Magdalena Mountain

by Robert Michael Pyle

  But there is such a force. So Erebia, showing now more than a hint of brown plush in the right light, flies once again to the knife-edge, where he finds an inflorescence of a yellow mustard whose nectar he has never before tasted. It suits him, and as he sucks the sweet liquor, his blood sugar rises and he prepares to fly. Carefully he withdraws his double drinking-straw proboscis from the nectary, preens it with his tiny brushlike forelegs, recoils its paired tubes, and tucks it between his furry labial palps. It is too valuable an implement to risk getting it stuck up with syrupy nectar or damaged. Thus nourished, groomed, and warm, Erebia takes off for his fifth descent of the day.

  The sun slides past the meridian. If an alpine can discriminate between cumulus clouds and mountains, as it probably can, Erebia might feel a keener sense of urgency now. The clouds are busy rising in the west, and the day is doomed. Scarcely an hour’s worth of courting time remains—and who knows how many more days?

  Erebia scales a huge boulder and alights briefly on its top, surprising the pika in residence who says Geek! Then he sails off again as the mammal dives for cover. Near the bottom of the boulder a pink patch of moss campion draws him down to drink again. But a stronger impulse takes over as a dark smudge enters his broad, shortsighted field of view. He swerves to investigate.

  The form rises to meet him, and they circle jerkily like paper dolls in a dust devil. It is another Magdalena—this time, a female. She glistens with the iridescence of a newly minted Erebia, shining amethyst and emerald like a violet-green swallow, and her blackness holds the depth of every night there ever was. She’s come out of her chrysalis only this morning, and scarcely a scale is missing from her wings. His antennae find her perfume on the alpine air, and Erebia smells at last the fragrance he was born to find.

  Now he senses something entirely new in his experience, as his counterpart’s pheromones shiver his ganglia. With a fervor he’s never felt in the false flights of earlier encounters, he charges his carbon copy. Unready before, she had already repelled two other courtiers today. Now, her wings dry and her own hormones flowing, she too feels a surge of urgency. The pair perform half a dozen pas de deux in an aerial ballet choreographed by centuries of selection, rising a dozen feet above the rocks. Close but not touching, exchanging aromas as intensity of purpose grows, the twin black shadows finally drop together among the stones.

  Male and female circle each other in a dance of recognition. So important: don’t mate with the wrong kind, don’t waste your genes, don’t blow your reason for living in this stony, bony land! Erebia palps the tip of his companion’s body with his antennae and receives a strong dose of her special scent. She strokes his forewings with her own antennae, finding the thick patches of androconia, plush velvet pads of sex scales where male satyrs’ pheromones arise. Now there is no doubt. Magdalena molecules, male and female, flow between them, released by their private dance. No arctic, no other sort of alpine could make this potion. There will be no mistake.

  Like a series of locks and keys made smooth and slick with graphite, the partners’ sexual rhythms flow together as they back end-to-end on a rock, everting their swollen genitalia. These exquisitely sensitive tissues rub together for a second or two before Erebia’s handlike claspers gape wide and find their way around her endpoint. In a reversal of the common pattern, she enters his body before he can enter hers. Then he closes around her so that, should they be forced to fly in copula, she will be able to carry his passive form without losing hold.

  Feeling only Pan knows what, Erebia probes his aedeagus into his mate’s bursa copulatrix. Then slowly, smoothly, he passes his sperms to her, not in semen but parceled in a shining envelope. There the spermatophore will lodge, as each egg, passing down from her ovaries, receives the charge of life from Erebia’s seed. The act completed, a kind of gentle subsidence overtakes the lovers—for may they not be called such? From first encounter through courtship to copulation, only a few minutes have passed. The giving of the spermatophore takes much longer. Even afterward, the mates cleave together.

  Like each other’s shadows, like an object and its reflection in a pool of ink, like a Rorschach test for a gentled mind, the two lie bonded. Like obsidian chips from an arrowhead’s face, like paired punctuation marks inscribed on the tablet of the mountain’s stone, like black valentines, they repose, Erebia’s wings enfolded between those of the larger female, her tip embraced by his body’s clasp. Such is butterfly love.

