GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Guess! But don’t go with anything other than “fog to start, then sunny.” That high pressure is still settled comfortably over the Northeast, and though temps will be slightly warmer today, otherwise it’s a repeat of the past couple days. Clear skies (once the fog lifts), highs reaching the mid 70s again, down to the low or mid 40s overnight.
It’s a bird’s life. For two natural antagonists…
“Sometimes it is a wild and woolly world out there in nature,” Peter Bloch writes about his new short film from Grafton Pond. On two separate days, he caught groups of feisty solo loons, who gather at this time of year as they prepare to migrate. The first set is loons just showing off to each other, he thinks; the second is two male loons trying to scare off an intruder—also a loon.
Meanwhile, Rebecca Lovejoy, Kevin Peterson, and friends were paddling down the Connecticut from Orford when they noticed a large eagle’s nest, with an adult and a juvenile on board watching the passing scene. Here’s the adult.
Heads up: I-89 Exit 19 southbound off-ramp to be closed all day tomorrow. The paving work that NHDOT had hoped to see finished last week couldn’t be completed. So the off-ramp will be closed tomorrow from 6:30 am until about 5 pm for final paving. As with last week, the detour will take you down to Exit 18, then back northbound.
Federal court: Quechee’s Mid-Vermont Christian School can compete in sports while lawsuit continues. You’ll probably remember that the school brought the suit against the VT Principals Assn and state officials after the VPA barred it from competition in 2023 for forfeiting a game against a team with a transgender player. Yesterday, reports Seven Days’ Alison Novak, the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd District (that’s NY, CT, and VT) ruled in MVCS athletes’ favor, arguing that “there is a strong public interest in ensuring that students and schools do not lose out on valuable athletic opportunities by virtue of the government’s hostility to religion.”
Well-drillers are doing okay. For the rest of the Upper Valley, the drought is taking a toll. As you know, a good portion of the region is in a severe drought, and not only are shallower wells drying out, but hay fields are suffering and several towns have begun telling residents to restrict water use. That’s in part because lakes and rivers are shrinking, reports Clare Shanahan in the Valley News—the Ottauquechee’s at a record low flow based on 93 years of data, and Grafton Pond’s levels are down because NH is feeding its water over to Mascoma Lake, on which Lebanon depends for its drinking water. Claremont’s also asking residents to conserve water.
VT confirms first known case of Jamestown Canyon virus—in Windsor County patient. Many people who get the mosquito-born disease never experience symptoms, writes VTDigger’s Olivia Gieger, but it can cause fever, chills, and muscle aches in others, while older people and those with compromised immune systems are at risk for serious symptoms. The state just began testing for the virus in mosquitoes and has found it in several towns; NH just identified it yesterday in mosquitoes in Hudson. It’s a reminder, says Natalie Kwit, VT’s public health veterinarian, “to continue to take precautions against mosquito bites.”
SPONSORED: Help someone who needs a hand right now! Based right here in the Upper Valley, Hearts You Hold supports immigrants, migrants, and refugees across the US by asking them what they need. Right now, there are requests from Orange County farmworkers for work clothing and medication, a young mother in Washington County for baby gear, and a Haitian immigrant in Lebanon who needs a mattress. And there’s plenty more: At the burgundy link or here, you'll find people to help all over the country and from all over the world. Sponsored by Hearts You Hold.
Driver badly injured in single-pickup crash on I-91 near Wilder exit. Around 7:30 yesterday morning, the VT State Police say in a press release, they began receiving “multiple reports of a vehicle driving erratically at high rates of speed on Interstate 91 South.” Shortly after, the Ford F350 driven by a 20-year-old Westminster, VT man “exited the left lane, struck a ledge, and rolled over a guardrail across multiple lanes of traffic before coming to a position of uncontrolled rest on the right side of the traveled lanes.” It was totaled—VN photographer Jennifer Hauck has a hair-raising photo—and the driver was taken to DHMC with “serious injuries.”
Rooing. It’s a shepherd’s term meaning “collecting the wool fleece found on fence wires or twigs where it has naturally snagged.” And as Jared Jenisch writes in this week’s Enthusiasms, it’s an apt metaphor for what Helen Whybrow, who grew up in the Upper Valley, has done in her luminous memoir The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life. She and her husband run Knoll Farm in the Mad River Valley, and her writing about the farm and the natural world is “precise and evocative,” Jared writes, a “gathering of sheep and land and family and seasons which is its own kind of belonging and, in this world more than ever, its own form of resistance.”
SPONSORED: This Sunday in Strafford, VT Law and Graduate School’s Shirley Jefferson on “Where Do We Go From Here?” Part of The Friends of the The Morrill Homestead’s speaker series, Prof. Jefferson will explore the experience of growing up in Selma, Alabama, during the Civil Rights movement, focusing on the challenges faced during that time, highlighting that era’s accomplishments, and examining how they’re being challenged today. At the Strafford Town House, 4 pm on Sept. 14. Sponsored by the Friends of the Morrill Homestead.
