GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Showers, then sun. Today's system is moving pretty quickly and ought to be out of our hair by midday, after which the clouds will clear, too, the sun will come out, and we'll climb into the mid-60s. Breezy winds from the northwest this afternoon, down to somewhere around 40 overnight.Out and about...
Well, for starters, there was this moose in Hanover yesterday morning checking out the proposed Garipay field dorm site. Lindsay Coker was biking to work. "It was at Garipay just standing there calmly looking around and then crossed Rt. 10 just south of the traffic circle and headed across the golf course towards the river," she writes. "Definitely my most eventful work commute thus far!"
Meanwhile, Bo Hopkins checks in with this poised Eastern Phoebe in Newport, NH. "It is one of the earliest migrants to return from the southern states to nest in New England," he writes. "The Upper Valley is loaded with them right now. Dark above and white below, male phoebes are one of those birds that say their name – a raspy “fee-bee.” Furthermore they are easy to spot, perching in the open before they sally forth to catch flying insects and then return to the exact same place time after time."
Lou's celebrates 75 years. Past and present employees of the Hanover mainstay gathered out front for a photo and there was plenty of good cheer, reports WCAX's Adam Sullivan. But inevitably, there was also a wary eye on the present, with its staffing challenges and need for constant reinvention. Even so, current owner Jarrett Berke says, "Am I pessimistic about the future? No, I’m not." He adds, as Sullivan puts it, that "for the next 75 years, you can expect more of the same—a business that rolls with the punches."D-HH will announce rebrand today. "Now is probably not the time to bring up New Coke," comments Kenyon. In the Valley News, columnist Jim Kenyon can't say what the new brand will be—the hospital network wouldn't tell him—but he writes that it plays a key role in D-HH's efforts to expand in southern NH. Where it will then have to "go head-to-head with Boston’s world-renowned medical centers for patients—and insurance dollars—in the Granite State’s most densely populated areas." He also suggests that some of its smaller affiliate hospitals, like APD, could see a name change.SPONSORED: VINS Owl Festival. Remember to visit the VINS Nature Center for our annual Owl Festival on Saturday, April 16! Gather with live owls, discover their life stories, join in a craft, and play games. Spice up your experience by dressing as your favorite owl! And this Friday, April 15, 6 - 7 PM, please join us for Virtual Owl Friday – Owls: Soul of the Night with author Scott Weidensaul, for an exploration of the weird and little-known world of these nocturnal hunters. Sponsored by VINS.Video surfaces of former Hartford deputy chief—now police chief in Barre—using derogatory language about women. The 19-second video dates to 2014 or 2015, Barre Chief Brad Vail tells VTDigger's Alan J. Keays, adding that he was filmed in the middle of describing a private conversation and that what he said in the video “was unprofessional of me and I’ve dealt with that.” Vail told Barre officials about the video during the hiring process, and says that former Hartford Chief Phil Kasten was aware of it. Barre's city manager tells Keays the video’s surfacing looks like “muckraking.”The guy was really lucky. The moose not so much. A few days after warning motorists to drive carefully at night and watch for moose, the Carroll, NH police (east of Littleton and Bethlehem) got a real-life example: Early yesterday morning they were dispatched to a car that had hit one on Route 302. The driver had minor injuries. The moose died. The car... a mess. "We can’t stress it enough," the PD writes on its FB page: "be vigilant when driving at night! Reduce your speed, stay alert, constantly scan the roadway, use your high beams when you can, and wear your seatbelt!"Got backyard poultry? Keep them inside through June. That's the upshot of experts' advice about the avian flu epidemic that's starting to appear in VT and NH, reports the VN's Claire Potter. It's spread by wild birds—in addition to the bald eagles in VT and geese in NH who've been found to carry it, three mallards in Lebanon tested positive for the virus, Potter writes—and "poultry should be kept away from compost piles, ponds and pools, or other places where they may interact with wild birds." Even boots picking up infected feces in a yard or field could create an outbreak.