Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World Read Free Page A

generation is responsible for carrying on their species’ migratory legacy. The butterflies traveling to Mexico are four to five generations removed from the butterflies that left the mountains the previous spring. But they always return to the same vicinity, and often to the very same tree their ancestors left the year before.
    Scientists believe the monarchs mark the trees in some way, but they do not know how.
    In 2007, three years before Archer was born, I visited the El Capulín Monarch Sanctuary on a magazine assignment. The site was deep in the Sierra Madre Mountains, beyond the orbit of Mexico City field-trip buses and day-trippers. I was joined by a driver, Paco, and travelers including the Matthews family—Judy, Donald, and their son, Dan, a second-grade teacher with a penchant for Hawaiian shirts.
    Judy and Donald, hobby naturalists from New York, had spent the last fifteen years of their lives working as volunteers for Monarch Watch, an educational outreach program of the University of Kansas. The Matthewses told me they had a garden they cultivated with plants other people might try to eradicate from their manicured lawns. They were especially careful to nurture milkweed, which the monarchs depend on for reproduction. This is where the butterflies lay their eggs, and the Matthewses were thrilled to think that the monarchs at El Capulín might have started their journey on the underside of a leaf in the family garden.
    The Matthewses almost hadn’t made it to Michoacán that year. Dan explained that his father was coping with an early stage of Alzheimer’s disease and his mother’s walking cane was required because she had Parkinson’s disease. “It was looking like we couldn’t come on this tour . . . but it was important that we come now,” Dan said. “This might be their last chance.”
    In preparation for the trip, Dan’s students had raised two butterflies to watch them go through their metamorphosis. One of the butterflies, Holey, formed its chrysalis on a book in a forgotten corner of the classroom. When he emerged, he had a hole in his wing. This deformity made the butterfly the kids’ favorite. Dan recalled, “I have a video of the kids on the day we released the monarchs. The butterflies were just out of reach, and they were chasing them and calling out, ‘Holey! Holey!’ It looked like a church service.”
    The kids asked Dan to keep an eye out for Holey on his trip, but the odds of it made him roll his eyes. He said, “I mean, I didn’t even think Holey would be able to fly.”
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    The path to the monarchs’ roosting site at El Capulín was hidden between a white house and a wooden hut surrounded by banana trees and grazing sheep. It was not a place you would easily find on your own unless you were a butterfly, and maybe not even then. There, just outside the village of Macheros, monarchs lived at the top of Cerro Pelón, or Bald Mountain, a dormant volcano.
    At the foot of the mountain,
vaqueros
, or cowboys, stood by their horses waiting for us to choose a companion. We’d been warned that the sanctuary’s roosting site was not accessible without one. I approached a tan horse with a black-and-gray-speckled mane. The animal, Flor, was short in stature, which helped calm my near-crippling fear of heights. But I was still nervous.
    At dinner the previous evening, I’d explained my hesitation about riding horses and another woman on the tour said, “Sounds like you are having control issues.” She was right. I didn’t like being dependent, out of control of my own motion.
    As Flor and I started our journey, I thought about how far monarchs travel. They move all the way to Mexico on air currents. They do not flap and flail; they soar. They would never make it across the continent before freezes if they used their own energy. It is because the butterfly leaves so much up to chance that it is able to reach its ancestral home in Mexico.
    The relatively flat section