Noni ignored the reference to fireworks. “Okay! So what’s the third letter?”
“Let’s see . . . it’s from Brownie! I saw him just before our Big Night at the monastery, and he said he might have something more for me.”
“So hurry, what does he say? Maybe Mary has fetched up on his doorstep.”
James read it to Noni:
Dear Mead, I much enjoyed our recent visit. Thanks for dropping by on your way to see your folks. I trust you found your family well. If this missive should fail to find you still at Magdalena Park, I’m sure it will be forwarded . . .
“Da da, da da. Okay, here goes.”
Most of my summer has been fully engaged among my fossils at Florissant. The other day, as I was brushing away Oligocene ash from a fine new specimen of Prodryas persephone (the ancestral satyr that Scudder described from these deposits—this is the first one found in a hundred years!), I was reminded of your interest in the etymology of Erebia magdalena. I stand by my brief postal response regarding Strecker’s irreligious prejudice. But jogged by your visit, I have remembered that nagging connection that I mentioned. It speaks to the plenitude of Magdalena monikers along the Peak to Peak.
You will recall that I had two coauthors for Colorado Butterflies. One, Don Eff, is a very popular amateur who works for the post office in Boulder and corresponds with lepidopterists all over the place—good friend of George’s father, P. S. Winchester, in fact. The other author was the Reverend Bernard Rotger. Don is gregarious and well known among all the western collectors, but Father Rotger was not. He’d immigrated from Malta before the War and has long served in parishes in southwest Colorado, remaining isolated down in places like Pagosa Springs and forming a fine collection from that undersampled part of the state.
Bernard belonged to a lesser-known Catholic order, the Theatines. The chief object of the order was to live an edifying life—what better way, I ask you, than butterfly collecting? But his favorite saint was always Mary Magdalene—I suspect because of the alpine, I don’t know. One of his brothers (by blood, not Holy Orders), Bautista, was employed as a surveyor for the Archdiocese of Denver. He was involved in siting, planning, designing, and ultimately building the old monastery north of your lodge, on Cabin Creek. Also, that handsome little stone chapel beside the highway—I know you must know it.
“Well, sort of,” James said.
“Get on with it,” said Noni, unused to Brown’s old-fashioned discursions.
Mead continued. “ ‘Well, it seems Bernard went to see his brother while he was engaged in the project. I dug up his letter about it after you left. He stayed at Columbine Lodge—same place Nabokov stayed in ’47 when he went after tollandensis with Winchester. While there, he went out with Don Eff—I think it was the only time he ever collected in the Front Range.’ ”
“Where is he going with this?” asked Noni, impatient for the punchline, if there was ever going to be one. “Is all this necessary?”
“He’s a storyteller,” said James. “Give him time.”
“ ‘Well,’ ” James went on,
magdalena is spotty and uncommon down in the San Juans. Up north, things must have been perfect that summer because Bernard and Don had a big time with magdalena. In fact, he is responsible for those sentences in the book you like: “Once in a while conditions have been such that a large brood of the species is produced. Then if a collector is around he has a field day.” I believe Bernard wanted to commemorate that day, and through his brother’s connections, he found a way to do it.
Meanwhile, the building project had been bankrolled by a man named Oscar Malo. When it came time to commission the building and sanctify the new church, the monastery was going to be called St. Malo’s and the chapel St. Catherine’s, for the wife of Malo’s partner and father-in-law, Denver bigwig J. K. Mullen, and for St. Catherine of Sienna. But no one knew who the heck St. Malo was, and Mullen pulled out when the chapel went over budget in those Depression times. So, seeing his chance, Bernard prevailed upon Bautista to propose a name change to commemorate St. Mary Magdalene.
Bernard never told church officials why that name was so suitable for the place, just that the setting resembled Mary’s hermitage in the French Alps. They bit. No one raised any objection, except, as Bernard wrote, one of the young seminarians moving into the monastery, a minority of one, and too junior to count. So the change was officially made.
“Holy shit!” said James.
Noni just waggled her head in wonder.
“Wait, there’s more. ‘And there’s more,’ ” he read. “ ‘The mountain itself! I wasn’t too sure about that, so I looked it up with the assistance of a friend down in Denver in the USGS, Rob Wall, who helps me find the best fossil sites on the geologic maps. It turns out that when you go back in the records of the Board of Geographic Names and check the old maps, the mountain has borne several names. For a number of years it was called Mount Meeker. That’s how Enos Mills referred to it. I’ll bet you could find old-timers around there who still use that name.’ ”
Mead flipped to the last page of the letter and continued reading.
