Daybreak Tuesday 6/2/20

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Cloudier but also warmer. There's a weak warm front headed our way, bringing rising temps (into the mid-60s today), but also mostly cloudy skies and a chance of rain. Later in the day another upper-level disturbance elbows its way onto the scene, raising the chances of rain tonight. Winds from the west, only down to around 50 tonight. 

So let's see, where are we?...

I-91 crash, fire hospitalize two. Around noon yesterday between exits 6 and 5, a southbound Jeep lost control, veered off into the woods, burst into flames and caught the woods on fire. Fellow motorists had pulled the occupants out by the time first responders arrived and they were taken from the scene. Firefighters subdued the blaze quickly. "It wasn't relatively hard, other than the terrain and a lot of downed trees in that area that we had to work around," Rockingham Fire Chief Kevin Kingsbury told WCAX. "But with enough help and enough hose, we got it." D-HH financial snapshot: Hundreds of millions in federal help, facing a budget shortfall, making some remote work permanent. The VN's Nora Doyle-Burr runs through the hospital system's latest filing with bondholders, which finds that it was $46 million in the red at the end of March, but had lined up $493 million in advance Medicare and Medicaid payments, CARES Act funding, and payroll tax deferrals. Its actual revenues were up slightly through the end of March, but expenses rose nearly 10 percent. The filing notes “plans are being developed to analyze and implement remote work as an ongoing staffing model even after the COVID pandemic has passed.”Just how exercised can people get about blue sidewalk de-icer? For several years, Norwich Town Meeting has kicked off with a ten-minute play written by Elisabeth Gordon, ripped from the listserv. For those of you new to the region, the Norwich List has a (partially deserved) reputation as a rubber-necker's dream, and Gordon has mined it to chronicle the foibles of small-town life. On Friday, Northern Stage is mounting a live webcast of Gordon's Small Town Trilogy, and arts blogger Susan Apel talks to Gordon about large conflicts playing out on a small stage.Should Hanover turn S. Main Street over to pedestrians? Over the weekend, VN columnist Jim Kenyon got restaurateurs on the two-block stretch from Wheelock to South Street musing about the possibility of banning traffic. Why? Because a lot of people feel downtown Hanover needs a boost. “Creating a more memorable, community-orientated experience is an especially good idea right now,” Boloco's John Pepper tells Kenyon. Of course, not everyone likes the idea of losing parking spaces, or of re-routing NH Route 10.SPONSORED: Do you have questions about creating a will or other essential health and financial documents? Everything in Order, the local company that helps people create essential legal documents, is hosting a free information session via Zoom, June 11th at 3pm. Started by the Upper Valley's Allegra Lubrano, EIO invites anyone interested in learning more about these basic legal documents to join the free session. Just RSVP at the maroon link and keep an eye out for more details via email. Everything in Order makes it ridiculously easy and insanely cheap for you to get everything in order today."It's somewhat arbitrary that no matter what you pick to major [in], it seems to take exactly four years of classes." Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy and pioneer of online learning, is this year's Dartmouth commencement speaker. The Dartmouth's Pierce Wilson talked to him about remote learning, the age of Covid, and unbundling college. When the pandemic began, Khan says, "we started realizing that what we had built over the last decade or so could be...[what] a lot of people would need to lean on when schools closed.... [I]t's one of those moments where you look left and look right and say, ‘I guess this is us.’""Man, they’re waiting for you guys and you’re listening to the wind!” That was a stage manager berating Pete Seeger and Robert Northern, better known as Brother Ah, on finding them backstage at a concert sliding a glass door to hear how the sound of the wind changed. Brother Ah, who got his moniker from students at Dartmouth while he was teaching there in the early 1970s, died on Sunday. A classically trained French horn player who made his name playing everything from Brahms to experimental jazz, he preached listening for music in every sound we hear, a habit he picked up in the New Hampshire woods. Lady's slippers, starflower, and the last days of choke cherry blossoms. Northern Woodlands' Elise Tillinghast chronicles what's going on, this first week of June, in and around the woods. The shelf fungus dryad's saddle, which has a melon scent. Woodchucks and woods moths. Oh, and crane flies and a link to an article with "the life-enriching detail that 'crane fly larvae tend to have distinctive ‘facial’ features on their rear ends.'"

