GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Still cloudy, a tad warmer. We're between systems today, but cloud cover will be hanging around and there's a slight chance of rain throughout the day, growing likelier as the next system moves in toward evening. High today around 70, down into the lower 50s tonight.It's a busy time out there...
Over in W. Fairlee, for instance, John Pietkiewicz caught this foraging chipmunk with about as much as a mouthful can carry;
And Newbury-based photographer Ian Clark has been checking in on nesting loons (and a pileated and beaver along the way), keeping his distance but with a powerful enough lens to make you feel like you're right there.
Quechee man charged with setting WRJ motel fire. A 30-year-old construction worker, Ethan Lavoie, was arraigned yesterday on multiple charges stemming from the May 23 fire that displaced 14 residents of the former Pleasant View Motel, reports Eric Francis in a Daybreak story. According to a police affidavit, Lavoie went to the Route 4 residential building because of a drug-related dispute with the ex-boyfriend of one of its residents. Finding no one inside the unit, the affidavit says, he lit the bed's sheets on fire, thinking only they would burn. The fire destroyed four of the nine units.In wake of US Supreme Court ruling, Randolph Union High takes down its Black Lives Matter flag. As Alison Novak makes clear in Seven Days, the issue and the history behind it at RUHS are complex. But a couple of weeks ago, after the Court ruled against the city of Boston for discrimination in choosing which banners to fly on its flagpole and a parent requested a "Don't Tread on Me" flag be flown at the high school, the Orange Southwest school board passed a policy that schools can only fly the US and VT flags. Other school districts around the state are grappling with the issue, too.Local VT legislative contests take shape. With the filing deadline past, writes Darren Marcy in the Valley News, several area seats will see contested Aug. 9 primaries. Three Democrats—incumbent Jim Masland, Sharon's Dee Gish, and Norwich's Rebecca Holcombe—are running in the two-seat district that includes Norwich, Thetford, Sharon, and Strafford. In Hartford, incumbent Kevin “Coach” Christie and two other Democrats, Nicholas Bramlage and Esme Cole, are running for two seats. Bradford's Monique Priestley and Fairlee's Lance Mills are facing off for the single seat being vacated by Sarah Copeland Hanzas.SPONSORED: It's time to JUMBLE! The St. Thomas Jumble Sale is back: this Saturday, June 4th, 8am-2pm, 9 West Wheelock Street in Hanover. Join us for fun and bargains, a jazz band, FREE pony rides and FREE ice cream too! Plus, Sunday at noon come for the $1 bag sale and Monday at 10am for the free-for-all. See you there! Sponsored by St. Thomas Episcopal Church.About that Killington closing date... You'll remember that yesterday, an item linked to an article saying the last time skiing continued there into June was 25 years ago. Turns out, there's been June skiing three times since then—twice until 6/1, once to 6/2. But the last time the slopes were open later than that was, indeed, in 1997, when they made it to June 22. If you look at the historic open/close dates at the link, you can't help but notice that way back, Killington tended to open earlier and close later than it has in recent years. (Thanks, JP!)"The trick is to make it thick but not too, too thick. If it sets, they’re not particularly happy." That's the Kilham Bear Center's Ethan Kilham talking to New England Public Media's Nancy Eve Cohen about a mix of baby food and lamb's milk he's preparing, and "they," of course, are the bear cubs he's tending. Cohen visited the Kilhams to follow up on a cub—now named Alma—that was orphaned in Greenfield, MA, back in April and brought to Lyme after being rescued. She talks to Ethan and Ben Kilham about the ins and outs of being a surrogate mother prepping cubs to be released back to the wild.ISO-New England expects enough electricity to meet demand this summer. In its summer forecast, the regional grid manager yesterday said that electricity demand under typical conditions will likely reach 24,686 megawatts (MW) and could hit 26,416 MW in an extended heat wave, while it projects more than 31,000 MW of capacity for consumer demand and reserves it's required to maintain. It also warned, though, that unexpected hits to supplies or spikes in demand could lead it to "call for controlled power outages."The many, many challenges of long Covid. "There’s no way to confirm the illness," writes NH Bulletin's Annmarie Timmins in a long piece on the issues patients face. "It cannot be diagnosed through a test, exam, x-ray, or any other tool. Nor is it possible to make a diagnosis based on symptoms." The result: fights with insurance companies; physicians skeptical about disability benefits or work accommodations; unsympathetic friends. And that's all while dealing with often debilitating symptoms. DHMC's long Covid clinic, the only one in the state, has seen or is scheduled to see over 1,000 patients so far.Survey finds strong support in NH for building more affordable housing. In the poll released Tuesday by St. Anselm College, reports NH Business Review's Bob Sanders, respondents overwhelmingly believed their communities need to build more affordable housing—and, 50 percent to 43 percent, wanted more such housing in their own neighborhoods. There was also general support for changing local zoning regs and limiting how long planning and zoning boards can take to review housing proposals.This