New Hampshire
I went to Lancaster, NH to see eclipse in its totality: Here’s what it was like
Lancaster, New Hampshire, was almost unrecognizable Monday as what seemed like thousands of visitors streamed into the town to see a once-in-a-lifetime sight: a full solar eclipse.
I drove up from Hopkinton, New Hampshire, and made it to Lancaster around 10 a.m. after hitting a little traffic. Usually a town of just over 3,500 people and quiet during “mud season,” the town was buzzing with energy. Five hours before the eclipse, the streets were full of people walking around, getting snacks at local shops and food trucks, and setting up their blankets and chairs in preparation.
Sitting on a field next to the Granite Grind, Heidi and Nina Glavac had arrived in Lancaster around 9:30 a.m. to make sure they got a parking spot. They are from nearby Bethlehem.
“I want to do the 100%, right. And our house apparently my husband’s like, we’re 99.6. So I’m like, where’s the closest to where we live,” said Heidi.
Much of New England saw a partial eclipse somewhere in the 90th percentile. But many of the people who traveled to Lancaster said they saw it as their one chance to see a total eclipse. The next one in the area won’t be until 2079.
The total eclipse
The moon began covering the sun around 2:15 p.m. Wearing my ISO certified eclipse glasses, I saw the sun begin to morph into a crescent.
Brad Moser, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Plymouth State University, was standing outside The Lancaster Motel with his telescope.
“I’m most excited … there’s a couple of minutes leading up to totality, there’s things like shadow bands or shadow snakes, if you’ve heard of those before,” Moser said. “Once there’s like this narrow slip a couple of minutes right before the eclipse, you can look onto the ground and there should be like these sort of like wavy shadows that are like kind of leaping over each other, kind of snakelike.”
Moser said that in the moments leading right up to full totality, informed viewers can see things like “Bailey’s Beads,” or little fibers of sunlight, and the subsequent “diamond-ring effect” as they disappear. Moser said these are caused by the sun’s light coming past the mountains and valleys on the moon.
The sun was still only partly obscured when I came upon a large sports field with hundreds of people scattered. Hannah, Chris, and Trish Autenrieth sat with their dog, Bear. Hannah lives in Rhode Island but had come home for the weekend just for the eclipse. The Hooksett family had driven up that morning, arriving just before the eclipse started.
“We figure there’s probably going to be some kind of an alien communication,” Chris joked.
As the sky got darker, kids who were playing catch and wrestling reunited with their parents to stare at the sun.
“Mommy it’s getting more!” cried one curly haired child.
“Momma it looks like a banana,” said a young boy around 3:15 p.m.
People started putting back on their jackets as the air grew colder, and murmurs grew about the light.
“Weird glow right now,” said one. “Not like sunset darkness, like under the shade of a tree or something,” observed another.
Just as the sun slowly, then suddenly slips under the horizon at sunset, the moon quickly overtook the sun in the sky, covering the whole field under an eerie darkness. For a short 20-40 seconds, all the observers were able to stare directly at the eclipse without glasses. You could see the corona, or the outermost atmosphere of the sun, as well as some brighter planets and stars in the sky. People clapped, laughed and screamed.
There was no alien communication, but the Autenrieth family said their trip was definitely “worth it.”
Residents, business owners of Lancaster worked together
Ruby Berryman, owner of The Lancaster Motel, said they had been preparing for a year for the eclipse. The hotel put together a package that included a few nights, food and entertainment like live music and talks by Moser, the astrophysicist from Plymouth State. Its 40-person capacity was filled last week, but she said they’ve been getting calls all night.
“It’s been nice to see the town come to life. Seeing all my neighbors and stuff,” Berryman said. “We normally don’t see this much traffic except during the fair. But even with the fair people are driving by, they’re not milling around and meeting each other.”
She said the motel partnered with local businesses, such as handing out coupons, to further stimulate the local economy.
Indeed, the Granite Grind and Polish Princess Bakery, two bakeries in town, saw huge lines for much of the morning. Business was also hopping for the food trucks that had come from nearby towns. And a couple local Girl Scout troops were clearing out their remaining inventory.
The bright, sunny skies added to the overall jovial feeling in town.