NH beaches reopened yesterday. But—this will stun you—they weren't crowded. Perhaps because the water was 49 degrees. Plus, under Chris Sununu's reopening order, beachgoers basically have to stay in motion: running, walking, surfing, or swimming; picnicking and sunbathing are still prohibited.“ Just having fun, and having the beaches back open, it makes me smile again. It gives me joy,” one surfer told NHPR's Todd Bookman. “Even with the small waves, it doesn’t matter.”Census picks up where it left off in NH. New Hampshire is the last state in New England where the bureau is resuming operations that were brought to a halt by the pandemic. Starting this week, census workers will drop off questionnaires at houses in towns that did not get initial mailings—generally, places that are in rural counties with lots of seasonal housing units, PO boxes, or unverified street addresses. Workers won't actually be knocking on doors, just updating addresses and dropping off packets.

So just how slow should a flatbed roll with a band on board? While traditional venues remain closed—the Barre Opera House just announced it'll be dark through 2020—artists themselves are coming back to in-person performing. Spruce Peak Arts is going to have Chad Hollister on a flatbed in Morrisville the Saturday night before Father's Day. VT Shakespeare Festival performers have launched "Shakespeare to You," a live monologue or sonnet delivered to your front yard, via Zoom, or by phone. Musicians are getting together to rehearse again—and livestreaming it. One band did a pop-up set in a Burlington lot; they eventually got shut down by police. Wireless transmitters to antennas: the new look of broadband in VT? That's the basic model for getting internet quickly to about 150 Northeast Kingdom students who don't have access to high-speed internet at home. Two small providers, including West Leb's New England Wireless, are working with the state and the local power company to mount transmitters on telecom towers on Burke Mountain and in Lyndonville, with signals going to homes with antennas. “It may not have the capacity of fiber," says Luc Beaubien of New England Wireless, "but it is much less expensive and much faster to deploy.” "No, I don't think anyone needs to be dominated." That was NH Gov. Chris Sununu yesterday, responding to a question about President Trump scolding governors for being "weak" in dealing with protests. "The message does have to be heard," Sununu said, "but we’re not going to condone or accept violence by any individuals.” He said he spoke with protest organizers ahead of Saturday's Manchester demonstration, and that the state's prohibition on large gatherings was irrelevant in this situation. “That event was going to happen, and frankly, it should happen.”Scott creates racial equity task force. VT's governor used his regular press conference yesterday to call for charges against the four police officers involved in George Floyd's death and to announce that he's forming a task force to look into VT's disparity in death rates between white and nonwhite Covid-19 victims, evaluate the state's support for its racial minorities, go over its hate speech laws, and promote public office for nonwhite Vermonters. He also won't oppose demonstrations. "The fact is, hate, ignorance and the inequality we've seen is a far greater risk to long-term health of our nation than even Covid-19," he said.In the midst of the protests, human warmth. Reminders that for all the ugliness we're seeing out there, decent human beings stand on both sides of the police lines: 

And heck, while we're talking about amazing sights... If you watched the SpaceX launch on Saturday, you'll remember that the video from the first-stage rocket cut out as it was dropping back to earth... to a landing pad out in the ocean. Here's what it looked like, from the rocket's point of view.News that connects you. If you like Daybreak and want to help it keep going, here's how:

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Reading Deeper

Wave of sorrow,Do not drown me now:I see the islandStill ahead somehow.I see the islandAnd its sands are fair:Wave of sorrow,Take me there.

"Island," by Langston Hughes.

(Thanks, ML!)

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