The Best Women's Travel Writing (12 page)

MEERA SUBRAMANIAN

Of Monarchs and Men in Michoacán

Would you give up sex to live (almost) forever?

T
hey live forever by not having sex. That's one theory. By forever, I mean they live eight times longer than either their parents or their offspring—which would be about 6,400 human years. By they, I mean the generation of monarch butterflies,
Danaus plexippus,
that emerges from chrysalides in the late summer and early fall across eastern North America. Scientists speculate that they discovered the fountain of butterfly youth by somehow delaying their sexual onset. It is called diapause. Although most monarchs live about thirty days, this generation lives eight months, traveling south to slumber chastely though a Mexican winter before heading north again in the spring. It is only in those last few weeks of their life that they sexually mature. Then they mate, and die, while their short-lived young flutter a bit farther north, and so on.

I must have learned about these monarch Methuselahs and their epic migration in third grade but I'd forgotten, and this lesson—half in Spanish, accompanied by drawings on the back of a coaster in a New York City bar, surrounded by handsome men—is much more intriguing. I'm with the adventurers of Papalotzin, most from Mexico, one from Europe, another an American expat. Papalotzin is the name of their ultralight painted with the orange and black markings of the monarch butterfly, and they are in the process of flying the machine (which is not much more than a hang glider with a giant propeller in the back, currently stashed in a hangar in New Jersey) between Montreal and Michoacán, Mexico. They're raising awareness about threats to the monarch butterfly.

The photographer of the group is named Luis, and he is like a radiant light and I am like a moth. He speaks little English. My Spanish returns. He is Oaxacan, tall of stature and broad of shoulder. A great big smile that pulls his dark eyes down at the corners seems to be his steady state, and I'm hypnotized by the easy laugh and the intense interest he shows as we muddle through conversations. There is a kindness about him that reaches out to everyone around him. He seems an innocent flirt with the world. He tells me he is at home on a skateboard or behind a camera. Or, I imagine, in a woman's embrace. I show the Papalotzin crew the city as lunch turns into dinner turns into drinks. They are travelers and need a place to stay, their group disbanding to various locations. My place is close. Luis's body is both heavy and light against mine that night, and I yield.

I will not live forever.

Papalotzin
means royal butterfly in Nauhuatl, the language of the Aztecs who once inhabited what is now Michoacán, in central-western Mexico. Their scattered descendants still remain, as does their belief that monarchs are the souls of the dead. Every year the butterflies come to the tiny patch of trees that their great-great-great grandparents left the prior spring. How they get there is a mystery. Maybe light. Maybe magnetism.

They travel three thousand miles in a matter of weeks.

They weigh less than a gram.

Do I go to see him or the monarchs when I travel to Mexico City three months later? Can I say both? It's early December, and I have missed the monarchs' arrival. Someday,
someday
, I will return to Mexico on November 2nd for Day of the Dead. Someday I will be there when the monarchs descend to Michoacán en masse, souls aloft and arriving, draining from every place where milkweed grows east of the Rockies. Do you think it is a coincidence that Día de los Muertos falls within days of the American Halloween, our holiday of skulls and cemeteries? Do you think it is random that the colors of our Día de Candy are orange and black, the colors of the monarch? I do not.

Ancient dead souls or flying insects, today's butterflies now live in our modern world. We mow down the milkweed the caterpillars feed upon so we can build houses. Genetically modify the plants from which the butterflies draw their nectar. Cut down the last bits of Michoacán's pine forests, a Goldilocks land neither too hot nor too cold that this magical long-lived generation returns to, year after year. In the last quarter century, monarchs have lost half of their overwintering grounds.

The photographer and I head west out of Mexico City to see the monarch reserves, but first we must fly. Valle de Bravo is Mexico's Tahoe, a playground of forested mountains surrounding a huge lake. The weather is ideal, the town quaint and quiet absent the influx of tourists. Families gather at the old stone church, where great white calla lilies overflow from the altar. The church bells ring, a resounding “uh-oh,” down the cobblestone streets lined with pink bougainvillea, scaring the roosting pigeons, flowing past the fruit vendors, the firecracker vendors, the church tchotchke vendors selling plastic Jesuses. Rising up into the blue sky where paragliders float down on colorful swaths of fabric. By afternoon, we join them in the skies. He and I leap off a mountaintop, me strapped like a baby in front of him as we sail down softly to the lake's edge, legs swinging in the air. In the evening we fly in Papalotzin, thousands of feet above the lake, our high-flying monarch, the air thin and chilling as the sun descends.

We go to great lengths to fly. The monarchs just spread their wings to let the sun warm them and take off.

Michoacán kindles my longings for man and land. We speak only in Spanish, and he is unlike anyone I've ever met. He has none of the hard edges of my ex. Luis is light, the result of an upbringing in a loving comfortable family but with the freedom given only to an adored youngest child. He wandered and played. Explored and adventured. He skateboarded competitively and photographed intimately. Troubles came to him as they did to all, but their blows seemed glancing. There is an ex-wife somewhere and two children he speaks of swooningly, yet happiness still dominates, even as he describes the pain of not seeing them nearly enough. Always, always, the default is the enchanting smile.

He's different, but the earth is familiar. Michoacán's flora is a living replication of the Pacific Northwest, where I once lived. The monarch's preferred habitat is the oyamel tree, a short-needled evergreen that dominates like the Douglas fir. The ocote Montezuma tree is a long-needled echo of the Ponderosa pine. The understory is thick with replicas of maple, manzanita, and rhododendron. I am at home.

The next morning is cold, with hints of frost on the ground, when Luis and I leave for El Rosario, home of the Special Biosphere Reserve of the Monarch Butterfly. Pablo Angeles, a forester for the World Wildlife Fund, meets our bus in a fire-engine-red Volkswagen bug. He's in his forties, with a thick moustache and eyebrows that are black and long, his hair neatly combed back.