  And so they remain throughout the long mountain night, for a storm arises and sends them understone for shelter, still paired.

  25

  The mated pair slid apart as day came and brought a stirring wakefulness. The spent male part shrunk from the female chamber, leaving it vacated but hardly empty, as her musky endpoint slipped from the grip of his claspers.

  Oberon stretched his long, strong thighs, cramped from enclosing the rounded rump of Mary Glanville for hour after melded hour. “Mmmmm. Good morning.”

  Mary stretched too, her backside suddenly clammy from the loss of the other half of its shell, and turned over to kiss Oberon. Her breath carried the heavy scents of long kissing and night’s breathing. Oberon inhaled it gratefully. “Hold my bottom?” she asked. “It’s cold with you gone away.”

  “I’m here,” he said, muffling her slender woman’s buttocks in his rangy hands. Her firm frontage felt warm, and she mmm’d again. Their loving had evolved rapidly since that night in the chapel after Tonkin’s incursion. It was still new, and they both felt a little silly and embarrassed by their naked pleasure.

  Eventually Oberon had to get up to pee. “As long as I’m up, can I get you anything?”

  “Would you mind getting me another of those like you got me before?”

  “I can only try,” he said. Oberon complied with his best attempt, a little doubtful. Since forty, he’d had slim pickings, and nothing at all like this. Seldom doubles, not since Estes Park a few summers ago, anyway. Another just might not work out. But it did. Cumulonimbi rose, billowed, and burst between the sheets in the Mountain Monastery: one a brief, violent prairie thunderstorm, heavy in output but no sooner spilt than spent; the other a gathering, prolonged mountain downpour, drawing into a moist, quiet close.

  Oberon stroked Mary’s pale, unbrushed hair, swept her cheek with it, Mary laughing and swatting him away. “Do you suppose we’ll ever be the same?”

  “As what, I guess is the question. But then we never are, one day to the next. Anyway, we seem to be fine—better than for some time, wouldn’t you say? Anyway—I hate to say it, but we’ve got to be up and at ’em. I’m due at Rocky Flats in two hours.”

  Oberon departed in the old panel truck that had brought Mary to the mountain. He left her in the care of Sylvanus and Xerxes. An hour and fifty minutes after leaving their narrow bed, having rolled down the Middle St. Vrain to Lyons, then south along the Hogback to Boulder and beyond toward Golden, he arrived outside the gates of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. There he entered a chaos of marchers, police, hired goons, television crews, and bullhorns. The peaceful shield of calm left over from the morning began to unravel.

  Established by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1952, Rocky Flats now supported fifty-six hundred jobs at a payroll of $280 million, becoming one of the most polluted places on earth—all devoted to the Flats’ bumper crop of plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs. Contaminated workers, watershed, and air were the collateral damages—and finally, this jarring scene of conflict and change. Oberon parked the truck along the road, half a mile from the demo.

  He looked down across the malign clutter of the plant, squatted up against Denver’s dirty brown cloud. Oberon, who hadn’t been downslope for months, wanted to hold his nostrils closed against the toxics of the plant and the noxious breath of the city, but he had to breathe. The air’s ozone smell reminded him of snow melting in a parking lot somewhere in 1954, evocative and not unpleasant, but impure. A Euclid earthmover, chartreuse and immense, groped
across a long barrow of earth that might never be safe to sift again. The white water tower stood on tiptoe like a Wellesian Martian over the scene of the crime. A creek ran from the foothills into the Flats’ polluted precincts, a reminder that water will have its way, regardless.

