enter your own location, set a radius, and it'll generate a list of nearby spots.Just out for a stroll... Well, this mother bear and three of her cubs are, anyway. The fourth, the runt, is working a little harder to keep up. From Will Cooney, in Bridgewater, VT.VT State Police issue name, age correction. The apparent drowning victim from Thetford in Sunday night's boating accident on Levi Pond in Groton was Kristophere Perkins, aged 32—not Kristopher Perkins, 27.Now closing the roads near Pomfret's Sleepy Hollow Farm has become a thing. As you know, Pomfret and Woodstock are closing Cloudland and Barber Hill Roads around the much-memed farm later this month, except to locals. In VTDigger, Ethan Weinstein notes that "a new genre of [social media] post has emerged," some with past photos or videos of the crowds at the site, and others now warning that you won't be able to get there from here. Oh, and heads up: When tourists ask where to go instead, some of the alternates suggested are Billings, Woodstock, and the Gile Mtn. fire tower in Norwich.On their way south, swooping and whirling for bugs. Northern Woodlands' Elise Tillinghast had the good fortune to be in the middle of a field this past weekend when a migrating flock of highly acrobatic common nighthawks came through, scooping up bugs as they went. Nighthawks are early migrants, on their way to South America this week. Also out in the woods this first week of September: asters—an important food source for late-season pollinators; comma butterflies (and how to tell the difference between a gray comma and an eastern comma); and, of course, porcupines.SPONSORED: When Harry met Sally... at the Windsor Co. Board of REALTORS auction site. Come see what happens next! Will you bid on a personal cartoon by Harry Bliss or a private concert by Sally Pinkas? A week on the Riviera? A new workout routine? Our online auction has something for everyone—and it benefits Upper Valley Haven and COVER! Catered dinner in your home; sculling or tai chi lessons; gift certificates for every palate; golf for 4 and much, much more! Take a look: The online auction is LIVE right now! Sponsored by The Windsor County Board of REALTORS® That's one serious culvert upgrade! VT Route 113 due to close for 48 hours this weekend. The stretch of state road at the Thetford/W. Fairlee line is due to shut to traffic Sept. 9 and 10 while crews replace an existing 48-inch pipe with a 7-foot-high, 9-foot-wide precast box culvert. Right now, the road's down to one lane. Once it's closed, the official detour's a doozy: Routes 5, 14, and 110 (map at the link). As the town of West Fairlee posted on the listserv the other day, "Local traffic may want to explore alternative (unmarked) detour routes via Beanville to Miller Pond Road to Sawnee Bean."A quick look ahead at fall with the Hop. As Susan Apel writes in Artful, it may be closed, but it's got "its usual wealth of artistic performances" headed to other venues. Former Silkroad violinist Johnny Gandelsman is in residence, spearheading an anthology of new works under the banner, This is America. There's dance, klezmer, and family-friendly hip-hop in the offing. And, of course, Telluride, starting Sept. 14. Plus, as she notes, the always unticketed time lapses of what's been going on behind that fence (hit "Time-Lapses").Each dollar you lose on the lottery in NH will send 22 cents to the state's schools. That's how David Brooks puts it in the Monitor, and we're not just talking peanuts: $603 million got spent on lottery tickets between July '22 and July '23, sending $135 million toward state education. Add in $35 million from sports betting (a measly 3 cents per gambled dollar) and $16 million from charitable gaming (84 cents per dollar to the schools) and NH gamblers spent a record $187 million on the schools last year, or 31 cents per dollar played.In NH, education commissioner announces he won't run for governor. There'd been intense speculation that Frank Edelblut would join the list of GOP candidates running to replace Gov. Chris Sununu, who doesn't intend to run for re-election next year. In a Union Leader op-ed on Sunday, reports Rick Greene in the Keene Sentinel, Edelblut wrote, "Having prayed and counseled with many over this decision, I have decided that I will not be running in this cycle." Greene notes that in an Aug. 28 UNH poll, Edelblut was the least popular among the potential GOP candidates.USDA approves disaster designation for VT farmers. As Sarah Mearhoff writes in VTDigger, yesterday's declaration by Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack covers farmers in all 14 counties—but, unlike other forms of disaster aid, any help coming from the federal agency would be in the form of interest-bearing loans. Even so, state Ag Secy Anson Tebbetts responded, the help is welcome. “With over $16 million in farmer-reported flood related damage and losses, and severe impacts from frost this May, our farming community has faced a one-two punch this year that some may not survive,” he said yesterday.You