Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (3 page)

I began to wonder just how far up we were going, so I asked a nearby
vaquero
accompanying us on horseback, “How much longer do we have to ride?”

“Two,” he said, making a peace sign.

“Two minutes?” I asked, hopefully.

“Two hours,” he replied, amused.

I resolved not to ask any more questions I didn’t really want to know the answer to.

Somehow, Flor and I began to take the lead, but it wasn’t long before we reached a point in the path where Flor refused to climb. I looked up and saw a stretch of unearthed stone so precipitous that the trail took on a switchback pattern, as if we were being asked to crawl up a downhill ski slope.

Paco was riding behind me. “
Ándale!
” I heard him shout.

“
Ándale
,” I said to Flor, and she began to move.

I leaned forward until my body was pressed against the hard horn of my saddle. The trail was so coarse, so difficult to negotiate, that Flor was starting to sweat. I could see the hair on her neck beginning to clump. To our right was an endless green chasm. My life and Flor’s were intertwined. If I had been nervous before, I was absolutely fearful now.

“Everything is okay,” I told Flor softly, “
Todo está bien
.”

I repeated this over and over to placate her, to placate myself.

Flor pushed on and it was all I could do to hold tight. The path was narrowing. My shoes scraped against stone and tree trunks. I was holding the back of my saddle so tightly it was digging into my skin. I could hear horses clambering behind me, but I could not turn.

“
Todo está bien. Todo está bien
.” I said it until everything really was.

Finally, we reached the top of Cerro Pelón. The sun was coming out as I dismounted Flor. When I first saw the butterflies, I saw more than a dozen at once, and my enthusiasm grew with their numbers. It took a few minutes to realize the extent of what I was witnessing. To see one hundred butterflies against a blue sky was fantastic. Seeing one million swerving and soaring above me, realizing there were more in the trees waiting for the right moment to open their wings, felt like nothing short of a miracle.

Paco called out and instructed me to cup my hands behind my ears. He said, “
Escuché
.” Listen. And, as we stood there, I could hear the butterflies. Their wings against the air sounded like a light rainstorm falling on verdant forest. All of those paper-thin wings had traveled as many or more miles as we had, but I was still surprised to see that some of them were a bit worse for wear. They looked like faded flags, tattered and torn after a battle. Monarchs are valued for their physical beauty, but what is most beautiful about them is that they are survivors.

Only three colonized trees were visible from where we dismounted, though there were more butterflies resting in the understory. I was standing under a tree filled with monarchs when a cloud passed to reveal more sunlight. Bunches of butterflies above me began to let go of the branches they’d been desperately clinging to and poured into the sky; they brushed against my face and fell into my hair. The streams of cascading monarchs made the trees’ branches look like ever-expanding arms reaching down to embrace me.

I was filled with an inexplicable surge of energy that made me want to laugh and cry at the same time. The butterflies were live orange confetti setting the sky ablaze. They were the beauty that cultures try to capture in stained glass windows, the elation people seek in religion.

They were an embodiment of hope.

The ancient Greek word for butterfly is
psyche
-
, the same word for soul. The Greeks believed butterflies were souls seeking reincarnation. All over the world butterflies have held an inexplicable amount of significance for diverse cultures. In Mexico, the widely observed Day of the Dead holiday has its roots in indigenous mythology. The P’urhépecha, also known as the Tarascan, believe that the first two days of November are a special time of year when their deceased loved ones are able to visit them, possibly in the form of monarch butterflies.

Historically, Celts believed women became pregnant by swallowing the souls of butterflies. Chinese culture indicates that butterflies are the joining of two souls, their wings halves of a sacred whole. And every contemporary American college student with a butterfly tattooed on her belly, ankle, or shoulder must have a different explanation for why she was drawn to the image.

In this information age, the monarchs’ mystique is part of their appeal.

