West with Giraffes has been on my to-be-read pile since it came out, and I regret taking so long to get to it. For some reason, the title made me think of Beryl Markham’s marvelous memoir, West with the Night, so I was expecting something along the lines of a safari story. With that in mind, being in the midst of catching up on my reading of books set in Africa, I started this one. West with Giraffes ends up being completely different from my expectations but ever-so-delightful nonetheless.
Told in the first person by a World War II veteran, Woodrow Wilson Nickel, who feels his life ebbing away. At the ripe age of 105, he has but days left to live and sets out to write the story that has haunted him all his life. His present, trapped in a VA nursing home, is interspersed with the past, things that happened when he was seventeen years old.
Based on a true story and set during the Great Depression in 1938, the book takes place over the roughly twelve days it takes for Woody and the Old Man to drive from New Jersey to California in a customized truck, hauling two young giraffes to the San Diego Zoo. It’s Woody’s first big adventure since escaping from the Texas Panhandle and the Dust Bowl. West with Giraffes blends a coming-of-age story, a road trip, and a first love romance. Woody falls hard for Red, a female reporter a few years older, who follows the truck across the country, taking photographs and hoping to become the next Margaret Bourke White. They all have secrets they never fully share. Along the way, they’re threatened by the landscape, weather, circuses, and policemen. They’re also rescued and sheltered by a black family, owners of service stations and restaurants, and hordes of people throng to see the giraffes as they pass.
Author Lynda Rutledge weaves fictional characters with real people, like Belle Benchley, the first female zookeeper (though for years she was listed on the payroll as “executive secretary”). It also pulls in American history and the factors facing America at that time: the Great Depression lingers, the Dust Bowl has caused a massive emigration of people to California, the Jim Crow era is in full swing, Hitler has conquered Czechoslovakia, a second World War looms, and a hurricane has just hit the East Coast. A ship flounders in that storm with two giraffes on board. Miraculously, they survive the hurricane, but will they survive the trip across the States? In the midst of all the political and financial turmoil, Americans seek good news, and they find it in the journey of the giraffes with the animals’ progress being followed in the newspapers.
This was an unexpectedly great story, funny, sad, and poignant all at once. I admit to being teary-eyed through the last few chapters. This should be made into a movie with Robert Duvall as the Old Man.
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West with Giraffes (Lake Union Publishing, February 1, 2021) is available through:
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©Suanne Schafer
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The giraffe photo is from my safari in Tanzania.
