Daybreak Thursday 9/10/20

A TREAT TO SEE YOU, UPPER VALLEY!

Today's the day things start to change. The front that's been hanging around up north is heading out, though it'll take its own sweet time. There's cooler air behind, but we won't really see that until tonight. Foggy and cloudy to start, then mostly sunny for a while, highs in the low 80s, and then incoming clouds and a chance of showers in the afternoon. Down into the high 40s tonight.Or, looked at another way, things have already started changing. Quechee photographer Lisa Lacasse was in Barnard yesterday. You know that one eager tree that's always ahead of everyone else to say that fall really is inevitable? Here's the one at Silver Lake.In special meeting, Co-op board, acting manager shed light on conflict. Faced with the need for a new board president and the weekend news that acting general manager Paul Guidone planned to step down after the board partially rebuffed his confidential set of 13 demands, the board met Tuesday night and, at the urging of member Nick Clark, made Guidone's conditions public. Former board member Don Kreis watched on Zoom and writes that the conditions "demand that the Board act like a Board and not like a bunch of squabbling preschoolers." He details and explains them at the link.Recount on its way in state Senate primary. With just 68 votes separating Lebanon City Councillor Sue Prentiss from Dartmouth prof and former state Rep. Beatriz Pastor, Pastor has asked for a recount. "I want to be able to confirm for all my supporters that they can have faith in the process,” she tells the VN's John Gregg. Prentiss responded last night, "It’s part of the process. It’s a democracy. I respect Beatriz Pastor’s right, or anybody’s right, to ask for a recount,” "This is how blacksmiths or telegraph operators must have felt at one time." As you know if you happened to read him in the VN, Tris Wykes likes to tell stories—and after growing up here, he chose local sports as his medium. He was laid off when the paper downsized at the start of the pandemic, but now he's going solo with a new blog. "Games mean so much more to us than their scores, and it’s time for me to try and describe their magic and exhilaration and agony for you in a different medium," he writes. It's a fine thing to see for the Upper Valley's sports and news scenes.Dartmouth students are back and taking a dim view of parties. At least, that's what some of them tell the VN's Anna Merriman. “People are rightfully pissed,” one incoming freshman says about the news that 23 Tuck students have been quarantined after a dorm party. “It’s kind of looked down on if you have a party,” another freshman tells Merriman. Members of the class have organized online, and agreed to tell the school if they hear of a large gathering happening on campus. “It’s clear that we’re not going to party,” she says."I tossed an ant into the air and watched it disappear amid a swirl of wings." Writer and naturalist Ted Levin was out in his yard Tuesday, just before sunset, when he noticed a "frenzy" of dragonflies, circling and plunging through the air, "like grains of rice in a roiling boil." There were green darners and others, and he was entranced and perplexed... until he noticed a swarm of winged ants rising from his walkway, drawing the dragonfly-by. "An hour later, when the ant exodus ended, the dragonflies left, a roving band of aerial predators in search of another windfall."There's good loon news this year. Counts are up in both NH and VT, the VN's Liz Sauchelli reports: five times as many "territorial pairs" as when NH's Loon Preservation Committee started counting in 1975 (and eight more than last year), and triple the loon population in VT compared to 20 years ago. The big factors: banning lead tackle and boaters learning to give loons space. “Competition between loons is becoming a bit of an issue, which is actually kind of a good sign as we have more and more loons around and they’re occupying most of our big lakes," says the VT Center for Ecostudies' Eric Hanson. GOP officials sue to block VT mail-in voting plan. They argue that Secretary of State Jim Condos' plan to mail a general-election ballot later this month to every registered voter creates a scenario "ripe" for voter fraud. Responds Condos: "We are confident that we stand on firm legal ground to prevail in this lawsuit, which attempts to force voters to choose between their safety and their right to vote." Meanwhile, in NH a judge has ruled that the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign can join a legal bid to fight a lawsuit by the American Federation of Teachers seeking to expand absentee-ballot access.Really? Just plain ol' VP? VPR and Vermont PBS announced yesterday that their boards have voted to merge; the new organization will be incorporated as Vermont Public. As Seven Days' Paul Heintz writes, "VPR would bring to the joint entity one of the largest and strongest newsrooms in the state. Vermont PBS, which has largely stuck to cultural and educational programming, would provide an enormous cash cushion, thanks to a 2017 spectrum sale that netted $56 million for the TV station." VP is slated to launch in July next year—if it gets FCC approval and tax-exempt status from the IRS.So, just who are these Covid refugees who landed in Vermont? Pretty much impossible to pigeonhole, it turns out. Seven Days' Chelsea Edgar, Courtney Lamdin, and Sasha Goldstein profile some of them: a Missouri family looking for sane public health standards, an unemployed retail worker leaving Massachusetts after her father's death, an epidemiologist and college prof from DC with an underlying heart condition, a newly graduated student from Newark who's headed back there—but will keep on doing the anti-racism workshops she started in Vergennes while she was there. And more.Devil's Washbowl. Popple Dungeon. Smuggler's Notch. And what's with all the Lost Nations? For the third time in as many years, VPR's Brave Little State spent some time recently looking into Vermont's more curiously named roads (or, in the case of the Notch, a place). And as you'd guess, they have stories behind them: the Pigman in Northfield, a particularly dark stretch of road in Chester, smuggling that either did or did not actually happen during the War of 1812 and Prohibition, and... well, Lost Nation. It's complicated."A habit formed by time, urgency, community, history, and a need to survive together." Long before crowdfunding and the sharing economy, writes Vicky Mochama in the Canadian online mag The Walrus, Black people in the US and Canada were taking care of one another through their own, informal money pools. "Your moms and aunties get together, they cackle loudly for a couple of hours, and later, your mother says not to worry, you will be going to university." But mutual aid is not just about money, she writes. "You’re now in a community of giving, with all the joys and burdens that entails."It really can fly! So, you remember that personal hovercraft Norwich's Jake Laser built in his parents' basement? The last time we saw it, he was able to get it off the ground and keep himself steady with the help of a support structure. Well, now he's gone and made it air-worthy—and took his first long flight at Storrs Pond, where he'd had swimming lessons and camp as a kid, and where the staff didn't turn him down when he called to ask if he could fly a large drone there. With that under his belt, he and his drone (now dismantled and packed up) are headed out to LA to start working on the next stage.

Meanwhile...

News that connects you. If you like Daybreak and want to help it keep going, here's how:

Dave Clark plays what may be his last gig tonight—from 6-8 at the Kedron Valley Inn. Here's guessing he'll draw as much of a crowd as can safely gather. 

 with longtime performing partner Rob Oxford, at the Anonymous Coffeehouse in Lebanon, as filmed by Chad Finer.

See you tomorrow.

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