Jackalopes.
“Well, that's terrible."
My wife had just walked into our basement bar to see my newly acquired eBay purchase. I hadn’t asked for permission ahead of time and the package arrived on our doorstep while she was out running errands. This purchase was years in the making and I knew would it spark controversy. But the best things in life are worth fighting for. Now all my Jackalope needed was a name.
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There are a lot of reasons why I fell in love with my wife, but a shared love of Jackalopes was not one of them. As a family of five living in Central Nebraska, our childhood vacations were a rotation of four options within a half-day van ride. Even though these summer outings weren't novel, they were highly anticipated.
There was:
The Mall of America and sleeping on Uncle Jim's couch
Reliving my parent's glory years stationed on an Army Base in Colorado Springs
Sitting in my Aunt's living room in hopes that Uncle Jerry would break the monotony by taking us to a movie in Aberdeen, South Dakota
But every four years we’d really get excited. The Summer of the Black Hills. The land where Jackalopes grazed.
Depending on whether or not I had purchased a new Gameboy cartridge, our summer car rides were simply something to be endured. Stomach aches from gas station food. Brothers farting in stuffy cars. Realizing you didn't pack enough AA batteries to get through the return trip. But the voyage to the Black Hills was something different. This wasn't driving through the barren wastelands of Iowa.
Around the time your first 20 ounces of Dr. Pepper have made their way through your system and begin assaulting the walls of your bladder, you see it. A sign.
"Free ice water. Wall Drug. Wall, South Dakota"
Wall Drug. The holy grail of roadside attractions and sites to blow through your saved paper route money. Some families took their kids to Disney, we went to Wall Drug. Miles of affordable kitsch and tchotchkes that were all screaming to be lined up in front of the fish tank in my room. The oasis with enough animatronics and fiberglass-sculptures-you-could-climb to devote an entire disposable camera. It was the happiest place on earth, all you had to do was pretend to be interested in the Mitchell Corn Palace so that your parents wouldn't cut your time lost in wanderlust short.
But it wasn't just my brothers and I that loved this pit stop, my parents were just as into it. They received joy out of our joy, and the only part of our vacation my dad looked forward to was ordering a hot beef sandwich at the café. It was a family outing we actually agreed on. And the wall of rabbits with deer antlers gave us the same collective awe that I imagine a more sophisticated group would reserve for a mountain range. Or a sunset. Or something way worse than a dead rabbit with horns stuck to it.
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I remember my first Jackalope sighting. I remember the feeling in my gut that accompanied it. Complete confusion mixed with utter delight. That sensation of, "wait, what?" Furrowing my brow in confusion at my mom only to be met with a crafty twinkle in her eye. It’s not easy for my mom to lie, but she kept the gag alive until a careful investigation of the Jackalope paraphernalia slowly eroded the beast’s validity. And then the twinkle was in my own eye.
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My brother got it right away. He eyed the wall of Jackalope mounts but was anguished by how much a purchase would deplete his vacation souvenir savings. And we were still just on the drive there. He hemmed and hawed, and secured a commitment from my parents to come back on the ride home if he still had ample funds. As we reached the end of our summer vacation his balance was close, but not close enough. The hotel room the night before the return trip was filled with anguish. But if there’s one thing my parent's could understand, it was this need in Jason’s soul.
As we were shoving dirty clothes in back packs and tracking down soggy swimsuits, my mom called a family meeting. One at a time, we were each handed a crisp $20 bill. We were going back to paradise. And my brother could make his dream come true.
I didn't have enough for a Jackalope and I could tell this was kind of Jason's thing—so instead I followed my brother Kevin around and decided to buy the mounted bull horns that he really liked but passed on. They're also currently hanging in my basement. They were originally supposed to inhabit the place where my new Jackalope resides, but my wife asked me to put them in a less prominent location. It worked out in the end, but I have a felling she’d like to have that vote back.
I was always a little (more than a little) jealous of my brother's Jackalope. It hung in his bedroom next to a taxidermy fish named Jim Carcass that was given to him by his eighth grade science teacher. When Jason went off to college he left both dead animals at home and I pretended they were mine.
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But why do people love Jackalopes?
That was the question Michael Branch asked in the years he spent researching America's favorite fake animal and then writing about it.1
To me, that was kind of like asking, "why do you like ice cream?"
"Why do you like dogs?"
"Why do you like sex?"
If you have to ask the question, you clearly don't get it. It doesn’t matter what the answer is.
But as my wife has clearly demonstrated, this love isn't quite as intuitive to everyone.
On the surface, you could compare the Jackalope to other mythical gags that are intended to bring joy. Prior to having kids, I had serious reservations about whether my family would ‘do Santa Claus.’ I certainly believed in Santa as a kid, but something just seemed kind of wrong about deliberately tricking your kids for years on end until they eventually figured out you were full of shit.
It seemed like the sort of quandary you'd find as a word problem on an ethics exam:
Question 32. You should lie to your kids (T / F)
Question 33. You should tell your kids to believe in Santa (T / F)
Question 34. Explain your responses to Questions 32 and 33.
I mean what are you supposed to do with that mindfuck?
