GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
So... How'd you do yesterday? Because it may be slightly hotter today, though sure, we're pikers to the Pacific Northwest. And there's a chance of showers and thunderstorms this afternoon. Still, mostly sunny, muggy, highs in the low-to-mid 90s, and at best down to the high 60s or low 70s tonight. Blooms! It's a good time of year for them, out there in the woods and fields.
Like, the Lady's Slippers are in fine form in the Strafford Town Forest—here's what some of them looked like on Friday, by Sue Jukosky;
And though we've seen fields of lupine recently, here are a few up close and personal, from Tom Thomson's lupine extravaganza in Orford, by Robin Osborne.
Could Lebanon get a whitewater park? Inspired by the years-long effort to create Mill City Park over in Franklin, NH, local commercial real estate broker Chip Brown is floating the idea for a section of the Mascoma River, reports Tim Camerato in the Valley News. In particular, he argues, it's time to improve the stretch of the river in the city—including getting rid of debris, rebar, and other hazards. “If you think about Lebanon, you’ve got this substantial river going through it and everybody faces away from it,” he says. “There’s no access to it, there’s no attention to it.”From seven to 96. That's the rise in the number of breeding pairs of loons in Vermont since a recovery plan was put in place in the early 1980s. That work just got a boost with a $440K grant to the Vermont Center of Ecostudies in Norwich/WRJ, part of a settlement resulting from a 2003 oil spill in Buzzards Bay, off Massachusetts, that killed 500 loons. Among other things, VCE says in a press release, the money will fund efforts such as installing nest warning signs and nesting rafts in particularly vulnerable areas, and creating lead tackle buy-back and monofilament collection programs in the state.Demographics catch up to Asian Super Store. “There was not a huge Asian and Indian community in the Upper Valley in 2001,” when Rajesh and Sheena Arora opened their grocery on the Lebanon Mall, Rajesh tells the VN's John Lippman. Now, two decades later, their numbers have grown—and customers come from as far away as Rutland and St. J to snag Indian and Asian basics. Elsewhere, Lippman notes, Andrew Switz and Rachael Henne, who founded the CBD products company RopaNa Wellness, have opened a vegan "ice-cream" parlor in Quechee Gorge Village: Conscious Cravings.So now there's Jamestown Canyon Virus... The mosquito-borne illness, which can produce anything from no symptoms at all to meningitis and encephalitis, according to the CDC, has been seen in 14 people in New Hampshire since it was first identified there in 2013. But the state has had no sense of its prevalence, because it hasn't tested mosquitoes—until this summer. On Friday, reports Outbreak News Today, it announced that a batch of mosquitoes in Bow tested positive.It can take a mile for a passenger train traveling at full speed to stop. Which is why the VT Agency of Transportation has just put out a warning to people who got used to walking on unused train tracks during the pandemic: Nuh-uh. Amtrak services start up again July 19. “We really want to get the word out there, that when you see tracks you need to think trains because they come on, there is no set schedule, they can come at any time and they are moving a lot faster than you think they are moving,” Toni Hamburg Clithero, VTrans's manager for Amtrak grants, tells the AP.VT once had 274 Catholic priests. Now it has 50. And it's about to lose another eight, reports Kevin O'Connor in VTDigger, as five international priests' visas expire and another three priests retire or are transferred. Over the years, the diocese has dealt with declining numbers by consolidating and closing parishes; now it has to leave several parishes, including in Proctor and Putney, without priests. With the Vatican firmly against ordaining women or allowing priests to marry, “We will need the involvement and support of the lay community like never before," Monsignor John McDermott says.Of all the pandemic shortages, this may be the cruelest: syrup jugs. Sugar-makers are being told to expect 40-week delays, reports Abigail Chang in VTDigger. The problem: It's not just that demand for maple syrup grew during the pandemic, says Owen Manahan, manager at a St. Albans-based supplier, but "how the product went to market changed.” In particular, more people have been ordering syrup online, which has meant rising demand for plastic jugs and glass bottles, and the handful of producers—who are also facing labor shortages—have had trouble keeping up with it."All of a sudden, I say, ‘moose!’ And about a 10th of a second later, I hit the moose.” Carl Brandon and his wife at the time were driving from Thetford back home to Randolph in 2003 when that happened; they survived—though "we completely grossed out the ambulance people, because we were covered in moose guts,” he tells VPR's Josh Crane. In a wide-ranging "Brave Little State" episode about how the state chooses where to put those yellow "Moose Crossing" signs, Crane covers the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, why driving a Saab may have saved Brandon's life, and Marcos Miller, VTrans's "sign geek."Off-roading where the nearest road is 238,855 miles away. Though much of the attention to the Apollo moon missions has been grabbed in the decades since by Apollo 11, writes Earl Swift in Outside, the scientific achievements—and fun, and lunar trickiness—came later, when astronauts got the equipment to go out and explore. In particular, the three missions that used lunar rovers not only allowed astronauts to go farther afield and do better science, they took them, as Swift writes of the Apollo 17 rover, "to the edge of the edge of [humans'] travels as a species."
VT and NH no longer publish Covid data on weekends, so the next update will be tomorrow.
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Roberto Carlos has been performing since he was 9, when he debuted on a local radio station in Brazil's Espírito Santo State. But he launched himself on his track to becoming the best-selling Brazilian musician in history after moving to Rio, failing as a Bossa Nova singer, latching onto covers of American rock in the early '60s—and eventually becoming a songwriter in his own right. One of the covers propelling him to stardom was his 1965 version of John Loudermilk's "Road Hog,"
It's fine not understanding the lyrics (Carlos didn't just translate them into Portuguese; he pretty much rewrote them) since the song's so expressive, but
if you want a sense of it.
See you tomorrow.
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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