Daybreak Monday 8/3/20

WELCOME TO AUGUST, UPPER VALLEY!

Boy, talk about the (mostly) calm before the storm... Today we get partly then mostly sunny skies, temps into the low 80s, and some humidity in the afternoon. Decent winds and gusts out of the southwest, temps tonight down into the low 60s. But of course, Tropical Storm Isaias is churning up the coast, and though its remnants aren't expected to hit us until tomorrow night, there's forerunning rain, which looks like it will arrive in the overnight hours.

Let's just catch up quickly...

Could Main Street in Hanover go curb-less?

The town planning department has been using the pandemic "to revisit downtown and look at what we can do to enhance it,” planning and zoning director Rob Houseman tells the

VN

's John Lippman. One option offered up by consultants: making the sidewalks flush with the streets, "which would give South Main Street more of a piazza-like feel and make it easier for restaurants to have outdoor dining tables," Lippman writes. The selectboard and public will get a first look at the various proposals in a Zoom meeting tonight. 

Most Dartmouth fall classes will be online.

Of the 997 classes being offered this term, report

The Dartmouth'

s Hannah Jinks and Kyle Mullins, 686 will be remote while 74 will be remote with optional on-campus components and only 23 are on campus; most of the rest are individual study. The challenges of classroom logistics, keeping hybrid classes equitable, and health concerns are keeping many professors from teaching in person.

Sturm, Ruger can't keep up with gun demand.

 “The incredible surge in demand outstripped our production capability during the second quarter,” Christopher Killoy, the CT-based gun company's chief executive, said last week in a conference call with financial analysts. Execs at Ruger, which has a major facility in Newport, NH, attribute the "staggering" surge to personal safety fears during the pandemic, "civil unrest," and renewed interest in hunting while people are home,

NH Business Review

's Bob Sanders writes. "The whole ‘field to fork’ movement is strong, and we think that is part of what we’re seeing," Killoy said. 

"Anyone who has seen a loon egg is apt to remember it first for its size. Any female loon who has ever laid one no doubt remembers it for the same reason."

  A lone loon flying high in the sky brings writer and naturalist Ted Levin back to a summer he spent surveying loons in NH and a lunch with loon biologist Judy McIntyre, whose loon-bible thesis contained those lines. Levin offers a quick loon tutorial, including that a family of four can eat over a thousand pounds of fish in fifteen weeks, and that while loons mate for life, males and females spend their winters apart. 

SPONSORED: Lawn season's not over yet! Theron Peck, Chippers' own "Mr. Grass," is launching a weekly Zoom webinar to discuss VT and NH lawns, as well as tick control. You can join him each Thursday at 9 am for a half-hour discussion about the lawn issues he's currently seeing, steps you can take immediately, and what you should be planning for the remainder of the season and next year. Theron will answer questions that were either submitted prior to that day’s Zoom meeting or during the meeting. Let a local expert advise you on your lawn! Register at the link above. Sponsored by Chippers.

"You look so nice, I didn’t recognize you." That was Norwich's Anne Garrigue greeting a dressed-up neighbor at Dan & Whit's one day. Garrigue died in April, and the VN's Alex Hanson has an appreciation. She was an ever-curious "model of civic engagement," as Norwich's Liz Blum puts it, voraciously interested in other people. She "sometimes would phone the Valley News to ask about something she’d read," Hanson writes. "Long conversations would ensue about the issues of the day, or about how the features editor’s son—whose name she always remembered—was doing in school. Her devotion to finding out what was going on ran very deep."

