I passed another Christmas shop (apparently Christmas is a moneymaker in South Dakota) and Bear Country USA—a 250-acre drive-through wildlife park, boasting the world’s largest collection of privately owned black bears. I could see some of the bears from the highway and I thought back to the grizzly I had encountered in the wild three weeks earlier in Yellowstone. These captive bears didn’t look nearly as lively or dangerous. In fact, they looked sedated and about as frisky as my father an hour after Thanksgiving dinner.

There were more tourist attractions in this stretch than perhaps anywhere else in America. I passed a reptile zoo, a wax museum, a corn maze, and a mountain zip line, the latter of which reminded me of my eleventh birthday.

That was a birthday to remember. Actually, it was impossible to forget. My dad, in a rare moment of introspection, decided that in the absence of a mother, a dutiful father should probably throw his only son a birthday party at least once in his life. This was something that he’d never done before, so, not surprisingly, he was clueless. I once saw my dad dismantle a five-horsepower Briggs & Stratton engine from our lawn mower, strip it down to its block, then reassemble it perfectly. But he couldn’t put a birthday party together to save his life.

He started by inviting random children from the neighborhood, many of whom I didn’t know, including two sisters whose family had just migrated to the U.S. from Hungary. The girls didn’t speak English, or at least not that any of us had heard, and they huddled together the whole time speaking in frightened whispers to each other.

My father borrowed a minivan and took all seven of us to a Pizza Hut (which wasn’t a bad call), then to a zip line he’d found a coupon for, located about forty-five minutes from our home.

The Hungarian girls only became relevant to the party when the younger of the girls (none of us ever learned either of their names) somehow got her long blond hair caught in the pulley, stopping her mid-ride and leaving her dangling hundreds of feet above the ground, screaming hysterically.

The rescue mission was well worth the price of admission. We, and a few dozen others from waiting groups, gaped as one of the zip line workers donned thick gloves and shimmied down the line until he was close enough to cut the girl’s hair with a pair of wire cutters, sending her rolling down the line. We clapped and hooted when she was free, unanimously judging the rescue operation a great success. All of us, that is, but the sisters, who apparently thought otherwise, evidenced by their red and tear-stained faces. The older girl kept examining her sister’s chopped hair and crying.