Despite recent advances that have led scientists to believe the sun plays a role in assisting the butterflies’ navigation, it is unknown how the fragile-winged insects make the many decisions necessary to keep them alive as they battle storms and choose their moments of passage in high-stakes situations, such as crossing the Great Lakes. It is also a mystery as to how they find their way back to the very specific spots where they gather in Mexico’s mountains in concentrations of millions per acre.

No single butterfly ever makes the round-trip from Mexico to the northernmost reaches of North America. Most of the males die near their ancestral breeding grounds, but female monarchs move north in the spring. There, they lay their eggs. Each subsequent, short-lived generation moves a little farther up the continent along corridors of wildflowers.

In early fall, the chosen generation reliably starts the migration cycle anew.

Wandering Cerro Pelón, I found Dan lying on a patch of open ground, playfully calling out for the monarchs to cover him. Judy was watching her grown son with a satisfied smile on her face. “God gives us more than we even know to ask for,” she said.

Though I was raised a Sunday-school-going Lutheran, I usually shirked away when people started talking about God. I always imagined there were political, social, or moral motives at play rather than spiritual ones. Also, coming from North Carolina—the Bible Belt state where I was born, raised, and still lived—I was hesitant to use the word “God” because people from my part of the country often used it interchangeably with Jesus. And—while I thought the cultural manifestations of his handsome, bearded face brought a lot of people peace—I didn’t think it was necessary to go through Jesus, or for that matter, anyone, to get to divinity.

I’d called myself spiritual but not religious since I was twelve years old. Yet, as I stood on that mountaintop at twenty-nine, I still didn’t have a good grip on what that meant. But in the presence of open-hearted Judy, in that extraordinary place, I was actually starting to suspect that I had been limiting my way of thinking about the word “god.”

Mythology mastermind Joseph Campbell wrote: “God is not supposed to refer to a personality . . . God is simply our own notion of something that is symbolic of transcendence and mystery . . . We are particles of that mystery, that timeless, endless, everlasting mystery which pours forth from the abyss into the forms of the world.”

That, I could get behind.

It wasn’t social or political. It was not a religious affiliation. But it was something.

I did not turn from Judy, and she had nothing more to say. Together, we stared into the day’s abundance, appreciating the tangible rewards of our resilient, monarch-focused faith.

Dan, whose students were never far from mind, finally stood up and said, “I saw a butterfly with a hole in its wing just like Holey’s, but, I mean, I don’t really think it was Holey.”

“You never know,” I said. “It’s pretty amazing that any butterfly with a hole in its wing could make it down here.”

“I guess you’re right. I took a picture. I’m going to show my kids. They’ll believe it’s him,” Dan said, shaking his head, amazed. “Think of how many days we take for granted in our lives, but this is one day we will never forget. We will never be able to take this for granted.”

The hours we spent with the butterflies passed quickly. Just before we left, I looked down and noticed the monarchs were casting shadows on the earth. They were turning the mountaintop into an inverted carousel night-light, their shadows moving slowly across the land.

Overlooking the surreal scene, I began to wonder how something this marvelous could take place year after year without millions of people clustering in these mountains along with the butterflies. I made a mental note to research nature’s most spectacular shows, questioning:
If I’d never heard of this phenomenon, grand as it was, what else was I missing?

When we departed, there were still millions of butterflies overhead. I opened my hand as if to touch the gliding creatures, even though I could have reached them no more than a star. There were so many monarchs at the top of Cerro Pelón that, when we began our descent down the mountain’s trails, the butterflies seemed to chase us as we left, horse by horse. They followed along in the air to our right, gliding over the abyss I feared.

One of the guides, knowing my trepidation about horseback riding, looked at me, glanced at Flor, and then said, “It’s amazing what we can do when we have to, isn’t it?”

But when we hit our first acutely steep stretch of trail, I started to clench up. I called out to my fellow travelers, “I can’t do this. I couldn’t have made it up without my horse, but I think I’m going to have to walk down.”

From behind me a voice called out, “You can do it. Just take a few deep breaths and get comfortable. Your horse knows what to do.”

I took a deep breath. I considered how much farther I’d get if I had faith in my horse, just as monarchs have faith in the invisible breezes that carry them across the continent.

