GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
The weather's still active up there. Don't let the early part of this morning fool you—there's a chance of showers and thunderstorms much of the day and especially this afternoon, before the low pressure system above us scoots off to the east later tonight. Highs in the low 70s, clouds dissipating over the course of the day, and continued good sleeping weather tonight: low 50s.Up in the air, down on the ground...
On Sunday, John Pietkiewicz writes, he noticed an intriguing flourish of clouds shifting above him as he drove up and back to Woodsville. Finally, in Bradford, he pulled over to capture an instant of their movement.
Meanwhile, Lori Harriman was at Tom Thomson's tree farm off 25A in Orford over the weekend. When the lupines are at their peak, Thomson opens his astounding lupine garden to visitors with a high-clearance, 4-wheel or all-wheel-drive vehicle. It's open all this week, until 7 pm on Sunday. Here's more on the garden, from New Hampshire magazine.
Bradford man dies in Newbury VT lake. The incident occurred on Sunday afternoon at Hall's Lake, a popular swimming spot. Beachgoers noticed James Peabody, 72, start swimming, but shortly afterward he appeared to be floating, unresponsive. "At first, I thought maybe he was alive and we could save him,” Chris Wilson of Newbury tells WCAX's Adam Sullivan. Wilson pulled Peabody to shore, but efforts to revive him were unsuccessful. New London Hospital creating urgent care clinic. The 2,400-square-foot walk-in clinic, reports Nora Doyle-Burr in the Valley News, "is aimed both at increasing patients’ access to treatment and also boosting the hospital’s bottom line," according to CEO Tom Manion. Manion expects that it will reduce emergency room visits but increase the overall number of visits to the hospital. SPONSORED: Vermont Tech's Ground Transportation Days for high school students. Learn the basics and beyond at a fun one-day camp at VTC's Randolph Center campus. Rising 9th-12th graders get hands-on experience with cars and engines, and learn about careers in automotive and diesel. $25 includes lunch and a swim. Scholarships available; non-binary/gender non-conforming youth welcome to choose the camp they’ll be most comfortable attending. Girls: Saturday, July 10, 9 am - 2 pm / Boys: Sunday July 11, 9 am – 2 pm. Sponsored by Vermont Technical College.
Women's World Cup returning to Killington. The resort has signed an agreement with US Ski & Snowboard to host the event in November this year and next, reports Dan D'Ambrosio in the Burlington Free Press. Killington had hosted the event 2016-19, before the pandemic shut it down. "Bringing FIS Alpine World Cup racing back to Killington Resort for the 2021/2022 Olympic qualification season is an incredible opportunity for the resort and the surrounding community," Mike Solimano, the resort's president and general manager, says in a press release. So, when's the hotel coming to downtown Lebanon? That's the question Susan Apel asks in her latest Artful post. Downtown could be "destination travel," she writes, what with AVA, the Lebanon Opera House, and the Upper Valley Music Center all right there, the "convivial atmosphere of indoor/outdoor seating at the town’s restaurants," everything going on at Colburn Park during the summer, and soon, the many uninterrupted miles of biking and walking that the new tunnel will usher in.Blue flag irises are out, how to help bobolinks, and a beetle you do not want to feed to your chickens. It's the start of the third week in June, and Northern Woodlands' Elise Tillinghast found the blue flags—"our most common native iris"—by a woodland pond. Meanwhile, she writes, bobolinks are nesting, and they like large, grassy fields—so delaying mowing until late July can help them get their young launched. And rose chafer beetles are showing up on garden flowers—with toxins in their bodies that can kill birds and small animals.That snow arch in Tuckerman's Ravine? Don't go under it. The remarkable feature forms each year where the Tuckerman Ravine Trail steepens and then climbs into the Sluice area, and hikers are often tempted to enter it to cool off. So yesterday, the Mt. Washington Avalanche Center posted a video from last summer, when a hiker entered the arch, which then collapsed, bringing thousands of pounds of ice down. "This incident is what we classify as very low probability and very high consequence," they write. "The best move is for you to enjoy this natural [phenomenon] from a distance." (Thanks, JF!)Delta variant spreading in New England. The Covid variant, originally identified in India, has gone from 1 percent of sampled cases to 3 percent in short order, reports Teddy Rosenbluth in the Concord Monitor. Though the absolute numbers are small—there were 13 identified in NH as of yesterday—officials are concerned because the variant is more contagious and leads to more hospitalizations and deaths than even the so-called British variant. Existing vaccines are largely effective against it, though at a slightly lower rate than with other variants.Free State Project veteran now leads NH House GOP. Jason Osborne, the House majority leader, has helped steer his caucus, with its 213-187 majority, to what NHPR's Josh Rogers calls "a historic year for conservative policies" in NH. "My way of leading is not telling people what to do, but more like figuring out what people want to do and then showing them how to get there,” Osborne says. Though he's kept a low media profile, he's emerged as a player in libertarian circles, with a $50K donation to a PAC for libertarian candidates; 53 of the 76 NH House candidates it backed won last November.NH House, Senate negotiators move ahead with 24-week abortion ban. This is crunch week in the legislature, with conference committees meeting to reconcile differences between bills and the budget versions passed by the two houses. Yesterday, reports Ethan DeWitt in NH Bulletin, budget negotiators agreed to a Senate move to ban abortions after 24 weeks, though they have not yet reached agreement on a House move to withhold funding from Planned Parenthood and other providers unless they physically separate abortion services from family planning services. VT lifts restrictions. Those