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Goodnight, Irene

    Hey, everyone. Many years ago I was working at a weather station and we had a very interesting visitor. He was a member of the Hurricane Hunters and he was on a recruiting trip. He hoped to find some crazy people to voluntarily fly through the walls of hurricanes for the purpose of taking readings. I raised my hand because A. I loved the weather career field.
            B. I was young and adventurous.
            C. I thought it would be cool.
      The guy looked at the wedding band on my raised hand and shook his head.
"Sorry, son. We don't take any married guys, for obvious reasons."
      Well, that was okay because then, as now, my wife is more fun than flying through the wall of a hurricane and at times she is as peaceful as the 'eye'. It may get really stormy around her in the morning, when she reads this.
    When hurricane season rolls around I still like to get the coordinates of these storms from The National Hurricane Center in Miami and plot them on a map, much as I used to do for the status boards, back in the day. By the way, there is an app for that. I'd rather just grab a grease pencil and plot it.
    As Hurricane Irene lumbers northward toward the East Coast of the United States, I think back on weather stuff. I remember being in the Delaware Bay when a tropical storm rolled in, back in the 1980's, I think. I was in a concrete box at a plant and had to ride it out.
      I remember tracking a hurricane on radar as it approached the gulf coast, watching it spawn a line of tornado infested thunderstorms.
    I remember sitting on the beach at Jekyll Island as a hurricane approached, watching the sea and sky change as tourists behind me were packing and moving out.
    The weather career field is terrific. If you love a good storm, that would be a great job for you youngsters. Someone reading this may be the next Jim Cantorre.
    Oh, yeah. About that title. Many decades ago there was a popular song called Goodnight, Irene. It went something like this, Goodnight Irene, goodnight Irene, I'll see you in my dreams. I'm pretty sure that the singer was not thinking about a massive, destructive and totally unfeeling monster with only one eye, but one never knows. For my part, hurricanes are beautiful, in a way, merely because of the intense interest which they generate in me. Maybe tonight, I'll see her (Irene) in my dreams.
     From the author's green retreat, far from the ocean, I'm CE Wills.

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