The Imperfect Storm
It all begins with a hurricane. A ship sails into the treacherous waters near Haiti where a hurricane lurks without warning in this period before fancy weather satellites or even sophisticated radar. On that ship are two giraffes. Under normal circumstances, this imagery would come near the end as part of the climax. Here, it is almost prefatory material merely setting the stage for the story to begin:
“Witnesses describe swells blocking out the sky, fish swimming in the air, and winds whipping waves into water spouts as seamen caught on deck helplessly watched one snatch a crewman into the void. Crawling to the hold where their mates pulled them in, they had no choice but to abandon two crated Baringo giraffes to face the hurricane’s full force . . . Within minutes the ship went into a half-roll starboard and stayed that way for 6 hours of pelting waves and winds, abruptly righting itself as the hurricane passed.”
“The Tricked-Out Pickup Truck”
In the Author Notes section of the book, Rutledge cheekily—but accurately—describes the vehicle which manages to successfully transport two giraffes literally cross the entire United States as being little more than a pickup truck customized especially for the occasion. Her narrator uses a bit more precise imagery:
“Coming right at us was a shiny new truck with a wood contraption strapped to its long flatbed that would’ve made Rube Goldberg proud. Shaped like a squatty T, it looked like a two-story homemade boxcar plopped down on the entire length of the truck bed, wooden window openings along the top, trapdoors along the bottom, and a short step-up ladder nailed on each side. I jumped out of the way as the driver—a goober-looking guy with cauliflower ears and enough Dapper Dan pomade on his hair to grease an engine—jerked the rig to a halt.”
The Dust Bowl
The story is set in the final dying years of the Great Depression and just slightly before a second world war will break out in Europe courtesy of there just being something about Germans and their misplaced pride. The first two rounds of the Dust Bowl were still impacting the economy and the final hard hit was lurking in the unseen future. The narrator provides an imagery-laden portrait of the most infamous day in the history of that drying up of once fertile ground:
“You may have heard of the worst day, the duster of all dusters, called Black Sunday. In April of ’35, a black cloud came roaring onto the horizon enough to scare a multitude of saints. It was the Great Plains blowing at us, the storm from hell that blew three hundred million tons of topsoil off Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. When it hit, it blackened the skies so bad that your hand in front of your face went unseen, the static in the air so bad that the slightest touch of anyone or anything turned sparks into black magic flames.”
The Storytellers
This novel is not just about the story of the giraffes being transported across the country. It is also about the storytelling of that story. And since this takes place before television, that means it is about print media:
“I’m doing a photo-essay…As the country teeters between a depression and Europe’s looming war, a pair of giraffes, survivors of a hurricane at sea, left a wake of much-needed cheer while driven cross-country to the San Diego Zoo, where lady zoo director Mrs. Belle Benchley awaited…But it’s the pictures that’ll make it. You don’t have the shots, it can be the Second Coming of Christ and it wouldn’t make it in Life.”
