#3: The Encounter

My name is Tobias. A freak of nature. One of a kind.

And so we come at last to Tobias, most beloved of Animorphs, who sadly gets only half as much narration time as the others because for some reason Scholastic thought kids wouldn't be interested in reading about an abused orphan whose superpower simultaneously frees him from his tragic home life and isolates him from other people. Yeah, there's nothing gripping or relatable about that at all. Let's hear more about Jake's failed middle school basketball career.

Anyway, this is Tobias's first book and immediately, just in the first line, you see the dualism in his character. He sees himself simultaneously as a "freak of nature" and as "one of a kind." Or maybe he starts to see himself as a "freak of nature," and quickly switches to a more positive self-image to keep himself from sliding into despair. He's going to do that a lot in this book, and it will work... for a little while.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We begin the way the last book began, the way too many of these books begin, with Captain Planet-style escapades. Unlike last book's drunken rednecks, though, this one actually connects to the main plot. A used car salesman named Dealin' Dan Hawke has a red-tailed hawk in a cage, and he's using her to "hawk" his merchandise. (See what I did there?) He's filming a commercial with this hawk, which for some reason is airing live. So Tobias has this harebrained sceme to free the hawk in the middle of this live-airing commercial, and Rachel joins in because she's Rachel. So Tobias swoops in and picks the lock on her cage with his beak and sets her free while Rachel distracts everyone by elephant-stomping a whole lot full of used cars. They free the hawk and run away, and Marco yells at them for being stupid. And this time he's completely justified; it was idiotic. They could have easily snuck into wherever Dealin' Dan was keeping the hawk in the middle of the night and opened a window and no one would have thought anything of it. But instead they make this huge scene with an elephant that appears out of nowhere and then mysteriously disappears and a red-tailed hawk who knows how to pick locks, and seriously, even if the ad wasn't apparently the first commercial to air live in television history, there is no way that wouldn't make the national news. This is like a thousand times stupider than what Rachel did in the last book, and there's literally no reason they had to take such enormous risks. Jesus, how have you people not been caught yet?

Anyway, before Marco chews them out, Tobias sees a mysterious ripple in the sky. He decides to go back the next evening, around the same time, to see if it happens again. Not only does it reappear, but a flock of geese unknowingly fly right into the rippling nothingness, killing themselves in the process. This convinces Tobias that what he's seeing is an enormous Yeerk ship, cloaked so perfectly that it's made itself invisible to the human - and, apparently, goose - eye. And it looks to be headed into the mountains.

He tells the others about it at Cassie's barn the next day. And then this happens:

"Look, these aren't people we know," Marco argued. "They aren't my friends. Or my family." He shot a guilty look at Jake. "And we did everything we could for Tom. So why should I get killed for strangers? We can't stay lucky forever. Don't you people understand that? Sooner or later, we'll slip up. Sooner or later we'll be standing around here crying because Jake or Rachel or Cassie or Tobias is gone."

"You know something?" Rachel exploded. "I'm tired of trying to talk you into this, Marco. You want out? Fine, you're OUT!"

THANK YOU. This is why you're my favorite character. I am so sick of Marco's bullshit. Book five can't come fast enough.

Anyway, Marco accuses Rachel of being in it mainly for the thrill, which is fair, and calls the lady hawk a "stupid bird," which is not fair, and everyone's awkward and guilty for a minute until Tobias is like, [You know what? I'm going to the mountains to check this out tomorrow morning, and you guys can do whatever.] But they all agree to go with him, even Marco, who points out that it would be too conspicuous if they all skipped school on the same day, so they should go to the mountains in the afternoon. See, Marco, isn't it nice to contribute to the group instead of bringing everybody down?

