a prologue of sorts

PART I: AN INTRODUCTION OF SORTS

 

We’ve got a camper and we are preparing to hit the road. It’s the bestest gosh darn camper in the world, I’m pretty sure. It’s name is the Grolar Bear. It’s not too big and it’s not too small. It’s just right. Goldilocks would be in little goldy heaven. She can’t have the camper though. It’s for me and the boy and the doggo. We are other wise known as the Tara Dactyl and Zack Attack and Malachi the Wonder Beast.  I am escapee from office life. I was a grumpy office worker. No good. No good at all. I gave up. Zack Attack did his thing in the Coast Guard and now he is done with that. He is a good Zack Attack. I like adventures and he does too. We shall adventure together. Malachi the Wonder Beast is a doggo. He is a good doggo. He is also just right. The best and the goofiest dog ever. Still enjoying adventures at the ripe old age of 13.5. His head is too big for the rest of body maybe and his fur is copious and insidious, but we love him.

 

The camper was born just a few months ago in lovely Denver, Colorado where the good folks at Phoenix Pop up Camper helped it to become a reality. Look at the pictures and behold its goodness. The Grolar Bear is not an RV and not a 5th wheel. It is a camper attached to the chassis of our Toyota Tacoma. We took the bed off attached the camper and behold! The mysterious hybrid beast known as the Grolar Bear! Soon we will have adventures and the Grolar Bear shall be our trusty steed.  We shall go north!  We are strange folk that prefer cold to warm.

 

 

PART II: A STORY OF SORTS

 

And now a short tale about a Grolar Bear, a real creature, even if one you had not heard about before (You could of course use the google to find this knowledge. But why would you google when you can rely on me to tell you something only partially true and probably misleading. I am really offering you the much more exciting option. Truth is over-rated). So here goes:

 

Not very long ago, in a land that is not very far away at all (at least if you live in Alaska perhaps or somewhere in a rather more Northernly direction) there was a very nice Grizzly Bear. We’ll call him Fred. Fred loved berries and the occasional salmon. He didn’t think very much of honey, even though he did very much enjoy the works of A.A. Milne and found that Winnie the Pooh creature to be both very charismatic and funny. Fred was rather lonely. Fred had wandered a bit farther north than all the other bears he knew when he was a wee bear. It was too hot for him. So he kept heading where it was colder. Sometimes there were days and days when he found nothing but trees and some birds who didn’t seem inclined to befriend him. Many days passed in much the same way.

 

One day, Fred was lounging beneath a very tall fir tree, enjoying the cool, soft cushion of the fallen pine needles softened by the morning dew. He leaned back against the trunk as a person would. His knees were crossed and a tattered copy of The Hotel New Hampshire lay open across his lap, but he had ceased reading some time ago. He was half dozing and half watching the butterfly that had flittered down and aimlessly landed on his ample bear nose. He twitched his nose occasionally and the lovely little creature would skitter up and off just a touch before returning to his favorite perch over and over again. This was a most amusing activity and really the most fun he had in days.

Camper test run in San Diego. Mission Trails.

And then, just as his eyes were falling shut upon a snooze (a snooze that surely would have been a lovely snooze), Fred got a glimpse of something not quite like anything he had seen before, but even so, quite familiar. She perched on the distant hill. Her lovely nose snorffling the sweet spring grasses in the much the same way as Fred himself was inclined to. She was white, with long limbs, her face had a grace to it that Fred immediately acknowledged in his big, bear heart. Fred rose up on his hind legs and executed the merest of bows intended to acknowledge her presence and present himself in a gentlemanly manner. He had never before behaved in such a way, but at the site of Esmerelda (Ezzy to her friends, although Fred would always call her Esme, my love, my light, my just right) the gesture came naturally to him.

 

Esmerelda was of course, a Polar Bear, who had wandered just a little farther south than most of her compatriots. She too had been lonely. She too thought Fred to be a most wondrous site, full of dignity and covered with the most lustrous fur that gleamed in the early morn light that fateful spring morning when first these two furry soul mates met.

 

I think you can guess what happened after that. Not so much time had passed before a wee creature, a Grolar Bear, graced the world. He did not know he was a Grolar Bear of course, or anything different than anything that had ever come before.  He just was. And so it was that his very own adventure began.

Hanging in Rancho Cuyamaca