A few weeks ago, we made the 400-mile jaunt from Rapid City to upstate North Dakota to be a part of my brother Gabe’s 40th birthday celebration. There were no pony rides or bouncy houses, but there were 18-holes of golf and plenty of clowns around the backyard firepit.

Our son, Jackson, wanted to golf and carry-on into the wee hours with his uncle, so we weren’t able to depart Rapid City until about 7:00pm (our time…as it is often referred to by those in our Central Time Zone destination) as Jackson had to work later than anticipated. He’s a UPS driver, and we can’t have people without their essentially unessential stuff delivered in a timely fashion.

A departure of 7:00pm our time (8:00pm their time) made for a 2:00am our time (3:00am their time) arrival, which amounted to about 20-minutes of daylight driving. The other six-hours and forty-minutes were spent glancing from ditch-to-ditch, my eye’s pinballing the breadth of the headlight beams in search of nefarious beasts looking to raise my insurance premiums. They were relentless. One rabbit, one moose (no squirrel), two foxes, two owls, three horses, and I stopped counting deer after 30 (that’s where my mathematical education topped out my second year of kindergarten).

As Patches O’Houlihan once said, “If you’re going to become true dodgeballers, then you’ve got to learn the five d’s of dodgeball; dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge.” Only one animal that we encountered on this Dakota safari failed to become a true dodgeballer. We will never know the answer to the question, “Why did the rabbit cross the road?” I suspect it was to make more rabbits, but that is merely speculation.

Sometime after midnight (both times), I spotted four young bucks loitering on the shoulder of the road, passing around a bottle of blackberry brandy they had stolen from some old stag and smoking Virginia Slims that one of them had lifted from their mother’s purse. They appeared to be trying to cajole the youngest of their renegade bachelor herd into setting my airbags off, but his eyes were watering from a coughing fit from inhaling a Virginia Slim and he mistimed his jump. So it goes.

When we rolled into my mom and dad’s driveway at 3:00am (their time), the tuft of rabbit fur clinging to the bottom of the mudflap was a stark reminder of how fortunate we were to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge the larger animals we encountered. Maybe rabbits’ feet are lucky?

That moose would have made our Toyota, and myself, a convertible. Dawn was lying down in the backseat and Jackson was fully reclined in the passenger seat, so they most likely would have emerged unscathed. The moose appeared friendly enough, so I’m sure he would have given them a lift to the party after he dusted me off of him.

It was an enjoyable birthday party. A day of laughter and general shenanigans…the usual. A good usual to have while we have the time…ours and theirs.