“Nobody here did anything wrong. These are victimless so-called crimes.” That’s Mark Freeman, the Keene man facing federal charges for running an unlicensed cryptocurrency exchange, doubling down after two of his co-conspirators announced they would be changing their pleas to guilty, reports Ryan Spencer for the Keene Sentinel. Freeman was arrested a year ago after the FBI discovered he and others had illegally handled more than $10 million in bitcoin transactions. Despite the guilty pleas, he says, “I expect they will not be cooperating…because we all believe the state is evil.” NH Supreme Court prepares to step into lawsuit over congressional redistricting. The court yesterday named a Stanford law prof as a "special master" to oversee possible new line-drawing and set a timetable for hearings, reports NHPR's Josh Rogers. But it also said those are "preliminary" steps, and that the legislature could still enact a different redistricting plan. GOP legislators and GOP Gov. Chris Sununu are at loggerheads over the plan passed by the legislature, with no end in sight and the fall elections approaching.$140,000. That's how much the median home price in New Hampshire has risen since 2019. It hit a record $440,000 in March, reports NH Bulletin's Ethan DeWitt—and $350,500 for townhouse/condos. And that home price is up from $400K in February, the first time it had reached that mark. Two years ago, DeWitt writes, the median state income was 126 percent of what was needed to buy a median-priced home. Now? Just 80 percent.6,400 acres north of Squam preserved. The Conservation Fund and the NH Division of Forests and Lands said yesterday that they've completed the preservation of the land in central NH's Beebe River Watershed. The land will be managed for timber harvesting as well as public access for hiking, hunting, fishing, skiing, and snowmobiling. "The dream of walking from the shores of Squam Lake to the height of Mt. Washington on conserved land is now a reality,” says Roger Larochelle, executive director of the Squam Lakes Conservation Society, in a press release.Meanwhile, the Green Mountain National Forest will grow by 2,000 acres. The US Forest Service has bought three parcels in Pownal and Stamford, two of them within a mile of the Long Trail. They'd "caught the eye" of the Trust for Public Land, writes VTDigger's Tiffany Tan, which "saw that the properties can increase the buffer between renowned Green Mountain hiking trails—the Appalachian Trail and Long Trail—and real estate developments and industries." Among other things, Tan reports, the Pownal land hosts American chestnuts, "of which there are very few mature specimens left."VT State Police tell strapped police departments in Springfield, other towns, that its help is limited. “Our desire to help is stymied by the fact that we are experiencing the same challenges,” VSP Col. Matthew Birmingham wrote in a memo last month. “We are currently operating at our lowest staffing levels in decades." Even after implementing a six-point plan requested by the VSP to reorganize police department personnel and create an on-call system, reports VTDigger's Tiffany Tan, police in Shelburne and Springfield are being augmented by state police.“The current surge is under-detected and underreported." That's Timothy Plante, a prof at UVM's med school, commenting to VTDigger's Erin Petenko on the current state of Covid testing—which now relies heavily on at-home tests whose results often are not reported to the state—in VT. With numbers trending upward, Petenko writes, experts are uncertain whether it's the start of a new wave or merely a plateau "with a very gentle upward slope to it," as state health commissioner Mark Levine puts it."The members of the book." The first Jewish community in VT that kept a record of itself didn't have a house of worship, but it did keep a book of minutes. Made up of peddlers and others who settled in Poultney in the 1860s and '70s, its members form the first "chapter" of VPR producer Josh Crane's tour of Jewish life in Vermont for "Brave Little State"—through "Little Jerusalem" in Burlington and the back-to-the-landers of the 1960s to the "Jews in the Woods" gatherings a couple of decades ago and recent arrivals with their own approaches to Jewish life and to honoring those who came before.One of the last two white rhinos on earth—and other award-winning photos. It’s a quietly devastating image: a Kenyan wilderness ranger, trained to help protect the animals from poachers, leans against a female white rhino, an expression like exhaustion on both their faces. Matjaz Krivic’s photo took home one of a handful of prizes in Smithsonian mag’s 19th annual contest. The grand prize winner memorializes an intimate Lunar New Year celebration in Malaysia during pandemic lockdown; another captures the dynamism and pure radiance of a Navajo dancer performing in Sedona.Wait! Is that an iPhone 13? Those California newts. Always needing to check out the latest toys.
And the numbers...
Dartmouth case numbers continue to climb, with 199 active cases reported yesterday (compared to 181 on Thursday). The college's dashboard reports 133 undergrad cases (+40), 42 among grad and professional students (-31), and 24 among faculty/staff (+9).
