GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
One more day... Of this spectacular weather we've been enjoying. There's warm, humid air moving in from the southeast and low pressure headed our way tonight and a cold front coming tomorrow, but for the daylight hours today, we get mostly clear skies, temps reaching the low 80s. The changeover starts late tonight, with a slight chance of rain by dawn. Lower 60s overnight.Road construction heads up. The season continues, and in Woodstock a repaving project gets underway today on Route 4 east of town stretching from Sawyer Road to the Route 12 intersection in Taftsville; alternating one-way traffic, and the project lasts into fall. Meanwhile, in Fairlee, Bridge Street (as in, how you get to or from Orford) will be closed today and tomorrow for drainage work. VTrans will be detouring motorists along Route 5 to E. Thetford or Bradford. VT projects at the maroon link, NH, ME, and VT here.Red Clover Café and Creamery opens in E. Thetford, with emphasis on local food and artists. It's been a year since Janet and Tom Call bought the former Isabell's from Bev and Don Hodgdon, and last Thursday all four were on hand for Red Clover's opening—as were Sidenote's Nick Clark and Li Shen. Suppliers include Bev and Don's pies (it was maple cream on opening day), Cedar Circle Farm, Wilcox Ice Cream, Free Verse Farm herbal teas, and more. Plus art on the walls from local Odanaksis/Little Village artists and the Chin family, including Jason, who this year won a Caldecott medal."Democracy is a scrum, especially in a town of 800." The NYT's Dan Barry has made a career of delving into people and places that national newspapers usually ignore. Now he's turned his attention to Croydon and its school-funding fracas. The whole story arc is there, from Ian Underwood's "sucker punch to the body politic," as Barry puts it, to the school board's efforts to deal with the aftermath, to what comes next. "Outsiders think they know what happened,” brewer Chris Prost tells him. "But most people here know that’s not the whole story. It’s just the beginning.” (Gift link: No paywall.)Eagle Times returns to local hands. The Claremont-based newspaper, reports John Lippman in the Valley News, has been bought by Jay Lucas, a Newport NH native who now runs a business-consulting business in Portsmouth and since 2018 has spearheaded the Newport Sunshine Initiative, a community development group in town. The paper had been owned by a PA-based publisher; these days it fields a single reporter, one editor, and two business-side employees. “Our plan is to grow staff, particularly in the area of providing more content with a high degree of focus on local news," Lucas says.“Sometimes when people ask me what I do, I just say 'I listen to Black people.'" That's Allie Martin, an ethnomusicologist and music prof at Dartmouth, talking to Vermont Public's Lexi Krupp. For the last months, Martin and her team in the Black Sound Lab have been collecting stories of how Black communities have kept themselves well during the pandemic: grandmothers in Oregon teaching young people to cook; viral TikToks from Black creators urging people to rest; Black churches hosting vaccine clinics. Each story is paired with music by DC musicians Asha Santee and Jennifer Patience Rowe.With new community center in its old village school and new fire station next door, Bridgewater has "a new heart." Back in 2016, voters opted to tear down the school, writes Nora Doyle-Burr in the VN, in part to make way for the fire station. But the town reversed course and now it's got both. The old school hosts a childcare center, which opened its doors last month and plans to expand next year. “Bridgewater, we feel, is undergoing a bit of a revival,” furniture-maker Charles Shackleton says. “Between the community center and the fire station, it’s brought a lot of the community together.”With mine cleanup scheduled to begin in 2024, Corinth gets its Superfund turn. The EPA first got involved in assessing the Pike Hill Mine over a decade ago, writes Frances Mize in the VN, but soon turned its attention to the Elizabeth Mine cleanup in Strafford. Now that that's done, Pike Hill is back on the docket; sampling last summer found that concentrations of toxic copper in runoff from the site are "just as harmful" as they were a decade ago, EPA project manager Ed Hathaway tells Mize.NH will try to make it easier for low- and moderate-income residents to get community solar. The measure, signed into law last week by Gov. Chris Sununu, directs utilities to create a list of residential customers who would benefit from a low- and moderate-income community solar program, makes it possible for community solar developers to register with the state, and then directs the state energy department to select households to enroll in those projects. Customers, who can opt out, would see a credit on their electric bill, NHPR's Mara Hoplamazian reports.With bald eagles recovering, NH Audubon gets state contract to focus on northern harrier and other endangered birds. It's been 20 years since real data was collected on the northern harrier, writes Amanda Gokee in NH Bulletin; a 2019 monitoring project found just a single nesting site in the state. Now, NH Audubon's won a $65,000 state contract to monitor not just harriers, but peregrine falcons and cliff swallows—and to keep tracking bald eagles—in hopes the state can replicate its bald eagle success with other species.“They look like galaxies with little collections of stars all over their faces.” That’s Wardsboro, VT dairy farmer Kim Porter describing her Randall Lineback cattle, an endangered breed that originated in VT many decades ago. By the time the cattle’s namesake farmers, the Randalls, passed on in the 1980s, only about a dozen remained. But as Happy Vermont’s Erica Houskeeper reports, Randall Linebacks are making a comeback. Porter and others are raising herds of the unusual-looking, unusually friendly cattle. “They’re giant dogs [who] come when they’re called,” says Porter. “They’re cute.”It’s like Facebook for seals—but for science. On haulouts in Maine’s Casco Bay, where harbor seals like to hang, biology students from Colgate University are using new technology to take their pictures and tell them apart. A system called SealNet “uses deep learning and a convolutional neural network,” writes Sean Mowbray for Hakai mag, to analyze the photos and identify each seal. The research helps marine biologists better understand how seals move around and which sites to protect. And in case you thought all seals look the same: the facial recognition software is 85 percent accurate.The Monday Vordle. Getting your week started on the right word.
Heads Up
As the Oak Hill Music Festival's musicians prep for their first concert in a couple of days, four of them—including locally raised members Leah Kohn and Daniel Lelchuk—will hold a final open rehearsal today at 1:30 at the Roth Center in Hanover, on the Dartmouth campus. They'll be prepping a chamber music piece, talking about their work, and answering questions. If you're interested, email Chris DePierro.
And at 6:30 pm, the brand-new RiverFolk music festival gets underway outdoors at Northern Stage's Courtyard Theater. Hosted by fiddler Jakob Breitbach and actor-singer-songwriter Tommy Crawford, it features fiddler Ida Mae Specker, Beecharmer (the acoustic duo of Breitbach and Jes Raymond), honky-tonkers the Western Terrestrials, percussionist Marcus Copening, bassist Ben Kogan, guitarist Ed Eastridge, and singer and pianist Alex Kelley. Food from Wicked Awesome BBQ, a beer tent, and more. Both in-person and livestream tix.
The French trio Soadan is made up of musicians from Brittany—Gregory Audrain (vocals, guitar, bass), Armel Goupil (marimba, keyboards) and Jean Marie Lemasson (vocals, drums, percussion)—but their taste in music is wide-ranging, from Africa to the Indian Ocean to Latin America. Here they hearken back to the sunny, beach-y vibe that came out of West Africa in the 1970s with "Pieds nus."See you tomorrow.
Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Writer/editor: Tom Haushalter Poetry editor: Michael Lipson About Rob About Tom About Michael
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