“I feel like it’s a gift to me personally,” said Berryman.
People came from near and far
Sprinkled throughout the New Hampshire and Massachusetts license plates, states like Utah, Washington D.C., and Kentucky were also represented.
More: Eclipse arrives in NH and Maine: Crowds thrilled by show in sky
Samir and Cristina Shoukleur came from San Diego.
“I wanted to see the eclipse in Mazatlan, Mexico, because that’s where it started,” said Cristina. But the pair had family in the area, and so they decided to combine the trip. She said it felt very spiritual, and so happy. “It was like I wanted to say, Happy Eclipse Day! Like Happy New Year.”
Paul Broce, Bea Zakur, and Linda Swope drove up on Sunday from Massachusetts and Rhode Island. They felt so lucky to have no clouds for the eclipse.
“We’re not going to be around for the next one,” said Broce about why they decided to come. “We’re a lot older than you are.”
I’ll be 83 by the time of the next eclipse in this area. I told them it might be a stretch for me too to make it. But as a newfound umbraphile, I’ll certainly try!
New Hampshire
City Of Concord Library: Christmas Eve Early Closure
The library will be closing early on Tuesday, December 24, at 12pm. We will be closed Wednesday, December 25th, and will resume of normal hours on Thursday, December 26th. The CPL wishes you a happy holiday!
This press release was produced by the City of Concord. The views expressed here are the author’s own.
New Hampshire
Hypothermic hiker rescued after stranded in waist-deep snow amid wind chills near zero
MOUNT LAFAYETTE, N.H. – A hiker was rescued on Thursday after becoming lost and suffering from hypothermia during a solo hike in central New Hampshire.
Patrick Bittman, 28, of Portland, Maine, had embarked on a hike to see the sunrise from Mount Lafayette on Wednesday night.
Officials said Bittman came upon deep blowing snow near the summit of Little Haystack on Franconia Ridge, forcing him to come back down the mountain.
On his return, however, he became lost and ended up moving into the Dry Brook drainage, where temperatures dropped to around 20 with wind chills near zero.
After spending the night lost on the mountain, Bittman called 911 on Thursday morning. He said that his limbs were frozen, he was experiencing hypothermia and that he was no longer able to move through the snow, which was several feet deep.
HOW TO WATCH FOX WEATHER
Ground crews with the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department and Pemi Valley Search and Rescue Team, along with an aerial crew with the Army National Guard, responded to his call.
However, they faced poor visibility from cloud cover and intermittent snow squalls over the steep terrain and thick vegetation, forcing them to adjust their approach to rescuing Bittman.
The first ground rescuers had to spend an hour bushwhacking 1,000 feet of vegetation off the trail to reach Bittman by early Thursday afternoon. By then, he was found suffering severe hypothermia and was placed in an emergency sleeping bag for shelter and given warm, dry clothes and warm fluids.
Two hours later, weather conditions allowed for the Army National Guard to reach Bittman with a medic. They hoisted the young man into the helicopter and then was flown to a local hospital for treatment.
“This aerial rescue saved a multi-hour carry out thru rugged terrain and is a testament as to how search and rescue works in New Hampshire with several different groups working together for a common goal,” New Hampshire Fish & Game officials said.
New Hampshire
Distant Dome: Christmas Comes for Some in New Hampshire
By GARRY RAYNO, Distant Dome
Christmas in New Hampshire is upside down if you are the Granite State’s government.
New Hampshire lawmakers have decreed that most of the “gifts” from the state do not go to the needy, but to those on the other end of the economic spectrum.
With Republicans again firmly in charge of the legislature and governor’s office, the “mandate” according to House Majority Leader Jason Osborne, R-Auburn, will focus on “lowering taxes, cutting wasteful spending, growing our economy, empowering parents with the Parents Bill of Rights and expanding the wildly successful Education Freedom Account program.”
The question is who benefits the most from “lowering taxes” and “cutting wasteful spending,” and what is “wasteful spending,” services for poor women who go to Planned Parenthood clinics because they cannot afford to go to a private practice physician?
For the better part of a decade now, Republicans have voted to cut the rates of the state’s two business taxes, the business profits tax and the business enterprise tax.