The kids finally figure out that a red-tailed hawk, a bald eagle, a peregrine falcon, and two ospreys look kind of weird all flying together. I guess the scene with the geese was meant to explain why they can't acquire some Canada geese for flying, although in all situations where a giant invisible spaceship is not involved, that would actually be an excellent disguise. But wolves were recently reintroduced into the national forest near their town, and already two of them - a male and a female - are injured and in Cassie's barn. How convenient!

They decide to morph the wolves - all of them taking the female except Jake, because two males might fight for dominance. Now, a couple of people on Tumblr have pointed out that K.A. got wolves really wrong here. The conventional view of wolf packs for several decades had been that they organize themselves into a hierarchical structure, with the alpha male and female at the top and lower-ranked wolves occasionally challenging the alphas for dominance. However, wolf researchers came to that conclusion because they were studying wolf packs in captivity. That's sort of like studying prison gangs and extrapolating their behavior to the entire rest of humanity. But for a long time, scientists didn't have GPS trackers or video cameras that they could leave in the woods to observe wild wolves. Once that technology developed, they started observing wolves in their natural habitat - and found that a wolf pack is actually just a family. The "alpha" male and female are the mom and dad, and the other wolves are their children. When the children grow up, they move away to find mates and form their own packs. There's no more fighting for dominance in a wild wolf pack than there is in your average nuclear family. So when a bunch of wolves who don't know each other are thrown together randomly in captivity, they do their best to approximate a family. But no one can agree on who the "parents" should be. Hence, the fighting.

But at the time this book was written, the leading scientific consensus was that wolf packs were hierarchical. Information about how wild wolf packs operate didn't start coming out until years later - and it would be years after that before that information reached the general public. So you can't really blame K.A. for not including information that even leading wolf biologists did not know at the time. In any case, the kids' plan hinges less on how wolves actually act than on how the kids think wolves act. And a wolf pack consisting of multiple copies of the same two wolves is pretty freaking unnatural, so maybe their instincts would drive them to fight each other just out of sheer WTFness. Although it is kind of funny to consider that, given how much Marco bitches about having to morph a female wolf, he probably didn't even have to do that.

Wildlife biology tangent aside, they morph the wolves (hey, Cassie finally got her battle morph! And it only took her three books!) and they head off into the forest and Jake can't stop peeing everywhere, which is hilarious. And then they all start howling and Tobias is like, [WTF is wrong with you people?] At first, I just thought it was a funny scene, but now it strikes me as kind of a poignant comment on Tobias's distance from the group. They've got the wolf pack's cohesion, and he's just kinda... there. Outside the pack. As a bird, not even capable of understanding or sharing their howl.

So Tobias flies off to do some aerial reconnaissance and finds a bunch of park rangers with automatic weapons gathering around a lake. They drag some freaked-out campers away from their tent and a bunch of helicopters land and Hork-Bajir climb out of them. So, you know, just your average day in the woods. Tobias goes back to warn the others and swoops down once he spots the wolf pack. But they all growl and encircle him, ready to strike. Thinking his presence surprised them into letting the wolf instincts take over, Tobias starts to reassure them - until he realizes that there are five wolves in this pack, not four.

Tobias barely escapes with his life, then finds the real fake wolf pack and tells them what's up. They head to the lake and creep along the edge of the treeline, trying to act like real wolves who would generally avoid humans like the plague. And then the ship arrives, and sheds its cloaking, revealing itself to be massive. It lowers three big pipes into the lake, and starts sucking up the water like straws. The kids realize that the ship is basically a supply truck that gathers air and water from Earth to bring to the Yeerk mothership hovering in orbit. Delighted that they have found the Yeerks' weakness but mindful of how little time they have left in wolf morph, the kids turn around and start heading back.

