Part 1 (1/2)
Four Wings and a Prayer.
Sue Halpern.
To Sophie Crane McKibben and her devoted scout, Barley, who brought me outside.
Chapter 1.
BILL CALVERT EASED his truck off Interstate 281 near McAllen, Texas, pulled into a mall parking lot, and drew a knife from his knapsack. It was late in the day, about eight o'clock, and he had been driving for the past five hours.
”What you want to do is make the cut like this,” he said, unfastening his belt buckle and the top b.u.t.ton of his jeans. He peeled back the waistband to reveal the smallest of incisions. ”Nothing too obvious.”
Calvert pressed on the fabric, and it opened, exposing a tunnel the width of two fingers. He reached in and extracted a wad of cash that was folded to the size and shape of a stick of gum. Three hundred dollars, it looked like.
”You try,” he said, handing over the knife.
I got out of the truck and began to slice at the inside of my jeans. People walked by, mothers and fathers towing small children, for the most part, but also the occasional solitary individual or couple, and if they found it odd to see a woman with a knife in her hand fiddling with her pants not two hundred yards from Montgomery Ward, they weren't saying.
”It's so uncomfortable to walk around with money in your shoes,” Calvert was explaining. ”It gets real damp. And smelly. This is much better.”
We were ten miles from the Mexican border. I threaded my money into its hideaway and followed Calvert into the mall restaurant, a Luby's cafeteria. We were the only diners.
”I always come here before I go to Mexico,” he said happily, sliding his tray along the steam table and overloading it with plates of green beans, broccoli, and peas, all of which looked like they had been through the wash. ”These are the last green vegetables we'll see for two weeks.” I couldn't say I was sorry.
BILL CALVERT is a biologist. Not the kind of biologist who wears a lab coat and not, especially, the kind who has a lab. He works out-of-doors most of the time, observing and cataloging and trying to come to terms with natural phenomena. Among people who study monarch b.u.t.terflies, which is what he himself has done for the past twenty-five years, Calvert is considered the best field researcher in the pack. This may have something to do with the fact that Bill Calvert isn't really part of a pack. He works by himself, getting grants here and there and leading trips for science teachers and wealthy ecotourists, just sc.r.a.ping by. Although he has a doctorate in zoology, academia doesn't interest him. A ”real” job doesn't interest him. Calvert is fifty-eight years old. Going to Mexico to look for monarchs-what we were doing-interests him.
”I TOOK AN apt.i.tude test when I was in my thirties, and I scored two sigmas past a seventeen-year-old for 'desire for adventure,' ” he said a couple of hours after we crossed the border at Reynosa, as he leapfrogged eighteen-wheelers along the rutted two-lane Mexican highway to Ciudad Victoria, where we planned to stop. It was close to midnight. We had just breezed through two military checkpoints with the words ”Biologico” and ”Mariposa monarca,” and now ours was the only pa.s.senger vehicle on the road.
”I thought you weren't supposed to drive at night in Mexico,” I said to Bill, who smiled at me and tugged on his mustache.
”Why not?” he asked thoughtfully, as if it were a real question.
”Bandits,” I said.
”Maybe,” he said, and smiled again. It was an enigmatic smile, nothing comforting.
I DIDN'T KNOW Bill Calvert. Or rather, I had known Bill Calvert for about ten hours, ever since he picked me up at the Austin airport earlier in the day. He was late, and I had begun to have my doubts, but then he'd rushed through the door and though I had never before laid eyes on him, I recognized him instantly and was rea.s.sured. He was a familiar type. Tall, thin, with a professorial mop of graying hair and an abundant white mustache, wearing stiff Wranglers, a plaid s.h.i.+rt, and scuffed brown shoes. Gla.s.ses. A sunburned neck. Mischievous eyes. Pens in his pocket. We had talked twice on the phone before that, too-I was interviewing him for an article I was writing-and it was during one of these conversations that he mentioned he would be driving to the International Conference on the Monarch b.u.t.terfly in Morelia, Mexico, the following month, looking for b.u.t.terflies along the way and doing some research, and invited me to come along.
