I recently saw grizzly bears eating salmon! No, no — not in Malibu. I haven’t completely lost it yet. My bride of 32 years and I decided to leave paradise and took a plane to Vancouver, British Columbia, where we hopped on to another plane — if you can call what we boarded an airplane. (Twenty passengers without a bathroom barely qualifies.)
We flew more than an hour and landed somewhere north of the planet Pluto. (For those of you sticklers for accuracy, Pluto is no longer classified as a planet.) In short order, we were floating down some river where the grizzly bears and their cubs were gorging on salmon so they could be well fed before their five-month nap.
I feel a certain kinship with the bears. I, too, like long naps, although five months might be a tad bit long, even for me. I also like to eat salmon, but I prefer mine smoked on a bagel with cream cheese. These bears seemed quite content eating the salmon skin and brains and often discarding the rest.
I enjoyed watching the salmon almost as much as the bears. These salmon swim over 40 miles just to mate. Chew on that before complaining about your long schlep into Los Angeles. And they often find their birthplace, all without the help of a GPS.
The most amazing thing about salmon is their compulsive drive to procreate. The water was teeming with salmon jumping for joy in anticipation of their spawning, but as soon as the female lays her eggs and the male fertilizes them (no foreplay involved), a strange thing happens —they literally start to disintegrate, and within 48 hours, they carpet the river bed with their carcasses.
From now on, whenever I share an intimate moment with my bride, I will be eternally grateful I am not a salmon.