About those WRJ overdoses… On Friday, Eric Francis wrote a Daybreak piece about the frequent encounters he witnessed this summer between Hartford’s first responders and people who’ve overdosed in WRJ. The first responders and others who’ve talked to him about it since have all said it’s an ongoing problem, and no one knows what to do. Dottie Moffitt, who organizes Hartford’s annual Overdose Awareness Candlelight Vigil, has a different perspective. “All this article did was help to desensitize people even further to the humanness behind overdoses,” she writes in a letter to Daybreak urging more attention to “the voices of the recovering.” More at the link.
When it comes to barbecue, “Use good ingredients, and don’t over-season.” That’s advice from Matthew Danforth, who along with Jashua Tetrault runs the pop-up MJ’s Barbecue on Sundays and Mondays behind Roma’s Butchery in Royalton (plus a new Saturday pizza night). As Corin Hirsch writes in Seven Days, their pork belly burnt ends, brisket, pulled pork, and chicken—sourced from Roma’s, Robie Farm, and other local farms—sell out in a few hours both days. They aim “for simplicity with a definite New England touch,” Hirsch writes: “maple syrup in place of sugar and maple wood in the smoker”; plus, no seed oils, and fries done in beef tallow.
Nine people, a winch, some fire hose, a lot of mud, and a 1,500-pound horse named Doc. Those were the main characters in the early Sunday morning rescue of Doc from a rain-soaked marsh in Dunbarton, NH, and judging from Sruthi Gopalakrishnan’s story in the Concord Monitor, no one had fun. Doc had been part of a breakout of four horses, but the only one unlucky enough to sink up to his midline in the muck in the deepest part of the marsh. “It was miserable. Everyone was in mud, head to toe,” says Louis “Bud” Marcou, the Dunbarton fire department’s deputy chief. “ There was no getting dry.”
NH sees drops in key revenue sources. In particular, Phil Sletten writes in a new report from the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute, “revenues to the General Fund and Education Trust Fund, after being boosted by high corporate profits and quickly-accelerating housing prices, have declined since 2022,” while the state is becoming more reliant on gambling and taxes on insurance premiums—though tobacco tax and liquor receipts have fallen. So, too, have business tax revenues. At the link, he digs into the specifics, as well as some questions: Where are business tax revenues headed? Ditto gambling and gaming taxes? And as liquor consumption drops, what then?
On VT’s highways: “It’s our job to protect. Why aren’t we being protected?” That’s Kellen Cloud, director of operations at Green Mountain Flagging, which puts traffic controllers at construction sites around the state. Since the pandemic, drivers have gotten more aggressive and the job’s become even less safe than it was, he tells VTDigger’s Shaun Robinson. And by law, the state is supposed to be using automated cameras to catch speeders. But it’s not. The hitch: The law says a sworn "law enforcement officer" has to review the images and issue a citation. And no police agencies have stepped up to take it on. Robinson delves into why.
Some perspective. The earth/space streaming company Sen happens to have a high-def camera system on board the International Space Station, 250 miles overhead. And you can watch the livestream at the link. Though if the ISS happens to be passing over the ocean at night (which is to be expected, since it orbits the Earth nearly 16 times a day), you won’t see much. The cool thing? Just wait a little bit.
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak.
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HEADS UP
At the Royalton Memorial Library, historian Howard Coffin and “1800 and Froze to Death”. 1816 saw “frosts every month, dark skies, and mysterious lights that caused a widespread belief that a higher power was displeased.” In his talk, Coffin will tell the story of that tough and tumultuous year through anecdotes and narrative. 6 pm.
Cartoonist Harry Bliss at Plainfield’s Philip Read Memorial Library. The Cornish-based New Yorker cartoonist will be talking about cartooning and his graphic memoir, You Can Never Die. 6 pm.
Artistree’s Music on the Hill concert series brings in Scott Forrest. “You never know what to expect from this talented singer-songwriter,” they write. “It might be Brazilian jazz, blues, rock, folk, and even opera. He has been one of the winners of the annual Vermont Singer/Songwriter contest for several consecutive years… and was named ‘Best of Nashville’ for songwriting.” 6:30 pm.
At Hanover’s Still North Books and Bar, Makenna Goodman and Helen of Nowhere. Goodman’s second novel plays with form and structure as she slowly reveals the story of a disgraced former English prof through his own narration and his encounter with a country-home realtor. Goodman will read from the novel and talk it all over with fellow novelist Lucy Ives. 7 pm.
Valley Improv puts “new faces” through their paces at Sawtooth Kitchen. Every spring, the local improv troupe brings in new members, and now, after a summer of practice, this year’s recruits get their chance to show what they’ve learned. 8 pm.
And for today...
Oh, heck, lets go back to 2015, when Greg Allman was the centerpiece of a star-studded tribute concert being taped for Skyville Live, and he was joined onstage by Taj Mahal and breakout star Chris Stapleton for their version of the Blind Willie McTell classic “Statesboro Blues”—which both Taj and the Allman Brothers Band had cut versions of decades before. This is an ensemble firing on all cylinders.
See you tomorrow.
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