can eat out for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in Montpelier, but the choices will be limited for a while. Seven Days food writer Melissa Pasanen recently was in VT's capital city, checking in on a wide range of restaurants. For a very occasional (last one was in '20) feature, she had breakfast at Café NOA, which didn't flood ("The big word is 'No basement,'" says owner Joe Buley), checked out new gas-station Mexican and Yellow Mustard Deli for lunch, and Woodbelly Pizza for dinner. Separately, she surveyed restaurants all over town: Some hope to reopen this month, others will be longer. If at all.A horse blanket, a wooden spoon, a big stainless bread bowl, and some flowers. That's what Hardwick farmer Forrest Foster put with the casket he built out of spare pine boards for his partner of 43 years, Karen Shaw, who died in the spring. Radio producer Erica Heilman is close to Foster—she's made previous shows about him—and it took her a while before she could bring herself to listen to her tape of the coffin-making session and burial, much less make a new Rumble Strip episode about it. But she did, and it's out now. "Like always with Forrest, I'm struck by the combination of pragmatism and love about everything he does," she says, "and burying Karen was no different."Six decades of "finding ways to bring people together to watch movies." Rick Winston—Green Mountain Film Festival founder and, for nearly 30 years, one of the moving forces behind Montpelier's Savoy Theater, has a new memoir out, Save Me a Seat! A Life With Movies. In Seven Days, S. Strafford's Jim Schley traces the story Winston tells—and situates it amidst the burgeoning up-by-the-bootstraps cultural blossoming that north-central Vermont saw in the '70s and early '80s, from Circus Smirkus to what is now Village Harmony. Winston's business lessons are helpful, Schley writes, but it's his "verve" for introducing audiences to films they hadn't seen that sets the memoir apart.The most hated food? Anchovies, of course. But not everywhere. In Missouri—blech. In DC—bring 'em on. Instacart, the food-delivery company, commissioned a poll to learn which foods Americans really don’t like. Anchovies are the most reviled, sure (hated by 58 percent of women and 43 percent of men), but hot on their tails are black licorice and oysters. Oddly, diners in NH, VT, and ME are none too fond of oysters. Licorice is big out west, hugely unpopular in Ohio. Mayo, it turns out, does not stir up much controversy—it’s the least hated of the most-hated foods across the country.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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This evening at 7, the Norwich Bookstore brings in writer and long-distance walker Kathy Elkind to talk about her new book, To Walk It Is To See It. It recounts the nearly 100 days in 2018 that she and her husband spent walking the 1,400-mile Grande Randonnée Cinq (GR5) from village to village across the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. The bookstore has paired her with another family gap year expert: Charlie Wheelan, senior lecturer and policy fellow at Dartmouth's Rockefeller Center and, more to the point, author of We Came, We Saw, We Left, his memoir of his family's year off to travel the world.
Also at 7 this evening, JAM in WRJ hosts Israeli multi-instrumentalist, household-object rhythmist, and loop artist Inbar Heyman, performing a live one-woman show, "Inbar Heyman Gets Loopy." Heyman, who's studied all over, including Ghana, Senegal, Ireland, Argentina, and Greece, will pull it all together on the spot.
Just looking ahead, later this month the Parish Players will present its first-ever 24-hour play festival, in which four plays get written, cast, rehearsed, directed, and presented in the span of 24 hours. "We would love to tell you more about these plays, but we can’t because they haven’t been created yet," organizer Rachael Thomeer writes on the One Night Only website. The show itself is Sept. 23, but if you want to write, act, direct, work tech, or volunteer in some fashion, you probably want to sign up ahead of time. You can do that here.
And finally, Woodstock-based photojournalist JuanCarlos González pretty much spent the pandemic on farms and in fields, working on a book profiling women who farm in Vermont. He pulled them together into a book, Vermont Female Farmers, and an exhibition that's on now through the end of October at Billings Farm & Museum. In all, González captured 38 farmers at work, a good number of them in the Upper Valley, including Luna Bleu's Suzanne Long, her daughter Shona at Flying Dog Farm, Cathy & Meg Emmons at Cloudland, Ash Loehr at Hurricane Flats, Lisa Robar at Kiss the Cow, Liz Guenther at Three Cow Creamery, Carly McKee at Moon Castle, and plenty farther afield.
And for just a taste...
Here's Inbar Heyman (tonight at JAM)
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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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