The challenge of creating historical fiction inspired by a true event like this one is to research well enough to capture what life was like when such a crazy idea seemed feasible. At the same time, a story is always a reflection of the present, since that is where it’s being read. We have big, big things to worry about in this new century, extinctions of beloved animals among the most heartbreaking. But there’s good news: all over the world, conservation organizations, research centers, aquariums, sanctuaries, foundations, and zoological institutions like today’s San Diego Zoo Global are fighting the good fight for endangered species—and for ourselves, since we now know there will be a human toll for losing even creatures as small as bees and butterflies.
In the decades ahead, when or if someone finds this novel on a bookshelf or in the stacks of a library, God forbid the world’s a place without elephants, pandas, tigers, butterflies—and giraffes. In a famous 2014 TED talk, nature writer Jon Mooallem suggested how we feel about an animal dramatically influences its future survival. In his words: “Storytelling matters now. Emotion matters. Our imagination has become an ecological force.”
May it be so.
For now, we may not have the chance to ride cross-country with a pair of giraffes, falling in love with them and each other while learning secrets to life, but we can still be charmed and inspired by them. They are still with us. Here’s hoping that will never, ever change.
HISTORICAL NOTES
Belle Benchley
An early glass-ceiling breaker, Benchley came to the fledgling San Diego Zoo in 1925 as a civil servant bookkeeper and quickly began doing everything from taking tickets to sweeping cages in the burgeoning but always-cash-strapped zoo, until she soon took over directorial chores after a series of male directors didn’t last. While she was known in newsprint and popular culture by the time of our tale as the only female zoo director in the world, the official title given her by the zoo’s 1927 male board of directors was “executive secretary,” until voted “managing director” just before her 1953 retirement. Through her long tenure, she became affectionately known as the “Zoo Lady” and in 1949 was the first woman elected president of the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums. Her first book, My Life in a Man-Made Jungle, was published in 1940, becoming an international bestseller, and was sent to soldiers overseas as a morale booster. She followed it with three more. One of her most forward-thinking ideas was a school bus program that brought second graders to the zoo, fueled by her belief that the only way people will care about nature’s wild animals is to meet them, which now infuses all conservation-minded zoological institutions’ missions.
Burma-Shave Ads
A brand of brushless shaving cream, famous for its advertising gimmick of posting humorous rhyming poems, phrase by phrase and spaced evenly for full punch-line effect on a series of small signs along the roadside.
Dapper Dan
A famous hair pomade used in the early twentieth century to give a greasy and waxy hold on hair.
Great Hurricane of 1938
Also called the Long Island Express and the Yankee Clipper, the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 was the first to hit the upper East Coast in over a century and was the most destructive storm to strike New England in recorded history until 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. The hurricane was so devastating that several shore communities simply disappeared, along with the people who lived in them, with houses and people swept out to sea. Katharine Hepburn famously was caught in it at her family’s beach house. As for New York City, the Empire State Building reportedly swayed in the high-powered winds as the East River overflowed.
Giraffe Hum
Giraffes have been caught on tape by biologist researchers humming at night on a very low, rich frequency. Speculation abounds, such as the hum being a giraffe snore, a sound made when they dream, a sound made when they are content, or even a way to communicate with each other like dolphins or elephants.
Hobo Cards
Despite public perception, hoboes weren’t just tramps who happily rode the rails. They began as nomadic workers who roamed the United States, taking jobs wherever they could, and never spending too long in any one place—enjoying the freedom of the traveling life. To avoid police harassment, a group decided to form a union, which created hobo cards to flash, touting a hobo pledge. Dues were a nickel a year.
Hoovervilles
Shantytowns pieced together by the homeless in the United States during the Great Depression, nicknamed after Herbert Hoover, president during the onset of the Depression.
James Fenimore Cooper
Considered the first true major American novelist, he most famously wrote adventures of the frontier American life. They were called collectively the Leatherstocking Tales, about a wilderness scout named Natty Bumppo, known as “Hawkeye.” While they tend toward old-fashioned verbosity, they still endure in our culture, his most famous novel being The Last of the Mohicans, a tale that included the last two members (both male) of the Mohican tribe and now is a common phrase used to connote the last of a type, which resonates for our tale.
Lloyd’s of London
The legendary insurance group, established in 1688 by a seaside coffeehouse owner named Edward Lloyd to insure ships, is famous for insuring the uninsurable (such as giraffes being driven across the entire USA). Interestingly, it’s able to do that because it is not an insurance company but a “market” of financial backers, underwriters, corporations, and single members who pool and spread risk.