Butterflies, yes, but first, tacos. A man named Salvador serves us meat from a lamb he killed the day before. Each day, another animal, two on the weekends he tells us, is buried in a pit with hot rocks and the leaves of the maguey cactus to slow cook as he sleeps. Now, he asks our preference—legs, back, balls—and lifts up steaming wet cactus leaves to find the right body part, which is thrown on the thick section of wood that is his cutting board. He chops it fine with a large cleaver, but it's so tender it falls apart under the blade, and a woman behind him wordlessly hands him a hot tortilla off a grill. Salvador pressures Luis into having the specialty of balls, tossing a glance at me. Luis reluctantly accepts the mushy meat. We bathe the tacos in salsa—red and green—cilantro, onions, and fresh-squeezed lime. He shows us the skull of the animal.

Satiated, we climb back into the bug and head to El Rosario.

Pablo's hands hold a steady ten and two o'clock on the wheel as the bug putters up the mountain, sliding around switchbacks that open up to expansive views of the cultivated fields and
pueblocitos
cradled amidst forested hills. A man tosses a white chicken into the air as he stands atop a stack of hay. Girls with jet-black hair plaited in long braids walk to school, past roadside altars covered with flowers and candles. We pass stands of poinsettias, piñatas, pottery. We pass police with large guns and blue uniforms. More images of monarchs start appearing, stenciled on walls, accompanying business signs, on the sides of taxis. Pablo has spent his entire life here and laughs about the 1976 “discovery” by Americans of the monarch's winter home.

At 10,200 feet above sea level, we arrive, emerging from the car and entering the reserve. We leave behind the people, the tourists, the women cooking tortillas on smoky wood-burning stoves. We leave behind the children, watchful and covered with dust. One by one, monarchs fill the air.

Within minutes, there's an opening in the forest where a path cuts through, a mini flyway with thousands of monarchs drifting down the passageway, from ground level to the treetops fifty feet above. We have entered a church, a holy place, and we fall silent. Pablo encourages us to keep moving; there's more, higher up, he gestures. But every turn in the path reveals more, and we keep stopping, each vantage a new shot for our cameras. Butterflies are covering the benches set up for visitors, lining the handrails, filling the tree branches and trunks. Their flight sounds like the falling of the gentlest of rains.

The path divides, the right fork clearly cordoned off, directing traffic to the left. Pablo hesitates for a moment before lifting the rope and with his WWF credentials, we walk up the path that leads to the right, into the heart of the butterfly grounds. Wings and monarch bodies litter the ground. Pablo picks one up and cups it in his hands, blowing hot breath onto it. He watches it closely, but there is no sign of life, and he tosses it gently off the path. Another hundred feet on, we cross another rope and gasp as we gaze up into the trees.

How to describe what I see? To my eyes they are burls, that thick protuberance in a growth of wood, swirling and knobby. But they are masses of butterflies. Where the monarchs have clustered, the tree branches swell like a dark cloud, the limbs hanging down instead of springing up as usual. It's as though burnt-orange snow has covered the trees, a foot thick, weighing down the branches, clinging to the bark after a gusty, rusty storm had blown through. We walk up a rocky dirt trail, carved by erosion and covered with monarchs, alive and dead. I tread cautiously.

One falls with a soft splat onto the ground from the trees above, and I kneel down on the forest floor to observe. The sun shines off the glossy wings, distinct black veins against orange-gold. It has a furry black thorax, all speckled with white dots, and the wings are ringed with a border of black pixelated with white. It's still early in the day, and it lies motionless for a moment before it begins to vibrate its wings in a shivering motion, making its own heat. When it warms up, it takes flight and joins the thousands of others that are already in the air, seeking the sunny spots, filling the space between earth and heaven. They're bumping into us, us into them. We stand still, watching and breathless as they land on Pablo's hat brim, on Luis's black curly hair, on the back of my neck, where they tickle me.

Scientists like numbers, so the WWF is gathering information, but Pablo shakes his head when I ask him for a figure. Twenty-two million one year. Two hundred fifty million the next. He looks up at the trees, covered with an unfathomable amount of tiny, paper-thin creatures. “Ten thousand or one hundred thousand on each tree? We just don't know. It's all a hypothesis.” I imagine trying to count the leaves in a chunk of deciduous forest. Look up at the foliage and guess how many pieces. Stand in leaf litter after fall has come and gone and count the brittle remains. I was always bad at those how-many-beans-in-the-jar contests, but to stand amidst the clusters and think anyone could ever even begin to approximate seems ludicrous.

I see a broken branch on the ground, and it's moving. It takes a moment for the eyes to focus, the brain to catch up. I realize that the weight of the monarchs caused the limb to sever from the tree. The branch is six inches thick at its base and fifteen feet long. I imagine the moment when one butterfly, a fraction of the weight of a penny, becomes too much for the tree to bear and something irreversibly changes in the world. One butterfly is the tipping point, causing the snap, the tumble, the smash, the disturbance, the deaths of the tiny creatures caught below, the trimming of the tree, the shift. The hundredth butterfly.

On the ground the dead are missing wings, thoraxes, heads. Some are intact, fresh-looking but devoid of that elusive energy that means life. Others are long dead, the oils from their body seeped out into the wings, making them dark and greasy. Birds and mice predate on them. Somehow, they often live through the attacks. I see one moving with no wings, another with only half a thorax.

As the day warms up, more and more monarchs lift from their slumbering spots. By one o'clock, it's a blizzard of butterflies. They appear to be blowing in all directions simultaneously, a torrent. The sound of light falling rain has changed into the rush of a distant waterfall, something that at its source is powerful but that has been muted into delicateness.