But along about 1935, application was made to change the mountain’s official name. The argument advanced on the petition claimed confusion with the town and county of Meeker on the Western Slope of Colorado, named for the pioneer Ezra Meeker. Apparently the residents of Meeker Park agreed with that complaint. Nor had Ezra’s brother, Nathan Meeker, former editor of the New York Tribune, much to do with the mountain. All he did was come west with Horace Greeley in 1870 and help found Greeley’s Union Colony, and later serve as Indian agent. He was killed by the Utes for plowing their racetrack and trying to make them farm. He merely increased the confusion.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” said Noni.
“ ‘Meanwhile, the chapel-on-the-rock was rapidly gaining fame as a tourist attraction. So the petitioners to the Board—get this, B. Rotger, M.A., A.I.S. & Rev. B. Rotger, C.R.—proposed a new designation for the peak: Magdalena Mountain. The hearing record contains only one dissenting testimony, from the same dyspeptic monk, who offered Mt. St. Paul as an alternative. Needless to say, Magdalena won out. Magdalena Park and lodge simply followed suit.’ ”
“Wow,” said Mead, just “Wow.” Noni nodded.
“ ‘I thought you might find some interest in these arcane details of the area’s nomenclatural provenance, James. I hope they will prove useful to you. Thanks for giving me an excuse to track them down in the rapidly fossilizing strata of my filing cabinets.
“ ‘Good luck in your studies, and please give my regards to your esteemed professor.
“ ‘Sincerely yours,
“ ‘Brownie.’ ”
James stood stunned, the letter falling from his hand like so many wings. “So,” he finally said. “It was all just the butterfly, after all.”
“Just the butterfly?” repeated Noni, at his elbow. “Because if Mary’s right, James—what else is there?”
AFTER
Up on Magdalena Mountain, new snow clings like the soft striations on an eland’s flank. The tear-track cleft, a backward question mark, is already cast in white again. Solifluction bands stripe the north slope, freeze-thaw pillows the south. Pine fringes below stand flocked, shocked by the night’s surprise; and aspen leaves cling like the last yellow scales on an old swallowtail’s wing. Across the face, every rock—each stone, all the boulders—stands out as sharply on the new white field as the Steller’s jay sweeping across the scene shows up against the pale blue behind it. Wispy white clouds that could be blowing locks of an old man’s hair form and reform across the mountain’s brow.
Last night, Erebia sought a deeper cleft in the rocks to escape the coming cold. But all through this end-of-summer nocturne, the snow fell and the boulders froze. All the creatures of the mountain shivered, departed, or perished as its stone-built face took on a rimy glaze. Fingers of wind with sharp nails picked through the rocks to send martens do
wn the slope into the forest and their prey into still deeper holes. The fingers found the big rock spiders and squeezed the life out of them. They searched out the last green sedges and wrung them brown.
Now, in the frosty dawn, the fluids jell in Erebia’s body. Ice crystals congeal in his cells. Circulation ceases, and a butterfly dies.
Nearby, a tiny caterpillar, cowled in a sedge beneath the insulating snow, preserves the promise of another spring on Magdalena Mountain.
Those frigid fingers find Erebia’s tattered husk, teasing it out from where it rests in its crevice. And on the open wind, the black butterfly sails across the rocks one more time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I must thank a number of people for their help and faithful support for this book over the years. The Devers of Meeker Park Lodge; the Ray and Jan Chu family, Mary Jane Foley, the Ron and Murt Cisar family, Ron Wahl, and many other Colorado Summiteers; the Young Colorado Feminist Lepidopterists’ League (Jan and Amy Chu, Carol Bylsma and daughters Lauri and Lynelle, Josie Quick, Rusty and Molly Muller); Audrey and Jim Benedict, Gerald Hilchie, Charles Slater; Terry Chester, Francie Chew, Paul Ehrlich, and everyone at RMBL and Yale OML; and especially the late F. Martin Brown, Charles Remington, and Karölis Bagdonas, and all of the BFC. Larry Gall and Debra Piot provided critical assistance in the C. L. Remington Archives at Yale University, establishing a key date for a meeting with Nabokov. Andy Warren showed me Nabokov’s Maggies in the Cornell University Collection, and Naomi Pierce in the MCZ at Harvard University.
