by Lynda Rutledge, 2021
Wonderful book, recommended by neighbor, Pat. It’s historical fiction about a true life 1938 pair of giraffes that survived the hurricane out to sea near NYC in 1938, and then the journey across country to the San Diego Zoo, to become the first giraffes in a zoo in America.
Most wonderful characters – a young 17-year old, Woody Nickel, who survives the horrors of the Dust Bowl, then the trip cross-country and a horrible cousin in the shipyards of NYC, with nothing and nobody left and horrible guilt over how he left his Dad. He finds the giraffes and they love and adore him. He somehow is meant to be their driver when the real driver ends up running away drunk. Old Man is a kindly and wise Old Man, who is the head zookeeper at the San Diego Zoo, tasked with bringing the giraffes across country. He has a gnarled up hand so cannot be the driver. Young Woody Nickel ends up taking over as driver, step-by-step-by-step. Red is a beautiful young girl who ends up stealing her husband’s Packard and following Woody and Old Man and the giraffes across the country. She says she is a Life magazine photographer, but the truth comes out eventually, that she wants to be a Life magazine photographer. She takes a million wonderful photographs that all get destroyed in a flash flood in Texas.
There are so many adventures and near disasters that occur, sometimes because of mistakes Woody makes due to his horrible childhood of never anything but horror, want, and death. But all comes out good. Loved this book!
One time, going through the desert of Arizona, she describes a sense of peace they finally have:
“I’d felt a sliver of that peaceful feeling after we’d made it through the mountains. This time, though, it was long and lingering and soul-soothing deep. It seems now like the closest thing to praying I’d ever done. When I’d lived a little longer and heard people talking about such things, calling it by spiritual names, I’d want to scoff but couldn’t. In the years ahead, through the War and beyond, it was this quiet day moving through the unmoving land with Boy and Girl and the Old Man and Red that I returned to when I needed it most. Like the jolting joy of giraffes amid the traveling bird wave, its peace passed any understanding, any attempt at words. You only get a few of those in your whole life if you’re lucky, and some only get one. If that be true this was my one. When I remember it, I’m not eighteen in the memory. I am whatever age its comfort came to me, be it 33 or 103, and I am driving us all, through the timeless red desert, headed nowhere in particular, just someplace good. Together.”
The tale is told by Woody Nickel, age 105, looking back on it and needing to get all the words down before he died, because the giraffes are going extinct, and the story needs to be told, especially to Red’s daughter, who the VA hospital administrator takes the time to find and send the handwritten pages to, after she finishes reading them. That’s in the epilogue. Red’s daughter is now 86 years old. What a wonderful tale!