Daybreak Thursday 5/20/21

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Warmest day of the year so far. There's a thermal ridge of high pressure in place above us, and it's going to produce some heat down here. Not that many clouds out there, either, so we'll have a mostly sunny day, temps getting into the mid-80s. If there are any afternoon thunderstorms they'll most likely be over the mountains. Winds from the south, mid-50s tonight. Two reasons to get out in the morning...

12-year-old boy rescued after fall into Fairlee ravine. He was on a hike yesterday morning with his mother and brother along Glen Falls Brook, just west of Lake Morey, when he slipped off the trail and tumbled down a 30-foot ravine. Upper Valley Ambulance responded and called in support from area fire departments and the Orange County Sheriff's Department. Rescuers set up a pulley system and pulled the boy, "who was conscious but bleeding," out of the ravine, the Valley News reports. He was taken to DHMC. Fire in Thetford destroys barn; house, people safe. Sparks from the structure fire on Cream Street yesterday afternoon set off small fires in the woods, a neighbor tells Sidenote's Nick Clark, "but the fire departments kept it all under control. No one was hurt." Crews from Bradford, Fairlee, Hanover, Hartford. Lyme, Norwich, Orford, Thetford, West Fairlee, and Vershire all responded. The cause remains unknown. As Clark points out, Thetford, along with about half of Orange County and a good bit of Windsor County, is in a moderate drought.SPONSORED: Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital's Emergency Department is always here for the Upper Valley. The Emergency Medicine team at APD delivers you personalized and professional care close to home, now with a unified electronic health record and regional staffing with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Learn more in the video at the title link above. We don’t want you to experience a health emergency, but we are always here for you when you do. Sponsored by APD. "We want to show films that are helping us make sense of the world we're living in and who we are in this changing world." That's Samantha Davidson Green, one of the moving forces behind White River Indie Films, whose annual festival opens  tomorrow, talking to Seven Days' Travis Weedon. The festival will hold three free outdoor screenings—"kind of a public service. We exist to bring people together through film," Green says—as well as a pile of online films and panel discussions.Fate of Carter Country Club heads to NH Supreme Court. The historic nine-hole course, built in 1923, has been the subject of a tussle between owner Doug Homan, a New London developer who wants to turn the land into housing, and the nonprofit Carter Community Building Association, which contends that a 1986 sale agreement give it the right to retain the golf course. A superior court judge ruled against CCBA last year, writes the Valley News's Tim Camerato, who explains the background and legal to-and-fro."Not only are the students burned out, a lot of the teachers are burned out.” That observation, from a Nashua 12-grader, pretty much sums up the dilemma that confronted members of NH's school reopening task force this week, writes Ethan DeWitt in NH Bulletin. Teachers are quitting or talking about it and many students are looking anxiously at the prospect of full classrooms in the fall. But boosting mental health support will take staff that schools may not be able to afford, especially over the long term. “Hopefully," ed secy Frank Edelblut told the task force, "we can have a meaningful plan."Some chunk of federal aid to NH likely to go to mental health. That message came from state Senate President Chuck Morse yesterday, when he told colleagues on the Finance Committee that while the half-billion dollars of federal aid set to flow to the state this year might not get spent for a while, he wants state health officials to come up with a plan for the state's mental health system before the legislature ends work on the budget, reports NHPR's Josh Rogers. The push comes after last week's state Supreme Court ruling imposing a 3-day limit on holding people in crisis involuntarily in emergency rooms.UNH researchers want to boost tree-sap markets. David Moore, a UNH researcher who used to make birch and beech syrup himself, is now trying to fine-tune processing methods for saps from those trees, as well as sycamore. It's part of an effort to diversify the syrups coming out of northern forests as climate change makes spring more unpredictable for maple producers, reports NHPR's Annie Ropeik. "We're going to see more variable years in terms of good versus bad sugaring seasons and sap yields,” UNH forestry prof Heidi Asbjornsen tells her. Meanwhile, climate spending has emerged as a "flash point" in VT budget considerations. The legislature is in its last days of prepping the budget, reports Seven Days' Kevin McCallum, and its initial pass includes less spending on climate investments than Gov. Phil Scott proposed. One key issue: expanding the state's EV charging infrastructure and how to go about it. On that and other fronts, Scott has taken legislators to task for not appropriating more. Legislative leaders counter that the administration's decision "to highlight these relatively minor differences in a $7.2 billion state budget" is political posturing.VT restricts products containing PFAS. Gov. Phil Scott yesterday signed into law a measure phasing out the manufacture, sale, and use of the toxic group of chemicals in firefighting foam, food packaging, ski wax, and carpets, rugs, and stain-resistant treatments, making the state the first to ban their use in those products. Restrictions on products will take effect over the next several years. Time to get some summertime events on your calendar. There's plenty out there, but Seven Days' Kristen Ravin has a handy guide to seven of them around Vermont, all outdoors. They include music (including Dar Williams and Brooklyn Rider), dance, and circus arts all around Windham County as part of the Bandwagon Summer Series; Trucks, Taps and Tunes up in Essex; the Festival of Fools in Burlington; Shakespeare: Completely Unbound! from the VT Shakespeare Festival; and, of course, Northern Stage's outdoor production of Million Dollar Quartet in August.Maine bags a Dark Sky monopoly in the east. Last year, Katahdin Woods and the Waters National Monument were certified as the East's first Dark Sky Sanctuary by the International Dark-Sky Association. Now, reports Maine Public Radio, the Appalachian Mountain Club's holdings in the nearby 100-Mile Wilderness have been designated a Dark Sky Park (like a sanctuary, only with more infrastructure, like lodges and trails). "The park is expected to drive astronomy-based tourism and additional conservation in one of the darkest remaining night skies in the eastern U.S.," reports MPR's Susan Sharon.I don't know... Do you or do you not want to meet a hairy goosefish? They're... well, you'll just have to see for yourself. Marine biologist and photographer Jeff Milisen is a pioneer of what's called "blackwater photography," in which divers do a deepwater dive at night in the open ocean, attract what's out there using light, and take their picture. All sorts of rare and unknown species have shown up in front of the lens. My Modern Met's Jessica Stewart talked to him about why he does it and the challenges he faces. And includes lots of photos. Sharp-eared enope squids are pretty wild, too.Oh, and while we're talking ocean... It's hot today, which makes you think of summer, which makes you think of the beach, which of course makes you think of sharks. In the ocean. Off the beach. Wouldn't it be cool to know who's out there? Ocearch is a private research group that specializes in Great Whites, but has also been collecting data on other sharks tagged by researchers. They've built a tracker that lets you know, for example, that "Andromache," a nearly 11-foot female white shark who was tagged off Cape Cod last summer, was just hanging out off Long Island the other day. 

So...

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Traditional folk music is a thing in Bulgaria. It's not just that the music itself is complex, with intricate harmonies and knotty rhythms that demand hard practice. It's also woven into the cultural life of the country—weddings and celebrations and hanging out in the village tavern, sure, but also ubiquitous festivals and competitions and high-profile television programs.

...which also just happens to have been used as the inspiration for the theme music for 

Xena: Warrior Princess

.

(At last, KrH!)

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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