Lake Forest: intesify; turbulence; a bad career path; two poems

NOAA’s Earth Observatory site, which is on the list I visit each morning, has an interesting post today about watching a hurricane intensify via new milk carton size satellites.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/151603/watching-a-hurricane-intensify

Of weather, Kent, who is a pilot with a major airline, wrote to me today:

 I can tell you from 37 years of flying that the air mass has changed, we are finding more pockets of disturbed air, storms build quicker and they are of higher intensity. That increases our challenge of finding smooth air. When I first started flying it was the winter weather that kept me on high alert, but now I can say that I will not miss dealing with summer storms. I bid trips to fly early before the afternoon cumulo granite builds, but nowadays we are avoiding severe convective weather earlier in the day.

I thank him for permitting me to share his observations with you.

I don’t write much for publication any more, but I sold an article yesterday to a magazine for less than half of what that magazine paid me for articles forty years ago.  The editor pleaded poverty caused by competition from the Internet.  That probably is true.  But factoring in inflation, I am being paid a tenth of what I was forty years ago.  This is not usually considered a good career path.  The money does matter now, but it did forty years ago, and if there were a young Webb Chiles out there now, which of course there isn’t, he could not support himself as I did from my thirties to my fifties and three and a half circumnavigations by writing.  I am glad I am not young now.

The oddly named SEASHELL ANTHOLOGY OF GREAT POETRY is divided into sections.  I have mentioned ‘Arms and the Boy’.  Others have been about love, loss of love, nature, death.  I confess to skimming one about the relationship of parents and their children.  I have no knowledge of that experience from one side and do not like to dwell upon it from the other, but the next section ‘Wanderer’s Song’ is meant for me.

Here is a poem I did not know which gives the section its name by Arthur Symons and also the end of Tennyson’s wonderful ‘Ulysses’. As I believe I have mentioned here before Tennyson was only twenty-two or twenty-three when ‘Ulysses’ was first published yet he so well imagined epic old age.  Perhaps at eighty-one it is understandable that I particularly admire, 

        Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.

        Death closes all; but something ere the end,

        Some work of noble note, may yet be done.

And:

        We are not now that strength which in old days

        Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

        One equal temper of heroic hearts,

        Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

        To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.