But when I had kids of my own, it was blatantly obvious what our family tradition should be and how much deceit would be required. We adopted our kids from Colombia at the ages of 3, 5, and 8. As we were still getting to know them, one night the topic of missing teeth came up. In Colombia, the jurisdiction of tooth collection doesn't belong to a flying, magical wood nymph— but rather a discrete vermin that goes by the name of Ratón Pérez. Our eldest daughter asked about the veracity of said rat, because as she was living with her foster mother she tried on four separate occasions to put a lost tooth under her pillow. Even though this method worked for friends of hers, she never awoke to find any pesos.
Pretty fucking sad, right?
Ethics exam Chris might have told her, "well he's not real, so that's why." But we can imagine how well that would go over in my daughter's therapy sessions. Instead, I immediately looked for ways to restore her stolen innocence and sense of imagination.
I bought a ‘Ratón Pérez door’ on Amazon, which is just a tiny wooden door that Latino kids place against a wall and Señor Pérez magically walks through in the middle of the night. We kept it hidden until our daughter’s first dentist appointment. Afterward I had something I needed to share with her.
“Hey I spoke to the dentist and asked if she had any ideas why Ratón Pérez didn't visit the last few times. She thought it might be because you didn't have one of these doors.”
That night we set the door up in our bathroom “just to see if it works." The next morning our child was rewarded with $5 and a handwritten note from the Ratman himself. In the best cursive Spanish a rodent could muster, our enamel bandit explained how he had been trying to find our daughter for a long time but couldn’t locate the proper door. His going rate per tooth was $1, but he threw in an extra dollar for the hassle. He also outlined that Omaha was normally the Tooth Fairy's turf, but since she was originally from Colombia, he had a founder’s claim on her teeth.
And you know what my daughter also received? Delight.
Do I think she'll think I was a bad father for utterly deceiving her? Hell no. And will this farce give her a little more incentive to carry on the falsehood with her own children, creating a generational legacy of lies? I'm confident it will.
And how much more fun is that than just getting $5 from Dad.
This mystery, this wonder, this sense of strangeness created a tenderness and excitement that poured gasoline on her imagination. A few months later, after waking up early to catch an unsolicited glance at her Easter basket, this same girl barged into our bedroom in a rage of disgust.
"The Easter Bunny doesn't exist!!!!”
She forgot to check the basement where their baskets were all neatly arranged. And then the joy was restored. And the twinkle was back in her eye.
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As kids, we want these deceptions to exist. We don't really want our parent's taking credit for a gift when a mysterious rabbit, fat geriatric, or household pest could accomplish the same task by breaking and entering. We look for ways that these creatures could be real, despite all our senses and logic suggesting otherwise. We want to believe in a world where this magic exists. Where Jackalopes exist.
But that's not quite the whole story either. There's a progression that takes place. It begins with an innocence. You allow yourself to be taken in by a sense of wonder. When something like a mythical creature delights, the pleasure creates a desire. Even if those beings aren’t real, the excitement stirring from within is.
But when the truth is unmasked, you’re left with more than a broken spirit. Now you're in on the secret. And there's a new joy that comes with being an insider. Not necessarily a joy that comes in tricking people (though there can be a bit of that) but the joy that comes with your kids gasping at all the toys Santa brought and how he ate the cookies they left out. If everyone was in on the gag, it wouldn't just spoil it for you, it would spoil it for them as well.
In being in the know, you get to continuously and vicariously relive that fascination with the unknown by hoodwinking others. And that’s when you reach the final stage: ownership. Creating this pleasure becomes something that you feel a sense of responsibility for. Not in a dutiful way, but in a way that wants the people you love to experience the enchantment that comes from going through this progression themselves.
An ambassador.
A steward.
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Why do we love mascots? My wife hates those too by the way.
It's not quite the same thing as believing in Santa, but it’s not different either. We look to personify a place, an experience, or a nebulous concept into something more tangible. Some symbol that inhabits the personalities and behaviors that we feel when we experience something. Christmas is jovial, so is Santa. Americans are brave and dignified, so are bald eagles. Philadelphia Flyers fans are fat slobs that appear disgusting and hairy anytime you see them doing something stupid on tv, so is their mascot Gritty.
We see the Jackalope as a mascot of the Midwest. Of my family vacations. Of my people. I'm sure other cultures appreciate the Jackalope, but this is ours. Like Herbie Husker is also mine.
We see mascots all over if you do any sort of travelling. We see Leprechauns in Ireland and bulls in Spain. Iceland has four ‘Guardians’ on their coins and international soccer jerseys, each representing a cardinal direction of the island and its inhabitants. When I traveled to Guam, I was greeted by the greenish dinosaur creature that eats pollution named Gumamon. And no one embraces this symbolism more than the Japanese and their menagerie of Yuru-chara.
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After reading Branch’s book, I mentioned it to my brother in hopes that he would give me his old Jackalope as a Christmas present. It was currently hung up in my nephew's closet. But that day never came, so I started my eBay bidding. I lost my first auction on the final seconds before time expired. I immediately entered my max offer on the next available Jackalope. And this one joined the family.
Most days I still look at it and smile.
My wife completely avoids eye contact with it at all times.
https://www.amazon.com/Trail-Jackalope-Legend-Captured-Imagination/dp/1643139339