105 Degrees

Late Saturday afternoon, while driving from Helena to East Helena, my car registered a temperature of 105°F. That’s about 40 degrees higher than my preferred maximum temperature. It also ties the official all-time record high temperature for Helena.

When my car recorded that temperature, I had serious concerns that I might melt into a white-haired puddle. I insisted that Desiree capture an image of the numeric display on the console of the car so she could share my manner of demise with future generations.

You know that thing about all of us returning to dust?

Welp, apparently, I am getting an early run at that, too. When you look at the photograph of the temperature on my car’s display, you’ll see a lot of dust.

—Mitchell Hegman

Willing

I’m willing to eat daisies, cut boards with a dull handsaw, and rebrand myself as retired. But I’m not willing to live with a humanoid robot, paint the walls in my house hot pink, or eat a hot pepper.

—Mitchell Hegman

From What I Gather

Under certain conditions, sound carries itself remarkably intact across the lake. In the latest installment of this, I heard a pair of young “ladies” talking. From what I gather, there are a lot of “fuckers” on that side of the water.

—Mitchell Hegman

My Canadian Friends

Back in the days when I listened to AM radio while driving, a phenomenon called radio skip would occasionally deliver strange radio stations to me. Under just the right conditions, the ionosphere, a layer of electrically charged particles 60 to 250 miles overhead, becomes an invisible mirror that bends certain radio signals back toward Earth instead of letting them drift into space. A signal can leap hundreds or even thousands of miles in a single hop, allowing someone in Montana to suddenly hear a station from Texas or even Europe. No satellites. No relay towers. Just the Earth and its atmosphere briefly pulling off a long shot.

I sometimes found myself listening to radio stations from the far northern prairies of Canada while driving alone in the middle of the night.

We became friends.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Mouse Thing

There seems to be no end to the supply of mice living around my back deck and hot tub. I have captured and released something very near 50 of them in the last five weeks. If you are keeping track, that's a lot.

If I had my druthers, they would be living over at Billy's place, and a bunch (can we call them a herd?) of hummingbirds would surround my deck.

It's not because a mouse is particularly intimidating. In fact, if you met just one out in the yard, you'd probably find the tiny fellow rather endearing. Twitchy pink ears. Bright eyes. Busy whiskers.

This is no grizzly bear.

But ultimately, they are after my peanut butter cookies. And as you can judge by the number I have captured, they procreate like mad.

A female mouse reaches maturity in only six to eight weeks. Her gestation lasts a mere nineteen to twenty-one days, and she typically produces five to eight pups. Under favorable conditions, she can become pregnant again within a day after giving birth.

That schedule doesn't leave much room on her calendar for hobbies.

Suppose you start with one healthy pair of adult mice in the throes of rodent love. Three weeks later, six pups arrive. Three weeks after that, another six. Two months in, fourteen mice isn't exactly a furry apocalypse.

Then the daughters grow up.

About six to eight weeks after they're born, they begin having litters of their own. Suddenly, reproduction isn't happening one family at a time. It's happening several families at once.

By the end of the third month, you might have thirty or forty mice. By the fourth month, it's easy to top a hundred. Five months in, several hundred isn't out of the question. By six months, under ideal conditions with plenty of food, warmth, and shelter, the descendants of that single pair could number well over a thousand.

I don't have that many cookies. So, I trap and relocate.

—Mitchell Hegman

Making Faces

As my dented luck would have it, I stepped into a checkout line behind a young mother with a toddler seated in her cart just as the young boy started bawling with conviction. The mother did her best to placate her child while, at the same time, placing items on the belt.

After a minute or so, the boy noticed me. "What's going on, buddy?" I asked. Then I offered a smile and a few skewed faces. The boy immediately stopped crying and studied me with a countenance that a mechanic might wear when examining a handful of bolts left over after rebuilding an engine.

Before long, the kid was pointing at the soda and candy on display next to him and then looking back at me for my reaction.

We had a thing, and he was calm and quiet as his mother completed her transaction and bagged her groceries. She even thanked me for calming her son before pushing off with her cart.

I'm thinking I might try offering Desiree those same faces the next time she is miffed at me to see if I can deliver her to a new state of mind.

—Mitchell Hegman

Three Horses and One Mule

Even though I’ve lived in horse-infatuated Montana my entire life, you’d be surprised how impressive I find the sight of horses (and one mule) frisking about in a pasture with mountains as the backdrop. Desiree, of course, is impressed with elk and horses above most things, both of which have a proud, regal air about them. So yesterday, when three horses and a mule pranced up to a fence line to check us out, we stopped so Desiree could talk to the critters and capture them in a sun-washed portrait.

Three Horses and One Mule

—Mitchell Hegman