We arrived yesterday afternoon.  As always I am awed by the tall spruce, birch, and pine trees standing in deep snow for miles and miles.  The bridge over the Wisconsin River revealed a frozen, snow covered surface except for a small channel of flowing water close to one bank.  Three deer had ventured out on the river appeared in the distance.

For someone who lives in a suburb of Chicago, these scenes are “magical” to use a word familiar to children.  What is the difference between magic and the mystical?  Surely there is not much.

All is relatively quiet here in the coffee shop which is a contrast to the atmosphere in the summer months, when summer homes are filled with returning snow birds.  The summer migration to this town means that you will be lucky to find a table to sit, think, and do a bit of writing at Eagle River Roasters Coffee Shop.

Late last night just before turning in this Los Angles Times article came up on my phone screen news feed.  The cursory reading before bedtime was troubling.  Here is the gist which I have excerpted:

How a 50-year-old design came back to haunt Boeing with its troubled 737 Max jet

By Ralph Vartabedian

Mar 15, 2019

The crisis comes after 50 years of remarkable success in making the 737 a profitable workhorse. Today, the aerospace giant has a massive backlog of more than 4,700 orders for the jetliner and its sales account for nearly a third of Boeing’s profit.

But the decision to continue modernizing the jet, rather than starting at some point with a clean design, resulted in engineering challenges that created unforeseen risks.

“Boeing has to sit down and ask itself how long they can keep updating this airplane,” said Douglas Moss, an instructor at USC’s Viterbi Aviation Safety and Security Program, a former United Airlines captain, an attorney and a former Air Force test pilot. “We are getting to the point where legacy features are such a drag on the airplane that we have to go to a clean-sheet airplane.”

Few, if any, complex products designed in the 1960s are still manufactured today. The IBM 360 mainframe computer was put out to pasture decades ago. The Apollo spacecraft is revered history. The Buick Electra 225 is long gone. And Western Electric dial telephones are seen only in classic movies.

……To handle a longer fuselage and more passengers, Boeing added larger, more powerful engines, but that required it to reposition them to maintain ground clearance. As a result, the 737 can pitch up under certain circumstances. Software, known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, was added to counteract that tendency.

It was that software that is believed to have been involved in a Lion Air crash in Indonesia in October……

This information is troubling because Boeing is a company that is regarded as emblematic of our country, a icon of our self-image, the notion that we are an advanced society with institutions and corporations that others around the world envy and emulate.

And yet….there is the possibility that a mistake in judgment looms large before Americans and all in the developed world who use Boeing aircraft for day to day travel.  I count myself in company with those who fly in Boeing airplanes.  Did they decide to stick with an obsolete design, to squeeze more from work dating back to the 60s— “betting the farm” that by software finesse the machine could be made “safe enough?”  We will know in due time since the laws of physics are unforgiving.

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We are spending a few days in Eagle River because a beloved family member is in the final stage of liver cancer.  She has lived 90 years, and her life with her husband stands to the rest of the family as an example of courage, strength, kindness and love.  We will morn her, and will miss her  with her departed husband.  They belonged to this land and the lakes. And we will go on, until our sun sets.

Nature unlike human institutions, corporations especially, knows when yesterday’s model has well served its purpose.  There is a time for everything to pass away, to be mourned.  Thus the ground is cleared for a new generation, one more apt for the present, which is always new.

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And these lines from T. S. Eliot:

There is, it seems to
     us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment.
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been.

…..Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,….

—excerpt from East Coker
by T. S. Eliot