West With Giraffes(95)

In 1999, while doing deep dives in the San Diego Zoo’s archives for a project, I uncovered a batch of yellowed news clippings chronicling the kind of story that captures the imagination and never quite lets go. A place as colorful as the San Diego Zoo has stories galore, but the scope and audacity of this one was remarkable:

In September 1938, on the orders of the zoo’s famous female director, Belle Benchley, two young giraffes survived a hurricane at sea, then were driven cross-country for twelve days in little more than a tricked-out pickup truck to become the first giraffes in Southern California. While the giraffes saw the USA from their sky-high windows, over five hundred newspapers carried the story day after day to their readers’ delight.

As I read those old clippings, I kept seeing a bored little farmgirl staring out her window when suddenly two giraffes whiz by. Finding a telegram from Lloyd’s of London insuring them, as I recall, for “blowouts, acts of God, tornadoes, dust storms, and floods,” I was hooked all the more. I searched for a trip diary by the keeper who managed the feat, a man named Charley Smith. Like most rough-and-tumble zoo men of the time, though, he wasn’t the kind of guy who wrote in diaries.

So that was that.

Then, a few years ago, I began thinking about those giraffes again—but for a disturbing reason. Here in the early twenty-first century, giraffes along with far too many other species are now threatened in what is being called “the sixth extinction,” which is about as scary-sounding a name as it should be. As I brooded over the future of the world’s most iconic wild animals, I found myself back in 1938, traveling the winding roads of America with two young giraffes, seeing things in my mind’s eye no one will ever see again and imagining how those two animals must have made people they met all the more human. Maybe that’s what really had me. Realizing we could lose them, I wanted to spend time thinking about why creatures who share our world can move us so. Belle Benchley’s memoir My Life in a Man-Made Jungle being an international bestseller during one of the worst eras of the twentieth century proves that connection. There’s more going on than the “circle of life”—Hitler was threatening, the Great Depression was persisting, yet two traveling giraffes lightened the load of an entire country.

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.