Four Wings and a Prayer Read online

  THAT NIGHT WE WERE stopped by the police. Or maybe it was the army; it wasn’t obvious which. There were sixteen of them, in knee-high black paratrooper boots and black pants and black sweatshirts, and they had AK-47s and Uzis. It was dark. We were in the desert and it was late. We had gotten cavalier about where we went, and when. We had been taking our time all afternoon, inching our way along the side of the road just past Tula, looking for roosts. Every couple of trees Bill would say, “Over there” or “A thousand on that one,” and “That will grow by a factor of ten by nightfall.” He said this so confidently that I wrote it down in my notebook as if it were fact, not prediction.

  The land outside Tula was arid; rain seemed a memory. The ground was cracked and it curled like smoke when the wind blew. The wind was blowing. Monarchs were dropping out of the sky. Those that were flying at tree height were being tossed around like falling leaves. They were fighting back, treading the air by pumping their wings, but often blowing backward. “Golly,” Bill said to me, “there are a lot of them.” And then, to his tape recorder: “The last five-mile segment there were at least one hundred butterflies.”

  We drove due south. When the wind let up, the monarchs escorted us, flying straight along the edge of the road as if they were pedestrians on a sidewalk. But then, as if there were a sign, or a crossing guard, or a traffic light, they all turned at the same spot and went to the other side of the road. We stopped the truck and got out and looked up. The trees were teeming with monarchs. I followed Bill across the road and saw him enter a grove of huisache trees and drop to his knees. There was little understory here, but enough to get my legs full of cactus thorns. Bill was rooting around the leaves at the base of one of the trees. “Mouse cache,” he said as I walked up behind him. He pointed to the pile of leaves, only they weren’t leaves, they were monarch wings—hind wings, forewings, left wings, right wings. Wings, no bodies. “The mice eat the bodies and leave the wings,” Bill said. I poked around with the tip of my boot. There were hundreds of them.

  When we crossed the road again to walk back to the truck, the sun was going down. Not one to pass up an opportunity, Bill got out his net and his scale and his ruler, and I started a new page in the logbook, sitting on the hood of the truck.

  So we were late, and crossing the chaparral in darkness. Not late for anything in particular, though I guessed there were chicken mole and Dos Equis and a marginal hotel room not far ahead. The road had turned bumpy, and then there was a detour sign, and we followed it, though it took us off the pavement and through dried streambeds and gullies that the truck strained to climb. The truck, which was already low to the ground, bounced on its shocks like a pogo stick. Bill gripped the wheel and fought to keep us upright. All of the things in the truck bed, Calvert’s carapace, really—the sleeping bags, gallon jugs of water, the Random House Dictionary, a Spanish dictionary, woven mats, nets, our gear, his boots—crashed into one another and into the windows. They were timpani to the engine’s tuneless melody. We were gaining altitude, little by little. Outside of the narrow band of the high beams, everything was black. It was as if the night were a well and we were submerged in its ink.

  They must have seen us, then, long before we crested the last hill. They must have seen us dipping into each ravine and heard us pulling out. Their lights were riveting, like klieg lights when you’re standing on a stage, and there was no choice but to stop. They made a ring around the truck, each one pointing a gun. One of them opened the door and motioned to Bill, with a wave of the barrel, to step out. I was like a monarch in the morning, unable to move. A gun, though, can motivate you. The handle of the door on my side turned, and when I looked to see what it was, I saw the midsection of a man with a gun trained on me.

  We showed them our papers—first our passports, then the ones that said we were going to a conference on monarch butterflies. I was careful not to say the word mariposo. I was careful not to say anything. The men with the guns handed back the papers and opened the hood and peered inside with flashlights. They took off the hubcaps and looked in there. They dumped out our trash and rifled through our books. Bill and I didn’t talk. I knew what he was thinking: if they found the glassine envelopes and the digital scale, we were in big trouble. It occurred to me that we had picked the perfect cover for running drugs.