The larger collector, the business profits tax, receives the vast majority of its revenue from multinational corporations not based in New Hampshire, but who do business here.
The business enterprise tax is a value added tax on every business in New Hampshire although many very small businesses are exempt from paying.
Now you might think lowering the rate of the business enterprise tax would benefit local businesses more than cutting the rate of the business profits tax and that would be a no brainer for lawmakers, but no, they lowered the rate for the business profits tax more frequently and far greater than they did the tax rate of the business enterprise tax.
Who did that help more? Large multinational corporations received the bulk of that benefit not your local business owners who do not reach across continents and cultures to soften the blow of taxes.
And in a little over a week, the one state tax that actually taxes wealth will be eliminated although it produced $185 million in revenue last fiscal year. Can you imagine what $185 million would do spread across the university and community college systems to reduce tuition for New Hampshire students?
Who pays the interest and dividends tax? About 90 percent of the revenue comes from the top five percent of wealth holders in the state. That is not most of us or our neighbors.
Well you might say, what about property taxes which every home, building and land owner pays in the state, surely they too should have a lower tax rate.
Have you checked the tax bill you are about to pay in a little over a week? I don’t know about your tax bill, but mine had a hefty increase this year, and I suspect yours did too.
And with the state facing a budget crisis not seen in two decades, you are likely to see it go up even more after the lawmakers are finished crafting the next two-year budget this spring as more state costs are likely to be downshifted to local property tax payers as they were two decades ago when the state stopped paying its share of the retirement system costs for municipal, school and county workers as they had since the unified system was created during the last century.
That sifted tens of millions of costs to local property taxes that the state once paid.
There are two Christmas presents the majority of local property taxpayers sort of received in the last year, two superior court decisions declaring the state’s education funding system unconstitutional, inequitable and too meager to cover the cost of an adequate education, which is every child’s fundamental, constitutional right.
Those two decisions in the ConVal and Rand cases — if acted on by lawmakers — could have lowered the property taxes of the poorer communities hit hardest by the state’s education funding system like Claremont, Berlin, Franklin, Newport, Pittsfield and others.
But that change would increase the property taxes in communities with the lowest rates in the state with the greatest property wealth, so in New Hampshire’s upside down Christmas world, lawmakers did not take the bait and instead did nothing keeping the current system in place.
We don’t want the taxpayers in those property wealthy communities saying “Bah Humbug” this time of year lawmakers might as well have said.
Elementary and secondary education is not the only place New Hampshire lawmakers traditionally shortchange the poorer residents, they do so in post-secondary education as well with tuition costs that are second only to Vermont for in-state students in the country.
Is it any wonder New Hampshire students have the highest debt load of any in the country when they graduate from college?
While the university and community college systems have held tuition costs near steady for in-state students for the last few years, they cannot do that forever with shrinking enrollments, reduced programs and fewer full-time faculty members.
There is a Christmas flavored program that began four years ago, the Education Freedom Account program that was sold by Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut and others as an alternative for poor families whose children have trouble in the public school environment.
However 70 to 75 percent of the students were not in public schools when they joined the program, they were in private or religious schools or homeschooled.
In other words, parents already sending their children to private or religious schools or homeschooling have been able to gain a state taxpayer-funded subsidy to cover the costs the parents were paying.
The program is currently capped at 350 percent of poverty, which is a salary of $71,540 for a family of two and $109,200 for a family of four.
The legislature defeated an attempt to raise the rate higher last session to 425 percent of poverty level, or up to $133,600 annually for a family of four and $86,870 for a two-member family.
The federal government estimates the median income in New Hampshire for a family of four is $133,447.
One bill in the upcoming session would do away with any income cap which would allow anyone with school-age children to apply for a grant of about $5,200 per student, a provision that is bankrupting Arizona, North Carolina and several other states with no cap.
But the program has gifted many religious and small private schools struggling to survive with a great deal of state money, money that once was forbidden for religious schools.
And another beneficiary of the program, the single biggest vendor for the parents using state money, is Amazon.
Does Jeff Bozos really need any more of your state tax dollars? I doubt it, especially at Christmas time.
Merry Christmas and to all a good night.
Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.
Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn in New London
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