pet rabbit has climbed more mountains than you. Take it as a challenge if you must, or simply squeal with delight like the rest of us—that is to say, the tens of thousands of TikTokers who follow Moose the rabbit’s White Mountain adventures. NHPR reports on Sunapee-based hiker Chelsea Eason’s mission to scale all of NH’s 4,000-footers—not with a dog but with her bunny. Eason says her companion makes each journey more relaxing, full of stops to nibble or just to sit and take a breath. With all the attention Moose receives on the trail, hopping onto social media seemed like a no-brainer.Scott signs bills on environment, corporate tax reform, school meals and mascots. The environmental bills, says VPR's Abagael Giles, include measures creating an environmental justice policy and changing current use to give landowners an incentive for letting their forests grow old. The tax measure, writes VTDigger's Lola Duffort, changes how the state calculates a company's presence in VT and is expected to give a boost to manufacturers. And the school bills, Seven Days' Alison Novak reports, extend the free school meal program for all students and prohibit discriminatory school "branding."On the other hand, yesterday he vetoed the Act 250 reform bill. Advocates, writes Emma Cotton in VTDigger, had argued that the updates "relaxed Act 250 in designated areas while installing protections for natural areas...to prevent sprawling development there." But Scott—and municipal leaders around the state—contended that the bill made the Act 250 process, and housing development in particular, "even more cumbersome than it is today," as Scott put it in his veto message.Oh, boy. One more thing to worry about: Trains. Steven Berbeco, whose 802 Ed newsletter brings together national and VT-focused links on education policy and practice for anyone interested in schools, passes along this new video from VTrans for schools to show before summer. Every three hours in the US, says Toni Clithero, the VT coordinator for Operation Lifesaver, a person or vehicle is hit by a train. "Trains move faster and more quietly than you realize," she adds. "Today's trains do not make a clickety-clack sound like the trains of the past... The only sound you'll hear is the wind moving through the wheels.""Some of the best cycling in the country." That would be Vermont, says... well, Vermont, in this paid article in Outside Online. Still, it's got some tempting descriptions: Kingdom Trails; the legendary LAMB loop linking Lincoln, Appalachian, Middlebury, and Brandon gaps; Killington's downhill mountain-biking trails; an 80-mile gravel loop in the southwest; and the VT Mountain Bike Association's Catamount trails up in Williston. The piece doesn't mention the Cross VT Trail between Burlington and Wells River, but in Seven Days, Steve Goldstein writes about how it's all coming together.Try making olive oil the way the ancients did. Olives are synonymous with the ancient Mediterranean world. and methods of extracting their essence predate even the Greeks. There’s evidence that Egyptians were making oil in 2,600 BCE, employing a technique called torsion that continued to be used for millennia. Which could only mean: the technique worked. Archeologist Emlyn Dodd, writing in The Conversation, wanted to find out for himself. Gathering up cheesecloth, a mortar and pestle, and lots of olives, Dodd embarked on some “experimental archeology” to see if that old-timey oil was really any good.Okay, this is just kind of a flip-out. It's an optical illusion that creates "the perception of an illusory expanding central region or 'hole,'" as the Norwegian and Japanese psychologists who report on it wrote last week. It's a little far-fetched to say that it feels like you're falling into a black hole, as Michele Debczak writes in Mental Floss, but when she says, "You may want to sit down before looking at the picture," that's not bad advice. Though 14 percent of you are unlikely to see it. You're probably better off.The Thursday Vordle. For those of you who've just joined Daybreak: This is the Upper Valley version of Wordle, keyed to a word related to an item in yesterday's Daybreak. You'll find it in this spot each day.
From words to numbers... Well, kind of. As you know, the Covid data's in flux—especially in Vermont, but really, everywhere. Dartmouth is ending PCR and in-person antigen testing in a couple of weeks, and Vermont is winding down its testing sites this month. Given the well-known uncertainties that go along with self-reporting of take-home tests, this means that the most basic metric—positive cases—isn't as reliable a measure of what's going on out there as it would be if institutions and states had decided to keep up a robust testing program. For the moment, Daybreak's going to move to once-a-week reporting, most likely on Thursdays, though what that looks like will evolve. Today, though...
If you want to read more about which indicators you might want to look at in this particular moment of high uncertainty, The Atlantic's Caroline Mimbs Nyce has an overview. And the mag's Katherine Wu, who's worth reading every time she publishes, takes a look at what it means to face a virus that's proven so incredibly adept at evolving rapidly: "For now," she writes, "every infection, and every subsequent reinfection, remains a toss of the dice.... Vaccination and infection-induced immunity may load the dice against landing on severe disease, but that danger will never go away completely, and scientists don’t yet know what happens to people who contract 'mild' COVID over and over again."
