Magdalena Mountain

by Robert Michael Pyle

  I spent what remained of the summer exploring the incredibly lyrical Rocky Mountain states, getting drunk on whiffs of Oriental Russia in the sagebrush zone and on the North Russian fragrances so faithfully reproduced above timberline by certain small bogs along trickles of sky between the snowbank and the orchid. And yet—was that all? What form of mysterious pursuit caused me to get my feet wet like a child, to pant up a talus, to stare every dandelion in the face, to start at every colored mote passing just beyond my field of vision? What was the dream sensation of having come empty-handed—without what? A gun? A wand?

  Mead knew just what he meant about the talus, the dandelions, and the motes, and he knew exactly what it was his hand was missing in the dream. Elsewhere, Nabokov himself had written of a sunlit saunter that “the cold of the metal netstick in my right hand magnifies the pleasure to almost intolerable bliss.” That feeling too, Mead knew. So the narrator, Vadim, was a collector, or had been. “Amazing,” he muttered to the elk.

  He was even more amazed a little further on when Vadim and his daughter Bel, traveling in what he called “the paradise part of Colorado,” come to stay in Lupine Lodge—surely Columbine Lodge where V. and V. Nabokov stayed in that summer of 1947. “We spent a whole month walking a path margined with blue flowers [that] led through aspen groves.” And then he found it. On a walk near Longs Peak, “sharing a picnic lunch, somewhere between those great rocks and the beginning of The Cable,” Bel scribbled a poem that she later copied on the back of a photograph in violet ink:

  Longs’ Peacock Lake:

  the Hut and its Old Marmot;

  Boulderfield and its Black Butterfly;

  And the intelligent trail.

  Mead read it several times. To his ear, it sounded more like a koan written by Gary Snyder than like Nabokov’s lush cadences. And precocious, certainly, for eleven-year-old Bel. But all that aside, it showed him that someone had been aware of Magdalena the butterfly here for many years—and not just anyone, but Vladimir Nabokov! Mead wasn’t the first to make the connection.

  Nor was Nabokov the first to make it, as Mead learned the next morning. In spite of his late night, he struggled up for pancakes at eight, intending to spend another day on the mountain. There he found a message from Annie beside his place. “James,” it read. “Nice to meet you. While you’re at it, there’s something else you should see. If you’re willing, I’ll take you—I have to drive up toward Estes anyway. I’ll check in around nine and see if you’d like to go with me. Annie C.”

  Mead was ready on the porch when Annie rolled up in her truck, and he climbed in. “Look,” she said, “I may have been out of line when I told you about Mary. Some people have been harassing her, but you seemed harmless.”

  He wasn’t sure it was a compliment, but Mead said, “You can trust me,” not even clear on what he was implying.

  “Your only interest is in the butterfly, right?”

  “Right—that and the history of its name.” He figured Carson could come later, after he waded through all these new revelations.

  “Then I guess it’s okay. Well, I’ll take you up to the monastery, but first I have a little surprise. It’s a few miles farther along the road. Did you have a chance to check out that novel last night?”

  “Did I ever! I only skimmed the story, of course, but I found the good parts.”

  “By that I assume you don’t mean the sexy bits.”

  “No, they were too many, by the looks of it. I mean the drunken whiffs of timberline and talus. And Bel’s amazing poem . . . what a find! Who would’ve known?”

  “Nice, eh?”

  “More than you know.” Mead filled her in on Nabokov and Winchester’s field trip to Tolland in 1947, and then said, “ ‘Boulderfield and its Black Butterfly’—that’s just marvelous! Only it sounded sort of Gary Snyderesque to me, especially that last bit about ‘the intelligent trail’—the part Vadim likes so much.”

  “I see what you mean. Well, maybe Nabokov has read Snyder, who knows? Anyway, if you liked that, wait till you see the next thing I have to show you.”

  As the two cruised north on the Peak to Peak, Annie pointed out the chapel and the monastery. “How cute,” said Mead when the chapel came into view. “And to think the highway almost took the rock it’s sitting on—no, growing out of!” he added, craning his neck as they passed.

