Few true friends have I known and two were giraffes, one that didn’t kick me dead and one that saved my worthless orphan life and your worthy, precious one.
Not actually a quote passing in conversation, but rather one handwritten into a notebook. While this book is based on a true historical event, it nevertheless fulfills the literary genre of historical fiction. The facts are true, as they say, but some elements have been invented for dramatic purposes. The main narrative takes place as the era known as the Great Depression was about to move into the World War II era. The narrative proper begins, however, in what at the time of publication was still the very near future: 2025. Woodrow Wilson Nickel has just died at the grand old age of 105 and health care worker whose duties include discharging his possessions has just opened a footlocker and discovered a buried treasure. Part of that treasure is a collection of notebooks and the first words on those notepads are those quoted above. The story is now officially off and running.
New York Sun
September 22, 1938
HURRICANE GIRAFFES TO QUARANTINE
ATHENIA, NJ—Sept. 22 (Evening special edition).
The miracle giraffes who survived the killer hurricane on the high seas had to make their way the flooded and blocked streets of Manhattan today in order to get to the United States Bureau of Animal Industry Quarantine Station in Athenia, New Jersey. After passing quarantine, they will attempt a daring road trip cross-country to the San Diego Zoo, on the orders of its famous lady director, Mrs. Belle Benchley.
Most of the chapters in the book begin with a newspaper clipping updating the progress of two giraffes westward to the San Diego Zoo. These are, indeed, the two true friends of Woodrow Wilson Nickel. The historical record documents that two giraffes survived a horrific six hour belting by a hurricane against the ship on which they went to America. Once arriving in New York harbor, the real story of the book begins. And that story is the one that in reality captivated much of the American public precisely because it was document in papers nationwide. Although nearing its end, the Great Depression was not yet quite over. And one of the peculiar quirks of that horrible decade-plus of misery for tens of millions of Americans was the elevation to brief national obsession of idiosyncratic stories that differed in almost every respect but one: they were uplifting stories of survival against overwhelming odds.
Yesterday, long after I was told I’d lived over a century, which was as strange a thing to hear as you might suspect, I saw a giraffe filling the screen of the crowded room’s TV. I stirred from my foggy mind to hear a deep-voiced TV man talking. Giraffes had all but vanished from the earth, he said, like the elephants and tigers and gorillas and rhinos. Warring, poaching, and encroaching, he said, were emptying the jungles and silencing the forests and turning zoos into arks enough to make Noah weep. Thousands of animals and birds and even trees were at the point of no return…
Obviously, the story that Nickel writes in his pack of notepads is getting close to the final entry by this point. In another five years he will be dead. Remember that that that event takes place in the year 2025. Meaning the big event of his life occurred way back when he was just a fresh-faced teenager. The reference to the man on the television discussing the disappearance from the earth of animals that at least appear likely to still just be clinging to existence—if only just barely in some cases—is another fictional component, obviously, but it is also a reference to historical fact. It is called the Sixth Extinction which also just happens to be the title of a Pulitzer Prize winning non-fiction book published in 2015.
This sixth mass extinction has therefore been widely publicized in predictive form for some time. Interestingly, it was around the end of 2021 as it gave way to 2022 that a study by the International Union for Conservation concluded that the Sixth Extinction is not something to be forewarned about; it is already underway. Which would mean that the sudden realization of its existence by millions of people who were unaware of this theory beforehand coincides just about exactly with the timing of Nickel watching that fictional TV show invented by the author years before.
