The Confessions of Ira Short

As soon as traffic starts to back up on the freeway, there is always someone who will decide to drive down the shoulder as a shortcut to the next exit. The morning commute has slowed to a crawl. The freeway narrows to three lanes; we're moving, but slowly. I'm in the center lane, pacing the semi in front of me at a steady 20 miles an hour. To my right, coming up the paved shoulder, is a small flock of medium-sized birds. Uniformly white, there's about a dozen of them, flying in a loose formation no more than eight feet above the pavement. Steadily, they pass the slowly moving cars, keeping to their straight path along the empty shoulder. They got off at the next exit.

When they are running, horses take one breath perfectly in time with one stride. At a canter and gallop horses do not breathe by expanding and contracting their chest - all air movement comes from movement of the legs and diaphragm. In other words, the act of running actually moves the air in and out of the lungs. From the traffic light at the bottom of the grade, the highway runs straight and flat five miles across the desert floor to where it disappears into the Interstate. If I catch the green light coming off the hill, I can carry my speed onto the flat. It's smooth and usually lightly traveled, but there's also enough tamarisk trees and slight hills to give the CHP a place to hide. Discretion is the better part of not getting a ticket in 20 years. I hit the red light just before the freeway. They added this signal when they widened and re-paved the highway - it can be a pain if you get behind a truck on the on-ramp. I'm first in line though, and when the light ...