  “We’ll be back soon,” said Mary. Then, a few miles on, “Now look to your left. Those cabins up there? That’s Columbine Lodge—Lupine Lodge in the book, according to you. As you can see, Vladimir/Vadim could walk right out his back door and up onto the boulder field of Magdalena Mountain.”

  “Meaning he probably netted his first one right here,” said Mead. “That would have given him a kick, if I’ve gotten any sense from Dr. Winchester of the man and his love of wordplay. While the actual type locality of the species is Georgetown, this is its namesake. You could call a specimen from here a ‘nominotype.’ ”

  “If you say so—you’re getting beyond my ken. Now, over there, just beyond—that’s the Longs Peak Inn, at least a modern version thereof. Have you heard of Enos Mills?”

  “Sounds familiar, but do tell.”

  “Father of RMNP, as John Muir was of Yosemite—a friend of Muir’s, and of John Burroughs as well. In fact, the three of them formed a kind of trinity of conservationist-naturalists on either side of the turn of the century. Mills never was as well known as the other two, but he wrote a bunch of books set here in the Rockies, very popular in their day.”

  “One of them is about grizzlies, right?”

  “Yes, that’s right. The Story of a Thousand Year Pine was his bestseller. But he also initiated the practice of what he called ‘nature guiding,’ which anticipated the Park Service’s ranger-naturalists, of which I was one. Plus, he was a great mountaineer, and he built and ran Longs Peak Lodge. Later he fell afoul of the parks and the heavy hand of government, he died too young, and his rustic buildings sadly burned. But there—other side of the road—see that? It’s the sole survivor from those days—the Enos Mills Cabin!” The truck slowed to pull into the long dirt driveway to a little log structure back up among the pines.

  “Is anyone home?” asked Mead.

  “I hope so.” They parked, got out, and walked up to the door, where Annie knocked. “Hello, Enda!” she said warmly, hugging the middle-aged woman who appeared at the door. “Enda Mills, James Mead. Enda is Enos’s daughter, James, and she runs the cabin as a museum.” Enda Mills was sturdy, as tough as the winters she had weathered, and protective of a legacy that had not received the recognition it deserved, in her judgment. But she was also warm and welcoming to any pilgrim who came there out of a genuine respect for nature, and that clearly included Annie and anyone who was her friend.

  For the next half hour Annie and James talked with Enda and pored over Millsian artifacts, photographs, a letter from Muir and another from an ancient Burroughs, and shelves upon shelves of books. James bought a postcard with Enos’s photo of the bark-on, elfin little post office he’d built in the lodge. Then Annie asked, “Enda, may I show James your dad’s correction copy of Wild Life on the Rockies?”

  “No, you go right ahead,” said Enda. “But don’t walk off with it. Nothing is rarer here, unless it’s that copy of Romance of Geology he inscribed to Bob Marshall.”

  Annie lifted a green buckram-bound volume from a special shelf and opened it to the back pages. “Check this out,” she told James, crooking her long, graceful index finger. As James peered at the open book, he saw that a page had been pasted in. There in a fine hand script lay lines of words in black ink. “Read it aloud, James, why don’t you. I found it by accident. You might be amused . . . or amazed.”

  “ ‘FOR NEXT EDITION,’ ” read Mead,

  “must include some of our friends, the insects, as well as the large-scale wildlife I have recorded here. The cicadas in the junipers, the mole-crickets and yellow jackets, the bumblebees in the high
meadows. But most especially, write about Strecker’s butterfly, Erebia magdalena. Seldom, if ever, have I trod the rocks above here—whether on Mills Moraine (as they insist on calling it) or Battle Mountain, Ship’s Prow or Boulder Field, The Loft, The Trough, the Keyhole, or Keyboard of the Winds, in summer on a sunny day, that I have failed to see the living shadow of the Black Butterfly. For me, it is the signature creature of these rocky redoubts, every bit as much as the pika and the marmot, as it drifts along the bases of the minarets, touching the stones with the gentleness of a lover’s hand. I cannot imagine how it makes a living up there, never coming down (as even I do eventually for the comfort of the fire, the succor of the table). Nor can I imagine how I have failed, all these years and all these books, to so much as mention it before. Oh, I like the brightly colored butterflies well enough, as old John o’ Birds loves his orioles; but more, I think, do I love these dun beauties of the stony places, even as John o’ Mountains cherishes his soft-hued thrushes. So that settles it—I shall write about Magdalena—perhaps even a book! E.M. 1921.

