Daybreak Thursday 6/25/20

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Warm and drier. Looks like a pretty great day on tap, plenty of sunshine, temps spending most of their time in the 70s, with a high only in the low 80s. There'll be a fairly steady breeze from the southwest, which will also help dry things out. Partly cloudy tonight, lows in the mid-50s.

Let's just get to it...

VT identifies new clusters in Rutland and Windham counties. The cluster in Rutland County is tied to a workplace in Fair Haven, with 12 cases so far. At his press conference yesterday, health commissioner Mark Levine refused to identify the company, saying that "could be identifying and injurious to the population." The cases in Windham County involve a single family. Levine said the state is doing further testing in both counties.Enfield town employee tests positive. In a news release on Tuesday, the town said the employee had traveled out of state and been placed on 14-day quarantine as a result; it was notified of the positive test result Tuesday morning. Municipal employees who came in contact with their colleague have now gone on 14-day self-quarantine; they'll also be tested. "We do not currently believe the employee came into direct contact with members of the public during working hours in the time since exposure," the town says. (Thanks, MH!)Dartmouth students can be on campus two out of four terms, large gatherings banned. In yesterday's "Community Conversation," Provost Joe Helble laid out some details of the college's plans ahead of the official announcement, which will go out in an email on Monday. Students will get their own bedrooms, either in singles or two-room doubles, and will be asked to consent to testing when they return, as well as to followup testing during the term. They'll also be required to wear masks in common spaces, at least during the fall term. DHMC expects to increase its testing capacity to 1,500 a day. Leb skate park to sport lights. The Rusty Berrings Skate Park was created by Buddy and Ginny Kirschner in 2017 in memory of their son, Tyler, and it's become a go-to spot for skateboarders and scooter riders from many miles around. Now they've raised $100,000 to install lights, making it possible to pursue the sports in the cool of the night. The lights will turn on for the first time next Tuesday.Quechee Lakes wants to use herbicide to kill milfoil; Hartford frets. The invasive plant has been tangling up Lake Pinneo, and the Quechee Lakes Landowners Association is hoping that a one-day application of ProcellaCOR, which was approved in VT last year, will help solve the problem without harming other plants or swimmers. Their application to the state for a permit, however, drew an objection from Hartford officials, who worry that the chemical could leach into the groundwater and affect a town-owned well about 250 feet away. QLLA counters that the aquifer under Lake Pinneo flows away from Hartford’s well. (VN)"We were getting bendy pizzas that just didn’t hold their shape.” Norwich's Charlotte Rutledge runs the test kitchen at King Arthur Flour, and she's about to take a star turn in the NYT Magazine, in an article by Tejal Rao that went online yesterday about her team's breakout approach to deep-dish pizza. During her pregnancy last summer, Rao writes, "she nauseatingly cut into dozens and dozens of pizzas, testing out dough styles, sauces, methods of baking and more, not knowing she was at work on a superstar recipe." The twin secrets to crisp crust? A cast-iron skillet and cheese underneath the sauce. "My demands are way different than they were before. I think white cultural institutions that want to engage with Black folk right now should just step out of the way and let the people that are doing the work do it." That's JAG Productions' Jarvis Green explaining to Seven Days why he declined an interview offer. So they countered: Interview someone you admire. Green's conversation with Lillie Harris, a 28-year-old graphic artist and student at the Center for Cartoon Studies, about how Black artists are responding to the moment, is at the link.Or if you're up in Burlington on a weekday afternoon this summer, you could have your own conversation. Danyeh Gutema grew up in VT, was one of the few Black students at Essex High School, and is home from Cornell for the summer. He's set up a table on the Church Street pedestrian mall with two signs taped to a folding table: “It’s uncomfortable. Join me and let’s talk about race,” and, “We move forward by talking to each other.” People have been taking him up on it, and Seven Days' Ken Picard checks in on how it's going.Crotched Mountain School to close. The school, in Greenfield, NH, serves young people and adults with developmental and behavioral disabilities, and its history dates back to the '50s. “Our organization has had financial challenges for many years,” CEO Ned Olney wrote in a public letter. "Ongoing financial challenges including the Great Recession, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic, forced the decision.” The campus will close by Nov. 1, though the foundation that runs the school will continue community-based services.NH could face evictions crisis. That's the warning from housing experts in the state, who are alarmed by the combination of expiring eviction bans and the ending of the federal boost to unemployment benefits. “It seems like August is when we’re likely to see this perfect storm come together. You can see the radar, you can see it coming,” said Ben Frost of the New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority earlier this week. (Scroll down)VT ranks second in country for proportion of jobs lost due to pandemic. Researchers at LendingTree, the online financial-services firm, looked not at unemployment figures, but at the difference between total non-farm employment in April 2019 and April 2020. Michigan ranked first, with a 23 percent drop; VT's was 21.5 percent. All told, the Northeast accounts for 10 of the states in the top 15. NH ranks 11th. The researchers don't say what adding farm jobs to the mix would show.Rotarians help keep milk from being dumped. Overall, 10 Rotary clubs around Vermont, including WRJ's, raised $10,000 to help the state buy raw milk from dairy farmers. Together with a grant from the VT Community Foundation, the effort kept 32,000 gallons of milk from being tossed, Seven Days reports. Instead, it was processed into yogurt, butter, and milk to be given away by the Vermont Foodbank. VT crowdsources community recovery strategies. In an effort to help businesses and towns rebuild from the pandemic, a subset of the state's economic recovery task force has created a website for communities to share steps they're taking and, ideally, glean ideas from others. The projects include summer drive-in entertainment in the Northeast Kingdom, ShiftMeals, a 48-hour gift card challenge for downtown Brattleboro merchants (it raised $57K), boosting wifi connections, and hiring a dedicated "recovery navigator" for local businesses, as Montpelier did. "Like many rock n' rollers, adult luna moths survive on the charge of youth." Thetford naturalist and writer Ted Levin is still keeping daily track of his home turf. The bitterns are gone, turkeys have quieted down, but fireflies are out and luna moths are now on their last glorious end run. As adults, they don't eat or drink or excrete, Levin writes. "They’re just a package of eggs or sperm..., the most gorgeous moth imaginable." Especially when lit from beneath by the amber glow of a lamp. I swore no more luna moth photos, but I'll make an exception for this one by David Russ, of a luna moth on the Mica lamp on his porch last week. Singular, strange...and smelly. That's how writer JW Ocker, who does a regular column on New Hampshire oddities, describes Morphy, arguably the star of the greenhouses atop Dartmouth's Life Sciences Center. Morphy is their seven-foot-tall corpse flower, native to Sumatra, that looks "more like a prop for a science fiction movie than a real, living thing," Ocker writes. It's bloomed only three times, most recently in 2018. Ocker's seen it bloom twice, and "those experiences were among my most favorite in a life of chasing oddity." Oh, the smell? "Kind of like bad crab."News that connects you. If you like Daybreak and want to help it keep going, here's how:

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And speaking of joint efforts, here's

, a young Maine musician who collaborated on this original polska across the Atlantic with his friend Samuel Lundh, a Swedish musician whom he met first at a music festival in Sweden and then serendipitously a few weeks later on a train. Footage is from two years' worth of Fishman's travels.

(Thanks, GF!)

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

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