West With Giraffes

by Lynda Rutledge

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened. —Anatole France, Nobel Laureate, 1921

Other creatures’ miracles don’t mean a thing when you’re still working on your own.

California. The giraffes were bound for the land of milk and honey.

it always seemed wrong to think an animal’s life isn’t worth as much as a human’s. Life is life.”

“I’m touching a giraffe . . .” She sighed a sigh so full of reverie I thought she might float away.

“Careful. Big don’t know from small—”

she was movie-star gorgeous to my seventeen-year-old eyes.

🫠

“I love sleep,” she said. “Only thing better is being awake. Really awake.”

Haven’t you ever had a story you should’ve told someone before it was too late?

“Forget the skullduggery. You’d want to bring the wrath of God down on them just for how they treat their animals.”

she leaned over and cupped my jaws with her hands. This time, I was sure she was about to kiss me on the lips. Instead she trained her whole being on my prairie face like she was taking a photo with her eyes. I was as stunned as if I’d been buckshot. I’d never been looked at this way, and sure not in moonlight.

having yet to learn that nobody gets devil-dealing both ways, there being either heaven or hell to pay for everything in this world and nothing in between.

temptation as bad in inches as in miles.

To live before the War was to believe you could be or do whatever you wanted by just moving on down the road, especially with the Hard Times turning even good people bad.

There are far more salvations than the kind you find in church, and I was in need of one right then to save me from myself.

soul but also that destiny is a mobile thing—that every choice you make, along with every choice made around you, can cause it to spin this way and that, offering destinies galore.

Choices are as bad as plans,

Then whatever happens, good or bad, you’ll forever mark it in memory along with the passage of ticking time, a date on a calendar forcing you to look behind with no way to change things and look ahead with no way to know what’s coming.

We don’t much cotton to carnivals around here. Too much riffraff among other undesirables. We like a peaceful town after sundown,” he said, tapping his uniform’s inky title. “And it’s almost sundown.”

😡

“sundown peace officer”

🙄

“Let me regale you a bit more about the place we’re headed,” he said. “You think that prairie dog dry moat over yonder is good? In San Diego, you got African lions with nothing between you and them but a moat. In fact, if the Boss Lady had her way, the weather’s so nice they’d fence in all of Balboa Park and let the animals roam. The fencing may be rusty and the money’s always tight, but it’s about as aces a place to be an animal among us humans as there is.

❤️❤️❤️❤️ My hometown zoo. Was just there in December’24 with my Husband and Daughters.

The land you grow up in is a forever thing, remembered when all else is forgotten, whether it did you right or did you wrong.

There were two main roads to California from the Dust Bowl. Route 66 took most of the load and the fame, swooping down the plains from Chicago through Oklahoma toward Los Angeles. The other, the “southern route” heading to San Diego, cut across the bottom part of the Texas Panhandle, my part. Nobody I knew called it the Lee Highway. It was just the road west, and it was the road we were traveling whether I much liked it or not.

feeling a soul-weary loss beyond explaining.

The thing about destiny and fate and God-sized coincidences is that they fly in the face of being the master of your own life. When things are falling your way, it’s an easy idea to give up.

The thing about finding yourself in the impossible-turning-possible right under your feet, you aren’t quite in control of all your faculties.

You can carry around a heavy load only for so long, though, before you’ve got to set it down,

I cannot be the one to take away her life, not when her life takes in my whole life.

“People look at you peculiar if you talk about the feeling you got for animals, saying animals have no souls, no sense of good or bad, no value up next to humans,” he said. “I don’t know about that. Sometimes I think animals are the ones who should be saying such things about us.”

But at least you know the ground rules with animals. You can count the cost of breaking the rules. You never know with people. Even the good can hurt you bad, and the bad, well, they’re going to hurt you but good.”

It had taken the gentlest of giraffes to save us from the fiercest of lions,

The thing about knowing you’re doing something for the last time is that it takes the joy right out of it. I’ve done lots of things for the last time in my long life, but I didn’t know it. This time I’d know it.

It was a day of no lions.

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.

On such small things, entire lives turn.

didn’t know her long enough to say she was the love of my life, although it can deeply feel that way here and now as I write. But if a man leads a handful of lives inside a long life like mine, I can say she was the love of my first life. That I can surely say.

Some things are so much yours, you just have to keep ’em to yourself.

It’s a strange thing how you can spend years with some folks and never know them, yet, with others, you only need a handful of days to know them far beyond years.

Before they were gone, I even got to see them running free in a farm-like park the zoo built out in the desert with a herd of their own making, along with some from other zoos—

The Wild Animal Park!!! I grew up 20 min from there and have been there more times than I can even remember. It’s soooo wonderful.

Time heals all wounds, they say. I’m here to tell you that time can wound you all on its own. In a long life, there is a singular moment when you know you’ve made more memories than any new ones you’ll ever make. That’s the moment your truest stories—the ones that made you the you that you became—are ever more in the front of your mind, as you begin to reach back for the you that you deemed best.

Time plays its cruelest trick without you knowing it. Even the memories a body holds most dear become like scratchy old phonograph records played too long, fading in and out, with little sound and even less fury.

😔

Giraffe Hum Giraffes have been caught on tape by biologist researchers humming at night on a very low, rich frequency. Speculation abounds, such as the hum being a giraffe snore, a sound made when they dream, a sound made when they are content, or even a way to communicate with each other like dolphins or elephants.

Lee and Lincoln Highways The Lincoln Highway was the earliest transcontinental highway route for automobiles across the United States, running through northern states and finished in 1913. The Lee Highway followed, finished in 1923, running through southern states starting at Washington, DC, and ending at the Pacific Highway in San Diego.

Sundown Towns After Reconstruction and before the civil rights era, signs like the one in our story popped up on the outskirts of thousands of small towns across the country, warning “colored people” to keep moving. This created a huge problem for the Black traveler and inspired an annual publication guidebook from 1936 to 1966 for African American motorists, called The Negro Motorist Green Book, or just the Green Book, after its editor, Victor Hugo Green. It also inspired the title of the Academy Awards’ 2019 winner for Best Picture.