  “P.S. Must get Cockerell from the Denver Museum up here to teach me about it.”

  “Good God!” said Mead. “But he didn’t, did he?”

  “No,” said Enda. “He showed me the black butterflies many times, and I suspect he really would have done it. But life had grown complicated, and the next year, Daddy died.” She seemed as sad as if she were speaking of events that had occurred yesterday. “Now—some tea?”

  Annie hugged her and said, “Thank you, Enda. You are so kind. But we must love you and leave you. James is collecting clues rather than butterflies, and he has one more important witness to visit.”

  James shrugged, smiled, and made his goodbye as well.

  “Come back,” said Enda, closing the door behind them as a campervan with Nebraska plates drove up and an excited young couple climbed out.

  “So what do you think?” asked Annie.

  “I think I want to read Mills’s books. Especially the one he never wrote.”

  34

  James, already whacked by the one-two punch of Nabokov and Mills, had no idea what to expect at the monastery. Annie dropped him off at the foot of the massive rock atop which the big white Jesus presided. “You’re not coming with me?” he asked, like a child being left by his mother on his first day of kindergarten.

  “No. I have a program to give at Allenspark Lodge on squirrels and raccoons. I’ll check with you later at the lodge—it’s just a short walk back from here. Ask for Mary Glanville,” she added, shutting the door. “And tell them Mountain Annie sent you.”

  At the far end of a willow bog braided by Cabin Creek, a big wooden building sat dwarfed by Magdalena Mountain’s northern face. Before walking up the drive, Mead peeked into the chapel in case Mary might be at her own devotions, but all he found was a sad-faced icon of the saint. Outside, Cabin Creek poured from the willows into a pool, willow leaves swirling on its surface before diving into the culvert beneath the road. Mead gazed into the brown water, seeking his questions.

  On the way up the sandy path to the monastery, two or three men in work clothes nodded serenely, and one in a brown robe walked by fast and scowling. A knot of women in ordinary clothing who were seated in a circle on a pine needle floor mostly ignored him. Mead wondered whether Mary might be among them, but decided he’d rather inquire at the monastery than invade the female conclave. The feeling brought back elementary school again, where boys and girls dotted the playground in mutually impregnable knots.

  Mead entered the Great Hall of the Mountain Monastery through an open door. A figure taller than himself stood beside a desk in an adjoining room. “Excuse me,” Mead said as he entered, rapping on the doorjamb. “My name is James Mead.”

  “Mine is Oberon,” the other said, extending his hand. “How can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for a woman named Mary . . . Mary Glanville.”

  Oberon stiffened visibly in shoulder and jaw. “What’s your business with her?” he snapped. “Are you from the state?”

  “N-no, not at all,” Mead stammered. “I’m just a graduate student.”

  “Say more.”

  “I have a purely academic interest in Magdalena Mountain and its name,” said Mead. He said nothing about butterflies so as not to complicate things. “I understand Ms. Glanville may know something about it.”

  “And who told you about Mary?” asked a calmer Oberon.

  “Oh, right . . . I was supposed to mention that Mountain Annie sent me.”

  Oberon relaxed more, but he was still unsure.

  Then a voice behind him said, “It’s all right, Oberon. I’ll see him. Alone is okay.”

  “Okay, Mary, if you say so. Call me if you need me.”

  Moments later, Mead faced Mary in the library. “Do you know me?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t. I’ve been told that you might know about this place and its name.”

  “What is your interest?” she asked with a faint hint of a smile.

  James told her, including the butterfly. “So I thought you might be able to help.”

  Mary looked down, pursed her fine ash-bow lips, stood with her left hand between her right collarbone and her breast. She was silent for more than a minute. Then, “You have heard correctly.” Another pause. “I am Mary Glanville, according to those who found me after an accident. Of uncertain origins and unknown connections, in this life. But the trauma I suffered”—the hand swept up and across her forehead, where auburn curls cascaded—“let me see a prior existence. I feel as if I am—or at least I was—Mary of Magdala, known as Saint Mary Magdalene.”

