Daybreak Tuesday 9/14/21

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Foggy start, then sun. Yesterday's high pressure is still with us and we'll get a brilliant start to the day. There's a warm front headed our way, though, and it looks like clouds will work in ahead of it, though not really until later this afternoon. Meanwhile, mid-70s again, winds from the south, showers overnight. Down to around 60 tonight.Pollinators. They're so much fun to watch at work. Here's a monarch proving it at Crossroad Farm in Post Mills the other day, taken by John Pietkiewicz.Balloon accident second for pilot. In the Valley News, John Lippman follows up on Sunday's ballooning accident in Ryegate, in which Keith Sproul, a computer manager at Rutgers University, in NJ, was knocked from his seat by treetops and lost control. Neither he nor his passenger was hurt, though the accident was "pretty traumatic," the passenger's mother tells Lippman. Sproul was injured in 2008 when a balloon he was riding in hit power lines and burst into flames in New Mexico, killing the pilot. (Available only in the VN's "e-edition," which is available only to subscribers—hit "e-edition" at the top right).The connection is personal. That, writes Edie Morgan in the Lebanon Times, is what lies behind the participation of several locals in the October 2 Walk to End Alzheimer's—which this year, unlike last, will take place in person. John Custer, a history teacher at KUA, lost his wife to the illness; Lauren Andreolas, a dentist at Mascoma Dental, watched her grandmother and great-aunts, vibrant women all, become debilitated; jeweler Jude Dutille lost both his father and his father-in-law. “My wife and I experienced it all, beginning to end," he tells Morgan. Details on the walk here. SPONSORED: It's hard to know how to move through these challenging times with hopefulness, but to do so is an act of bravery. Open Door Integrative Wellness is fully committed to being a conduit for helping you clarify priorities and deepen connections. We have recently updated our mission and programming to offer opportunities for healing, growth, and connection. We partner with our clients to find equanimity, joy, ease, and agency as you craft your future. Learn more at the maroon link. Sponsored by Open Door Integrative Wellness."We had 30 employees prior to Covid. During the worst of the pandemic, there was just one person here, eight hours a day." When the pandemic set in, the Norwich Inn's innkeeper, Dave Burtonbush, tells Bloomberg Businessweek's Isabella Simonetti, every call was a cancellation. "At least 80-85 percent of our business is driven by what’s happening at Dartmouth," he explains. Simonetti talks to him about what it's taken to steer the Inn through the pandemic. Stimulus funds kept it going, and now that the college is back in full swing, things are looking up—though hiring, as everywhere, is a challenge. "You can just feel that energy level in the community pick up.” That's Hanover town manager Julia Griffin talking to The Dartmouth's Anaïs Zhang about students' return to campus this past week. Hanover merchants have seen a surge of business as students—sometimes brought in by First-Year Trip leaders—explore downtown. This past week was "crazy," says Roberts Flowers owner Michael Reed. And Records, Memorabilia and Posters New Hampshire owner Bryan Smith adds, "all the businesses I’ve talked to, we’re all noticing that the Class of 2025 is extremely polite.”Not so fast, on transfer of Seminary Hill building to city. Lebanon wants to take control of the West Leb building that houses SAU 88 and turn it into a community center, but a legal review last week revealed that any transfer has to be approved by a citywide vote, reports Tim Camerato in the VN. Since the schools still use portions of the building, the school board and the city are still hammering out details—and the need for a vote means they'll have to wrap up negotiations by November if a deal's to go through next year. "Grandma-esque, nostalgic furniture." That's how Alejandro Morales, a student from Florida, describes the decor in Canaan's Red Wagon Bakery. The Dartmouth is launching a regular column reviewing restaurants around the region, and Morales checked out the Red Wagon last Thursday morning. Tina's Toast? "A great dish." The key lime pie? "Average for an Upper Valley key lime pie." The look? "Truly a feast for the eyes." The whole experience? "Despite the fact that Red Wagon Bakery is a small, family establishment, it still has a solid grasp of what works and what doesn’t. "Bumblebees are winding down the year. It's the second week of September, and Northern Woodlands' Elise Tillinghast writes that, unlike honeybees' hives, bumblebees' die off in autumn as the queen stops producing new worker bees. Also out there in the woods: 25 species of goldenrod, the dark blue berries of Indian cucumber-root and the sprightly blue of bluebead lily (which looks just like its name), and hobblebush (which acts just like its name) and bottle gentian.Split on best course for police watchdog slows NH commission's work. The discussions are aimed at making it easier for civilians to press for and keep tabs on investigations into police misconduct. One approach, recommended last winter by both the ACLU and the AG's office, would create an independent office to investigate and issue a report. But some lawmakers object, arguing that local departments already investigate their own: “Are we going to have this office step in and do the jobs of police chiefs?” asks one leading GOP legislator. NH Bulletin's Ethan DeWitt parses the debate.NH schools navigate new protocols as cases show up. The big change from last year, report NHPR's Alli Fam and Sarah Gibson, is that not all close contacts need to quarantine after exposure, only unvaccinated ones. Schools are essentially doing their own contact tracing—but not necessarily alerting faculty and staff to cases. The state health department will only step in if a school experiences an outbreak.Meanwhile, VT's contact tracing effort is "floundering." That's the conclusion Seven Days' Derek Brouwer draws after the surging Delta variant caught the state off guard. It had let the army of contact tracers it developed earlier in the pandemic return to their regular work, and outsourced the work to a Virginia firm. Where contact tracers were once able to reach 90 percent of infected people within 24 hours, now the figure stands at 37 percent—and fewer of those people are providing tracers with their close contacts, making it that much tougher to stem outbreaks.“It doesn’t matter what you do in the classroom if you ignore what’s happening in the lunchroom." School cafeterias, reports Lola Duffort in VTDigger, are becoming an issue for schools as the navigate reopening in the face of the Delta surge. "Some experts say lunchtime, once a mundane daily ritual, is essentially the most high-risk activity taking place at school," she writes—students aren't wearing masks, and given the clatter, they're talking loudly, spraying aerosols. Schools are already revising their protocols, and facing intense pressure from parents. New art in an old place—but not for long. In her latest Artful dispatch, Susan Apel takes us to Calais, VT, where she caught last weekend's opening of Art at the Kent and its “small miracle” of an exhibition titled 20/20 Hindsight, which lasts just one month (until Oct. 10). Apel describes a delightfully “contemporary, eclectic” selection of pieces in this historic building, whose curators undertook to match the “individual works to specific sites within the museum.” Add this one to your foliage itinerary—before it’s gone. "Go on in and land her, Jerry. I'll hold that wheel on with my foot." Think of a time when all odds were set against you and every option exhausted, then consider Hollywood stunt pilot F. Gerald Phillips, who in 1926 unwittingly took his prop plane up with one wheel loose—only to watch that wheel plummet to the earth. Phillips’ harrowing recollection, written in 1987 and just republished in Air & Space, puts us right in the cockpit as his stuntman passenger dares to climb the wing, receive a spare wheel from another plane, and attach it to the axle. But what happens when the motor and propeller quit in mid-air? 

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Here's John Keats in 1819, from "To Autumn":

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;Conspiring with him how to load and bless  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,  And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.....And here, in 2021, is Nigerian-born, UK-based poet and playwright Inua Ellams, reading "To John," the poem he was asked by the Financial Times to write in response to Keats, about the human toll on nature in the centuries since "To Autumn."See you tomorrow.

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