That's when Tobias spots the hawk he and Rachel freed. I'm going to refer to her as GirlieHawke, since that's what she is, and that was the screen name of a friend I had in Animorphs fandom way back when the series was still being written. And maybe she'll see this blog and contact me and we can catch up, and this is the only way I can think to make that happen because I have no earthly idea what her real name is. Anyway, he sees GirlieHawke and has ~*feelings*~ that he belongs with her, which is incredibly weird for him because she's a hawk, like a real hawk hawk, and he still considers himself human. So he freaks out a little and spins around to fly back to the others, all the while reminding himself over and over again that he is a human, that his name is Tobias, that he has human friends and human interests. But deep down, he fears that that's a lie; that human Tobias is dead.

When he gets back to the kids, they have stumbled into the path of the real wolf pack, which just killed a rabbit and now think they're trying to steal it from them. Now, wolf senses are extremely acute. I don't think this could have happened. They'd have smelled that other pack from a mile away, or at least their scent-markings, and steered clear. They most certainly wouldn't have just bumped into them without any clue that other wolves were there. And that's something K.A. should have known in the '90s. Anyway, it's a really tense moment, and the two packs are about to get into a serious fight, so Tobias swoops down, clutches the rabbit in his talons, and flies away with it. The real pack's "alpha" chases after him and he loses a tail feather while the others run away.

Once he's free of the wolves, Tobias checks the time on one of the park ranger trucks. They have been in wolf morph for just over two hours. Tobias rushes back and yells at them to demorph ASAP. Cassie manages to, but the others are having trouble, getting stuck with parts of their bodies human and parts wolf, and they are freaking out. Cassie races around, reassuring them one by one and talking them through it, and they actually manage to demorph all the way.

I saw Marco roll his human eyes up and stare at me. His gaze locked on me. It was like he hated me. Or feared me. Both, maybe.

I didn't move. If Marco needed me to concentrate, that was fine.

But it sent a shiver of disgust through me. I suddenly saw myself as they all must see me: as something frightening. A freak. An accident. A sickening, pitiable creature.

...

Suddenly I desperately didn't want to be there. I felt an awful, gaping black hole open up all around me. I was sick. Sick with the feeling of being trapped.

Trapped.

Forever!

I looked at my talons. They would never be feet again.

I looked at my wing. It would never be an arm. It would never again end in a hand. I would never touch. I would never touch anything... anyone... again.

I dropped from the branch and opened my wings.

"Tobias!" Jake shouted after me.

But I couldn't stay. I flapped like a demon, no longer caring that I was tired. I had to fly. I had to get away.

"Tobias, no! Come back!" Rachel cried.

I caught a blessed breeze and soared up and away, my own silent, voiceless scream echoing in my head. 

God, this book. THIS. BOOK. I reel from the feels.

That night, Tobias goes to his "new home": Jake's attic. Jake has left the drawer of an old dresser open with a blanket in it for Tobias to sleep in, and he leaves leftovers up here for him to eat. Tobias chokes down a cold, cooked hamburger patty, but can't digest the side dishes of potatoes or green beans. It is the saddest tupperware dinner in the world, and we're talking tupperware dinners here. He tries to make himself comfortable in the dresser drawer, but for him, comfort is a branch to perch on. He appreciates what Jake's doing for him, but none of these human comforts apply to him anymore. He doesn't want to be a burden on Jake, but is unnerved by the idea of truly living as a hawk. The conflict between his human brain and hawk instincts is particularly acute at the moment, and he can't sleep, so he flies to Rachel's house.

Rachel lets him into her room through the window and he confides in her, which seems like an unusually mature way for a teenage boy to act around his crush. Rachel tries to make him feel better, showing him a picture of himself which she has somehow (Yearbook photo?), and tells him that when the Andalites come, they'll probably have a way to restore his humanity. Even though he can tell that she's lying, the talk makes him feel a little bit better.

Tobias spends the next day flying around, waiting for the others to get out of school. He talks himself up, telling himself that at least can fly and he doesn't have homework. That's pretty cool. The group is meeting at Jake's house while Tom goes to a meeting of The Sharing. So Tobias flies around the school and then basically stalks the kids as they head home, then randomly flies around for a while so he can show up late to the meeting and make them think he has more of a life than he really does.