This would be my second trip to Mexico to see monarchs. The first had been three years before, when my daughter was nine months old. That was how I would always remember the trip, with a certain amount of distance, as if I had been watching myself there: a woman in a foreign country with a small baby in her arms. We had been at a meeting, my husband and I, and at the end of it, as a kind of reward, we were to be taken into the mountains to a monarch b.u.t.terfly preserve. Those words, b.u.t.terfly preserve, meant nothing to me. I could not make them into a coherent image the way I could, say, Walt Disney World, where I had never been, either, or Glacier National Park, or Victoria Falls. What would a b.u.t.terfly preserve look like?
We took a bus, and then a truck, and then we walked. At ninety-five hundred feet, where the climb began, the air was not so thin that you noticed, yet, how high you were. Other things were more obvious and would have taken your breath away even at sea level: the skinny little boys, for instance, who were selling things-recapped bottles of beer and snapshots of cl.u.s.tered monarchs and handkerchiefs embroidered by their mothers or grandmothers or sisters. The handkerchiefs cost a quarter, and though they were made by hand, all of them looked alike: a white cotton square with scalloped edges and an orange-and-black monarch b.u.t.terfly sewn into one of the corners. That was the other thing that brought me up short: the b.u.t.terflies. They were underfoot. I was used to seeing b.u.t.terflies in the air, or on flowers, but there, at the entrance to El Rosario, thousands of wings torn from their bodies lay in the dirt. They were like cairns in the forest, pointing upward, and so we climbed, my husband, our daughter, and I, and the little boys fell away, and I could hear myself breathing, and my heart in my ears, and when I looked up again, what I was seeing made so little sense that I turned it into something else, something I understood-autumn leaves, falling through the air. That was what it sounded like, too. Millions of leaves, ripped and ripping from their moorings. The sound was overwhelming. It woke the baby in my arms, who opened her eyes to this sight. The three of us stood there, looking and looking, and gradually it occurred to me, gradually it registered, that though there were millions of them, they were not leaves at all, they were b.u.t.terflies, monarch b.u.t.terflies, the b.u.t.terflies of my backyard. They were in the air, and so heavy on the branches of the pine trees that the branches bent toward the ground, supplicants to gravity and ma.s.s and sheer enthusiasm.
We moved on. As we hiked we saw even more b.u.t.terflies, more than would seem possible, twenty or thirty million. Every available place to roost was taken. Even the baby became a perch. There were b.u.t.terflies on her shoulder and shoes, b.u.t.terflies in her hair. Somehow she knew not to touch them, and not to be afraid. We found a rock at the edge of the forest, and the baby and I sat down. The clamor of b.u.t.terfly wings was as constant and irregular as surf cresting over rocks. I watched my daughter watching the b.u.t.terfly resting on her shoelace, watched her reach down and wait until the b.u.t.terfly crawled up the ladder of one of her fingers, climbed over the hump of knuckles, and rested on the back of her hand. She was completely silent, as if she had lost her voice. Her eyes were wide open, and so was her mouth, and for twenty minutes, maybe longer, the two of us just sat, eleven thousand feet up the side of a mountain, and paid attention. If I were a more religious person I would have called that place, and that moment, holy, or blessed. But my vocabulary did not typically include those words. Still, unbidden, they were the ones that came to mind.
AS A CHILD I collected rocks. Limestone, sandstone, mica, quartz-they all went in my box. Inside the box was a book with pictures of rocks, a field guide against which I would check my specimens, but what interested me most was how they felt in my hand, and their colors and consistency, not what they were called. The boy across the street collected b.u.t.terflies, which he would pin to a piece of foamcore. Although I didn't have this word for it then-I was eight or nine-I thought it was morbid, which is to say that when my grandfather died the next year and I looked at his body laid out in the casket, rigid and perfect, it reminded me of those b.u.t.terflies pinned to the board. The rocks, rattling around in my box, seemed more animate and full of possibility. Someday they would be dirt.