Lee and Lincoln Highways
The Lincoln Highway was the earliest transcontinental highway route for automobiles across the United States, running through northern states and finished in 1913. The Lee Highway followed, finished in 1923, running through southern states starting at Washington, DC, and ending at the Pacific Highway in San Diego.
Mann Act
Signed into law by President Taft in 1910, the act, named after its author, Congressman James Robert Mann, made it a crime to transport women across state lines “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose”—the last phrase allowing liberal, often racial interpretation. Celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin, Frank Lloyd Wright, Chuck Berry, and Jack Johnson were caught in it. Johnson, the first African American heavyweight boxing champion, was among the first to be charged under the act after a road trip from Pittsburgh to Chicago with his White girlfriend.
Rube Goldberg
An early twentieth-century American cartoonist, inventor, and Pulitzer Prize winner, best known for his popular and often hilarious cartoons depicting complicated gadgets performing simple tasks in convoluted ways. The cartoons led to the expression “Rube Goldberg machines” to any invention that looked overly complicated, and continue to inspire national competitions for fun to this day.
SS Robin Goodfellow
The merchant marine ship carrying the giraffes was famous for surviving the Great Hurricane of 1938. It didn’t survive World War II, though, when it was torpedoed and sunk by a U-boat in the South Atlantic on July 25, 1944, with all crew lost.
Sundown Towns
After Reconstruction and before the civil rights era, signs like the one in our story popped up on the outskirts of thousands of small towns across the country, warning “colored people” to keep moving. This created a huge problem for the Black traveler and inspired an annual publication guidebook from 1936 to 1966 for African American motorists, called The Negro Motorist Green Book, or just the Green Book, after its editor, Victor Hugo Green. It also inspired the title of the Academy Awards’ 2019 winner for Best Picture.
Tin Lizzie
A nickname for the Model T Ford that dominated the early automobile industry, being cheap and dependable, especially by the time of the Great Depression, after many of the earliest ones became dilapidated yet were still roadworthy.
WPA/CCC
The Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) were two New Deal programs creat
ed by President Roosevelt in 1935 to combat the Great Depression. The WPA employed mostly unskilled men to carry out public-works projects, creating new school buildings, hospitals, bridges, airfields, zoos, and roads, as well as planting an estimated three billion trees. The CCC was a public work-relief program for unskilled, unemployed young men, ages eighteen to twenty-five and later twenty-eight, that offered shelter, clothing, food, and a small wage. The young men lived in work camps most prominently in the country’s national parks. They planted more than three billion trees and constructed trails and shelters in more than eight hundred parks between 1933 and 1942.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Every book is a bit of miracle, and I’m deeply, humbly grateful for this one.
I will miss hanging out with the giraffes, Woody, Red, and the Old Man. It’s been a wild ride—a wild yet uplifting one that I got to share with you because of all who helped make this literary trip happen and who deserve my profound thanks.
Most exceptionally:
Jane Dystel, who may love giraffes more than I do and whose skill as well as attention continues to be a thing to behold. And Miriam Goderich, who so quickly saw the potential of this unusual story.
The people of San Diego Zoo Global, especially CEO Douglas Myers, for all you do every day for the world’s endangered animals. Words fail.
Danielle Marshall, whose book sense is extraordinary.
The remarkable sources that made the research for past-world building possible—San Diego Zoo Global’s archives; the San Diego History Center; newspaper databases and oral-history accounts of the 1938 hurricane, WPA/CCC, Great Depression, and the Dust Bowl; and book, film, and photo publications, including The San Diego Zoo: The First Century 1916–2016, John Steinbeck’s 1939 The Grapes of Wrath, Victor Hugo Green’s 1936 The Negro Motorist Green Book, Timothy Egan’s 2006 The Worst Hard Time, Ken Burns’s 2012 documentary film The Dust Bowl, plus the timeless documentary photography of Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke-White.
And, of course, my nearest and dearest, both human and animal, who continue to put up with the writer in the house.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2019 Korey Howell
Lynda Rutledge, a lifelong animal lover, has had the joy of petting baby rhinos, snorkeling with endangered turtles, and strolling with a tower of giraffes in her eclectic freelance career writing nonfiction for well-known publications and organizations while winning awards and residencies for her fiction. Her debut novel, Faith Bass Darling’s Last Garage Sale, was the winner of the 2013 Writers’ League of Texas Book Award. It was adapted into the 2018 French film La dernière folie de Claire Darling starring Catherine Deneuve. Lynda, her husband, and their resident dog live outside Austin, Texas. For more information visit www.lyndarutledge.com.
West with Giraffes: A Novel Page 30