  A blue sign faced the demonstrators: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY, ROCKY FLATS PLANT, OPERATED BY NORTH AMERICAN SPACE OPERATIONS, ROCKWELL INTERNATIONAL. Another with a star-studded shield advised all comers that this was U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY and to ENTER ON OFFICIAL BUSINESS ONLY. Oberon felt as foreign here as it was possible to feel. Then he noticed a tiny garden at the base of a streetlight opposite the entrance. Petunias, marigolds, and snapdragons bloomed beside a hand-lettered little sign that read HELP WATER THE GREEN OF PEACE, reminding him of why he’d come.

  Cacophony of dispute poured toward him as he approached on foot. Forces milled, putting off the face-to-face. Oberon tried to fix the abused land in his mind, to feel the rage it evoked. The great smear hung palpably on the eastern skyline, as if some Titan had browned his shorts and hung them out to air over Denver. Behind him, the painfully clear Front Range. And in between, plutonium pie. He wanted to flee back to the mountain and his bed with Mary.

  “I’m sorry I had to leave before the action, Catherine.”

  “Before the head-banging began, and the arrests? I’m not. Thanks for getting me out of there when you did.” Now there were two in the van, heading back north again.

  “Well, it wouldn’t have done for you to be arrested this time,” he said from behind the wheel. “You couldn’t have come back for the meeting.”

  “Which would have wasted your trip,” Catherine Greenland said as the carryall rattled over the asphalt between Golden and Boulder. Blue yucca and purple gayfeather candled the grassland hems. A few overbright tracts of new houses intervened, but this stretch remained mostly pastoral, seeming far removed from the frenetic scene they’d left behind. “Anyway, there will be larger actions soon; this thing is really coming to a head. Though it might take another ten years and an election or two to shut it down at last. But when the Sierra Club and the Daniel Berrigan people are holding hands on the line, as they were back there, it must mean we’re getting somewhere, doesn’t it?”

  “Let’s hope,” said Oberon as he shifted up to highway speed.

  “As for this meeting,” asked Catherine, “will I be the only woman there?”

  “I hope Mary will be present, and our friend Annie Cloudcroft, too.”

  “Oberon, who is this Mary?”

  “As we’ve recently learned, her full name is Mary Glanville. You’ve heard how she came to us. Since her injury, her recent past has become obscure to her. But she feels she has an older identity, that she was somehow drawn to the mountains by more than our ads alone.”

  “Oh God, she’s not channeling Ramtha, is she?”

  “No, nothing like that. She doesn’t even summon Shirley MacLaine’s grandma.”

  “Thank goodness. Can you tell me more?”

  “I’ll let her do that, if she wants to. She doesn’t talk about herself much, so I haven’t pushed it. Mostly she wants to learn about the mountains.”

  “Well, I should think you’re the one to help her with that,” Catherine said. “I know you’ve ranged all over them.”

  “Maybe I can help her with rocks and flowers and butterflies and such. But she could use someone like you to help her see inside, Catherine. Apparently she received no real counseling in the so-called home where those bozos lodged her—just drugs and more drugs.”

  “I’m a counselor, not a physician. But I’d be glad to talk with her. If our merger works out, maybe just having more women around will be good for her. It must be odd, living in an artificially all-male world.”

  “Odd for all of us,” Oberon said. “I’d like to learn more about your group before the meeting, if I may.” Green hills and red slopes of the Morrison Formation rolled by, shoved up against the metamorphics of the mountains. Boulder’s trademark Flatirons showed the contact as the truck turned west to make the loop back via Boulder Canyon and the Peak to Peak. “For example,” Oberon said, “how long will those arrested be kept, and what about their families?”

  “If it’s like last time,” Catherine said, “they’ll be booked under trespass, arraigned for a later trial date, then released. At most, they’ll have to stay in jail just one night.”

  “How many of you are there?”

  “Forty-three now, but sixteen have decided to remain with the camp over the winter. We have the resources for that, but no roof. We sixteen have arranged our lives, more or less, though some of our family members would dispute that, so that we can remain in the area all winter. We hope to set up a trailer and rotate in and out.”

  “I admire your conviction. I heard you were—”

  “One tough bitch? I can say that, but no one else can. When I have to be. But our dedication pales beside the Greenham Common women’s encampment in England. They are our inspiring angels. Housewives, single women, grandmothers, young girls, all living together to resist the cruise missiles and witness for peace.”

