For the past four winters, radio and podcast exec Sophie Crane has taught a class to Dartmouth juniors and seniors on the art and craft of audio storytelling. Their capstone assignment: Produce a story about some aspect of life in the Upper Valley outside the Dartmouth bubble. This year’s crop was outstanding, bringing to our ears the voices and stories of locals engaged in everything from running general stores to the world of yarn to a feud over perfect mixed-drink ice to—well, you’ll just have to follow along.
Each day for two weeks, a new episode has appeared here—newest at the top. Today, we end the series with:
“Airplanes are marching bands… In hot air ballooning, it’s pure jazz.” Jordan Long first visited the Post Mills Airport when he was 21 months old—both his parents were balloonists. In college, he spent two summers apprenticing with the airport’s world-famous balloonist-owner, Brian Boland, and then, after Boland’s 2021 death in a ballooning accident, he moved back to Post Mills to live half of each month in Boland’s old apartment as the airport’s resident balloonist—despite a job as a commercial airline pilot. When Janel Sharman caught up with him for her podcast project, they talked about training with Boland—”You wake up in the morning, you fly a balloon. It didn’t matter if it was a sunny day, good day, bad day, you wake up sick: Go fly a balloon!”—and about the sense that, even years later, his spirit is everywhere. Though now, as Long considers moving on (“It was great but how did you push yourself and how did you grow?” Long asks of himself, “because those are things Brian valued more than hanging out in the ghost of his orbit”), Sharman notices that he’s everywhere, too.
Janel Sharman is a junior from Lake Bluff, IL.
“This is a story about the beautiful things people make, and the meaning and memory that come with them.” Sabrina Durmaz begins her podcast episode about the dementia community in the Upper Valley with a conversation with her dad about her grandmother, whom she calls Yaya, who has dementia and “likes to focus on beautiful things,” which she paints. Here in the Upper Valley, far away from her family’s home in Vancouver, BC, Durmaz connects with Shelagh Harvard and the monthly dementia community dinner, and then with Jon Bouton, whose wife Judi, a well-known quilter, died in 2023 of Alzheimer’s. Her sewing studio is still in the basement of Bouton’s home in WRJ, still filled with patches of fabric, some of them tacked up on the back wall in a pattern, waiting to be sewn together—beautiful things, Durmaz reflects, that are “a kind of care, not just for them, but for the people who love them.”
Sabrina Durmaz is a senior from Vancouver, British Columbia.
“For maybe the first time in history, I’ve found teens who love health class.” When she was in 7th grade, Trudy Silver found health class—sex ed in particular—mortifying. This winter, for her podcasting class at Dartmouth, she decided to conquer her fears. She went to Sarah Lemieux’s health class at Hartford High, talked to Hanover High health teacher Dan Bornstein (a former health instructor at The Citadel in SC), and sat down with an adviser at Planned Parenthood in WRJ, all to talk about the state of sex ed, health ed, and why they think it matters. She also met two Hartford High students who found Ms. Lemieux’s class not just helpful, but inspiring. “I definitely would like to be a person people can come to if they have questions, and I’d like to be able to answer them truthfully, or at least not be too awkward about them asking questions,” says one.
Trudy Silver is a senior from Seattle.
“You’re driving forever in the dark and you seem to be nowhere, and then you go into a dance hall and it’s like a magical world.” That was longtime local dancer Sally Eshleman talking to senior Caitlin FitzMaurice about English Country Dance—ECD to its adherents. The Upper Valley’s got an extraordinarily active country dance scene, and FitzMaurice—who’d never really taken a dance class—decided to give ECD a try. Though as she crunched through the snow and ice and sand on her way into the Norwich Congregational Church on a winter’s night, she realized that snow boots were “probably not the best dancing shoes.” Inside, she found veteran caller David Millstone, a group of seasoned dancers, one other newbie—and a tight-knit and welcoming community that paid close attention not just to the steps, but to one another.
Caitlin FitzMaurice is a senior from Wellesley, MA.