Rachel wants to blow up the ship, but Marco suggests merely sabotaging the cloaking device as it flies over the city so that everyone can see there's an alien invasion going on. Everybody gets all excited until Marco changes his mind on his own plan, pointing out that the Yeerks wouldn't just roll over in an open battle with humanity. But Tobias suggests that they don't have enough power to attack Earth openly; why else would they invade secretly? Oh, I don't know, maybe because they've noticed that humanity has enough nuclear weapons to destroy themselves ten times over and has also exhibited a shocking willingness to sacrifice millions of valuable host bodies for no goddamn reason. It is not at all a reasonable assumption to make that they're only invading secretly because they're not powerful enough to invade openly, and it's a really stupid idea to trigger open warfare based only on this assumption. But none of the Animorphs sees that, so they're like, "Awesome idea! Let's do it!" Jake comes up with the idea to get inside the ship by morphing fish and getting sucked up into the water tank. Every single part of this plan is horrible.

So after the meeting, Rachel goes to the mall because her gymnastics class is doing an exhibition there. Marco threatens to come and watch her, but Rachel hates performing in front of crowds. Tobias flies off to scope out the lake area again and see if he can gather any useful information. He's actually feeling pretty good right now, feeling useful. He thinks about how he can get into outdoor concerts and amusement parks for free, how kids walking below him probably feel jealous of his flying ability. He feels so good, in fact, that he lets his hawk instincts take over, hunts and kills a rat, and starts to eat it.

Then he snaps. He goes wild with shame, not only for killing the rat, but that for enjoying it so much. He flies straight to the mall, fully willing to bash himself against the glass doors. Luckily, someone's walking in at the same moment, so he just zooms right into the mall. He shoots past Rachel, on the balance beam in the center of the mall. She cries, "Tobias!" and nobody in the giant crowd notices that this easily-identifiable girl just shouted the name of a boy who recently went missing at a hawk that's displaying unusual behavior. Whatever.

He knocks himself against a wall and falls into Rachel's arms. (I wonder why this scene wasn't mentioned in book #12? She's already got a public reputation for crazy, animal-related things happening to her.) He confesses to her that he killed, and says he's lost, and she reassures him then releases him in a way that makes it look like she's throwing him off her. But Tobias is not reassured. He flies straight up, toward the glass skylight. His human consciousness knows he will die; his hawk brain only sees sky. He consciously, willingly, gives himself over to his hawk instincts so he can kill himself by flying into the glass.

This was a children's book.

Luckily for him, Marco followed through on his threat and is on the upper level of the mall, and apparently brought a baseball and apparently has a really good throwing arm. Because a split second before Tobias hits the glass, Marco hurls the baseball into the window, shattering it and giving Tobias a way out. That sort of makes up for his previous assholishness.

For the next few days, Tobias gives himself over completely to his hawk instincts. He avoids his friends, sets up a nice territory in a tree-lined meadow, hunts during the day, tries desperately not to remember his human life during the night. But one day, he notices another predator running after its prey. It takes him a while, but he slowly begins to recognize that the "predator" is a Hork-Bajir and its "prey" is a human being. Tobias rakes the Hork-Bajir in the eyes with his claws and leads the human to safety, now remembering who he is and the responsibility he bears.

That night, he goes to Rachel's house to tell her what happened. She reassures him again that he is human, and this time it starts to sink in. He shares with her a new motivation for fighting the Yeerks, and for keeping himself together:

[See... there are human beings all over, trapped in bodies controlled by Yeerks. Trapped. Unable to escape. Rachel, I know how they feel. Maybe I can't escape. Maybe I am trapped forever. But if we can free some of those others, maybe... I don't know. Maybe that's what I need to do to stay human.]

