GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Still warm, but this time the clouds will be around pretty much all day. There's moisture moving in above, bringing us clouds on top of this morning's valley fog. Things might clear up some late in the day, but it probably doesn't pay to get our hopes too high. Temps reaching the low 70s again, light winds from the north. Another mild night ahead, upper 50s.Look! Up in the sky! If you were outside on Tuesday evening, you know it was extraordinary—still and clear with dramatic light and wildly interesting clouds. Too many photos to include have come in, but here are a few: the pink light over Lake Fairlee, from Kit Traub and Kristen Detrick; moonrise over Post Pond in Lyme, from Karen Huyck; a sudden vision of a hot air balloon against an autumn-leaves backdrop in Quechee, from Janice Fischel; and a bit farther afield but quite spectacular, two hot-air balloons high over Essex Junction in a setting of jubilant altocumulus clouds, from Sally Britton.Vandals deface Saint-Gaudens monument with swastikas, "Heil Hitler." Also, the letter C and pink horizontal lines, reports Nora Doyle-Burr in the Valley News. The damage was first reported Oct. 1, and the park is working with National Park Service conservators to remove it. However, former superintendent John Dryfhout tells Doyle-Burr that the Vermont marble from which the monument is made is “very porous” and “very difficult to clean off.” The Saint-Gaudens family was not Jewish, a park spokeswoman notes, and it's unclear why the site would be targeted in anti-semitic fashion.SPONSORED: Join the APD team. Are you a seasoned fundraiser who is ready to step into a leadership role with a beloved community hospital in the heart of the Upper Valley? APD's strong foundation is built on almost 90 years of care and the core values of kindness, community, partnership, and service. We invite you to apply to join our team and help shape the future of an innovative and vibrant element of New Hampshire’s only academic medical system. Email [email protected], call (603) 308-0812 or go here for more information. Sponsored by APD.“These [are] topics that you don't talk about when you're picking your kid up from the bus stop with the other mothers." That's Thetford's Kate Van Arman, who served as an Army nurse for two decades, talking to VPR's Lexi Krupp about the weekly Monday-night virtual book club for Upper Valley veterans. It brings together vets from various US wars—Vietnam, Afghanistan—to read what writers from Aeschylus forward have said about war. “It allows me to see that warfare―the visceral and the important aspects...of what war can do to a person―hasn't changed since antiquity,” says Leb's Anant Shukla.The dreaded Asian jumping worm. "Gardening Guy" Henry Homeyer has discovered an infestation of them in his garden, and in the VN he details what to look for and why finding them is bad news: They can turn soil sterile. They stay near the surface, he writes, and you'll see soil that looks like coffee grounds were spilled on it. What to do? You can try removing them by hand if the infestation isn't in a large area. But if it is? Well, let's just that Henry's plan involves lots of flames. And his sage advice: "We will get through this."“It was a typical storm drain—the kind that people drop their keys down into, which is a more common thing than people falling into them.” That's Concord fire chief Sean Brown, talking to the Monitor after a man fell 15 feet into a storm drain in the parking lot at the Steeplegate Mall. The cover was off, he told the firefighters who rescued him, and he didn't notice as he walked toward the hole. A firefighter reached him by ladder; once back on the ground, the man declined a visit to the hospital.NH Exec Council meets again, rejects $27 million from feds for vaccine help. There were protesters this time, too—about 170 of them, NHPR's Allie Fam reports—and unlike at the Exec Council's last, disrupted meeting, state police made nine arrests. The meeting was marked by an angry back-and-forth between Republicans on the council and Gov. Chris Sununu, but in the end, the four GOP members opted to reject the contracts. At a press conference later, Sununu said they had “sent our tax dollars back” due to “conspiracy theories.”“Dire” and “life-and-death.” That's the situation at Androscoggin Valley Hospital in Berlin, NH, reports WMUR's Tim Callery. Coos County is seeing a surge in Covid cases, and the small hospital has had to try to transfer patients elsewhere to make room for new ones. "We're also seeing heavy volume in terms of ICU patients, and honestly, patients that are struggling to make any progress with this," says the hospital's James Patry. Berlin Fire Chief Jay Watkins expects things to get worse before they improve. “It’s quite obvious that we’re in the up-rise from Covid," he tells Callery.Study ties high cost of living in NH to zoning restrictions. The report, published yesterday by the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy and St. Anselm College’s Center for Ethics in Society, argues that land-use regulations "suppress" building, and thus drive up the price of housing. "By reducing zoning restrictions," writes author Jason Sorens, "New Hampshire