The Confessions of Ira Short

This is about a mouse. At least, I think it is. The other night, as I was setting up the coffeemaker for the morning, I heard something scratching around in the kitchen cupboards. I opened some doors and peeked warily inside, but saw nothing. Nevertheless, I baited and set a mousetrap and left it in one of the lower cupboards. The next morning, the trap was still set. I assumed the intruder had found its way out the same way it came in, and I wrote it off. So it was, when I opened one of the cabinets that night, I was not expecting to literally come face to face with a field mouse. Our eyes met briefly before he dove for cover and I took an involuntary step back. A brief chase ensued, where he easily dodged from shelf to shelf among the clutter, while I vainly tried to slap a plastic container over him. His bright eyes would watch me intently as I maneuvered for position, and then he would duck away as soon as I committed to a move. He finally tired of our cat and mouse game - ...

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 ...

Actions have consequences, often unplanned and unexpected, and sometimes unwanted. Frequently the results of our actions are a mixture of both desired ("good") outcomes, and undesired ("bad") ones. Good and bad are relative terms, depending on your point of view. ***** Life in the desert is directly affected by the availability of two things - water and food. While this is true anywhere on Earth, due to the scarcity of those two elements in the desert environment, they become the paramount factors for the survival of living things. Usually the two are found together; plants and animals are concentrated in areas where water is reliably available. For many years I have made both available to the birds and small mammals occupying the rural suburban area where I live. I tend the plants that provide shelter and food to them, and make available a steady source of water and supplemental food in measured amounts. It is an oasis not dissimilar to the natural ones nearb...

This fork of a Joshua Tree fell over some months ago; you can see how the stump is nearly horizontal. They store water in their trunks and can be incredibly heavy, and it just fell over from its own weight. The upper part was laying across my driveway, and the trunk was hanging on the fence, so I had to cut it off. The stump was still partially rooted, so I let it be. Now there are a half dozen shoots, incipient new branches, sprouting from the stump. As I was growing up I would sometimes be envious of those friends and classmates who already knew what they wanted to be when they grew up. I still know a few of them and they actually have had the jobs they wanted to do, or moved to the places they said they wanted to live, done the things ... you get the idea. During my lifetime more than one person has thought me aimless, or lacking direction for my lack of a clear vision for my future. To be honest, they weren't completely wrong; I'm making this up as I go. It took me a...

The large front window of the house faces east, with the result that every morning I am privy to one of a seemingly limitless number of sunrises. Most of the time, that is simply a matter of the sun popping up over the horizon, without fanfare, and so my day begins. Other times, when I pull the curtains back, there is something more waiting for me. The work I do (aka, my "day job") is writing computer software. It is all very logical, methodical, and relatively predictable. Even when I am troubleshooting a problem, there is really not any creativity involved. There is a set number of variables to be traced; it's a problem in logic. It's all very cut and dried. If I look at the sunrise from that perspective, it is not in the least bit remarkable. A meteorologist could tell me the exact list of conditions that have caused the clouds to form on this morning. I don't know the exact terminology, but I do know it has to do with the relative humidity, the air tempe...

Living in the desert is to have a front seat to life at an almost primal level. That is, if you're paying attention. For some, like the desert marigold, life is a brief event, a brave foray into an inhospitable world. According to my reference it "thrives in dry, poor soils, in "extreme heat". The volunteer rye grass that sprouted up after the early rains has withered and died all around it, but the marigold soldiers on. Here on the sun-baked strip of bare dirt next to the street, it puts up a handful of small flowers to attract a pollinator, so that it can go to seed and spawn a generation of children it will not live to see. In more favorable areas, there are armies of marigolds crowded along the street, bright yellow advertisements for spring. But here there are only a few, like pioneers trying to stake a claim in a new land. It is not simply a matter of enduring the heat and lack of water and nutrients that the marigold is facing. Jostling for resources a...

Ahead of me, the freeway is dotted with cars, white and black and shades of gray. In the distance, a single red Mustang maneuvers its way through the monochrome blocks. A bank of clouds hangs ominously over the freeway ahead, black and white and shades of gray. San Gorgonio Pass Runs about 20 miles from the Highway 62 junction (where I get on Interstate 10), to the summit, roughly the junction with Highway 60 in Beaumont. Wikipedia informs me that it is one of the deepest passes in the contiguous 48 states, as it divides two peaks rising 9,000 feet above the valley floor on either side. From the desert floor to the summit of the pass is a rise of about 1800 feet; it's a long and gradual incline for 20 miles. This is one of the reasons the railroad came through this way in the middle 1800s. The steam locomotives still had to work pretty hard to go up it, so they put in a station to re-fill the water tender. Banning grew up around that. The freeway follows the railroad tracks. ...