Flor struggled to find her footing on the rocky path. I wanted to scream out when she raised her head to express her own uncertainty, but I didn’t. Instead, I released my grip on the saddle and placed a hand on her wiry mane. I leaned in to whisper, “
Gracias
.” And together, we stumbled forward, into the unknown—which, for me, turned out to be motherhood.

 • • • 

I’m now nearly thirty-two years old. I’ve traveled, explored, adventured. I’ve built a house, married a husband, had a baby. I’ve done it all, happily, in that order. None of it felt forced; all of it was welcomed and celebrated. But there is an untraditional glitch in my very blessed, traditional trajectory. I can’t get the travel, explore, adventure part off my mind.

Those things weren’t just part of my youth; they are part of me.

But all the years of my life I’ve been told that motherhood means I’m finished with hard-core, challenge-myself-to-the-hilt adventuring. I’m married with a child. That’s the adventure. Those roles will do all the challenging I need. Sure, there will be worthwhile things ahead of me, but, really, I’m in for the winter, and by winter I mean the season of discontent that will last the rest of my life. It’s only natural to allow myself to become a little embittered now that my familial roles don’t allow for the all-encompassment of my personal pipe dreams.

For a split second, I bought into this. But then I remembered how a friend once shared with me the fallout from her mother telling her, over and over again, about the sacrifices she’d made to have children. She’d reiterated them like tiny mantras, stories of personal loss offered as proof of love for her daughter. But the comments always made my friend think to herself:
Wow, she probably shouldn’t have had children
.

Parenting is about sacrifice, that is for certain, but does being a good mother mean devoting every drop of my being to my child, or does it mean being true to my spirit in a way that illustrates that there is more than one way to live a good life? Motherhood affects everything, but does it have to change everything about who I am and what I choose to pursue?

Archer and I are forming a relationship word by word, day by day. And it seems like embarking on a pilgrimage might just be a way for me to do my part in our partnership. I give to my son of myself, as I hope he will someday choose to give to me, but he is his own being. I am my own being. And I fight the idea that my life is no longer my own. I have to think like this because, as Archer grows, it will be increasingly true. I have given birth to a person with free will and my success as a mother, my personal gauge of success, will be how far, how brazenly, he ventures into the world—coming back to me as I will always return to him.

But since his birth, my world has collapsed into a series of rooms with central heat and a supplemental woodstove. I’ve been living in a black hole, feeling guilty that my curiosity—my need to venture afield—isn’t going to go away. The list of must-see natural phenomena I compiled after witnessing the monarch migration seems to read like a map that might lead me back to myself, a way of fortifying the natural-world connection I made in the presence of butterflies.

I need to take a leap of faith. For my sanity. For my marriage. For my son. I want to look back in ten years and think
I can’t believe this is my life
in a good way, a wondrously astounded way, rather than a
woe-is-me
way. I don’t want to wait and wait and subconsciously resent my life or, worst of all, my son—my beautiful, blessed boy. That, perhaps more than any of the
tsk-tsk
looks and comments I am opening myself to from the outside world, is the greatest danger of not embarking on the quest I’ve dreamed up. I am going to pilgrimage to some of the world’s most dazzling phenomena. I don’t know how I’ll make it happen, but I am going to do it.

When Archer suckles one breast and refuses the other during our ritual one morning, I feel a bit rejected and relieved. The next day, when I offer him my milk, he laughs at me as I lie on the bed, offering up my body. He makes the American Sign Language symbol for milk, a grasping motion reminiscent of milking a cow. Archer wants a bottle. He is weaned. I am inexplicably saddened. I will miss his nuzzles, the way he patted my breast when he was hungry.

He has inspired me to marvel at our joined bodies the way I yearn to once again wonder at all the world. But, now that he is eating solid food, it is time for me to start at the top of my phenomena list. I am going to reimagine my life by doing the unimaginable, and I am taking my husband with me. We need more than a vacation. We need rejuvenation, electrification.