  The men with guns thought so, too. They checked out our field glasses, the tape recorder, our cameras. They looked behind the heating vents. They pulled up the floor mats. The lights of a city, maybe two miles away, winked as if they were in on a joke. One of the policemen was wearing a U.S. Army surplus jacket that had once belonged to a soldier named Olson. They started in on our duffel bags, feeling them up and down as if frisking bodies. The scale was back there, too, in a knapsack stored inside a backpack. The backpack had many pockets. It was freezing outside.

  “Basta,” said one of the men. How long had it been? Forty minutes? Fifteen? The others lowered their guns. The one with the army surplus jacket nodded at us.

  “Mariposa monarca,” he said.

  Back in the truck, driving again, the heat was on, but I couldn’t stop shivering.

  “Bet you didn’t know studying butterflies was such a dangerous occupation,” Bill said.

  Chapter 2

  OF COURSE we kept driving at night. There was no time during the day. We’d go three miles and stop to scan the sky or poke around for roost sites or evidence of roost sites (disembodied wings, half-eaten thoraxes), go another few miles, hop out of the cab, do it again.

  We were in dry, poor country. The houses were made of concrete and tin, or sticks and mud. Smoke rose thinly from makeshift chimneys, and threadbare clothes hung from wash lines. Water was carried in. The word that came to mind was abject. But the word poverty, which is typically twinned with abject in such circumstances, seemed far too modern. This place was preindustrial, sixteenth-century, with not a power line or a phone cable or a car in the yard to be seen. The yards, in any case, were scars of earth where nothing grew. Hunched old women with bundles of spindly logs slung on their backs walked the roads, bringing home cooking fuel. Rib-skinny dogs trotted alongside them, scavenging for anything remotely edible, while turkey vultures patroled the sky, scavenging the dogs. This was not the Mexico of the off-the-beaten-track tourist guides. There was no track.

  Outside Ahuacatalán, in the dusty heat, we saw monarchs high in the sky and stopped to watch. I was conscious of our binoculars, and global positioning device, and tape recorder, and cameras—of how absolutely rich we were, in relative terms. As if reading my mind, a drunken young man in black jeans and a cowboy hat came reeling up the road, mumbling to himself, carrying an unsheathed machete that he twirled absently in his hand. He stopped nearby and stood at the edge of the road, peering into the same distance we were peering into, trying to see what we were seeing. The machete impressed me into silence, and I stood staring skyward, as if I could will myself up there, away from that blade. And maybe I did. After a few minutes the man wandered off, though I dared not lower my field glasses to see where he’d gone.

  “I guess we’d better get going,” Bill said finally, when he had seen enough, and then he proceeded to walk past the truck and continue down the road as if he’d forgotten where he’d parked his vehicle.

  “It occurred to me that we might find a roost,” he said when I caught up with him, fifty yards later.

  But we didn’t, not then—not until the next morning, when, driving out of Tequisquiapán, we took a wrong turn down Avenida Cinco de Mayo, which dead-ended at a stream decked with cypress trees. “This is perfect for monarchs,” Bill said, pointing to the water and the trees. He moved his finger two degrees to the left. “And there they are.”

  And there they were—a pair of monarchs chasing each other five feet above the middle of the streambed. We trailed them like spies, hanging back a few feet, trying to stay out of sight as we picked our way along the water’s edge and were led unseen to one roost site, and then another, till we count
ed four of them in all, each with about a hundred butterflies.

  WHEN PEOPLE FOLLOW the laws of a nation—when they pay their taxes and stop at red lights and respect others’ privacy—the infrastructure that lets us live together is transparent, and no one really notices it. The laws of nature are different. When the natural world conforms to them, or at least when it conforms to certain patterns, one glimpses, and understands—if understanding is a feeling—the origin of magic.

  That morning was magic, even when, an hour later, we had progressed no more than two miles and stood on the side of a busy road, and not a single monarch of the dozens we were seeing was going in what was supposed to be the “right” direction—that is, the direction that would lead it to its winter habitat. (The wrong direction, meanwhile, would ultimately send it back to the United States.) Calvert was unperturbed.

  “It seems to me that I’ve run into this before,” he said, more to himself than to me. “Their initial behavior in the early morning is east, toward the sun, and then they warm up and head southwest.”