Luckily, the mission was planned for Saturday, and Tobias apparently only spent Wednesday through Friday having a nervous breakdown, so the next day they morph wolves and head back to the lake.  Tobias is carrying a little pouch with fishing line and stuff, because the plan is apparently to catch a fish in human form. There has to be a better way to do this; if nothing else, two of them can turn into ospreys, which eat mostly fish and are awesome at grabbing fish out of the water. But they're new at this, so instead they demorph inside a little cave Tobias found them and then they spend the morning trying and failing to catch a fish. Cassie finally catches one, because she's the only one with points in Nature on her character sheet. They all acquire the trout and throw it back, and by now they've wasted so much time just trying to get the damn fish that the Yeerks are showing up in their helicopters and Jeeps and the kids have to dive back into the cave to hide.

This time, the Yeerks have come with two more Bug fighters than last time, and there's an extra ship: a Blade ship. That's right: Visser Three is there. Visser Three is always there. (To quote Greg from Opinionated Animorphs.) Tobias flies into the cave and Jake's like, "That's not the plan," and Tobias is all like, [FUCK THE PLAN. SHIT JUST GOT REAL.] Obviously, they can't just walk down to the water and morph fish like they'd intended to, because now the place is swarming with Yeerks, but nobody wants to give up on the brilliant idea of inciting open war between an advanced alien race and a bunch of hairless apes who can just barely get to their own moon. So Cassie decides that they should morph fish in the cave and Tobias will carry them one by one to the lake before they suffocate, on the assumption that none of the park rangers the Yeerks have infested know anything about hawk behavior. This plan just keeps getting better and better.

So they do that and none of them suffocate and the Yeerks don't appear to see anything unusual about a hawk making multiple trips to carry fish from a cave and dropping them in a lake. The kids get sucked up into the tank and see some kind of grate at the top. They decide to morph human, move up through the ship through the grate, then get into their battle morphs and fight whoever's on there. Brilliant! Meanwhile, they wait for the water level to get high enough for them to reach the grate.

The Yeerks have figured out, from Tobias's attack on the Hork-Bajir, that Andalites are probably in the forest in animal form. So they roam around incinerating basically every animal they see. They almost get Tobias, but he figures out the one place they can't shoot: right next to the ship. He flies straight there and lands on it, outing himself as an "Andalite bandit" but safe from the Yeerks' Dracon beams. Visser Three taunts him from the Blade ship 'cause that's what Visser Three does. Tobias doesn't respond. In the middle of all this, Rachel sends a thought-speech message up that they can't get the grate open. She basically begs him to destroy the ship so they won't be taken alive.

A children's book.

Unfortunately, the moment is kinda ruined by this bit of corniness:

[Rachel... I never told you...]

[You didn't have to, Tobias,] she said. [I knew. Good-bye.]

That's totally cliche and way too much for a couple of middle schoolers who pretty much just met. Their relationship was developing very realistically, and then that happens. Sigh.

So anyway, Visser Three sends a bunch of Taxxons with Dracon beams (how can they shoot when they don't have fingers? Whatever) onto the roof to get rid of Tobias without harming the ship. Tobias rakes a Taxxon's eyes, steals the Dracon beam with his talons, and starts shooting randomly into the ship's control room, destroying everything he can. The ship starts falling and crashes into a helicopter and a Bug fighter with the expected big explosions. Luckily, a hole's opened up in the side and the Animorphs are falling out along with all the water they collected. They morph birds as they fall, with just enough time to fly away before they hit the ground.

I just want to point out that this is the second time huge crowds of Yeerks have had the opportunity to see at least one human teenager morph. (The first one was when Rachel demorphed from elephant in the Yeerk pool back in the first book.) They are really not paying attention. Anyway, they all fly off safely, but the Yeerks are still shooting randomly at every animal they see, and they end up shooting GirlieHawke.

