GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
What are you doing inside reading this? As you can see, today's a pretty great day to be outside: full-on sun, temps hitting either side of 60. We'll start seeing some clouds this afternoon as a low pressure system and cold front head our way from the west, but if we get rain from them it probably won't be until after midnight. Down to around 40 tonight."Much more unbelievably 'mudlicious' than the video." That's Alice Vining, of E. Barnard and Hanover, responding to last week's "Stuck in Vermont" segment on E. Barnard. She sends along photographic proof from last week that the roads there could get even worse... as well as an ode to mud and this year's mud season, "IF," first published on the E. Barnard Crier. "If you have to walk a white dog..../forget about it."Croydon grapples with school-budget redo. In twin weekend pieces, the Valley News's Alex Hanson looks at the fallout from Croydon's town-meeting vote to slash school spending. Residents aligned with the Free State Project "have turned this town into a kind of test bed for their ideas about public education," Hanson writes, but the budget cut may have been a step too far. Meanwhile, at a hearing Friday night, the school district's business manager said if the $800K budget survives a May 7 revote, "we will not have enough money in the given school year to cover expenses.”With $3 million in federal funds, Springfield VT high-tech effort ready to move forward. The money for the Black River Innovation Campus will help renovate parts of the Park Street School, reports VTDigger's Ethan Weinstein. Eventually, Weinstein writes, "BRIC envisions transforming [it] into a 90,000-square-foot live-work center with 24 apartments, entrepreneurial workspace," and the infrastructure needed to train and attract tech entrepreneurs. It still needs to find the money needed for housing and further renovations.Northern Stage's Irene Green headed back to Minnesota. In case you missed this over the weekend, Green—who arrived in WRJ in 2013 along with a small group that had helped steer the Commonweal Theatre Company in Lanesboro, MN—has been managing director since 2018. She'll head back as of July 2 to direct the O’Shaughnessy, on the campus of St. Catherine University in St. Paul. The move, she says in a press release, gives her a chance "to live and work in the same state as most of my family members."SPONSORED: Give your neighbors the gift of healthy food. It's impossible to ignore how rising food and fuel prices are affecting our community. Many families who were barely making ends meet are now having to make tough choices about whether to buy groceries or gas. You can help ease this burden and ensure that everyone in the Upper Valley has enough to eat by making a gift to Willing Hands today. Sponsored by Willing Hands.For first time, Leb High School Science Olympiad team headed to nationals. "The pressure is on," one member tells the VN's Liz Sauchelli, as the team prepares to represent New Hampshire in the virtual national championship next month. The team won the state championship in March. Competitions throughout the year, says John Tietjen, the group’s adviser and a science teacher at LHS, are like an “academic track meet.”“I can’t tell you how many times we looked at a map of the whole country and asked, ‘Where do we want to live?’” Which, for Mich and Forest Brazil, who left Oregon after their home was destroyed by a 2020 wildfire, turned out to be the Upper Valley—Enfield, for now. In Yale Environment 360 (via Wired), Jon Hurdle looks at how New England and the Appalachians have become destinations for people leaving the West. It hasn't been easy, especially as transplants struggle to find a place to buy.But then, this kind of thing has been going on for a long time. In Sidenote, Li Shen traces populations shifts and influxes and exoduses that have shaped the local landscape—from hill farmers moving into the valleys in the early 1800s to the rise of sheep farming and then the flight of young people from farms later in the century. Which, in turn, led to the state's full-on efforts in the early 1900s to woo tourists—and generated a bunch of summer camps, inns, and guesthouses around the Upper Valley.Meanwhile, short-term rentals take center stage in the NH legislature and in court. A bill to bar towns in the state from prohibiting short-term rentals has made the topic "a lightning rod," writes Ethan DeWitt in NH Bulletin—with tourist towns in particular looking for some way to keep housing available for residents and real estate organizations arguing that property rights need to be respected. A case on the question is also headed to the state Supreme Court.Mud season mystery. The question, Ethan Weinstein writes in a hair-raising VTDigger story, is how Linda Radtke, host of VPR's "Choral Hour," wound up wrapped in a dirty sleeping bag with one leg stuck through the driver’s side window of her car, hypothermic and with her face—as well as the car—buried in mud less than a mile from her home in Middlesex, VT. Radtke almost died that night in March—her body temp was 77 by the time she was found and taken to the emergency room. She's been in rehab since, though was expected to return home over the weekend.That avian influenza outbreak? It affects bald eagles, too. VT says two of them have been found with the illness—one in South Hero, the other in Shelburne. That puts VT on the list of 34 states where it's been discovered.And in other bracing nature news, "tick season" is now the full year. Patti Casey, who leads VT's annual tick survey, points out to VPR's Abagael Giles that shorter winters and thaws in January and February mean that tick season is now all 12 months. You're safe if it's well below freezing, she says, but "if it's close to freezing, or above, you can't be sure." In general, Casey adds, "there are more ticks and they are on a Northeasterly march.""These new spaces are all designed to be flexible." That could be someone talking about the ambitious Hop redesign. But no. It's the text the wildly creative musician and composer Ben Folds riffed on a few years back at the Kennedy Center when he was asked to improvise a piece of music—along with the National Symphony Orchestra—based on suggestions from the audience. Watching him pull it together is enthralling. Thanks to Marie McCormick, who saw Friday's Hop item and immediately thought of this.See you tomorrow.
Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Writer/editor: Tom Haushalter Poetry editor: Michael Lipson
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