  Then we were heading southwest ourselves. At most, the butterflies were intermittent. We stopped near San Juan del Rio at Comercial Mexicana—a Mexican version of Kmart—to stock up on bottled water, but we never made it into the store. Calvert sensed that there were monarchs overhead, sensed them the way a dowser smells water, and though I couldn’t see them myself, I wasn’t surprised when I looked through a pair of binoculars and saw them skipping across the very top of the optical range. They were like stars in a cloudy night sky, only vaguer. “Let’s take some azimuths,” he said, so we did. The butterflies were going the “right” way, and so were we. That was the day when, at long last, we entered Michoacán, the state where most of the monarchs overwinter and where the North American Monarch Butterfly Conference would begin in Morelia, the capital city, the next day. It was an uneventful crossing through a scorched and scrubby desert, but it meant we were in range of the monarchs’ winter home. Flat though it was where we were, we could see tall, rugged mountains in the distance and began to gain altitude ourselves.

  “I think the butterflies may use those mountains as beacons, to guide them in,” Bill Calvert said casually, as though that thought had just popped into his head. But I had heard it before, in different versions, all of them his. We were taking the high road ourselves, on the spine of the Sierra Madre Oriental, then dropping into the valleys, because of this very notion—the idea that monarch butterflies might use these mountains as a focusing mechanism to set them on a narrow path leading to the preserves.

  “A butterfly born in Minnesota and one born in New York State end up in the same intermontane valley because of this focusing device,” he said. “When they start out they’re spread two thousand miles across the continent, but when they get into Mexico they’re condensed into just fifty miles. Wherever they join the mountain ranges of the Sierra Madre Oriental, they turn and follow it.”

  That was the theory—the only one, Calvert said, that accounted for longitude in a monarch’s migration. The problem was that the hypothesis was basically unprovable. Calvert ticked off a list of questions that could be answered, it seemed, only by radio telemetry: “Where do monarchs hit the Neovolcanics? How accurate are these creatures, anyhow? How do they know when to stop? Are they really directional? There’s some evidence that suggests that they’re not.” But so far, sticking a radio transmitter on a monarch butterfly had not been an option—the devices didn’t come in that microdot size, and even if they did, using them would probably feel like cheating to an inveterate field biologist like Bill Calvert, a guy who made his own furniture, poured his own concrete, raised his own bees.

  We pushed on, and the mountains got bigger, and as they did, Bill began looking at them and not at the sky, and it became clear that they were totems for him—totems to an earlier, less complicated life.

  “Boy, I’ve spent so much time wandering these roads and climbing those mountains, looking for monarchs,” he’d say. Or, “People would ask me, ‘What good are monarchs?’ I hate this question. Basically it’s a matter of aesthetics. Either you love these creatures and this phenomenon, or you don’t.”

  For more than two decades they had been the one constant affection in Bill Calvert’s life: a child’s life wedded to adult ambitions. Or maybe it was the other way around, an adult’s life wedded to a child’s ambitions. Either way it was seductive, this search of his, this responsibility to nothing but the questions. Where I came from, it was the answers that mattered most: had my daughter’s cough cleared up, had the doctor called in the prescription, had this winter’s firewood been cut and stacked, had the paycheck arrived, was the phone bill paid? As I drove along with Bill Calvert, I sometimes made mental lists of these for the rare times when we’d find a phone and an operator willing to place a call across the border. For the most part, though, my questions became simpler and less answerable: “Where are the monarchs?” “Will we see monarchs?” These questions could be enough, I was learning from Bill, to build a life around.

  TEN MILES FROM Coroneo we pulled over to get another set of azimuths. The monarchs should have been closing in on the overwintering sites, which were to our west, and the azimuths should have reflected this. Should have. But didn’t. The butterflies were going south. The monarchs were flying at about a thousand feet—high, barely visible. Calvert wondered if they were heading for San Andreas, a wintering area that in recent years had been ravaged by fires and logging. Who knew? We were in farmland that ended in a wall of mountains. Gunshots pop-popped somewhere close by. Un-fazed, Bill kept talking into his tape recorder, giving the azimuths. “It’s just a rifle,” he said, turning away from the machine to reassure me—saying, in effect, that we were hearing merely the call of an unremarkable bird. And as it turned out, he was right. In a nearby field, two boys were shooting at crows.

