GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Things are definitely cooling off. And wouldn't you know that even as colder air wanders in aloft, the reprieve we get from the clouds is relatively brief. Foggy to start, sun at some point, but clouds showing up. The high today will linger around 60, down into the mid-40s tonight (along with a slight chance of showers overnight). Winds today from the northwest.Fog playing games. Quechee photographer Lisa Lacasse was in Enfield the other day at a marsh that's one of her favorite photography spots. She managed to snag the few moments when the fog began to lift to get her drone up and take this gem of a shot.Public Health Council finds itself a national conservative target. Yesterday, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative DC think tank, filed a complaint with the federal Dept of Health and Human Services on behalf of an unnamed white 28-year-old with diabetes who called the health council in Lebanon in April to request a Covid vaccine. He alleges he was told they were “only serving people of color” at the time, following NH state guidelines. "HHS must investigate and hold New Hampshire accountable for its blatantly illegal discrimination,” an attorney tells the National Review's Brittany Bernstein.Section of WRJ's Gates Street closed "indefinitely." Actually, the stretch connecting Fairview Terrace to downtown had been ordered shut entirely by the Selectboard two months ago, reports Liz Sauchelli in the Valley News, but supply-chain issues kept the town from getting the detour signs it needed. The roadway was closed in 2017 because of problems with the retaining wall holding it in place, then reopened to one-way traffic the following year. Now, cars are barred completely, though pedestrians can still use it. The town hasn't yet allocated money to address the roadbed's problems.SPONSORED: Join Willing Hands on Zoom tomorrow! To celebrate the successful completion of our Capital Campaign, Willing Hands invites you to a Zoom showcase tomorrow, Sept. 30, at 7:00 pm. This hour-long session will walk attendees through the many improvements made to the Willing Hands facility and explain how they have allowed us to serve more people with more food. If you can't make it then, the maroon link includes a new, three-minute video that shows you how we've grown. Sponsored by Willing Hands."You can smell the sawdust." You know how it's fine to throw yourself on the whims of online commenters or established reviewers, but sometimes you just want someone familiar to hand you a recommendation? Well, today Daybreak launches "Enthusiasms" — a rotating cast of locals who've got stuff they really want you to know about. We're starting with books for the next few weeks, then over time will fold in other pastimes. Hit the maroon link for the Norwich Bookstore's Carin Pratt and why she thinks you should read the new Damnation Spring. Look for Enthusiasms each Wednesday.16,000... That's how many miles of stone walls in New Hampshire have been marked so far in the NH Geological Survey's stone wall mapping project. Really longtime Daybreak readers will remember that the project launched in 2019, crowdsourcing the work of finding walls on the state's LIDAR maps (LIDAR essentially measures the earth's surface in 3D). Well, the project is still ongoing, and the state is still looking for help, writes David Brooks on his Granite Geek blog. They're offering training and resources to learn more.“Either [Sununu] steps up...or he’s going to have a whole other pandemic on his hands." That's Terese Grinnell, a nurse who's also a prominent anti-vax activist in NH, reporting on what she told the guv's chief of staff on a phone call last week. NHPR's Josh Rogers looks into the network of anti-mandate activists in the state—which, he says, "resembles, in some ways, a burgeoning political campaign." Though there are plenty of "fervent citizens" with no apparent political ties, several of the groups behind protests feature former Tea Partiers and politicians with longtime Libertarian ties.