  Never having met a saint before, unless it was Marion Dever, nor anyone who claimed to be reincarnated, except on the Greyhound and that didn’t count, Mead wasn’t sure of the protocol. He stood speechless. She seemed sane enough on the surface: sound, and somehow full of grace.

  “I do not advertise the fact widely, for reasons that will be clear to you if you have ever been incarcerated.”

  He had not, though school sometimes felt like it when spring stretched out on the wrong side of the window. Eloquently he said, “Wow. Uhhhh—you see, umm. Geez!”

  She was clearer. Echoing Oberon, she asked, “How can I help you?”

  The cat gave back his tongue, and James explained further. “If it turns out that the butterfly, the chapel, and the mountain all have a historical connection, I’d love to know more about their common inspiration. I am not schooled in classical theology . . .”

  “Not that that would help you much in this case,” Mary said.

  “Well, can you tell me a little about Mary . . . about yourself?”

  “If you wish,” Mary said, flicking back her hair, which was almost as it used to be before the windshield, the scalpel, and the nursing home shears got at it. A few strands and coils refined copper out of the afternoon light. Mead was beguiled even before, and now bewitched outright. So much for objectivity. “How much do you know?” she asked.

  “Not much. Only that you were supposed to have been . . .”

  “. . . a whore?”

  “. . . and were . . .”

  “Forgiven?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, if that’s all you’ve got, we have a long way to go. But you’re not alone.” She settled back, and Mead did the same. “Mary Magdalene is not who you think she is—certainly not the unnamed sinner in Luke. Pope Gregory the so-called Great, on a Sunday in the year 591, having lumped several Marys together for convenience, proclaimed the Magdalene a prostitute redeemed by grace. You see, the early church needed a symbol of a fallen, forgiven woman who gave up her power over men by prostrating her shamed self at the feet of a blameless man. Jesus’s mother was unbesmirched, so she wouldn’t do; a racier role model was needed. Mary Magdalene-as-prostitute evolved to fill the bill.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “But true,” said Mary. “Not
that it’s such an insult—Leonard Cohen calls prostitutes sisters of mercy, after all—just incorrect. I was just another disciple, not a ‘comfort woman’ for Pontius Pilate’s shock troops.”

  “So—you . . . knew . . . Jesus? Not as in ‘come be saved,’ but actually knew him?”

  “Jesus paid me more attention than the others. Which was part of the problem.”

  “You’re said to have washed and anointed his feet, and there’s the bit about his saving you from being stoned, glass houses, and so on, and healing you—‘ridding you of seven devils,’ didn’t they put it that way?”

  “There was a lot of footwashing going on in those days; it was a common courtesy, an act of humility. It had nothing to do with worship, let alone abasement.”

  James was all ears. “And the stoning?” He flinched as he said it.

  “Both Mark and Luke chalked up that episode with varying degrees of license. It is quite true that I was about to be stoned to death and that Jesus interceded on my behalf, challenging the one who was blameless to toss the first rock. That image was very strong, and it stuck, though the bit about glass houses came in somewhat later.”

  “So what were those ‘devils’?” he asked, hoping he wasn’t out of line. He could not believe himself. After fending off the missionaries on the bus, here he was lapping up Bible stories from a self-proclaimed saint! He thought he might be just as keen if she were selling Amway products.

  “Jesus quelled my fears and hurts with what has been called his grace. So in a way you could say that he cast devilments from me, in much the same way as these naturalist brothers have done for me here. Devilments like depression, loneliness, alienation, bitterness, fear, despair—how many’s that, six? Okay, and how about vindictiveness? There’s seven of the worst for you.”

  James considered that, and Mary continued. “But many people, including someone here who should know better, have taken ‘devils’ literally, as if they were pesty little imps with horns. Horny little devils, in fact—for of course they were supposed to be devils of lust and carnal weakness above all, so as to bolster the oh-so-sorry hooker scenario.”