I first read about the ducks during the early days of the pandemic. An out-of-work elementary teacher wrote a blog post about ducking. When she spotted a Jeep in a parking lot, she squeezed a rubber duck into the door handle. A gift for a kindred soul, she said, knowing that all Jeep owners are basically the same people.

Months later, I started noticing ducks on dashboards—a Wrangler with three or four, a CJ7 with two or three. Sort of cute, but it quickly got out of hand. I soon started seeing passing Jeeps with forty-five ducks cluttering every horizontal surface.

When I was a kid, my father bred cats as a cottage industry. Suki and Cocoa, a pair of chocolate-point Siamese cats with pedigree, popped out litters of three to six kittens several times a year. A similar kitten these days might set a buyer back two-thousand dollars, but in the late sixties, I think the going rate was fifteen or twenty bucks.

Once, a kid purchased a kitten using his saved-up change. He paid for the cat using rolled quarters and dimes. When my father placed the coins on his car dashboard, a roll of dimes fell into the defroster vent. By the time a mechanic disassembled the dashboard and repaired whatever damage a roll of dimes can cause an HVAC system, the litter of kittens was a financial loss and then some.

Using my father’s mishap as a cautionary tale, I put nothing on my dashboard, ever. Probably automotive engineers have improved defroster vents over the past fifty-five years, and ducks in defrosters are not a concern, but the image of my dad trying to fish a roll of dimes out of a vent is never far from my memory.

Driving home from the beach last week, Susan suggested I search Spotify for a podcast our daughter Sophie suggested. The only thing we could remember was that the topic was cults. Search Spotify: Podcast on Cults. What popped up was the podcast series called Sounds Like a Cult, an entertaining and informative discussion on the cult-like behaviors of many modern groups. Some examples include Trader Joe’s shoppers, the Harry Potter infatuated, Ikea fans, Marathoners, the Costco obsessed (hmmm, lots of shoppers). What caught my eye was The Cult of Jeep Owners.

A couple of weeks earlier, Susan and I stood on a street corner with a friend when a Jeep whizzed by. He said, “You know, that duck thing just started during Covid.” I didn’t know that. I thought back to the early-pandemic blog post I read about ducking. Clearly, that blogger was an early adopter. Susan and I often point out the ducks to each other, maybe slightly derisively. Nothing screams “hey, look at me” more than thirty yellow ducks on a dashboard (except maybe blogging). This was a chance to learn the duck origin.

The podcast covered such topics as Jeep history (started as a war vehicle, as I’m sure we all know), Jeep hierarchy (owners get status for driving older Jeeps and Jeeps with aftermarket modifications), the Jeep-driver wave (yes, they have a wave*), and, of course, the ducks. Maybe our brains had become numb from our thirteen-hour drive home from Georgia, but it all sounded so good natured, so wholesome, so… FUN. By the time the podcast wrapped up, Susan and I were talking about buying a Jeep. At a minimum, we suddenly considered ourselves honorary Jeepsters.

By coincidence, I read a blog post last week reviewing the ancient T. Rex album Electric Warrior. No, I don’t know why the writer reviewed a fifty-four-year-old album, but he highlighted the song Jeepster as an album standout—a song I probably haven’t heard since college. I listened to the Jeepster on my phone and was suddenly transported back forty-some years to hanging out at my friend Andy’s house sucking down bong hits and trying to grasp the immensity of the universe. Jeepster has been playing in my head and on my car stereo on repeat ever since.

Jeeps! Everywhere!

I popped into Sweeet, Gettysburg’s retro candy shop, the other day to buy a duck for Susan. Most of Sweeet’s inventory is candy—buy it by the pound taffy, offbeat treats like chocolate covered scorpions, and yesterday’s faves like Zots, god I love Zots—but in the elevated window display area where fancy clothing boutiques arrange mannequins wearing the store’s most expensive clothing, Sweeet has assembled a few hundred rubber ducks, no two are alike. This display well preceded Covid, so the Jeep crowd wasn’t the initial target market. I assume they are now.

I bought the duck as a joke. A small expenditure to make Susan laugh. As we got ready to run an errand, I snuck outside and put the duck on her dashboard. It’s printed with “radiate kindness,” a message in line with Susan’s Buddhist beliefs. And laugh she did, long and hard, but then the laughter morphed into something different. Having a duck on her dash made her happy. Before we returned home from our errands, we stopped by Sweeet again so we could buy ducks to send to her brother and sister. She wanted to spread the joy.

I’m sure the Jeepsters out there reading this, and of course the ones who see Susan’s duck on the dash of her Hyundai Santa Fe will think we’ve appropriated their duck motif. And we have, shamelessly, but everyone deserves happiness, and if a radiate kindness duck on her dash brings Susan joy, the Jeepsters will just have to live with it.

* I googled the Jeep-wave. As it turns out, it’s identical to the wave you’re likely receive from a farmer driving a battered pickup down a country road. Those Jeep owners have done some appropriating of their own.

Buy a duck and give it to a friend. And listen to Jeepster by T. Rex so it can be stuck in your head too.