Last week, Thought-Speak posted their own review of this book, and Coleman suggested that it would have been better for Tobias's character development if GirlieHawke hadn't died. I agree with that assessment. Tobias should have been forced to make the choice as to whether to a human or a hawk, and killing off his potential "mate" took that choice away from him.

Anyway, the Yeerks burn all evidence that anything happened (damn kids and their fireworks) and the next day, Tobias goes to Rachel's house again. She seems to have started leaving the window open for him. There are gonna be a whole lot of bugs in her house. Anyway, she offers to help him find GirlieHawke's body and bury it, but he waves her off.

Tobias flies off into the beautiful blue sky, having finally come to terms with his divided self. And then it ends gorgeously:

I am Tobias. A boy. A hawk. Some strange mix of the two.

You know now why I can't tell you my last name. Or where I live. But someday you may look up in the sky and see the silhouette of a large bird of prey. Some large bird with a rending beak and sharp, tearing talons. Some bird with vast wings outstretched to ride the thermals.

Be happy for me, and for all who fly free.

Commentary:
I love Tobias so freaking much, you guys. He was my second fictional crush (after Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid) and he has unquestionably shaped my taste in men. I am positive I am not alone in this; at least 90% of the female Ani-fans I spoke to back in the day were in love with Tobias. Looking back, I can see how he's kind of the ideal preteen girl crush. He's got a tragic past (he needs me!), he's brooding and depressed (my love can heal him!), he looks like Kurt Cobain (messy blond hair! Deep, sad eyes! Fashionably messy clothing, one assumes!), he's sensitive and thoughtful (not like those immature boys at school!), and he's star-crossed lovers with the girl we all kind of wish we were anyway. Best of all, preteen girls love sexually nonthreatening boys, and how much less threatening can you get than a boy who literally doesn't have a human body? Jonathan Taylor Thomas had nothing on Tobias.

Apart from Tobias's appeal to preteen girls (and gay boys) specifically, this series as a whole is incredibly effective as a metaphor for puberty. Your body is changing rapidly and unpredictably in ways that disgust and horrify you. You also have emotional moodswings (animal instincts) that you struggle to control. Everyone around you seems swept up in creepy conformity (The Sharing), and only you know the truth. Everything you do is incredibly important, every day filled with world-changing life-or-death situations, but you can't trust anyone with the details except a small group of your closest friends. Not to mention the threat of becoming a nothlit: weren't we all told by our teachers that whatever choices we made now (now being 6th grade) set us on the path we'd walk for the rest of our lives? If you fail this class, you'll fail the next class, and then you won't get into honors classes in high school, and you won't get into a good college, and then you'll just die homeless on the street. I had the strong impression that we were all clay statues rapidly drying, with a limited amount of time to reshape ourselves before we found ourselves stuck in our current form until death. (It came as an enormous relief to me when I realized, sometime in my early-to-mid-20s, that no one ever stops growing and changing.) No wonder I loved this series as a middle schooler. It's middle school with aliens.

As for this particular book, The Encounter is very, very strong. The best of the three I've re-read so far, and from what I recall, one of the best in the series. Every single plan in this book is horrible, but they're kids who just got thrown into fighting a war, so you kind of expect them to not know what the hell they're doing. There are just a few problems; for one thing, Tobias says in this book that his parents are dead, whereas in the first book Jake said his mother abandoned him just a few years back. Jake's story lines up with what we find out later in the series. This inconsistency might be due to the fact that K.A. didn't totally know where to take his character this early in the series, or it might be Tobias's unreliable narration. Maybe it's easier for him to tell people that his parents are dead than to admit that his own mother ditched him. Although mentioning the conceit that the Animorphs are writing all this down for an audience raises the question of how the hell Tobias even wrote this book. I've got a mental image of a hawk sitting in Starbucks typing with his talons on a MacBook. Maybe wearing a little hipster scarf. Go tell the hawk he can't stay unless he orders something, baristas. I dare you.