Vast majority of NH's cases, Covid deaths are among unvaccinated—but good luck finding the data. To be precise, 96.5 percent of cases since January, 93.6 percent of hospitalizations, and 93.5 percent of deaths were among unvaccinated people, reports Andrew Cline on the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy blog. But those figures come from data released to the center by the state, not from its public dashboards. A health department spokesman tells Cline they're working on it, but "it boils down to capacity. As you might imagine, we’re as busy as we’ve ever been."VT food box program ends tomorrow. It got its start as the massively popular federal Farmers to Families program at the beginning of the pandemic, then earlier this year became the state-funded Full Plates VT, run by the Vermont Foodbank. Now that effort, too, is coming to an end, reports the Rutland Herald's Keith Whitcomb, Jr. “A lot of people liked it and were getting a lot of value out of the box program,” Foodbank CEO John Sayles tells him. “We had very few drops during this Full Plates VT where all the boxes weren’t spoken for." There are plenty of alternatives on the Foodbank's website, Sayles says."It's pretty much all we talk about... You go to job fairs in town, and two or three people show up.” That's the situation facing VT's (and the nation's) ski industry, Mike Solimano, president of the Killington and Pico resorts, tells VPR's Nina Keck. Resorts are implementing mask and vaccine mandates—to lure workers who might otherwise stay away; bumping up hourly wages; automating whatever they can; cutting back on food service and lodgings; and asking staff to be flexible. "Someone might direct parking in the morning," explains Keck, "then shift to child care or a retail shop later in the day.""You know you're doing something right if the RNC is suing you." That’s Montpelier city councilor Conor Casey shrugging off a lawsuit brought by the VT GOP and RNC against his town and Winooski for recent charter changes allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections. The plaintiffs call it “a blatant attack on election integrity,” report Derek Brouwer and Connor Flanders in Seven Days, and Gov. Scott says the changes create “separate and unequal classes of residents.” But a Winooski state rep counters that non-citizens were allowed to vote—before anti-immigration laws were passed last century.It's about zoning but... is it really about zoning? The VT Supreme Court today takes up the dispute between Daniel Banyai, owner of the Slate Ridge tactical weapons training facility in Pawlet, and the town of Pawlet. An environmental court judge ordered the facility closed for operating without a permit; Banyai and his attorney argue that he was okayed by the town's development review board and that should take precedence. VPR's Henry Epp and Nina Keck talk over the zoning ins and outs—and the fact that the case is drawing interest because of Banyai and Slate Ridge's notoriety.Marlboro College campus ends up in music festival's hands. The initial 2019 sale of the 533-acre campus and its 52 buildings to an educational nonprofit and its now-indicted leader, Seth Andrew, "opened a legalistic Pandora's box that wearied residents of the Windham County town and generated work...for at least six law firms," CB Hall writes for Vermont Business Magazine. Hall traces the many—many—twists and turns in the campus's path since then, but reports that as of five days ago, the property has been conveyed to the parent organization of the Marlboro Music Festival.And maybe a deck off one side...? That would be at the VT Statehouse, which "does not meet the needs of the century in which we are trying to do our work,” Senate President Becca Balint tells VTDigger's Grace Benninghoff. Cramped committee rooms, poor airflow, limited access for people with disabilities or large groups... and, in a pandemic, workaday spaces no one feels safe in. The result, Benninghoff reports, is that thanks to the upcoming infusion of federal rescue funds, legislators think they'll have the wherewithal to expand, and they're starting to explore the options. Sadly, a deck's not one of them.Learning your ABCs: Vermont foliage edition.... Just in time for peak, Boston magazine goes elementary with its alphabetical “do-it-all guide” to VT in October. Collective eye-roll aside, the list ain’t half bad. Now repeat after me: A is for the Antique Mall in Quechee. E is for Eating the Cajun meatloaf sandwich at the country store in Warren. G is for Gourdwalk, a “verdant tunnel of living vines and gourds” at the Woodstock Inn. L is for Lake Champlain’s full day’s worth of fun. O is for Outdoor festivals aplenty. R is for Restaurants like Worthy Burger. And S? Well, for plenty of us, S is sitting in the driveway.Love those drone photos! So here's a bunch of them. The 2021 Drone Photo Awards have just been announced, and there are some remarkable pics (and videos). Overall winner is of pink-footed geese in central Norway, but I don't know how the judges could choose. A surfer off Australia, a fisherman in a Vietnamese mangrove forest, a green turtle making her way back to the ocean after laying eggs in Oman, polar bears in the Arctic, a Utah canyon at sunset... Dive in and poke around. And while the Greenland "Ice Ballet" video is lovely, I say put that drone flight over Rome on a big screen and hold tight.Daybreak doesn't get to exist without your support. Help it keep going by hitting the maroon button:
The Hood has resumed in-person tours of the museum, and there's one today at 12:30. No need to register: Just show up in the Atrium five minutes ahead of time.
And this evening at 7, the Norwich Bookstore (along with VT's Northshire and bookstores in NH, NY, and KY) hosts fermentation revivalist, scholar, and hotshot Sandor Katz, in online conversation from his home in Tennessee with renowned chef and restaurateur Dan Barber. Katz has a new book out, Fermentation Journeys, in which he scours the globe for fermenting traditions, from turmeric mead to wine made from palm tree sap (Myanmar) to seabirds aged in seal skin (um, Greenland). No cost to register, though there's also an option to buy the book.
If you were reading Daybreak back in the spring, you may remember L'Arpeggiata, the European early-music ensemble that focuses on Italian, French, and English music from the 17th century, often pairs up with jazz musicians, and is led by Austrian theorbist and harpist Christina Pluhar. These people know how to rock. Here they are with "La Tarantella," by Neapolitan baroque composer, organist, and singer Cristoforo Caresana. See you tomorrow.
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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