could substantially cut the cost of living for thousands of families.” He notes that regions with the strictest regs, including the Upper Valley and the Seacoast, correlate with areas with the costliest housing, reports NH Bulletin's Ethan DeWitt.Turns out, the delay in opening the border to visitors from the north might be good timing. This will stun you, but businesses in VT (and NH) are pretty tickled with Tuesday's announcement that the border will open to non-essential travel from Canada in November. What's interesting, writes Anne Wallace Allen in Seven Days, is that some businesses—think Kingdom Trails—are worried that, short-staffed as they are, handling an influx of tourists might be tough. But as foliage season winds down, one hotelier tells Allen, "there will be more availability. It’s a good time to come back.”That Heady Topper you’re sipping? It's fighting climate change. Until recently, only large-scale brewers in this country could harness a new technology that prevents release of carbon dioxide during the beer-making process, writes VT Digger’s Emma Cotton. Now a company in Texas has created a carbon-capture system scaled to support a smaller operation—like the Alchemist in Stowe. Once captured, the CO2 may be used to—wait for it—carbonate the beer at canning stage. By next year, the Alchemist expects to run its entire production through the planet-friendly system.Two mainstay VT meteorologists issue their final forecasts. Giants of VT media, longtime weather broadcasters Tom Messner and Sharon Meyer are passing the torch. In a retrospective for Seven Days, Dan Bolles writes that both landed in their careers quite by accident. Messner answered an ad for a small NY station “desperate to find a weatherperson.” Meyer meant to be a veterinarian, till she visited a studio and realized “you can actually make a living doing TV.” The two "arrived together, will leave together, call each other friends," Bolles writes. And both will stay in this place they love.Definitely not pets. London's Natural History Museum has announced the winners of the 2021 Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards, with the overall prize going to French photographer and biologist Laurent Ballestra for his photo of camouflage groupers in French Polynesia leaving a mating frenzy—which occurs once a year under a full moon. These are remarkable photos. Unfortunately, the only way to see all of them is to visit the exhibition in person (it opens tomorrow), but you can get a good taste of them via Gizmodo.
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The annual Brattleboro Literary Festival gets underway today at 5 pm. It runs through Sunday, and since it's free and all online, there's every reason to go. One of its highlights is this evening at 7, when Bob Woodward and NBC's Robert Costa sit down to talk about Woodward's book on the Trump administration, Peril (you'll need to make sure you register in advance). But there's so much more: Shanta Lee Gander and Bernice McFadden, Jia Lynn Yang, Michael Gorra and Louis Menand, Francine Prose, Jonathan Alter, Chard deNiord, W. Ralph Eubanks, poets Jane Hirshfield and Edward Hirsch...among many others.
This evening at 7, the Norwich Bookstore hosts author and garden historian Marta McDowell online, talking about her new book, Unearthing the Secret Garden. It's about the life of Frances Hodgson Burnett—author of, you guessed it, The Secret Garden—and, in particular, her gardening life. She had four of them: "a lost one in Kent, a fictional one in Yorkshire, and her last two gardens on Long Island and Bermuda.”
Also at 7 in the Loew Auditorium, Hop Film screens The Loneliest Whale, Joshua Zeman's 2021 film about the "52 Hertz Whale," known familiarly as "52." First discovered by the Navy in 1989, 52 uses a frequency to call out to other whales that no other whales use. "Because 52's sound is unique, attached to this one lone denizen of the ocean, it's believed that he's calling for friends who possibly don't understand him—or for another whale of his specific type who simply doesn't exist," the Hop writes. The film's cinematographer, Alan Jacobsen, and Dartmouth-grad oceanographer Ingrid Biedron will be on hand for a discussion afterward.
This evening at 7:30, Honky Tonk Angels starts its run at Artistree's Grange Theater in S. Pomfret. The three-woman show features the music of Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, and others, woven into a story about three women, each determined to get to Nashville, who meet at a Greyhound station; tunes ensue. Masks and proof of vaccination required.
Even before her singing career began at the age of 5, Oumou Sangaré was a performer, singing in the streets of Bamako, Mali, to help her mother after her father left the family. Over the half-century since, she has become a world music star, featured on the festival circuit, performing with everyone from Baaba Maal to Beyoncé and Béla Fleck, becoming a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France. Here she is last year with a backup band made up of standout Malian and central African (and one French) musicians in their own right,
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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