Just because adults might seem to have a bigger leadership role—they’re older, they’re more wise, whatever—you can still point out things they don’t notice. After a stint one summer as a camp counselor to 10-year-olds, says Madeleine Saraisky, she left “thinking that 10 years old might be the age where you can see what matters in life most clearly.” So after she read about Vermont’s new Kid Governor program she got hold of Gaelen McNaughton, a 10-year-old in Weathersfield who wound up in the Kid Governor cabinet. He’s a normal fifth-grader—he runs, plays hockey, hangs out with friends—but as Saraisky says, “He’s not untouched by the world, his childhood is shaped by it.” Which is why he’s got ideas about how to make it better—and some hope that adults might listen.
Madeleine Saraisky is a senior from Montclair, NJ.
The plants are really the ones who are running the show here. About 20 years ago, Heron Breen—a Maine seed-keeper was paging through a 1937 agriculture yearbook when he came on a listing for the Vermont Hubbard Squash, developed long ago by Vermont farmers. He launched a search for seeds that lasted well over a decade: “When you eat a vegetable that someone used to grow 100 years ago, you are tasting what someone used to eat 100 years ago. Your taste buds and their taste buds are having the same experience,” he tells Dartmouth senior Maya Beauvineau. Eventually, his search led him to Germany—and to 25 seeds, which he sowed and grew and turned into a meal with Upper Valley seed savers Sylvia Davatz, Stuart Blood, and others. But it turns out, bringing the Vermont Hubbard back to Vermont isn’t so easy.
Maya Beauvineau is a senior from Nederland, CO.
Knitting gives me something rare: the chance to make something real with my hands. Corinne Fischer first learned to knit during the pandemic, when, as she says, she had nothing else to do. But while she quickly came to adore it, she never really understood where yarn came from. A conversation with Norwich Knits owner Cara Liu led her to Norwich sheep farmer (and pediatrician) Peter Wright—”He said, ‘I’ve always wanted to farm,’” says his wife of 61 years, Penny, “And I said, ‘Well, it’s the first I’ve heard of that.’” And from there she met Amanda Kievit, one of the co-owners of the Junction Fiber Mill, and began piecing together how “these farmers, spinners, and knitters carry on a deep Vermont tradition.”
Corinne Fischer is a senior from Seattle.
It’s really hard to work in a tourist town full-time, to stay when the tourists leave. It’s harder when your oldest friends betray you. We go just a tad outside the Upper Valley today, to Stowe, where Dartmouth senior Maisie Pike stumbled on the unlikely story of a super-clear ice cube feud. “Like, read-the-menu-through-the-ice-cube-clear,” she says. Brian Krux, a bartender, began making them when he worked at the popular restaurant Plate, and now sells them to restaurants and liquor stores across Vermont. One night, though, in a heated moment, he walked out on Plate—and on his boss, best friend, and neighbor, Aaron Martin. He kept making the cubes… and so did Martin and his new bartender. Pike tells the story of the face-off between two super-clear ice cube businesses in one small ski town, and the personal cost.
Maisie Pike is a senior from Atlanta, GA.
A leak in her roof changed her life. Rebecca Mathews was a single mom living with her two kids in a trailer park, working 80-hour weeks as a restaurant line cook when a group of COVER volunteers showed up to put on a new roof and make other repairs. She was so impressed, she started volunteering, too, and eventually got a job weatherproofing houses. “I’ll be honest with you, weatherproofing houses sounds boring,” says Wynn Johnson. “But Rebecca loves it”—and takes Johnson along to a job in Lebanon. They talk caulking and venting, the skills and sense of purpose and community that COVER offered—and overcoming hardship.
Wynn Johnson is a senior from Mission Hills, KS.
Apparently, someone was trying to buy up all the general stores in the Upper Valley. It began as a conversation at the Lyme Country Store, where Leila Brady had stopped in after a day of skiing and learned about Ankit Patel and his bid to corner the general store market in the Upper Valley. From there, she headed to several of Patel’s stores and to independents like the Last Chance in W. Fairlee and Chapman’s in Fairlee, trying to answer her question: “Is it bad that Patel is buying up general stores?”
Leila Brady is a junior from Pelham, NY.
And if you’d like to listen to stories from past years’ classes, you’ll find them here:
2025 (“Wednesday at the Circus” and “Plow Guy”)
2024 (Including “Hans Williams: Music from the Upper Valley”, “Yiping”, and “Wishbones”)
2023 (Including “Morning at Shyrl’s”, “If We Don’t Have It, You Don’t Need It”, and “So I Got a Tattoo…”)
