Four Wings and a Prayer Read Free Page A

branch of a tree on which to rest. Where Bill and I were, not far past the enormous concrete globe with a black line girdling the twenty-third parallel that marks the beginning of the Tropic of Cancer, there were pecan groves, row after row of them, and a carpet of yellow flowers. The rain had stopped, and though the day was bright, it was hazy. We hadn’t seen a single monarch all day.
    “If we’re going to see monarchs today, this is the place,” Bill said, stopping on the side of the road by an irrigation ditch. This is the kind of place they love.” He pointed to the trees, which were bowed over the stream. “They just love these.” We got out of the truck and began looking, searching the sky and the tree limbs and the water itself. We stayed maybe five minutes, as hopeful and enthusiastic as if we had never seen a monarch butterfly before, as if it wasn’t the most common and best-known butterfly in North America. There is something self-preserving about the natural world—its ultimate adaptation—so that what is familiar and expected often seems new, over and over again: snow in winter, robins in spring, leaves turning in the fall. Bill Calvert has probably seen more monarchs than any other person on earth, twelve or fifteen or twenty million in a single frame, yet here he was, excited to maybe see one, right now, in this place. But he didn’t. There weren’t any. And he was disappointed.
    “Let’s go catch up with them,” he said, so we got back in the truck and continued along Route 101. There were tapes on the dashboard—Gordon Lightfoot, Vivaldi, Bach fugues—but we drove in silence, looking, looking, looking, until it hurt to look so purposefully, at least for me.
    “Over there,” he said fifteen miles later, when we had begun the climb out of the lowlands into the mountains, and there it was, a single monarch, flapping its wings athletically, flying across the road. And, “There,” again. Three more monarchs coming off the ridge to our right, heading southeast. And then more coming right over the truck, crossing the highway, sinking down toward the valley below, disappearing. Calvert stopped the truck and gathered up his binoculars, his tape recorder, his compass, and his global positioning unit.
    “One at six feet at two-oh-five degrees,” he said into the tape recorder after holding up the compass to take the vanishing bearings of the butterflies as they dropped to the valley. “Powered flight,” he recorded, meaning that they were not gliding but were flapping their wings. “One traveling at ten feet at two-oh-five,” Calvert called out. The number 205 referred to the monarch’s azimuth, its direction with respect to magnetic north. In this case the monarchs appeared to be flying south-southwest. Calvert unsheathed the global positioning device and placed it flat on the ground, aiming it upward to beam a signal to a satellite passing overhead. “Let’s find out where in the world we are,” Bill said, turning it on.
    The answer didn’t come immediately. It reminded me of one of those Magic Eight Ball toys to which you direct a life-defining question (“Will I pass the math test?” “Will I find true happiness?”) and wait expectantly while the answer floats into view (“It is too early to tell”; “Try again later”).
    The numbers started to drift in: 23 degrees, 23.25 N; 99 degrees 29.37 H. 4704 feet. To me they were less telling than what I could see: mountains as far as the eye could travel—big, imposing mountains that rippled like an inland sea, allthe way to the horizon. We waited. Butterflies passed close by. Thirty monarchs in fifteen minutes.
    “They’re very patchy,” Bill said when we were back in the truck. “I suspect ridges have something to do with it. I suspect that wind currents do, too. But it’s hard for us to read the wind.” Another two monarchs worked their way over us and dropped out of sight in the valley. Then three more. Then nothing. We had