Chasing Monarchs by Robert Michael Pyle & Lincoln P. Brower

Author:Robert Michael Pyle & Lincoln P. Brower
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

TEN

BONNEVILLE

WHEN I HAD IMAGINED roaming the basins and ranges, I’d pictured dramatic and lonely landscapes scratched with rattlesnake draws, rough bivouacs in shad-scale thickets, coyotes calling to stars undimmed by human lights. Yet here I was again, hunkered in my car in a noisy, lit-up freeway rest area. I had my reasons, and they would turn out to be remarkably good ones.

From Adobe Pass I had dropped down into Elko, Nevada. I took a walk and donated eight bits to bandits that made electronic beeps instead of satisfying clunks and didn’t even have cherries. On some Nevada crossings, that much invested has won me a meal and a tank of gas. No such luck this time. I dowsed some local ale and a decent bite out of the neon streets, and over the second pint, it was time to decide: turn west along the Humboldt River to where it sinks into the playas of Ancient Lake Lahontan, then presumably up Donner Pass and down to the coast? Or continue southward?

Well, dammit, I hadn’t seen a single southwesterer for days. Those butterflies had been heading southeast as they rose off the Snake Plain. So I headed out of town east on the interstate to intersect their course. Putting Nevada quickly behind me, I passed through the border town of Wendover, where thousands of trucks were lined up at the casinos, whose billboard promised “17 acres of parking.” All those truckers and gamblers, all the night riders across the endless alkali strip of I-80, all looking for luck . . . and I, alone in the entire West, had the temerity, the presumption, and the sheer luck to be following monarch butterflies. I also had a good tip.

Once I’d settled into the freeway rest area on the Bonneville Salt Flats that night, I leaned back, turned on the overhead, and reread the quotation by Edwin Way Teale that had drawn me there. It was from Autumn Across America:

Before us now the Brown Mountains of the Pilot Range rose higher at the western edge of the desert. But we were still well out on this dead, flat, shimmering land when we encountered one of the most amazing sights of our travels.

Three monarch butterflies drifted by, then two more appeared in sight — five monarchs winging their way across the desert on their long migration south. More than fifty barren miles of salt and alkali lay between them and the southern boundary of this desolate, plantless waste. How, amid heat wave and mirage and blinding glare, could these insect voyagers find their way? They were not using landmarks, for there were no landmarks to use. All was one white, level, featureless plain. They were not following the terrain — the lay of the land, as in a river valley — for the desert stretched before them to the horizon as level as the sea. How were they orienting themselves?

Although my two vanishing bearings from yesterday’s monarchs pointed here, speaking strictly statistically, my chances of duplicating Ed and Nellie’s lucky sighting seemed vanishingly small.

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