Flight Behavior (17 page)

She was glad when Pete and Dr. Byron returned, even though she’d had no practical reason to miss them. Probably it was just a collie kind of thing, like Roy and Charlie, always relieved when the herd came back together. She helped spread out one of the tarps and they sat on it to eat lunch while discussing the area of the roost, the storm mortality, some things Dellarobia could understand and many she could not. She’d promised not to get in their way, but they went to some trouble now to explain things. The same transect they were sampling and counting today, they had counted a week ago, so comparing the numbers would tell how many butterflies were downed by the storm. This made sense, the matter of keeping track. She was surprised to learn the ones on the ground were not all goners. When the sun came out, a lot of them would bask and shiver to raise their body temperatures, and get going again. If the rain alone caused mortality, that would be different from what they’d seen in Mexico.

Their line of work was not just body counts, Dr. Byron assured her. Ovid. They called him that, and he was their boss, so she could try to do the same. She thought of the evening he’d come to supper and felt embarrassed all over again. But his manner with her was plain and very kind, guiding her into comprehension as he had with Preston that night. He called the butterflies a system, a “complicated system.” She was getting used to his accent. “A compli-
keeted
sys-tem, mon,” she would say to Dovey later, exaggerating, when she recounted all this. He’d been studying monarchs for twenty years, all over the North American continent. She asked him how long the butterflies lived, and his answer was baffling: generally about six weeks. The ones that lived through winter lasted longer, a few months, by going into something like hibernation. “Diapause,” he called it, a pause in the normal schedule of growing up, mating, and reproducing. Somewhere in midlife, the cold or darkness of winter put them all on hold, shutting down their sex drive until future notice.

Like life in an uninsulated house, she thought. Maybe like marriage in general. “And then what?” she asked. It made no sense, a lifespan of a few weeks did not add up to an annual migration of many thousand miles. How did they learn where to go? Dr. Byron explained that no single butterfly ever made the round trip. At winter’s end, the now-elderly butterflies in Mexico roused themselves and mated like crazy. The males copulated their brains out, then left it to the pregnant single moms to struggle north across the border into Texas looking for milkweed plants, the sole sustenance that could feed the caterpillars. There they laid their eggs and died without ever seeing their young. Dellarobia was stunned by this tale, which sounded soap-opera tragic, like something on the Oxygen network. She could tell Ovid liked telling it, too. The motherless baby monarchs hatched as caterpillars, grew up, and then flew north to repeat the drill, laying their eggs on milkweed plants and dying. The monarchs they would normally see in these mountains, he said, would be a second spring generation. Their offspring would go north to produce a third. And only those, in the fall, would fly all the way to Mexico.

“Where they’ve never been,” she said.

“Where they have never been,” Ovid repeated.

“How can they do that?”

He laughed. “You’re looking at one crazy man who has been asking that same question for twenty years.”

“Well, yeah, I get it,” Dellarobia said. His “complicated system” began to take hold in her mind, a thing she could faintly picture. Not just an orange passage across a continent as she’d imagined it before, not like marbles rolling from one end of a box to the other and back. This was a living flow, like a pulse through veins, with the cells bursting and renewing themselves as they went. The sudden vision filled her with strong emotions that embarrassed her, for fear of breaking into sobs as she had in front of her in-laws that day when the butterflies enveloped her. How was that even normal, to cry over insects?

It wasn’t easy for her to stay on the train of the conversation, even if they were running it for her benefit. Pete explained that in recent years their studies had found the range was expanding northward. Meaning the butterfly generations had to push farther into Canada to find happiness, Ovid added helpfully, probably astute to the fact that in her pay grade a range meant a stove. The southern end of things was getting difficult too, he said. The monarchs had to leave the Mexican roost sites earlier every year because of seasonality changes from climatic warming. She wondered whether any of this was proved. Climate change, she knew to be wary of that. He said no one completely understood how they made these migrations. Hundreds of factors came into play. Fire ants, for example, had now come into Texas, where the monarchs were vulnerable. Ants ate the caterpillars. And farm chemicals were killing the milkweed plants, another worry he mentioned. She wondered if she should tell Ovid about the landslide in Mexico. But the students were jumping into the conversation, rendering it less than comprehensible. Bio-geography, roosts, host plants, overwintering zones, loss of something-communities, devastation. That one she got, devastation. She held to the vision that moved her, an orange flow of rivulets reaching over a continent, pulsed by its own internal engine.