Tobias also says early on that no one's looking for him because Jake sent letters to his aunt and uncle telling them that he was with the other one. But I imagine problems would arise when he never enrolls in school in his aunt's neighborhood. If nothing else, wouldn't truancy officers investigate? I don't know enough about this sort of thing, but I kind of wish a search for Tobias had factored into the story, even a little. It wouldn't really threaten the Animorphs (would anyone seriously be looking for a red-tailed hawk?), it would be more realistic, and it would open up some interesting plot and theme possibilities.

But those are just minor nitpicks. A larger complaint I have is something that will pop up throughout the series, but seemed especially prominent in this book.

She didn't know that I had freed her. That kind of concept was beyond her thinking. And she felt no gratitude.

It wasn't like we were friends. Hawks don't know what "friend" means. And she certainly did not feel any gratitude toward me for saving her from captivity. Hawks don't have that sort of emotion, either. In fact, in her mind there may have been no connection between me and her freedom.

[I knew I was human when I realized how... how sad I was that she was killed. See, a hawk wouldn't care. If she had been my mate, I would have missed her, been disturbed. But sadness? That's a human emotion. I know it seems strange, but I guess only a human would really care that a bird had died.]

That's a whole lot of completely baseless assumptions about what hawks do and do not know or feel. Granted, the study of animal cognition and emotion has had something of a renaissance in the past decade. From René Descartes to about ten years ago, most people just assumed that non-human animals were mindless automatons with no emotion or capacity for critical thought. Which is rather silly, considering the fact that we humans are a type of animal, differing from other species in degree rather than kind. I have a hard time believing that an animal that hunts to survive does not understand cause and effect, or that an animal that has been observed engaging in social play lacks socially-oriented emotions like gratitude and grief. If nothing else, there's no particular reason to assume that it lacks these things, other than 500 years of unquestioned human exceptionalism.

Of course, much like the issue with the wolf pack, most of this scientific research happened long after this book was published, and there are still many people who maintain that animals are mindless automatons, and to think any differently is (gasp!) anthropomorphizing. I can't blame K.A. for not foretelling the next decade's advancements in biology, and Animorphs is generally fantastic about encouraging empathy with non-human creatures. It still irks me, though, and will likely continue to irk me as the word "sentience" pops up again and again and again.

Where do the Animorphs live?
This book provides some pretty major clues.
1. It establishes that they live on the edge of an enormous, mountainous national park.
2. It also establishes that wolves were recently reintroduced to said park. At the time this book was published, this had only happened in two places: Yellowstone National Park and Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Both of those reintroductions did indeed happen shortly before the book came out, and both those parks are indeed huge and mountainous. Unfortunately, they are nowhere near the ocean, or large cities, or animal theme parks.
3. Cassie says that there are no grizzly bears in the area, only black bears, which rules out Yellowstone National Park.

So it's the third book and we've already got mutually-exclusive clues as to where the story is set. I'll stop with this feature now, since there's no way to reconcile the clues we have. (That was quick.) Clearly, the Animorphs' hometown is basically Springfield. It would have gone a lot smoother without the hyper-specific details. Cassie's mom could have worked at just a plain old zoo, of which there are many, rather than a zoo/amusement park, of which there are very few. They could live near a national park, but not necessarily one of the two where wolves had recently been reintroduced.

If I ever write my series of Animorphs teleplays, I'm officially setting the story in Woodbridge, Virginia. The forest could be Prince William Forest Park in northern Virginia, and Cassie's mom could work at the National Zoo. Prince William's neither huge nor particularly mountainous, but it's big and wild enough for the Animorphs' purposes, and it just makes sense for the Yeerk invasion to be centered around Washington, D.C. This would remove wolf morphs from the equation, but whatever. I can write around that. If you're strongly opposed to this, feel free to yell at me in the comments.

Well, that's all for now. Come back next Monday to praise Jesus Whale's name when I review Animorphs #4: The Message!