Bear encounters in NH climbed during July. "It's been a very busy month,” bear biologist Andrew Timmons, of NH Fish and Game, tells WMUR. Part of it was dry weather during the early summer, he says, which cut into the berry crop and sent bears looking elsewhere. And part is the pandemic, which sent huge numbers of people to North Country campgrounds—along with their food—and encouraged people at home to take up raising chickens and to leave their birdfeeders out so they could birdwatch.Human encounters are up, too—in the Whites. The Forest Service is seeing record numbers of visitors to the mountains, NHPR's Sean Hurley reports—it's common to find 300 cars parked along the Kanc near Lincoln Woods on weekends. And with those visitors have come problems. "We're seeing human waste along trails,” says the Forest Service's Tiffany Benna. “We're seeing graffiti which we haven't really seen, on boulders and rocks along the trails, not just on our signs. And we're also seeing a lot of people, like 100 volunteers, you know, go into the forest and pull out...300 pounds of trash.”"New Hampshire might as well legalize jet packs." Fun little writeup in the auto-news-and-opinion site Jalopnik, whose motto is "Drive Free or Die." Erin Marquis notes that the state may have made flying cars street-legal, but they "exist in the same way as Level 5 autonomous cars exist: In theory only." Moreover, all NH's new law does is let them drive on roads, not take off from them. "If you can’t soar over a badly congested road while yelling 'so long, suckers!' from the safety of the skies, then what is the point?"If you're voting by mail in the VT primary, get your ballots in the mail today. Primary Day is next Tuesday, the 11th, but absentee ballots are due in by 5 pm on the 10th, and if you wait until later this week to mail them there's no guarantee they'll arrive on time, Secy of State Jim Condos says. As of last Friday, 141,485 ballots had been requested. There are only two USPS processing facilities in the state that will be handling them: in WRJ and Essex Junction, though some town clerks have also made drop-boxes available.And speaking of the primary, the most recent fundraising numbers are in. Norwich's Rebecca Holcombe outraised her rivals for the Democratic nomination last month, pulling in $64,913 to Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman's $60,229; overall, she's raised $546,278 to Zuckerman's $349,047. In the Democratic race for the lieutenant governor nomination, Senate President Tim Ashe drew $29,000 to Molly Gray's $22,000, though overall Gray has far outpaced Ashe.

Remember those six Vermont inmates who tested positive on returning from prison in Mississippi? They were just the tip of the iceberg. The Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility holds 219 inmates from Vermont, and the VT Dept of Corrections announced yesterday that 85 of them have tested positive for Covid-19, with more results pending. Mississippi is one of the hottest of the hot-spot states, and a DOC spokeswoman says that until last week, the prisoners were subject to that state's Covid-19 protocol, which tested only prisoners with obvious symptoms."Let roaring trains, straining automobiles, and soaring airships … accomplish extraordinary feats of speed, but let me wander through the mountains and feast on the beauties which abound on every stride!” That was James Gordon Hindes in the summer of 1931. He and John Eames, a fellow Dartmouth frat member, were among the first people to hike the newly completed Long Trail, and the Green Mountain Club has just published Hindes' journal of the trek. They started July 4 and were overjoyed to reach the Canadian border Aug. 11. “We sat on the boundary stone, stood on the boundary stone, played leap-frog over it …,” Hindes wrote."Swifts are magical in the manner of all things that exist just a little beyond understanding." Helen Macdonald (yes, H is for Hawk) has a new essay collection coming out this month, and the NY Times Magazine has this lyrical example on swifts, which spend most of their time aloft. To reach their nests, she writes, "they fly straight at the entrance holes and enter seemingly at full tilt. Their nests are made of things snatched from the air: strands of dried grass pulled aloft by thermals; molted pigeon-breast feathers; flower petals, leaves, scraps of paper, even butterflies." Don't miss this.

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Let's just plunge into this week with some ace strumming, whistling, and singing: singer-songwriter and former pro surfer Jack Johnson and magical Hawai'ian singer and ukulelist Paula Fuga do Fuga's 

a few months ago, still not accustomed to sitting far apart but cheerful, charming, and joyful nonetheless.

Written and published by Rob Gurwitt         Banner by Tom Haushalter    Poetry editor: Michael Lipson  About Rob                                                    About Tom                             About Michael

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