“They seem sturdy,” she said. “Seems like they always find their way.”

“They respond to cues,” Pete said. “Temperature, solar cues, it’s all they can do. It works perfectly until something changes. Like, if they’re roused off their wintering grounds to fly north before the milkweeds come up, they show up to an empty cafeteria. Or it’s too dry and they desiccate. Every year that we record temperature increases, the roosting populations in Mexico move farther up the mountain slopes to find where it’s still cool and moist. But there’s only so far you can go before you run out of mountain.”

“And then I guess you come to this one,” Dellarobia said, presuming this was the answer. “Is that so bad? They’re beautiful. We don’t get a lot of bonuses around here, let me tell you.”

Pete exchanged a look with Bonnie and Mako. Their silence embarrassed her.

“They are beautiful,” Ovid said evenly. “Terrible things can have beauty.”

“What’s the terrible part?”

He shook his head slowly, exactly the same gesture she’d seen that first night when Cub struck up the conversation by asking what he made of their butterfly situation. “Terrible, beautiful, it’s not our call,” Ovid said. “We are scientists. Our job here is only to describe what exists. But we are also human. We like these butterflies, you know?”

“Of course,” Dellarobia said. Good to know, being human was allowed.

“So we’re very concerned,” he said. “Monarchs have wintered in Mexico since they originated as a species, as nearly as we can tell. We don’t know exactly how long that is, but it is many thousands of years. And this year, instead of the norm, something has put them here.”

He took a bite of his sandwich, which appeared to be cream cheese on wheat bread, while she chewed on “thousands of years.” In her experience, conversations of this nature always ended with the same line: The Lord moves in mysterious ways.

What he said instead knocked the wind out of her. “If you woke up one morning, Dellarobia, and one of your eyes had moved to the side of your head, how would you feel about that?”

“Unh.” The repellent image filled her mind for a half second, before she could ward it off. “I’d scream,” she said. “I’m scrinchy about eyes, to begin with.”

“Well, that is about the sum of it. Your eye might look very pretty over there beside your ear. But what we see here worries us. We are scrinchy, as you say.”

All four of them looked at her with such grave expectation, she felt as if her face really might have become rearranged. She couldn’t guess if Ovid was pulling her leg. A relocated eyeball. Were they serious? “Well, I guess I’d call the eye doctor,” she said. “I despise going. That’s about what it would take to get me there.”

She ate the lunch she had carried here in a plastic grocery bag because she didn’t have a nice little expensive backpack. She didn’t have a nice little college education, either. She’d just have to let the smart people figure this one out. She tried to hold on to anger but felt it being swamped by a great sadness that was rising in her like the groundwater in her yard. Why did the one rare, spectacular thing in her life have to be a sickness of nature? These butterflies had been hers. She found them, she’d showed them to her son, in her name they were becoming beloved and important. They seemed to matter, like nothing she’d ever possessed. Already she had made up her mind to throw her one hundred dinky pounds against the heft of her family’s men, if it came to that. So how did an outsider just get to come in here and declare the whole event a giant mistake? These people had everything. Education, good looks, boots whose price tag equaled her husband’s last paycheck. Now the butterflies were theirs too.