On Tuesday, Dartmouth reported there had been 152 active cases during the previous 7 days, down a bit from the same as the 163 reported last week. Though undergrads and grad/professional students are holding steady, cases have dropped among faculty/staff, with 72 having active cases over the previous week, compared to 91 a week ago.
NH cases appear to be falling, with a 7-day average now of 423 new cases per day versus 560 a week ago. In all, the state reports 3,482 active cases. There were 8 deaths reported over the past week; the total stands at 2,539. Under the state's rubric of counting only people actively being treated for Covid in hospitals, it reports 24 hospitalizations (-9 over the past week). The NH State Hospital Association reports 89 inpatients with confirmed or suspected cases (-42 since last Thursday) and another 42 Covid-recovering patients. The state reports 236 active cases in Grafton County (-71), 104 in Sullivan (-32), and 326 (-107) in Merrimack. Town-by-town numbers appear to be continuing their general decline (as always, take the specifics with a tablespoon of salt and focus on the trends), with 52 in Hanover (-12), 37 in Lebanon (-29), 29 in Claremont (+4), 25 in Grantham (-15), 16 in Newport (-3), 11 in Haverhill (+3), 11 in Enfield (-1), and fewer than 10 in Piermont, Warren, Orford, Wentworth, Rumney, Lyme, Canaan, Grafton, Plainfield, Springfield, Cornish, Croydon, Sunapee, New London, Wilmot, Charlestown, and Unity.
Vermont is seeing dropping cases in its official numbers (again, this is likely a fraction of the cases that are actually circulating) as well as dropping hospitalizations, but it also reported 30 deaths for May, the highest total since February. Overall, cases have dropped 43 percent in the past two weeks, Erin Petenko writes in her weekly VTDigger wrapup. The state yesterday reported 36 hospitalizations, down from 63 on Monday. Here's the state's weekly surveillance report, released yesterday. It says that statewide community case levels are high.
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Today at noon, German Studies prof Irmela von der Lühe and Jewish Studies chair Veronika Fuechtner will introduce an exhibit in the foyer of Dartmouth's Baker-Berry Library, "Democracy Will Win." They'll be talking over the role of artists and intellectuals in safeguarding democracy with particular reference to the exhibit, which highlights Nobel laureate Thomas Mann's efforts to combat fascism after finding refuge in the US in 1938—and their relevance today.
This afternoon at 4:00, novelist and poet Chris Abani will be giving a reading of his work as part of the creative writing awards ceremony by Dartmouth's English and Creative Writing Department. Abani, who teaches at Northwestern and is the author of the Pen/Hemingway Award-winning Graceland, The Secret History of Las Vegas, and many other works, is this year's judge. In-person in the Sanborn Library.
And today at 6 pm, Feast & Field at Fable Farm in Royalton brings in Celtic harpist Rachel Clemente. Based in New England, she graduated from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow with a degree in traditional Scottish music, was the US National Scottish Harp Champion in 2016, and last year won the US version of the Princess Margaret of the Isles Clàrsach Competition (clàrsach is the Scottish name for the Celtic harp). Gates open at 5:30.
This evening at 7, novelists Chris Bohjalian and Flynn Berry will be talking writing and thrillers in-person at the Briggs Opera House in WRJ, presented by the Norwich Bookstore. Bohjalian's newest book, The Lioness, traces what happens when a Hollywood actress brings her new husband and friends on safari in Tanzania and—hope this isn't giving too much away—they get kidnapped by a bunch of Russian mercenaries. No charge (unless you want a signed copy of the book), but tickets are required.
Also at 7, Hanover High's Students on Stage opens a two-evening run of Ordinary Days, Adam Gwon's four-person "chamber musical" about young New Yorkers searching for connection, happiness, love, taxis, calm, and companionship...and whose lives intersect in unexpected ways. Admission is by donation. (No link).
And anytime, check out CATV's highlights for the week, including the Memorial Day musical tribute to veterans that was held at the VA on Monday; the WRIF panel on the future of movie theaters in the age of streaming (with film critic David Sterritt, James O'Hanlon, the owner of the Savoy Theater in Montpelier, Sydney Stowe, Director of Film at the Hop, and filmmaker and CATV director Samantha Davidson Green); Howe librarian Jared Jenisch talking over seven crucial books on race and racism as part of his ongoing series of "rapid reviews"; and the "Shelf Help" podcast by the region's booksellers and the Book Jam's Lisa Christie, talking over their suggestions for books based on requests from listeners.
If you're the sort who needs something lyrical to ease into your day, there may be no better way to start than with a dose of Celtic harp. Here's Rachel Clemente, who'll be at Feast & Field tonight, with duo partner Dan Houghton (on flute and borderpipes),
The Hiking Close to Home Archives. A list of hikes around the Upper Valley, some easy, some more difficult, compiled by the Upper Valley Trails Alliance. It grows every week.
The Enthusiasms Archives. A list of book recommendations by Daybreak's rotating crew of local booksellers and writers who want you to read. this. book. now!
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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