Four Wings and a Prayer (4 page)

T
WO BURROS WERE
tethered to the fence opposite us, and there were two women there, too, waiting for a bus. But the bus was nowhere in sight, and before long the women asked us what we were doing, and we said the words
“Biologico”
and
“Mariposa monarca,”
and they grunted and shook their heads and smiled at us and kept watching. Watching and smiling and pointing and laughing. We
were
pretty entertaining, especially when a butterfly would push its way out of an envelope and we’d flop after it, trying to get it back.

As the women watched us, I watched Bill Calvert sitting Indian-style in the dirt, measuring and weighing the butterflies and assessing their condition on a scale of one to five. Most of the monarchs were in good shape, all things considered, fresh and untattered. Focused as Bill was, I noticed that his affect was that of a child—happy, engaged, fully present. He reminded me of my daughter at the edge of our pond, sorting rocks, digging for turtles, catching newts. Children have enthusiasms and adults have passions, I thought, and
though it sounded good, Bill Calvert seemed to contradict it. The answers mattered to him—that was a given—but getting at them mattered even more.

“The need of the age gives its shape to scientific progress as a whole,” I read months later, in Jacob Bronowski’s classic meditation
Science and Human Values.
“But it is not the need of the age which gives the individual scientist his sense of pleasure and of adventure.… He is personally involved in his work, as the poet is in his and artist is in the painting. Paints and painting too must have been made for useful ends; and language was developed from whatever beginnings, for practical communication. Yet you cannot have a man handle paints or language or the symbolic concepts of physics, you cannot even have him stain a microscope slide, without instantly waking in him a pleasure in the very language, a sense of exploring his own activity.” It was an old book. I had underlined the passage twenty years before. But it described precisely what I was seeing while I was watching Bill Calvert.

T
HE BUS CAME,
and the women waved and turned and got on it. It shambled on, dust rising behind it. The heron paced the bank; our log list grew longer. The butterflies were healthy and fat. Their trip appeared not to have taken a toll. A young man rode by on a bicycle, doubled back, looked at us, rode by, and doubled back again—like a yoyo. Cheered by the bonhomie of our encounter with the two women, I decided to clue him in on what we were doing on his next pass by. “
Mariposo
,” I shouted loudly as he rolled past.
“Mariposo!”
Bill Calvert looked up at me and smiled. I smiled back, happy to have explained our mission with such ease and precision.

“You’d better hope he doesn’t come back this way again,” Bill drawled as he casually stuffed a monarch into an envelope. I looked at him curiously. “You just called him a faggot,” he said.

T
HAT 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

O
F 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 counted four of them in all, each with about a hundred butterflies.

W
HEN 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.