Spreading Kindness One Tiny Rubber Duckie at a Time
By Jessica Brodie
What do you do when the world feels like it’s on fire, society is terrified about COVID-19, and you’ve just gotten physically assaulted by a perfect stranger because your license plates aren’t local and he’s worried you’re bringing germs into his community?
If you’re Allison Parliament, you buy a bag of rubber duckies at Stedmans and you go out and put them on other people’s Jeeps to shine a little bit of brightness, kindness, humor, and levity in what can be a very dark world.
When COVID hit, Allison, a Canadian woman who’d been living in Alabama, decided to go back to Canada because of family health issues. But her homecoming wasn’t so welcoming. A man saw her American license plates, began yelling at her, and then physically pushed her into her Jeep, ordering her to go home.
The experience was both surreal and terrifying. As Allison shared on a YouTube interview, not only did it trigger trauma she had experienced some years ago because of a stalker, but it epitomized the culture of terror our world was in because of the pandemic.
A friend finally forced her out of the house for a shopping trip, so she decided she’d jokingly get back at him by buying some yellow rubber ducks and leaving them all over his house. But she also decided to place one of the rubber ducks on a gorgeous Jeep parked outside the store. Allison, a longtime Jeep-lover whose great-uncle used to take her and her cousins on Jeep rides, scrawled the words, “Nice Jeep!” on the duck and left it on the Jeep’s bumper. She thought it would be a cute, funny way to spread a small but very needed dose of kindness in the world.
But the Jeep owner spotted her in the act—and he loved it! They connected, and the idea impacted him so deeply that he bought a giant bag of rubber ducks himself and started putting them on other Jeeps, letting them know they were appreciated and loved. When it hit social media, it became a viral movement now called #DuckDuckJeep that today is spreading across the Jeep and overlanding community around the world.
Now, when I say Jeep and overland “community,” that’s exactly what I mean. My husband, Matt, and I got involved with it early in the pandemic, when he found a 1992 Jeep YJ and decided to replace the engine and turn it into a screen-accurate replica of the Jeep from the Jurassic Park movies. His Jeep is 98 percent movie-accurate, and it gets a lot of attention when we go out for drives or to Jeep festivals.
And it’s such a blast! See, I’m a city girl, born and raised in Miami, Florida, and my only experience with camping was a field trip to the Everglades when I was in elementary school.
But I’ve always loved the outdoors, especially hiking and nature, and Matt and I soon discovered how much fun it is to explore the great outdoors. We enjoy overlanding in “primitive” spots, where we skip the traditional campground or RV park sites and find places to camp with our Jeep pretty far away from other people. But a lot of our friends prefer actual campsites. However you prefer it, it’s a wonderful chance to step away from the distractions of everyday life and draw closer to God in creation.
Soon we discovered there’s a whole community of people just like us, who are tired of “existing” or fighting the proverbial rat race and want to experience the wilderness more intimately. (We have four kids and full-time jobs, so ours tend to be weekend excursions, but some people overland for weeks or months at a time.)
As part of this, Matt, a professional photographer and videographer, created a YouTube channel, Simply Must Go, that documents not only our excursions with the Jurassic Park Jeep and camping trailer but also the second Jeep we got as his “daily driver” last year. That’s a 2018 Wrangler JKU, which we’ve also been taking out on fun trips all over the southeast.
In doing so, Matt has discovered Jeep clubs in our community filled with truly welcoming and loving people. You don’t have to know a lot to join—you just need to be a genuinely nice person who is open to learning “Jeep stuff.” That’s who we try to be, and we’ve found a beautiful community of likeminded souls. Everybody’s different—there’s no particular race or age or socioeconomic standard. Most people are Christian, but not all. Most everybody we’ve met so far is a really good person. There’s even a special “Jeep wave” we do on the roads when we pass each other. They have festivals and other events to raise money for charity or just have some fun getting out and exploring new and different trails together.
I thought the rubber ducks were cute when Matt and I first starting Jeeping together, but I didn’t know the full story… only that it quickly grew in popularity. But when Matt told me that #DuckDuckJeep was a full-on movement started by a woman as a way to spread kindness in spite of bullying and a difficult time, I was hooked. As a woman of faith whose very blog is about shining the light of Christ in what can be a dark world, what a beautiful example of the way the Holy Spirit works through the smallest of things.
In this case, it’s one woman who decided on a whim to use a rubber duck as a way to compliment a stranger’s Jeep, and look what happened.
This weekend, Matt and I went to the Great Smoky Mountain Jeep Invasion in Tennessee and got to witness the power of the #DuckDuckJeep movement and all the kindness and happiness it brings to people. For the most part, the Jeep community is extremely family friendly, and it was incredibly sweet to see little kids—with canvas bags almost as big as they were, filled to the top with rubber duckies!—walking around putting ducks on Jeeps just to be nice. And on the last day, we got a special treat … we actually got to meet Allison Parliament herself, who came up to us and is just as nice in real life as you’d hope. (Here’s a photo of Matt with Allison in front of our Jeep.)
My husband, Matt Brodie, with Allison Parliament, who started the #DuckDuckJeep movement.
They call them ducks, but at this point they’re not all actual rubber ducks. Some are ducks with sunglasses and surfboards, pirate hats, or police uniforms. There are ducks that look like baby Yoda and elephants and Rottweilers and probably a thousand other things. Matt especially loves the dinosaur ducks, and by the end of the show people had put nearly 200 ducks on our Jeep to show us some community love (here I am in front of our ducked-out jeep).
Me with the nearly 200 ducks our Jurassic Park-themed Jeep received at a recent festival. What a neat way to spread kindness!
This world can be so divided politically, and even when it comes to matters of faith. We face disease and poverty and racial injustice and a host of other things. Sometimes it feels like people are only out for themselves, like they only care about their own individual families and not about their neighbors or the community around them, let alone the world. That’s not the case, but at times it can certainly feel that way.
But the #DuckDuckJeep movement is one way of changing all that. I think about Jesus’s words in scripture, about how people will know they are his disciples by the way they love each other, by the way they treat each other (John 13:35).
To me, I see Jesus at work every time some sweet soul places a duck on someone else’s Jeep.
“I see you, friend,” they’re really saying. “I see you, and we walk this road together.”
If you’d like to check out an interview with Allison on YouTube about #DuckDuckJeep, go here. If you’d like to see Matt’s (and my) rapidly growing YouTube channel Simply Must Go, about getting out and reconnecting with nature, God, exploration, and each other, go here: https://www.youtube.com/c/MattBrodie . His video from this weekend can be found here at https://youtu.be/JAigpLVQo-I or below:
How about you—have you seen the light of Christ show up in an unexpected place? Share in the comments below. I’d love to hear!
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