Flight Behavior

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.