GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
So, just how do you dress for the day? We're starting out just above 0 but climbing to just below 40... and after the winds pick up mid-morning we could see gusts up around 28 mph. Mostly cloudy today, temps dropping a little after sunset, but then rising overnight. We'll be comfortably in the 40s by the time tomorrow gets going. And speaking of drama... Robin Osborne was hiking the Bald Top Trail above Lake Morey over the weekend and came on this ice waterfall. "Winter is just amazing," she writes.Hartford Planning Commission denies proposed apartments next to Haven. The 18-unit project, steered by Twin Pines Housing Trust, is an effort to expand low-income housing along Hartford Ave. on land to be acquired from St. Paul's Episcopal Church and next to a proposed emergency-housing expansion for the Haven. Board members argued the proposal does not meet requirements for the preservation of trees and “natural topography.” (Sorry, the VN hasn't put this on a webpage yet this morning, so it's only available in the "e-edition" for subscribers.)Canaan settles Provenza lawsuit. InDepthNH's Damien Fisher reported on Friday that the town will pay Crystal Wright $160K to settle her federal lawsuit stemming from a 2017 traffic stop in which she alleges Samuel Provenza—then a police officer for the town, now a state trooper—physically assaulted her. The settlement, Fisher writes, means "Canaan will not have to publicly produce" a disputed independent investigation into Provenza's history as a police officer in federal court—though the VN's Jim Kenyon is still seeking it.Hartford deputy chief takes top job in Barre. Brad Vail, who's been with the Hartford PD for almost three decades, submitted his resignation Monday and will become Barre's police chief next month, John Lippman reports in the VN. His departure means Hartford will be looking for both a chief and a deputy chief—as well as a captain—at the same time. Town Manager Tracy Yarlott-Davis "plans to bring together an 'advisory group' of community members to provide input and feedback" in the search, Lippman writes. (Same web issue as above. If you have access to the e-edition, flip to page 2.)$100K award "doesn't make the self-doubt go away. It doesn’t make you able to write great songs every day. It’s just an incredible boost.” César Alvarez, a lyricist and playwright who's been at Dartmouth since 2020, creates musical theater that makes “space for strangeness,” he tells Dartmouth News's Aimee Minbiole—with shows featuring aliens, ghosts, bugs, and talking plants. And he's just won the Kleban Prize for most promising lyricist in American musical theater, created under the will of the lyricist for A Chorus Line.SPONSORED: Last few days to catch I Do! I Do! at Artistree's Grange Theatre. The creator of The Fantasticks brings us I Do! I Do!, a musical about marriage. Starring real-life married couple and music festival favorites Lyn Philistine and Christopher Sutton (I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change [2018]). The show begins with Michael and Agnes on their wedding day. Their vows behind them, they look forward to spending the rest of their lives together. We watch as they go through their wedding night jitters, raise a family, and negotiate midlife crises. Runs through Saturday. Sponsored by Artistree.An adventure in self-trust and the practice of patience. In 1918, the artist Rockwell Kent and his nine-year-old son rowed into Alaska's Resurrection Bay to find a "forgotten cabin" where they could live for a time. They did: a goat cabin deep in the woods. In Wilderness, his memoir of their seven months there, Kent makes a "perfect podmate" for the pandemic, writes William Craig in his debut Enthusiasms: "an unabashed idealist, a practical optimist, an unpretentious artist as handy with ax, hammer, and skillet as with pencil and paintbrush"—and a writer with a gift for "seeing transcendence in small things.""They’re very bright kids; they’re incredibly talented. It’s just that our system had left them behind." Those were the refugee kids whom Riyah Patel, who's just 15 herself, tutored last summer in Concord. Eager to learn but afraid to ask for help, they were slipping through the cracks in school, Patel believed. She'd been thinking about refugee children in the state—"They have come fleeing war, famine, persecution, and they’re still only children,” she tells NH Bulletin's Amanda Gokee—and founded a nonprofit, New American Scholars, to help. Gokee profiles her and her effort.VT's Jim Condos to step down as secretary of state. That'll be a combined 58 years of elections knowledge lost to Vermont and New Hampshire this year—though Condos accounts for a mere dozen of them and NH's Bill Gardner, who stepped down in January. Condos announced yesterday that he won't run for re-election. “I am grateful to have been provided the opportunity to help protect, defend and enhance our democracy,” he said, but added that after 35 years in public office, he was "looking forward to a new chapter.""Oysters, foie gras, lobster with shaved black truffle, an overly fussy cake, wine and Chartreuse." That was Anthony Bourdain's ice-fishing meal when he headed to Quebec in 2013. Seven Days' Jordan Barry didn't get as lucky. In fact, when she took one of VT Fish & Wildlife's ice-fishing workshops last month, she didn't get anything: it was so cold and windy the northern pike and yellow perch weren't going anywhere near the surface. But, Barry writes, she learned a ton about safety, gear, tip-ups, bait, and why people fish.VT masking guidance for schools to shift. At his regular Tuesday press conference yesterday, Gov. Phil Scott said the state will recommend schools drop masking if more than 80 percent of students are vaccinated—though state officials don't yet know how many schools that will cover. “Our kids need to get back to normal,” Scott said. “They’ve been through a lot. So we should begin this transition as soon as possible.” He also suggested the mask recommendation could be lifted entirely "at an unspecified later date," reports VTDigger's Erin Petenko.Ahh, sweet relief: New app maps America’s public restrooms. We’ve all been there: You’re out and about, you gotta go... but where? Starbucks has a line of people waiting. Old Navy is employees-only. Well, now you can download We Can’t Wait, an app with over 45K restroom locations around the U.S. As Elissaveta M. Brandon reports in Fast Company, while not the first public toilet app, it is the first to partner with businesses—like Home Depot—to list verified public restrooms as well as crowdsourced ones, with hopes that other stores will join to help offset most cities’ dreadful lack of lavatories. Local kid grows up to become Spider-Man. Some superheroes are made. Some are born. And some, like Jake Laser, are born with superhero names. Jake, originally from Norwich, is a bona fide engineer who’s carved out a hugely successful YouTube niche, creating videos in which he attempts to hack some of the most improbable (if not impossible) feats from the Marvel universe. In his latest, Jake taps into his Spidey senses to figure out how to scale a 14-story LA building with the help of handbuilt tech and a whole lot of guts. He says his time in circus camp helped him manage the dizzying heights.
