Flight Behavior

And so they did, on a muddy, after-the-flood kind of morning that brought Noah to mind. Where was their rainbow? As they slogged up the High Road, she was surprised to see how much man-made flotsam had washed down from above, given that no one lived up there: a flat-sided plastic bottle, bright yellow under its ancient patina of dirt. White shreds of plastic grocery bags. A large, rumpled panel of corrugated tin. Old fence posts tangled with barbed wire, from some upland boundary that was surely no longer relevant. Cigarette butts, also traces of some personal past, possibly hers.

Pete hiked in front, talking quietly with Ovid in what seemed to be a foreign language she almost knew: moderated micro-something, ratios, congregation, something-pause. It was the girl, Bonnie, who was most attentive to Dellarobia, hanging back to walk with her and ask about her kids, whether she had grown up here, things on that order. It was a conversation that emptied out pretty quickly, but Dellarobia appreciated the effort. She had never been around people from out of state, and was wildly anxious. Really she’d hardly been around people at all since she quit waiting tables, before Preston was born. As silly as it seemed, she had worried even about what to wear today. Her old, leather-soled farm boots seemed redneck-poor compared with these kids’ high-tech boots, which had mesh panels and candy-striped laces and rubber lug soles that looked like astronaut wear. They were like kids on TV shows, whose so-called ordinary families were provisioned by fashion designers and never wore the same thing twice. Farm boots and jeans, however, were what Dellarobia had. She’d noticed that Bonnie usually wore a bandanna on her head, tied in the back under her ponytail, so Dellarobia did the same.

“Do both your kids go to preschool?” Bonnie asked.

“Preston’s in kindergarten, half-day, so he gets home at noon. But Cordelia’s just eighteen months, so she’s a full-time handful. My husband didn’t have to go to work today. He’s babysitting.” Cub hadn’t been keen on it, but didn’t have other plans, having worked only two full shifts in the last two weeks. Gravel deliveries were the last thing anybody wanted in a downpour. These were facts she did not mention to Bonnie. She wanted to make conversation, but hardly knew how to begin. And she wanted a cigarette so badly her gums ached. People looked down on smokers nowadays, or these people would, she suspected, so she’d decided to go cold turkey for today’s adventure. To improve the odds of keeping her vow, she had not brought any cigarettes. Now, all of fifteen minutes in, she recognized the insanity of the plan and was ready to jump out of her hair. Like the day she’d first hiked up here, in secret. Then, too, she’d felt ready to explode from the combined forces of fear and excitement.

She alone, and no one else in her family, had played penny poker with scientists and done their laundry and gotten invited to see what they were doing here. Hester was dying to know. She’d confessed as much, insofar as Hester ever tipped her hand. She complained that Dr. Byron barely spoke to say hello, when she crossed his path with her tour groups up there, saying little and keeping to his work. Dellarobia thought of the night he’d come to supper, so modest about his expertise they’d nearly missed it. “You kind of have to draw him out. Did you ask him any questions?” she’d asked, knowing Hester wouldn’t have, endowed as she was with the glory of knowing it all. The students were also standoffish, in Hester’s opinion. Dellarobia would have said the same at first, but could hardly do so now that she’d folded their underwear. That was an icebreaker.

A new creek had insinuated itself on the High Road. For a while they managed to jump the puddles and rivulets, but soon their path was swamped by a brown torrent. A tree had been torn from the ground and pinned sideways, backing up the flow. Pete and Dr. Byron went ahead to find a place where they could safely cross or get around the water. Pete seemed to have seniority over the other two students. And Mako seemed youngest, maybe because of his dense black hair that stood up all over his head like a child’s. He had lovely, exotic features, Japanese she would have guessed; California is what he told her. Actually none of the helpers was all that young, probably close to her own age. Pete might even be older. But Cub referred to them as “those kids,” and it didn’t seem wrong. Because they were childless, she supposed. Free to look at bugs all day.

It was cold out today, she could see her breath. Hunting-jacket weather. She and Mako and Bonnie waited in silence by the washout, staring at the rugged brown roar. Unseen objects under the rushing water made peaks and swales, hinting at the shapes of what lay underneath. She thought of the day she and Cub stood in the flow of butterflies, objects in motion drawing lines around standing bodies. This water was fierce and dark. Clots of foam clung at the banks like dirty dishwater suds. A tattered ribbon of vivid orange flailed in the current, snagged on a twig, and it took her a minute to recognize it as flagging tape from the area meant for logging. That was a shock. From way up there it had traveled to here, this was the path of the flow. Next stop: her house. She’d done some looking on the Internet about the town in Mexico where Preston’s little friend and her family lost their home, and logging was a part of it. They had clear-cut the mountainside above the town, and that was said to have caused the mudslide and floods when a hard rain came. The horrifying photos showed houses and the twisted metal of cars all flattened together like sandwiches in the mud. Utility poles snapped like kindling. She’d had to shut off the computer before Preston completely figured out what they were seeing. She told him not to worry, that was a long way from here.

Pete now reappeared and was calling them, showing the way around. The moving water drowned out voices, to a surprising extent. They left the trail and then came back to it higher up the valley, in a place where two separate rivulets came together. Pete pointed out to her how the two different streams merged, one yellowish and silty from the road cut, the other one clear, from the forested side, the dark and light waters running parallel for several yards before they blended. The forest protected against erosion, was Pete’s point, but this one felt a little wrecked. Shattered sticks lay all over the drenched leaf carpet. Running water made leaf-banked runnels that scoured the forest floor down to gravel and bedrock. How strange, she thought, to see the forest floor laid bare that way. It gave an impression of the earth as basically just a rock, thinly clothed.

She kept her cold hands in her pockets, and kept up. She was surprised when they left the road and descended into the hollow on a trail she had not known about. Possibly they’d made it themselves. It led directly to the heart of the valley where the fir trees and the butterflies were. She’d seen clumps of dead monarchs along the way, another ingredient of the flotsam washed down by the flood, but here the ground was completely covered with flattened bodies lying every which way, like a strange linoleum pattern. The butterflies never lay open, as she’d seen them at rest or flying, but invariably were dead in the folded position, like praying hands. She hated walking on them, but that’s what the others did. They noticed, though, sometimes picking them up and opening them gently like tiny books to read something there. Bonnie showed her how to tell the males, which had darker wing borders than the females and a black dot on each lower wing.