  “If you decided to join us on the mountain,” said Oberon, “maybe you could help steer our bunch toward something worthwhile.”

  “In the meantime,” said Catherine, “it sounds as if you have a misogyny problem.”

  “Just one of us,” replied Oberon, “but he does create a roadblock for all of us. An otherwise smart man with a bone-built heart and a pretty twisted outlook on half of humanity.”

  “So why is this character part of your group, and how do you tolerate him?”

  “One thorn at a time. He does have his good points. Attalus is a fine naturalist, one of the best lichenologists in the West. He published a monograph on the crustose lichens of the Rockies that stands today. And he was a good bonesetter from his days as pharmacist’s mate in the Merchant Marine, and he kept our library beautifully. But he had a discharge and a conviction in his past, and now I wonder whether it was related to his hatred of women, which seems to have obscured everything else lately.”

  “And?”

  “And we don’t begin to tolerate him. He drives us nuts when he gets off on this. We’ve simply had no choice but to live with it—he’s been the dealer, as the charterholder from the old order. But now Mary has forced the issue. It would have come up soon anyway, given the hopeful plans we share with you.”

  “So, what is the plan?”

  “I’m making it up as we go. I’ll emphasize the creative side of the union—with us providing winter shelter for the women, you bringing us your political strength and experience. Attalus should be able to understand the intrinsic value of diversity in a community, in ecological terms if nothing else.” Oberon said it, but he didn’t believe it.

  They ricocheted through Boulder as quickly as they could and struck up Boulder Canyon toward Nederland, Ward, Allenspark, and finally Magdalena Mountain. They stopped for a stretch at Boulder Falls, where an odd boulder sat upon a plinth for public inspection. The action over the eons had carved it into a holey doughnut of stone. To Oberon, the rock looked like nothing so much as a vertebra from some great extinct beast. He was about to say so, but Catherine was already laughing her way through the middle like an otter in a waterfall pool. Fresh fir terps and piney essences swirled around her on the rushing stream’s breath. The mood lifted and lasted a way up the canyon, until Catherine said, “Sounds charming. A drafty old ruin full of maladjusted monks and one lichen-loving psycho.”

  “Well,” said Oberon, “if you’d prefer to freeze your buns off in your alfresco, glow-in-the-dark nunnery . . .”

  “Maybe we’ll take our chances with you after all. But tit for tat: I told you a little about us. Will you please fill me in a bit on your bunch?”

  Oberon glanced at Catherine beside him. Maybe fifty-five or fifty-eight, possessed of short, neat cloud-colored hair, a riveting pair of hazel eyes in a narrow, high
-cheeked face, and a runner’s body, she had the brisk bearing of an AAUW chair or a city councilwoman. She looked more like a Realtor or a member of the bench than an earth mother activist willing to risk arrest to make a chink in the brick wall of war. “Okay,” he said. “We come from many traditions. We have a Southern Baptist, and we have a Levi Samson, just as we have a Druid, a Zen Buddhist, and a Bacchus—even a Rastafarian.”

  “Sounds like a recipe for chaos!”

  “On the contrary. We’re not a religion, so we have no dogma; not a party, so no ideology. Nothing is compulsory except pacifism and a profound respect for the land.”

  “But how can a Baptist lie down with a Druid—or an evolutionary biologist?” They had slipped through Nederland and rolled past Caribou unnoticed by the locals.

  “Because,” Oberon went on as smoothly as the fresh-paved road, “we try to value each of our separate creation myths. Raven, Turtle, Jahweh, Darwin—they’re all metaphors for something subtler than any of us know. Of course, evolution by natural selection is the central operating principle of biology, and each of us—even our Baptist—recognizes that. But we’re inclusive—he can have his Genesis and eat it too, for all we care. After all, the myth of the Garden is just as useful as Darwin’s version for bearing up hylozoism.”