last arms showed up, and yesterday Gov. Phil Scott announced that slightly more than 80 percent of Vermonters have gotten at least one dose of a Covid vaccine. "There are no longer any state Covid-19 restrictions," he said. "None. So unless there is a federal requirement in place—like [for] public transportation or long-term care facilities—employers, municipalities and individuals can operate under the same conditions as before the pandemic." VT is the first state in the nation to have vaccinated four out of five eligible people, writes Colin Flanders in Seven Days.One of the big questions now: Where will people in emergency housing go? With the end of restrictions, Vermont's state of emergency is also being lifted as of midnight tonight—and with it, the grants that have helped fund the state's emergency food and shelter efforts. Scott says he'll address those issues with a new executive order to be detailed today, but VPR's Peter Hirschfeld reports that advocates working with the roughly 2000 people who've been housed in motels are worried about mass displacements; they keep hearing that "exit plans" often "consist of finding a tent," they tell Hirschfeld.“Plants are all magic. If you get to know a plant, you love it automatically." That's wild-plant harvester Les Hook talking to Amanda Gokee for her profile of him and his longtime partner-in-gathering, Nova Kim, in Atlas Obscura. The two, who live in Chelsea, for years have led workshops for people interested in collecting food that grows wild. These days, reports Gokee, they're more focused on working with chefs and other gatherers to teach sustainable approaches; among other things, Gokee writes, ramps are disappearing in the east due to over-harvesting by commercial gatherers. (Thanks, LL!)Aren't canoes supposed to go in the water? You may remember that back in March, three Canadian adventurers set out on a 4,700-mile ski/paddle/bike trek from Ellesmere Island in the far, far north to southern Ontario. Well, they made it through the ski portion (with an 80 km plane hop when it turned out the ice in Barrow Strait had broken up). Now it's on to canoes...except at the moment they're on sea ice, and satellite imagery shows the rivers they'll be navigating are still frozen. So they'll be hauling their canoes on skis for a while, at least until they reach actual flowing water."The man who put out fires with music." That's the title of music historian Ted Gioia's recent post about Charles Kellogg, who toured the country (in what amounted to the first RV—a home-on-wheels fashioned out of a section of a redwood tree) as a vaudeville performer known as "the Nature Singer" for his ability to imitate birdsong. Not only was he capable of singing in a range inaudible to the human ear, but he discovered that he could extinguish fire with sound. He was put to the test by a team of Berkeley scientists in 1926...over the radio. What followed was memorable. How did we not know about this guy?
Let's catch up.
Dartmouth reports 1 student case and none among among faculty/staff. No students and 1 faculty/staff members are in quarantine because of travel or exposure, while 1 student and 2 faculty/staff are in isolation awaiting results or because they tested positive.
NH reported 44 new cases on Friday, 45 Saturday, 25 Sunday, and 29 yesterday, bringing it to an official total of 99,143. There were 3 new deaths, which now number 1,363, while 20 people with confirmed cases are hospitalized (down 11 since Thursday). The current active caseload is at 280 (down 65). The state reports 11 active cases in Grafton County (down 15), 26 in Sullivan (down 12), and 28 in Merrimack (down 3). In town-by-town numbers reported by the state, Claremont has 7 (down 8), Unity has 5 (no change), and Newport has 5 (up at least 1). Haverhill, Hanover, Canaan, Cornish, Croydon, Sunapee, Newbury, and Charlestown have 1-4 each. Lebanon and Plainfield are off the list.
VT reported 7 new cases Friday, 3 on Saturday, 7 Sunday, and 1 yesterday, bringing it to a total case count of 24,331. There were no new deaths, which remain at 256, while 2 people with confirmed cases are hospitalized. Windsor County added 2 new cases during that time and stands at 1,503 for the pandemic, with 27 over the previous 14 days, while Orange County also added 2 cases and now stands at 822 cumulatively, with 8 over the previous two weeks. Because of low case counts, the state is only updating its town-by-town stats every other week now.
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Today at 5, New London's Center for the Arts hosts Penobscot poet and "language keeper" Carol Dana for an online talk about the Penobscot language and her life and times on Indian Island in Maine (scroll down). You may recognize Dana's name from a New Yorker piece a couple of months ago about the Penobscot dictionary she helped create. "She admitted to being linguistically lonely," Alice Gregory writes. “'I’ve been talking to myself in Penobscot for years,' she said. 'You need to say it out loud, so your own ears can hear it.'”
And this evening at 7, Here in the Valley continues its "Tuesday Jukebox" series, in which fiddler and HiTV impresario Jakob Breitbach hosts a combination music/talk show, interviewing and sitting in with guest artists and bands at the Briggs. Tonight's guests are the Vermont-based outlaw honky-tonk band the Western Terrestrials, and they'll be both in-person and streamed. Tix are a minimum of $5, suggested price $20. Here's where to order if you want to see the livestream and here's where you can get tix for the live version—limited seating with social distancing and VT mask guidelines in place.
Finally, today and tomorrow are the final days of the joint Shelburne Museum/Bennington Museum online exhibition, "Painting at Home with Grandma Moses." The show "highlights the artist’s methodical artistic process and varying sources of inspiration that reveal Moses as a complex, thoughtful, and thoroughly modern artist," they write, despite her reputation as a "an artist trapped in amber from an earlier time."
The woodpecker —still drillingas the sun goes down.
— by Kobayashi Issa, 1763-1827
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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