Ode to the 'Baru

This was written for my Subaru Outback 2.5i., and Subaru owners of all walks. Enjoy.

To those that do not know you, you appear small, weak, and strange. Unassuming in your shiny, innocent white coat, and neo-sheek Griswold family station wagon post Gastric Bypass procedure design. They mock you for not being a "man's car".

They do not know you.

Sitting at the red light with the powder crunched beneath your tires and the foggy exhaust rolling from behind you they laugh. "He's gonna get that thing stuck." "He'll be asking me to pull him out in about a quarter mile or so."

They do not know you.

"That thing's gonna break like a kids armless Spiderman rolling through this snow!"

They do not know you.
But I know you. I know you very well.

While you enjoy chauffeuring my children, my wife, my pets, and my bikes around with the utmost sense of duty and responsibility, you long for an alternate life.
While you enjoy long drives to distant places for our relaxation and enjoyment, you long for an alternate life.

You have heard tale of your brothers, sisters, cousins, and ancestors, carrying no cargo, shuffling no children. These legends that you have heard tale of, scream over dirt, mud, or snow, in blinding feats of speed and cornering, focused only on "get there as quick as you can". Oh to have but a taste of that life would surely tide you over, satisfy that lusty itch for which you were not created.

I know you, and I will indulge you.

With children absent from your back seats, and wife away, we will play, we will live. We will find an open pasture of highway filled with snow and slush absent of assuming villains, and the clique's of "popular transportation sheeple", and we will live.

Like Superman from the phone booth, or Batman from the cave, we will hurl ourselves into this alternate life, we will fly, we will corner, we will find the mud and the grime. We will indulge our child like fantasy for the day. We will dine on slush and snow, mud and muck until our stomach's become distended from adrenaline and joy!

And once we have had our fill, we will quietly roll ourselves back to the norm. We will again become Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne. The mild mannered 'Baru. Toting kids, getting the groceries, taking the Fam on the cheesy vacation.

For we know, and because we know, we are happy.