Catching Up With New Hampshire...
NH's new cases continue to fall, with a 7-day average now of 505 new cases a day, compared to 725 at the end of last week. The state reported 2,892 additional cases since Friday, bringing its total to 291,083. There have been 28 deaths reported since last Thursday; the total now stands at 2,312. Hospitalizations continue to trend downward: 151 people are currently hospitalized (-24 since Thursday). The state reports 3,452 active cases (-2,612) and that there are 299 (-195) active cases in Grafton County, 176 (-89) in Sullivan, and 329 (-306) in Merrimack. In town-by-town numbers, the state says Claremont has 90 (-35), Hanover has 63 (-58), Lebanon has 29 (-20), Newport has 27 (-17), Enfield has 24 (+2), Haverhill has 21 (-15), Charlestown has 18 (-10), New London has 12 (-8), Grantham has 12 (-6), Canaan has 8 (-8), Plainfield has 8 (-2), Wilmot has 8 (+1), Sunapee has 5 (-9), Newbury has 5 (-1), Rumney has 5 (+at least 1), and Piermont, Orford, Lyme, Dorchester, Grafton, Springfield, and Cornish have 1-4 each. Warren, Wentworth, Orange, and Unity are off the list.
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At noon today, Billings Farm and the VT Woodlands Association present an online wildlife tracking workshop with National Park ranger Ed Sharron. He'll introduce ways of identifying the tracks and signs of many common area mammals, including fisher, foxes, bobcats and more. You'll need to register for this one, and you can follow it up if you like with an outdoor, in-person workshop on Saturday.
At 2 pm, the Woodstock History Center presents storyteller and folklorist (and former longtime American University professor) Jo Radner on "Humor in 19th-Century New England." And not just any kind of humor: She'll focus on the home-grown, community-written "newspapers" that townspeople in the region used to create: "Sometimes serious, sometimes sentimental but mostly very funny, these 'newspapers' were common in villages across Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont and revealed the hopes, fears, humor and surprisingly daring behavior of our forebears."
Today at 5 pm, Pueblo potter and printmaker Diego Romero gives a talk on "Art, Humor, and Narrative in Pueblo Pottery" in Alumni Hall at the Hop. Romero, who's based in Santa Fe and is a Montgomery fellow at Dartmouth, blends contemporary design with ancient Pueblo techniques; his work is in the current Hood exhibit "Unbroken," featuring Native American ceramics and sculpture. No cost, but you'll need a ticket.
Today at 5:30, the Rockefeller Center hosts former NH Supreme Court chief justice John Broderick, who's now senior director of external affairs for DHMC. Broderick, who has been heavily involved in creating public awareness around addressing mental illness in the same fashion we approach physical illnesses, will give a public lecture on "Changing the Conversation Around Mental Health—It's Way Past Time." It will be both in person, in Filene Auditorium, and livestreamed.
At 7 pm, the Norwich Bookstore hosts poets Alexandria Peary and Alice Fogel—New Hampshire's current and past poets laureate. Peary's new collection, Battle of Silicon Valley at Daybreak, looks at "the vexations of life" over the past couple of years; Fogel's recently publishing Nothing But grapples with how we approach the unexplainable. Online.
"Electric party music, surf rock, from a place that is all beach." That's how a reviewer once described Etran de l'Aïr, a hard-working wedding band in Agadez, Niger, the rocking center for what's come to be known in the west as "Sahara blues." Unlike some other bands that made it onto the world-music festival circuit, Etran de l'Aïr—made up mostly of family members—stuck to its knitting for years, playing gigs for locals. Last fall, ahead of their first foray to Europe,
pieced together from cellphone videos at performances in neighborhoods around town.
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.
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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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Writer/editor: Tom Haushalter Poetry editor: Michael Lipson About Rob About Tom About Michael
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