All these years later, I hardly remembered the difference between an igneous and a metamorphic rock. What I did remember was the single-mindedness with which I had picked through the woods behind my house, and the pure joy of finding something valuable enough to hold on to. It seemed reasonable to call this pa.s.sion, and to think of myself-and everyone else-as a collection of pa.s.sions. What this suggests is that it is not simply our ability to think, to be rational, that distinguishes humans from other species, but our ability to be irrational-to put stones in our pockets because we think they are beautiful.
All of us have experiences that could change our lives if we let them: love, offered suddenly, turning from the mantelpiece, as Delmore Schwartz put it. And that, oddly, was the way it was with me and the b.u.t.terflies. Not love, exactly, offered suddenly, but a similar quickening of heart and desire-in this case a desire to know, if knowledge was not only information and understanding but experience. I could feel those b.u.t.terflies tugging on my imagination as if it were a loose sleeve.
”YOU MEAN YOU agreed to spend a week in a car in a foreign country with a man you've never met?” my mother asked in disbelief the night before I left for Austin. She reminded me that I had a small child at home, and a husband. ”Promise me you won't drive through Mexico at night,” she said finally, and I did. I promised her up and down. And now it was near midnight and I was breaking that promise, doing something that only somebody who scored two sigmas more than a seventeen-year-old might find unremarkable.
”Are you worried?” Bill asked after a while, picking up, perhaps, on my body language, which spelled ”tense” in marquee letters.
”Yes,” I admitted. ”Should I be?”
”I don't know,” he said, but with conviction.
MONARCH b.u.t.tERFLIES never fly at night. They can't. Once the ambient temperature drops below fifty-five degrees, they become sluggish, unable to flap their wings. The wings, which are commonly-and erroneously-described as solar panels, don't store energy but instead absorb it directly from the sun and air. Pick a monarch off a tree in the early morning and put it on your palm and it will sit there as if it were tame. Until the sun warms the air, the monarch is stuck paralytically, making it breakfast for certain steel-gutted birds. This is crucial because every autumn, monarchs do something no other b.u.t.terflies do: they migrate unimaginably long distances. Monarchs born east of the Rockies typically go to Mexico. Those born to the west go for the most part to the California coast. They travel forty-four miles a day on average, but sometimes as many as two hundred, and all of it by day. Unlike songbirds, which often migrate in the dark to elude predators, monarchs are limited to flying out in the open when it is sunny enough for them, and warm enough, and not too windy.
”I THINK THEY are up there,” Calvert speculated the next day, while the winds.h.i.+eld wipers slapped at the morning drizzle as if it were something annoying, like bugs. The sky was gray, and Bill was narrating what we would have been looking at if we weren't looking at a thick curtain of clouds: big mountains, part of the Sierra Madre Oriental, mountains that rise eight and ten and twelve thousand feet into the air. In the foreground there were p.r.i.c.kly pear and century plants and scrub gra.s.s, beautiful in their own way but hardly majestic. Calvert was sure the monarchs were on the move, but up high, above the fog-an unprovable hypothesis.
”Keep your eyes open,” he said. ”If you ever see a b.u.t.terfly flying under these conditions-overcast, with no wind-it'll wreak havoc with all the existing theories.” I understood implicitly that he would like this. Rules, even scientific rules, were anathema to him. But it wasn't going to happen; it was a biological impossibility. Thermoregulation was one of the few sure things that scientists knew about monarch migration. The rest-how the b.u.t.terflies knew when it was time to leave their summer breeding grounds for their overwintering sites thousands of miles away, and how, navigationally speaking, they got to those sites-had stymied them for decades. And so had this: how did monarch b.u.t.terflies from the eastern United States and Canada, millions of them, end up every year in the same unlikely spot, a remote and largely inhospitable fifty acres of oyamel fir forest ten thousand feet up the southwestern flank of Mexico's Transverse Neovolcanic Mountains?
