The mountain rises up from a jigsaw of fields and farmland. Its sides are thickly forested, blue-green as deep seawater. Zoom in and notice the individual trees that make up the carpet of forest: oyamel, cedar, pine, and oak. Their branches lift skyward and hang heavy with clusters of what look to be densely-packed dried leaves. Zoom in again and notice that these leaves are moving, shifting between shades of rust and ochre. Toggle the binoculars, look closer still, and realize that they are not leaves but wings. Nature’s sleight of hand: roosting in clusters on the mountain’s trees are thousands upon thousands of monarch butterflies.
Weeks before the world shut down, in the first days of March 2020, I visited a monarch butterfly sanctuary in central Mexico. I was reporting a story about a group of ultra-runners who followed the monarch’s migration path across three continents. The Monarch Ultra, as the event was called, was a 4,300-kilometer relay designed to raise awareness about the monarch butterfly’s plunging population. (The eastern monarch’s population has declined by more than 90 percent over the last two decades, mostly due to habitat loss caused by chemical farming and extreme weather.) Thanks to blessedly affordable flights out of Tijuana, Davis decided to join me on the trip—we figured, why not spend a weekend with some butterflies? In a way that seems impossible in hindsight, Covid was not very much on our minds. Shortly before we left on the trip, a conservationist was murdered at a neighboring butterfly sanctuary. One of the hosts at the lodge where we stayed told me that several tour groups had canceled visits because of the violence. But no one had canceled because of this novel coronavirus.
After one border crossing, one flight, two Ubers, one bus, and one taxi ride, we arrived in Macheros. Macheros is a farming community at the base of Cerro Pelón peak, where the monarchs spend the winter. Mountains encircle the village, giving Macheros the sensation of being rocked by ancient arms. The Monarch Ultra runners had arrived on foot at the beginning of the monarch season. Davis and I pulled up in a taxi at the very end of the season, passing a sign warning vehicles to drive slowly through “the butterfly zone.” We dropped bags in our room, grabbed icy Modelos, headed to the rooftop. From the roof we watched the sky smudge into sunset and the moon rise like a stray balloon above Cerro Pelón. It was one of those blissful travel moments in which the 4 a.m. alarm and the neck-ache-inducing backpack and the plastic-wrapped muffin eaten for lunch fade into distant memory, all discomfort erased by a moment of beauty. We looked and looked and looked.
The next morning we woke to a square of peach sky framed through the window. A breeze ruffled avocado leaves and carried the calls of doves and roosters and horses into our room. After breakfast (eggs and pinto beans dusted with cotjia cheese and served with a warm stack of tortillas and coffee, nothing better), we joined a group of guests on their way out of the lodge. The group congregated at a trailhead at the base of Cerro Pelón. We were headed to see the butterflies.
To reach the monarch’s overwintering site, you ride a horse up switchback trails. The horse’s hooves kick up clouds of fine dust as it picks over rocks and roots. You wear a bandana handed out by the butterfly guides, but dirt still coats your lips and clings to your skin. Air plants hang from trees like oversized spiders. Felled logs block the trail, a reminder of the illegal logging that threatens the butterfly’s winter home. One woman on the tour tells you she grew up along the monarch’s migration route in Michigan. She plants milkweed in her garden and raises monarchs from caterpillars. You realize that this is a sort of pilgrimage for butterfly enthusiasts and anyone who wishes to see one of the world’s wonders.
After an hour you dismount and continue on foot. You notice shards of wings littering the trail and dead butterflies caught in bushes like stray tissue paper. Then you see living monarchs shivering on branches, opening and closing their wings in the sunlight to stay warm. When these monarchs, called the super generation, lifted off from their birth place some three-thousand miles to the north, their wings were a violent shade of marigold. But now it’s the end of their journey. Their scales, arranged on their wings like shingles on a roof, have fallen off over the course of their migration. They are bronze now, closer in color to the forest floor.
The butterfly guides usher your group into a clearing. Trees soar skyward. The group is silent, each person picking their way through leaves and roots to find a vantage point. You stand apart from each other out of respect, as though in prayer. The air is thick with butterflies dipping and rising. You crane your neck skyward and then sink down. Lying on your back on a carpet of pine needles, you watch the butterflies flit overhead. Their wings block the sunlight in short bursts and cause tiny shadows raced over your face and arms and hands. Suddenly, a nearby cluster of resting monarchs cracks open like an egg. Butterflies pour into the sky. Again and again the clusters burst, wings filling the jigsaw pieces of sky in the forest canopy. Explosiones, your guide says reverently.
