GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Sunny, cooler. Yesterday's system moved out overnight and we should see increasingly blue sky today. But it'll also be blustery, with winds out of the northwest and temps not getting out of the 30s. Mid-teens tonight.If you're heading out first thing... In its daily email road report, VTrans says, "Most primary roads are reporting as bare and dry with a little blown-in snow on the shoulders. Some black ice is possible in open sections and cold spots.... Most of this snow and black ice should be cleared out by daybreak as sunshine and freshly laid down road treatments go to work. Gusty winds throughout the state have been felling trees and branches, drivers should be on the lookout for suddenly appearing road debris." Seems good for NH, too.Woodstock to recount sales-tax vote. On town meeting day, voters rejected a 1-percent local-option tax by nine votes, 417-426 (with 24 blanks). Now, reports Liz Sauchelli in the Valley News, a recount will take place Thursday morning at Town Hall with 10 justices of the peace counting ballots by hand. Town Clerk Charles Degener tells Sauchelli it's been a long time since the town faced a margin this close. “I think years ago when we had one of the town and village merge votes, there was a tight margin and we had a recount,” he says.Leb city council to weigh dropping mask mandate. It will take up the issue at its March 16 meeting, reports the Union Leader's Meghan Pierce (possible paywall). “I feel like it’s time we do the public discussion with so much swirling around about masking,” Mayor Tim McNamara said at a meeting last week. The Lebanon schools intend to drop their mandate on March 14. During the discussion, councilor Karen Liot Hill noted the schools "relied entirely on Gov. Sununu’s relaxation," not on CDC guidelines and data, and that the city council's move to discuss the issue does not mean it will drop the mandate.Hanover town manager search nearing end of first stage. It's been a quarter-century since the town had to find someone to steer its administration, and selectboard member Bill Geraghty, who's leading the search to replace longtime manager Julia Griffin, tells The Dartmouth's Frank Blackburn that one priority is finding a candidate who intends to stick around. “We don’t expect them to stay 25 years, but [we don’t want] someone who is just coming in and leaving," he says. The consultant reviewing applicants will meet with the selectboard this week; members intend to choose finalists by early April.River Valley Club, FitKids offer free childcare to employees to help address shortage. In a 2021 study, UNH researchers found there'd been a 12 percent loss in childcare providers in the Upper Valley over the previous four years. Now, reports NHPR's Daniela Allee, Woodrow Fitness—the parent company for the RVC and FitKids—has decided to offer childcare free to all qualified employees. "FitKids will have the ability (hopefully if this benefit works like we think it might) to offer childcare to an additional 50 families and reach our care capacity," says RVC marketing director Ross Dutille.
SPONSORED: Summer Camp for Young Classical Musicians. Classicopia Summer Chamber Music Camp is back! Two week-long sessions of day camp in August are open to ages 8-18. Incredible faculty from across the country will guide students through a fun and immersive experience. Chamber music, masterclasses, and more. Find out more and register at the maroon link above. Also, don’t miss our upcoming “The Dancing Cello” concerts with the mother/daughter team Cecylia Barczyk and Elizabeth Borowsky, March 18-20. Info and tickets here. Sponsored by Classicopia.March’s signs of spring: sap buckets, skunk-cabbage, unfrozen frogs. As in wood frogs, which, writes Julia Pupko of the VT Center for Ecostudies, “freeze solid and internal functions cease” during the winter, thawing out and resuming life only as the ice melts. Along with these chilly amphibians, the VCE’s March field guide includes a handful of hopeful harbingers, like Pupko’s nice dissection of the sugar maple to explain how and why its sap flows. And as muskrats and bald eagles begin to breed, on the icy forest floor an odd-looking cabbage creates its own heat to spring forth.Transit options expand in Upper Valley. There's service between Claremont and Lebanon, Vital Communities notes in a new blog post, and an expansion by Tri-Valley Transit to serve Strafford, Tunbridge and Chelsea (along with its extensive network through Orange and Addison counties). If you're looking to cut down on greenhouse gases or just on gas use period, the page gets you easy links to AT (Canaan, Enfield, Hanover, Hartford, Lebanon, Norwich); TVT; the Southeast VT MOOver (the I-91 corridor south of WRJ) and Southwestern Community Services (Claremont, Charlestown, and Newport).Got thoughts on getting around Lebanon or on housing in NH?
The city is looking for input from both residents and non-residents as it sets out to develop its first-ever comprehensive plan for walking and bicycling. It wants to design a network that makes being a pedestrian or bicyclist easier and safer. There's a good graphic of where things stand right now and where they could be headed, and a survey digging into where problems currently lie and where (literally) the city should place its priorities.
Meanwhile, for the first time ever, all of NH's regional planning commissions are coordinating an effort to assess housing needs—and what types of housing might best suit residents. The Upper Valley Lake Sunapee Regional Planning Commission has gone up with two surveys, one for Upper Valley NH residents, the other for local businesses, gauging what kind of housing people live in now, what they'd like to see, and which housing issues directly affect towns and neighborhoods.