NH cases are definitely rising, with a 7-day average now of 200 new cases per day, versus 147 on Thursday. The state reported 266 new cases Friday, 228 Saturday, 256 Sunday, and 108 yesterday, bringing it to 304,365 in all. There were 2 new deaths reported during that time; the total stands at 2,459. Under the state's new rubric of reporting only people actively being treated for Covid in hospitals, it reports 10 hospitalizations (+4 since Thursday). The state reports 185 cases in Grafton County (+10), 51 in Sullivan (+22), and 112 (+28) in Merrimack. In town-by-town numbers, it says Hanover has 112 (+4), Plainfield 25 (+20); Lebanon 21 (+6); Claremont 10 (-2); New London 10 (+at least 6); Enfield 7 (+at least 3); Haverhill 5 (no change); Grantham 5 (+at least 1); , and Piermont, Orford, Lyme, Canaan, Springfield, Sunapee, Cornish, Newport, and Charlestown have 1-4 each.
VT cases continue to climb, with the state reporting 247 cases Friday, 233 Saturday, 186 Sunday and 100 yesterday (these are PCR test numbers, and do not include self-reported numbers from Vermonters taking at-home rapid tests), bringing it to 118,520 total and up to a 7-day daily average of 199, compared to 158 Thursday. There were 3 deaths during that time; they stand at 623 all told. Hospitalizations are about the same: As of yesterday, 28 people with confirmed cases were hospitalized (+2), with 5 in the ICU (no change). Windsor County has seen 37 cases since Thursday and 121 over the past two weeks, for 8,816 overall, while Orange County gained 12 cases on the state's tally: It's at 4,884, with 43 in the past two weeks.
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Today at 4:30, Dartmouth's Dickey Center hosts career diplomat, former ambassador to Niger, and former US Deputy Asst Secy of State Bisa Williams for a talk on "Pursuing Peace in Times of War: A Diplomat's Efforts from Mali to Cuba to the UN." Among many other accomplishments, Williams at the moment is leading the Carter Center's efforts as an independent observer of the peace agreement in Mali. Both livestreamed and in-person in Haldeman 41.
At 6 pm today, InDepthNH offers up the second in its (mostly) online series of talks on the sustainability of community journalism. This time around it's Jason Pramas, who's executive editor of the alternative weekly DigBoston and who runs the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. For a journalism conference, he once described himself this way: "Pramas‘ gruff and blunt exterior conceals a gruff and blunt interior. Never pitch him fluff pieces."
This evening at 7, Lebanon journalist Sherry Boschert and WISE program director Kate Rohdenburg will be in-person at the Norwich Bookstore to talk about Boschert's new book, 37 Words: Title IX and Fifty Years of Fighting Sex Discrimination. Officially published today (and a couple months shy of the 50-year anniversary of Title IX's passage), it's the story of that landmark civil rights law—the social movements, legal history, and above all, the people who helped bring about greater gender equity on campus, especially in sports, hiring, housing, and the ways in which colleges and universities respond to sexual assault and harassment.
Also at 7, it's Here in the Valley's Tuesday Jukebox, both in-person and livestreamed. This week fiddler Jakob Breitbach welcomes former Boston, Brooklyn, and now Woodstock, VT resident Ben Kogan, indie-Americana bass player and vocalist, who's headed up the Ben Kogan band and played with artists like Jay Nash and the Contenders, Michael Zsoldos, and Jes and Jakob.
Finally, this week CATV is highlighting this year's Vermont Statewide Spelling Bee—long words, hopes and dreams; NH state Rep. Russell Muirhead (Hanover) talking to VT state Reps. Jim Masland and Becca White about the differences between the NH and VT legislatures; a Co-op cooking class on making green shakshouka for breakfast, lunch, or dinner; and local visual artist Laura Di Piazza on how to do calligraphy.
It is blue-butterfly day here in spring,And with these sky-flakes down in flurry on flurryThere is more unmixed color on the wingThan flowers will show for days unless they hurry.But these are flowers that fly and all but sing:And now from having ridden out desireThey lie closed over in the wind and clingWhere wheels have freshly sliced the April mire.—
Robert Frost,
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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