This last question-how do monarchs find their way back to the same oyamel trees year after year?-remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of animal biology. Monarchs are not guided by memory, since no single b.u.t.terfly ever makes the round trip. Three or four generations separate those that spend one winter in Mexico from those that go there the next. A monarch b.u.t.terfly born in August where I live, in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State, for instance, will probably fly all the way to Mexico, spend the winter there, and leave in March. Then it will fly north, laying eggs (if it is female) on milkweed along the Gulf Coast in Texas and Florida before dying. The b.u.t.terflies born of those eggs will continue northward, breeding and laying more eggs along the way. So will their offspring. By August another monarch, four generations or so removed from the monarch that left my land for Mexico the previous summer, will emerge from its chrysalis hidden among the raspberry canes and do the same thing. It will head south, aiming for a place it's never been, an acre or two of forest on the steep slopes of the Neovolcanics.
All over the world-in the United States and Canada and Mexico, in Australia, in the United Kingdom, in Germany-people were puzzling this out. They were studying navigation, orientation, cellular structure, biogeology, ecology. All were doing science, and like much else in science, what they were doing was haphazard and unsystematic. Those of us who do not do science are often in awe of it, for it seems to possess a certain inherent power, the sort of power that comes from inalienable truths. For those of us who do not do science, science often seems to be the last bastion of unfuzzy logic, a place where the answers are clear-cut, a moral universe where there is a right and there is a wrong. But we fool ourselves-it's not like that at all. Science is ruled by human pa.s.sions and limitations and creativity. Science is the story we tell ourselves, or are told, to make sense of the world of atoms and cells, illness and beauty, ozone and oxygen, the world in which we-collections of atoms and cells-find ourselves.
Every fall monarchs pa.s.s through my yard, and though I know where they are going, no one can tell me for sure how they get there. Maybe it doesn't matter; so much of nature happens in the background, without most of us paying it any attention. But paying attention is part of our animal heritage, a link to deer and dolphin, owl and bear. And that, perhaps, is where the itch of curiosity begins, and the ongoing attempt to scratch it.
People have been paying attention to the monarch for hundreds of years, and most of them, unlike Bill Calvert, have not been professional scientists. They have been drawn to these insects because their behavior has seemed so unlikely, so amazing, so nearly heroic. The monarchs' presumed heroism, in fact, has been the subtext for much of the fascination. In the process, data have been collected and then organized into a narrative. Ultimately, that narrative didn't have to be true, but like all stories, it had to seem to be true.
Bill Calvert was one of the storytellers, as well as part of the story itself. As an undergraduate at the University of Texas he studied philosophy, and as a graduate student there, zoology. His dissertation was on b.u.t.terfly feet, how female b.u.t.terflies find their host plants. He started looking at monarchs on a lark because he was stuck in Ma.s.sachusetts one winter and wanted an excuse to go south. He went to a talk given by Lincoln Brower, then a professor at Amherst College and the world's leading monarch scientist. Brower needed b.u.t.terflies for his research, and he put Calvert up to flying down to Texas to collect some. It was the beginning of a loose collaboration that continues to this day.
In monarch circles, which are bigger than one might suppose, Bill Calvert is something of a legend. It's not just his reputation as a cowboy entomologist, a guy who sleeps in his truck in pursuit of monarch b.u.t.terflies and has more field notes and more data than he'll ever be able to write up-though these are part of it. What makes him a legend is that almost twenty-five years ago Bill Calvert figured out, based on a couple of clues in a National Geographic article whose authors were trying to keep it secret, where monarchs from the eastern United States and Canada spend the winter.
”I had a friend who was a librarian,” Calvert said, ”and she gave me a bunch of maps. There were two clues in the National Geographic article, that the b.u.t.terfly colonies were at ten thousand feet and that they were in the state of Michoacn. When you put those two features on a map, there were not very many choices.”