  SO WHAT IS DANGER? For me it is a feeling, sensual and percussive and paralytic. For a butterfly it may be this, too— we can’t begin to know—but it is also a constant condition, like weather. Indeed, weather itself presents one of the greatest dangers in a butterfly’s life, and particularly that of a migrating monarch butterfly, which covers thousands of miles through uplands and lowlands, across water and along coasts, in its journey south and then north again. Too cold and the monarch can’t fly, might freeze. Too hot and it gets overheated, can’t fly. Too hot and there might not be enough water. Too much wind, grounded. Wind from the southeast, stalled. Wind from the west, blown seaward. Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Snow. All present dangers, and not just to monarchs, but to their habitat as well. Of the 106 known species of milkweed, only about a dozen are used by monarchs as sites on which to lay their eggs. The milkweed is essential, for it provides the cardiac glycosides—the poisons—that are ingested by monarch caterpillars and that in turn make monarch butterflies poisonous to most birds. Although perhaps hardier than the monarchs themselves, milkweed plants nonetheless need adequate rain, but not too much rain, and adequate sunshine, but not too much sunshine, in order to grow. They are weather-dependent, too. The absence of suitable habitat for breeding, migrating, or overwintering breaks a link in the chain and puts monarchs at risk.

  So do predators, which are numerous: wasps, fire ants, earwigs, aphids, rodents, birds, and, in their own way, people. Cows like to eat monarchs: Mexican farmers used to bring cattle up to the overwintering grounds and smoke the butterflies to the ground, where the cows would eat them by the thousands. Mice like monarchs. Once I was raising a newly hatched monarch whose crumpled right forewing made it unable to fly. Day after day it would sit in my kitchen sucking up sugar water from a saturated sponge. It was there as usual on a Thursday night and then, suddenly, not there the next morning—totally absent unless you counted the mouse droppings on the counter not far from the sponge. And raptors, which you might assume would have bigger fish to fry, like—as in “find tasty”—monarchs, too. Watch a thermaling sharp-shinned hawk through binoculars and you’re likely to
catch sight of a thermaling monarch in the same funnel of wind, but only for a minute if the hawk happens to be hungry.

  To call people predators is perhaps a stretch, but only if you assume that predation requires intent. For the most part, people are monarch butterfly predators not by design but by default, as when they mow a highway median strip at the wrong time and eliminate thousands of acres of accessible milkweeds; or when they plant genetically modified corn infused with a toxin aimed at killing corn borers, which also, through its pollen, kills monarch caterpillars; or when they spray crops with herbicides and pesticides; or when they cut down trees in the Mexican overwintering sites, thinning the protective canopy and altering the microclimate it creates, which together allow the butterflies to survive both the cold and the breakfast-time raids of orioles and other birds of this particular emetic appetite. It’s the same old ecological story: everything is connected.

  The fact that the process is circular, not linear, poses its own danger, too. What I mean is this: it’s easier to identify problems that arise in causal relationships and then to address, if not remove, them. If your boyfriend hits you, for example, you can leave him and no longer be in the path of his blows; it may not be that simple a relationship to leave, but you understand what you have to do. With monarchs, however, there are many potential “batterers,” few of whom actually mean to hurt the butterflies. The loggers in Mexico may be thinking only of the money that a truckload of oyamel fir trees will get them, the corn it will buy or the heat it will furnish; monarchs may never enter into the calculation. But the loss of the trees puts them in jeopardy. The farmers in the midwestern United States who plant genetically altered corn may be thinking only about increased crop yields, not how far the pollen travels or whether monarch caterpillars will ingest it and die. The road crews in New York State may be thinking only about driver safety when they raze the weeds and grasses along the highway, not realizing that in so doing they are eliminating a major food source and breeding ground for migrating monarchs.