Have you heard about Owen and Mrzz? Their story is about a year old, but I only just heard it. Grab the Kleenex. This is, hands down, the sweetest damn story ever told. You can read it firsthand from their caretakers’ personal blog or from the pdf book with photos (Note: These look a little weird at first, but there are lots of clear photos in there.), but for kicks, lemme give a quick recap here:
Owen met Mrzz as a direct result of waking up one morning, going for a swim with the folks and getting his baby hippo butt whisked away by a big ass tsunami. Finding himself promptly dumped in the middle of a crumbling coral reef and no way to get to shore, Owen attracts about five hundred villagers who proceed to chase him around and catch him with a SHARK NET. “Hey, guys? Hey, uh, what are you…hey, GUYS?! That’s my LEG…Dude! This is so… blrbrbrl… NOT… blrbrbrl… COOL… blrbrbrl…!” A day’s work well done, the Hippowompa tribe loads Owen into a truck and drops him off at the nearest wildlife sanctuary, where there’s no mom, no dad, and no vacancy at the nearest pod because the Big Boss hippos? They KILL new hippos. Especially the little biddy ones.
And what does Owen do? Does he wander off to mope and cry and waste away with sadness at how unfair the world is? No. He doesn’t. Does he go a little koo-koo and wear a track in the ground walking circles for five days straight? Ok. Maybe a just a bit. But then Owen spots a giant grey blob nearby and trots right on up to make friends. With a 130 year old TORTOISE.
Kids, the last guy who could make stuff like this up and sell it was Hans Christian fricking Anderson. And I would love to hear someone lay this story on him. “A 600 pound Hippo? Friends. With a turtle. Oh, come on. Now you’re just reaching.”
Apparently, hippos are stone BLIND. And tortoises are crankier than a one-armed USPS mail clerk. So when Owen bobbled over to say, “Ohmigod, Ohmigod, Ohmigod, I am SO GLAD to meet you…That hippo over there? Tried to EAT me! But he can’t catch both of us! We hippo babies have to stick together”, Mrzz was all, “Hmmm? Hippo what? …oh, HELL no! Get the fuck off me.”
“You,” Owen paused, “are SO…COOL! Let’s be friends!” and laid a huge, slurpy, hippo kiss right on Mrzz’s leathery, wrinkled head. Seriously pissing Mrzz off. “Hey!” Snapping about a half an inch from Owen’s snout, Mrzz said, “I’ll bite right through that fat schnauzz of yours. Swear. To. God.”
To which Owen said, “Really?”
“Really. Fuck off.” Mrzz turned and stalked away. If by ‘turned and stalked away’, I mean ‘slowly nudged his shell half an inch’.
“Ok,” Shrugging, Owen turned, rubbed against Mrzz’s shell and sat down. “Wow! I am ti-red.” Mrzz desperately stretched out another leg, trying to get past the jungle tree he’d been working around all afternoon. “Wait, dude? Wait! Just let me get…”
As darkness fell over Haller Park animal sanctuary, workers who closed up for the night still swear they could hear the faintest of cries, the kind often heard from the lovingly resigned.
“CRAP!”
Mrzz and Owen have been inseparable from that night on. And get this – not only do they eat, sleep, and play together constantly, they talk to each other. Now, I know you’re sitting there going, “Well, DUH”, but it’s not like Owen’s over here making Hippo noises, and Mrzz is over there making Tortoise noises. No, they went and made some kind of Torti-po variation and they totally GET IT.
Can you imagine what playtime is like with these two?
Owen: *Whee-ooonk!* “Marco!”
Mrzz: *Skeee-ommmp* “Polo!”
Owen: *Eee-eee-ooooah! Ph-zoooeee!* “Here I come, turtle-man! Heee-rre I…gotcha! You’re it!”
Mrzz: *Zzznornk! Krrr-oo-ah phrn-ooo-ZEE Fa-woook-eeeeooo* “Crap! Ok. Let’s play a better game. Let’s play: Who can sit quietly in the water without moving the longest?”
Owen: *Hwaak! Ffthl-neek-owaaaa!* “Dude! That’s what I was thinking!”
This is Nature at its best, people.
But can we leave well enough alone? Noooooo. We can’t. We’re people. Who have, by our very nature, a curious and meddlesome disposition that makes us fiddle and fark and twiddle with things that are perfectly fine. And so the wise folks at Haller Park have come to the conclusion that Owen should start ‘fitting in’. This spring they’ll be dangling a cooler, cuter, girl Hippo in front of Owen in an effort to get him to ditch his buddy.
God. That’s one mother of a twisted metaphor right there. The whole thing covers so much I don’t know where to start – friendship, marriage, race…high school. But there’s one thing I do know. You can’t force love into a certain mold. And you really shouldn’t try. Because love is love, and the more you mess with it, the more it hurts. (An Elfquest story, The Jury, illustrates this point sooo well.)
Granted, Owen & Mrzz’s story is a happy one so far, and I know the fine folks at Haller Park just want to keep the ole man from getting smooshed when his four ton buddy decides to play a little foosball one afternoon. But whether Owen abandons Mrzz for Cleo, or stays and steps on his buddy someday, it doesn’t much matter. You can’t avoid the pain.
Nature’s a bitch that way.
© 2006 – 2011, jules.maas. All rights reserved.