Calvert and three friends borrowed a truck and drove to Angangueo, a mountain town that was home to a silver-mining company once owned by the Guggenheim family. He was carrying a picture of a monarch b.u.t.terfly, and when he showed it to the mayor of the town, the mayor became very excited and began to talk about a b.u.t.terfly roost high in the mountains, a place called Chincua. It was the last day of 1976. Bill Calvert called Lincoln Brower and told him this. The next day Calvert and his companions found the b.u.t.terflies on a ridge above Zapatero Canyon.
Bill Calvert gave up his postdoc on tent caterpillars. He bought lots of maps and started looking for place-names with the word paloma-”b.u.t.terfly”-in them. He mounted expedition after expedition, discovering seven more colonies, roaming around Mexico on National Science Foundation money. Nearly twenty-five years later he was still roaming. He had a wife and a son back near Austin, but the marriage was breaking up. He was too restless-or she wasn't restless enough. ”You pretty much have to be retired to do this research, wandering around, looking at things,” Bill Calvert said. ”You can spend all your time traveling around and not getting conclusive answers. So that leaves people like me to do it.”
IT WAS NOVEMBER 6. According to the biological clock that unwittingly winds us all, the b.u.t.terflies would be approaching their winter home. The door would be ajar, and they would be streaming over the threshold, marathoners tired from their long journey, eager for a patch of bark, or the branch of a tree on which to rest. Where Bill and I were, not far past the enormous concrete globe with a black line girdling the twenty-third parallel that marks the beginning of the Tropic of Cancer, there were pecan groves, row after row of them, and a carpet of yellow flowers. The rain had stopped, and though the day was bright, it was hazy. We hadn't seen a single monarch all day.
”If we're going to see monarchs today, this is the place,” Bill said, stopping on the side of the road by an irrigation ditch. This is the kind of place they love.” He pointed to the trees, which were bowed over the stream. ”They just love these.” We got out of the truck and began looking, searching the sky and the tree limbs and the water itself. We stayed maybe five minutes, as hopeful and enthusiastic as if we had never seen a monarch b.u.t.terfly before, as if it wasn't the most common and best-known b.u.t.terfly in North America. There is something self-preserving about the natural world-its ultimate adaptation-so that what is familiar and expected often seems new, over and over again: snow in winter, robins in spring, leaves turning in the fall. Bill Calvert has probably seen more monarchs than any other person on earth, twelve or fifteen or twenty million in a single frame, yet here he was, excited to maybe see one, right now, in this place. But he didn't. There weren't any. And he was disappointed.
”Let's go catch up with them,” he said, so we got back in the truck and continued along Route 101. There were tapes on the dashboard-Gordon Lightfoot, Vivaldi, Bach fugues-but we drove in silence, looking, looking, looking, until it hurt to look so purposefully, at least for me.
”Over there,” he said fifteen miles later, when we had begun the climb out of the lowlands into the mountains, and there it was, a single monarch, flapping its wings athletically, flying across the road. And, ”There,” again. Three more monarchs coming off the ridge to our right, heading southeast. And then more coming right over the truck, crossing the highway, sinking down toward the valley below, disappearing. Calvert stopped the truck and gathered up his binoculars, his tape recorder, his compa.s.s, and his global positioning unit.
”One at six feet at two-oh-five degrees,” he said into the tape recorder after holding up the compa.s.s to take the vanis.h.i.+ng bearings of the b.u.t.terflies as they dropped to the valley. ”Powered flight,” he recorded, meaning that they were not gliding but were flapping their wings. ”One traveling at ten feet at two-oh-five,” Calvert called out. The number 205 referred to the monarch's azimuth, its direction with respect to magnetic north. In this case the monarchs appeared to be flying south-southwest. Calvert unsheathed the global positioning device and placed it flat on the ground, aiming it upward to beam a signal to a satellite pa.s.sing overhead. ”Let's find out where in the world we are,” Bill said, turning it on.
The answer didn't come immediately. It reminded me of one of those Magic Eight Ball toys to which you direct a life-defining question (”Will I pa.s.s the math test?” ”Will I find true happiness?”) and wait expectantly while the answer floats into view (”It is too early to tell”; ”Try again later”).