NH economic recovery picture mixed. In presentations to legislative committees Friday, analysts from Moody's and the NH Fiscal Policy Institute noted that while its "gross state product" has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, NH's labor market has not—and that the state's recovery "appears to be slowing compared to the rest of the country," reports NH Bulletin's Ethan DeWitt. Both older workers and adults aged 25-34 have shown notable drops in workforce participation, and though recreation and hospitality have seen people return, it's been slower in manufacturing and retail. Renny Cushing, NH House Democratic leader until last week, dies after battle with prostate cancer. Cushing had announced last Wednesday that he was taking a leave from his leadership role on the advice of his doctors. A self-described "fading romantic" and "aging revolutionary,” he began his political career as a co-founder of the Clamshell Alliance opposing the Seabrook nuclear plant in the 1970s, and more recently led the successful 2019 effort to abolish NH's death penalty. He was 69, and in his eighth term in the House."Like a life-size Etch A Sketch, the landscape is continually transformed by recurring snowfall." If you've got a long memory, you may recall that in the first summer of the pandemic Middlebury-based photographer Caleb Kenna ran a stunning series of drone photos in The New York Times. Yesterday he got a repeat—only with the wintertime landscape as his muse. The photos are all on the western side of the state... but they could be around here. (Thanks, FT!)A century-old German “flying train” still feels like the future of mass transit. We are in a heyday of historic film footage going online. And with digital restoration techniques the recorded past now comes so cleanly into focus, it’s startling. From MoMA’s film vault emerges this 1902 reel—shot on 62mm Mutoscope, an early motion-picture capture device—of the world’s oldest electric suspension monorail, Germany’s Wuppertal Schwebebahn, soaring over the city like a pinnacle of engineering and innovation—which it was. It's like early IMAX. This version has the train running alongside itself today.
And the numbers...
Dartmouth cases continue to fall, with 39 active cases reported yesterday, compared to 53 last Thursday. The college's dashboard reports 30 active undergrad cases (+2 since Thursday), fewer than 5 among grad and professional students, and 9 among faculty/staff (-4). There have been 83 combined new cases among students over the previous seven days, as well as 20 among faculty/staff. 25 students are isolating on campus, somewhere between 5 and 10 are isolating off-campus, and 9 faculty/staff are in isolation.
NH continues to drop, with a 7-day average now of 151 new cases a day, compared to 203 earlier last Thursday. The state reported 172 new cases Friday, 146 Saturday, 158 Sunday, and and 42 yesterday, bringing it to 299,651 in all. There have been 5 deaths reported since Thursday; the total now stands at 2,403. Hospitalizations are still dropping: 56 people are currently hospitalized (-21 since Thursday). The state reports 1,045 active cases statewide (-443) and 142 (-33) active cases in Grafton County, 59 (-3) in Sullivan, and 75 (-22) in Merrimack. In town-by-town numbers, the state says Lebanon has 50 (+12 since Thursday), Hanover has 42 (-11), Claremont has 17 (+3), New London has 16 (+5), Newport has 12 (-6), Charlestown has 8 (+3), Grantham has 5 (-4), and Haverhill, Rumney, Orford, Lyme, Canaan, Orange, Grafton, Enfield, Plainfield, Cornish, Croydon, Sunapee, and Newbury have 1-4 each. Piermont, Wilmot, and Unity are off the list.
VT's trend remains in the right direction, with the state reporting 211 new cases Friday, 131 Saturday, 95 Sunday, and 57 yesterday, bringing it to 113,407 total. There were 3 new deaths over that time, with 607 all told. Hospitalizations have dropped a little: As of yesterday, 25 people with confirmed cases were hospitalized (-7 since Thursday), with 3 of them (-1) in the ICU. Windsor County saw 36 new cases over the last four days, with 152 in the last two weeks and 8,393 overall, while Orange County added 25 to reach 4,787 overall, with 115 in the past two weeks. Case numbers in Upper Valley towns in VT dropped again last week, with 109 new weekly cases reported last Friday vs. 171 the week before: Springfield +46; Hartford and Hartland +9; Windsor +7; Bradford +6; Chelsea +5; Newbury, Randolph, Weathersfield, and Woodstock +4; Killington +3; Thetford and Tunbridge +2; and Bridgewater, Norwich, Royalton, and W. Fairlee +1. There were no new cases reported in Barnard, Bethel, Cavendish, Corinth, Fairlee, Pomfret, Reading, Sharon, Strafford, Vershire, or W. Windsor.
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At 6:30 this evening, the libraries in Canaan, Lyme, and Plainfield jointly host NH-based art educator Jane O'Neail for an online talk, "Fierce Females in Art." O'Neail will offer an overview of the history of women artists, then look more closely at the works of several major women artists from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, including Artemisia Gentileschi and Mary Cassatt.
At 7, Here in the Valley has revived its Tuesday Jukebox, both in person and livestreamed. This evening, emcee and fiddle ninja Jakob Breitbach welcomes acoustic-folk/pop singer-songwriter Devan Tracy to his Speakeasy Studio in WRJ for conversation and music. The online version will be on HitV's YouTube channel; for in-person, email Jakob. Info on both at the link.
Also at 7, the Norwich Public Library and VT Center for Ecostudies host an online talk by VCE biologies Kevin Tolan about vernal pools. Lots of species, including spotted salamanders, have evolved to rely on them—but as development and climate change alter the landscape, they're disappearing. Tolan will talk about the pressures bearing down on vernal pool communities and what's being done to conserve them. Here's the Zoom link.
And also at 7 pm, Still North Books & Bar brings in writer and Dartmouth grad Echo Brown, whose young adult novel The Chosen One is a no-holds-barred recounting of the experiences at Dartmouth of a first-gen Black student from Cleveland named Echo Brown. She'll be in conversation via Zoom with fellow alum Deimosa Webber-Bey, a librarian at Scholastic.
The other nightAs I was driving home-I reached my free hand –Across the passenger seat.I imagined you holding itBefore the light changed –Then I returned both hands to the wheel.I found a parking spaceTwo blocks from my apartmentBeneath a large maple-(Lord, I love this city)And turned to kiss you anyway.
—"Dearest Kadijah," by
, recommended by Nancy Welch and chosen by poetry editor Michael Lipson.
See you tomorrow.
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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