S
he worked steadily through the afternoon counting insects. She’d had worse jobs in her life. One quadrat she split with Mako, and all the ones still uncounted she did by herself while the rest of the crew did other work. They measured trees by looking at them through a little yellow instrument, and measured wingspans using tweezer things called calipers, and measured what they called wet weights using tiny scales that looked like drug-dealer equipment to Dellarobia, not that she knew. When the light began to wane they headed down-mountain. She was ready to bolt and run toward the sight of her dear children and, more importantly, her cigarettes. But they all walked together, climbing back up through the forest to the High Road and descending it with the sun at their backs. Butterflies that had moved around during the day now flowed toward them up the road, coming home to roost. They’d been out seeking flowers if they could find any here, for nectar, Ovid said. Warm days that got them awake and flying around would deplete their fat reserves. Fat reserves, on a butterfly? Yes. In fact, he said, warm spells might be a bigger danger here than the cold snaps. The butterflies would burn through their fuel much more quickly than in the steady cool of Mexico’s high-altitude roost. That was a big problem on this mountain, with no winter flowers for refueling. She tried to picture winter flowers, and came up blank. Poinsettias?
Depauperate
of nectar sources, was what he said. She tried not to take it personally that her mountain was poor in all ways, even flower-wise.

She tried to calm her burgeoning resentments and just float on the tide of butterflies that surrounded them. It was like being inside a video game. Little V shapes of moving orange light kept coming at her, sweeping around. They seemed to magnify the sunlight, igniting the air. She could see how they would need steady cues in their unsteady world. She felt for them. She wanted to like the scientists too, who really did care about the butterflies, probably a far cry more than she did. It was true what Ovid said, they were only taking the measure of things. If the news was bad, that wasn’t their fault. They were just people. Kids, for the most part, basically her own generation, with jackets tied around their waists, walking along in a river of butterflies.

Earlier in the day she’d taken a look at Mako’s coat with its wrecked zipper, and had considered offering to replace it, but hesitated. Maybe he didn’t care one way or the other. She made the offer now.

“
Replace
it? You mean, take out the zipper and put in a new one?” he asked her, apparently unacquainted with the concept of clothing repair. These kids must think their expensive gear grew on trees.

She laughed. “Lay that coat out on a table and use some of those measuring tools you’ve got to measure the zipper. You can buy one just like it at the Walmart in Cleary, they’ve got fabric and notions. Bring it to the house tomorrow, if you can get by without your coat for a day, and I’ll fix you right up.”

“You’ve got, what, like a sewing machine?” His surprise was genuine.

“Well,
yeah
,” she said, “a sewing machine. It’s not like an atom-smasher or anything. Just a needle that goes up and down. I used to make just about everything I wore, in high school. Prom dress, the works. It was the alternative to fashion death, in my income bracket.”

“But how did you learn to do that?” Bonnie also seemed floored. All these college graduates, mystified by Dellarobia’s store of knowledge. She wasn’t sure whether to feel proud or mocked.

“It’s nothing all that hard, it just takes patience. My mother was a seamstress.”

“Really,” Mako said. “Like, what would she sew?”

“Her specialty was business suits, if you can imagine. Mostly for women, but some older men still had their suits made to order, when I was little. Before they all went over to buying factory made at half the price.”

“In some sweatshop,” Bonnie said.

“Or foreign-made at one-tenth the price, right,” she agreed. “Mama brought me up to be really picky about double seams and linings, and then set me loose in a world where those things don’t even exist.”

The students seemed to be digesting this. Maybe they didn’t know about seams and linings either. Mako changed the subject, remarking that the washed-out road would hinder her mother’s tourism business. It took her a second to realize he meant Hester.

“Oh. That’s not my mama. My mother-in-law.” She decided not to mention her dead parents, a reliable conversation-stopper.

“Who does she bring up here?” Mako wanted to know. The others were listening too, she could tell, surprisingly curious about these personal things. She was not the only one with questions she was afraid to ask. For the first time all day, it dawned on her that these scientists owned nothing here, and knew it. Her husband’s family could kick them out and tear down the trees and the butterflies uncounted, at the snap of a finger. There were two worlds here, behaving as if their own was all that mattered. With such reluctance to converse, one with the other. Practically without a common language.

“Well, it was all church groups to begin with,” she said. “This has been a meaningful thing in our church, people appreciate . . .” She hesitated to use churchy words. “The beauty, I guess. It’s inspiring for people to see. It helps them respect the earth.”