Generous writing grant support was provided by the Raymond Chu Family Foundation. JoAnne Heron brought Magdalena back from the Wind River Range and indulged my early obsession. Sally Anne Hughes took my Saturday morning watering shift in the Yale greenhouses so I could begin the book, and Thea Linnaea Pyle saw it through many drafts. For helpful readings of earlier versions I am grateful to Harry Foster, Eve Prior, Donna K. Wright, Fayette Krause, Jan Chu, Mary Jane Foley, Boyce Drummond, David Branch, Ron Cisar, Susan Kafer, Howard Whetstone Pyle, Pat Miller, and members of my writing group: Jenelle Varila, Lorne Wirkkala, John Indermark, Pat Thomas, Susan Holway, and Brian Harrison. Jane Elder Wulff, Neil Johannsen, Mathew Tekulsky, and Peter Stekel offered valuable fellow-writers’ counsel throughout.
Very large thanks to my wonderfully encouraging literary agent, Laura Blake Peterson; Patrick Thomas; Jack Shoemaker; and especially Harry Kirchner and Florence Sage, all of whose critical readings were essential to the final form. And thanks to Jordan Koluch, Jennifer Alton, Kelly Winton, Megan Fishmann, Alisha Gorder, Kathleen Boland, Miyako Singer, and everyone else at Counterpoint Press who helped to make the book and bring it into the world.
Bel’s poem from Vladimir Nabokov’s Listen to the Harlequins! is reprinted with permission from Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings, Brian Boyd, Robert Michael Pyle, and Dmitri Nabokov, eds. (Beacon Press, 2000). The Magdalena mating sequence previously appeared in Walking the High Ridge: Life as Field Trip (Milkweed Editions) and in American Butterflies. The image of Erebia magdalena that appears on the title page and elsewhere came from William Henry Edwards’s grand work, The Butterflies of North America [with colored drawings and descriptions], (Boston & New York; Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1888). I thank John V. Calhoun and Jonathan P. Pelham for providing me with this striking image for use here, and for their splendid butterfly scholarship, which has informed, inspired, and excited me for many years.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Creatures, People, and Places
Magdalena Mountain is a real place, with a different name. The Magdalena alpine (Erebia magdalena) and all the other animals and plants mentioned in these pages are real species, and I have endeavored to depict them as accurately as I can. The insect order Grylloblattodea (ice crawlers) has been shifted south of the Red Desert biogeographical barrier in southern Wyoming, but it does co-occur with Erebia magdalena in Alberta. The particular butterfly I’ve named Erebia is an imaginary individual of E. magdalena, but nothing in his experience should be other than plausible, given what we know of his kind. The Theano alpine’s name has been changed to Erebia pawloskii in North America, but I’ve used the old name E. theano, as it is what October Carson would have known. Certain other places and landforms are based on actual locations, but their names have been changed if I have made up much about them.
When historical figures appear under their own names, such as Evelyn Hutchinson, F. M. Brown, Enos Mills, and Vladimir Nabokov, I have tried to be true to them and their actual activities in the book’s arena of action. Most players are either wholly de novo characters (including Professor Griffin and Attalus) or composites loosely based on real people. Their names are different, and I have felt no compulsion to treat their models accurately, only kindly.
Vladimir Nabokov’s connections to the place and the butterfly and to a couple of the characters (or their inspirations) are absolutely truthful; only a detail or two have been adumbrated by way of fill-in flash. However, during earlier drafts of the book I was unaware of Nabokov’s personal attachment to the vicinity of Magdalena Mountain, and of his poem-within-a-novel about Erebia magdalena: I discovered these parallel details only while coediting and annotating Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (Beacon Press, 2000) with Brian Boyd and Dmitri Nabokov: a truly stunning case of convergent evolution.
ROBERT MICHAEL PYLE grew up and learned his butterflies in Colorado, where he fell in love with the Magdalena alpine and its high-country habitat. He took his PhD in butterfly ecology at Yale University, worked as a conservation biologist in Papua New Guinea, Oregon, and Cambridge, and has written full-time for many years. His twenty-two books include Wintergreen (John Burroughs Medal), Where Bigfoot Walks (Guggenheim Fellowship), and Sky Time in Gray’s River (National Outdoor Book Award). He lives in rural southwest Washington State and still studies butterflies.
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