MESA MUSINGS:

For me — and I can speak only for myself — it’s a mystery shrouded in a conundrum clothed in an imponderable.

No, it’s knottier even than that. It’s downright existential!

I speak of that ultimate question: “Where have all the squirrels come from?” The squirrels I refer to are the furry ones that inhabit Costa Mesa (not the nerds who debate matters of database management).

According to my research, they’re of the ubiquitous red squirrel variety (though they’re actually brown), called: sciurus vulgaris. Mr. Scarily Vulgar!

I moved to Costa Mesa as a 6-year-old with my family in 1951. There was nary a squirrel on the Mesa. As a normal rambunctious adolescent I built tree forts, stuck my nose in snake holes, fished for crawdads in ditches, and dug bunkers. There were no squirrels. Bupkis.

I attended Lindberg School, Rea Junior High and Costa Mesa High. Never once did I see a squirrel on campus. There were no squirrels.

There were gophers, to be sure, plenty of them. There were big, ugly possums that lumbered across the power lines at night and laid down under automobile tires on Costa Mesa’s pothole-strewn streets. And we had the occasional coyote saunter through our neighborhood. But, squirrels? None.

Of course, in the 1950s there were relative few trees in Costa Mesa, unlike today. The Mesa was somewhat desolate. Former bean fields were being transformed into single-family dwellings. My family lived in a new development on the Eastside, and each house had a spindly stick-like tree in front.

Most of Costa Mesa’s mature trees were eucalyptus. Can you imagine a squirrel attempting to sink its nails into slick eucalyptus bark? Mr. Scarily Vulgar would find himself halfway up the trunk and suddenly emulating Rocky the Flying Squirrel.

You need mature elms, oaks and pines to host a residential squirrel population, and those we didn’t have in Costa Mesa, circa 1951.

I joined the Army in 1964 and went to Fort Benning, Ga. One of my first mornings on post I saw a large Eastern gray squirrel dart across the grass and scamper up a tree.

“Wow, look!” I squealed to a fellow G.I. “A squirrel!”

My friend looked at me as if I’d just discovered that mud is brown.

“Where are you from, the North Pole?” he asked. “In this part of the world squirrels are everywhere, millions of ‘em. Don’t you have squirrels where you come from?”

Nope, not in Costa Mesa!

Not until now.

I began noticing squirrels in my neighborhood in the mid-1980s. Skittish, scrawny brown ones with bushy tails. They played peek-a-boo. As the decades passed, the cheeky varmints became more brazen: uttering shrill sounds, stealing pet food and raiding garbage cans, jumping trees, getting into lovers’ spats in the branches above my back yard, and dancing along the telephone wires.

Where’d they come from?

Did some guy from Lone Pine steal into town one dark night in 1982 and empty a sack of the rapacious critters at TeWinkle Park? Did he liberate them with the admonition: “be fruitful and multiply”?

Today they oversee the park, run loose in the neighborhoods and beg food from students at OCC. The pests show no fear. Some of my neighbors feed them.

Not me.

In an unrelated matter: I’m selling faux Fess Parker/Buddy Ebsen coonskin caps at the swap meet for bargain prices. Sorry, we don’t have the plush gray-striped Blue Ridge caps in stock; but we’re proud to offer our popular new “Mesa Browns.”

JIM CARNETT lives in Costa Mesa. His column runs Wednesdays.