You expected beauty, but not like this. You expected clouds of wings, but not the sound of snow falling. The monarchs in motion create a pattering sound that is almost inaudible. They fly like snow flurries, too, lifting, floating, swirling. A sky full of wings. You can’t stop staring. All of you there, lying on your backs on the floor of the forest, looking and looking and looking.
In the weeks and months after leaving the butterfly sanctuary, Davis and I returned there in conversation. Remember Macheros? Remember that weekend?
The trip marked for us the hinge point between before and after the pandemic. It was the last traveling we did before entering the time-warped, house-bound routine of quarantine. In the months following our visit, our footprint shrank to the scale of our neighborhood. We read about morgues reaching capacity in New York City and we yelled conversations with neighbors across the street. We thought back on that clearing full of butterflies with the unreality of a dream.
Now it’s three years later—almost to the day—from when we rode in an old cab up the winding road toward Macheros. We’ve traveled less over these past three years than we used to (it turns out that a global pandemic and having a baby will do that). A question I’ve been thinking about lately is this: What does it mean to live well in our places, in our particular landscapes?
The Monarch Ultra relay run was, in many ways, absurd. The runners often ran alone, pounding along dozens of miles of searing asphalt before reaching their check point. They could go days between catching sight of a monarch or a spectator. They faced injury and heat stroke and vehicle breakdowns and route closures. On many days, they worried the endurance event wasn’t making the impact they hoped. They weren’t sure anyone was paying attention.
Endurance runners are drawn to traverse absurd distances for many reasons. Some like the challenge of pushing one’s body to absolute limits. But I tend to think most people don’t run 30, 50, or 100 miles at a pop fueled on masochism alone. You don’t undertake a grueling journey unless there’s something to love about the journey itself. In the case of the Monarch Ultra runners, they loved to run. And they loved the monarchs. Despite the bleak outlook for the butterfly’s future, their advocacy wasn’t grounded in despair. They hoped that if people ran with the monarchs—that if they looked at them up close and saw them as fellow creatures capable of remarkable feats of endurance—they would become advocates for their continued existence. They thought people would fall in love.
Recently I heard a writer describe the traveler’s eyes as “the eyes of love—disoriented and incredibly curious.” A traveler sees the world they encounter with the clarity brought on by disorientation and awe. The traveler’s eyes pay attention. And attention is a form of love. When we are tempted to tilt toward despair or a throw-your-hands-up kind of apathy, I wonder whether the traveler’s eyes might help us live well in our particular landscapes. Even if we don’t travel far, we can still bring these eyes to whatever place we find ourselves in. If we look at the world with love, we will see loss of species, more frequent and devastating natural disasters, the most vulnerable communities impacted first and worst by a changing climate. And we will see oyamel trees thick with shimmering wings. We will see a monarch hovering over our neighbor's milkweed or dipping down to a lemon tree’s blossom, appearing like a magic trick.
Read with me:
If you’ve asked me what books I’ve loved within the last year, there is a ninety-eight-percent chance I’ve gushed about Kathryn Schulz’s memoir Lost & Found. Come for a meditation about love, grief, and the loves which make our griefs bearable; stay for some absolutely brilliant writing. (A favorite line, in which Schulz describes her late father: “He had the gravitational pull of a mid-sized planet.”) There’s a part midway through the book that literally made me gasp with how smart it is—a detail so perfectly placed, the progression so subtle that you don’t see it coming, and yet the arrival feels inevitable. Lost & Found also seems like appropriate Lenten reading. If you observe Lent, you know that it’s a time to meditate on our mortality for the forty days leading up to Easter. Life and death mingle together in this season of “bright sadness.” Schulz’s memoir is likewise a melding of deep loss and the miraculous experience of finding and being found.
What are you reading and recommending lately? (And have you read Lost & Found and if so can we talk about it!!!)
Lately:
I was interviewed over on Famous Writing Routines (which apparently also features many *non-famous* writers, hi). Read about chaotic mornings, E.B. White, and my housecat-like work routines).
👏🏽🙌🏽 Love the question: What does it mean to live well in our places, in our particular landscapes?