♪ This one comes with a song, “Butterfly Lane.” Linked at the end. ♪
We were finishing a business meeting at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History; Jonah was our host when he asked if we had a few more minutes. We checked our watches, the way you do when you are trying to look responsible, and said sure, what’s up. Would you like to see the butterflies, he said. We said yes before he finished the sentence. He already had the look of someone who knows the thing he is about to show you is going to make the rest of the day irrelevant.
On the way, he opened a door we would have walked past a hundred times without noticing, no sign on it, and took us down a hallway that was not part of any tour. He stopped us at a pane of glass we did not know was there. On the other side, a tech was unboxing a shipment of chrysalises just in from Costa Rica, lined up like cargo, each one a butterfly that had not happened yet. It is not the kind of thing you think about when you buy a ticket. Somebody has to receive the shipment
The sound first
The exhibit is called Butterflies Alive, though everyone just calls it the pavilion. The permanent structure has its own name too, the Sprague Butterfly Pavilion, built in 2018, and it turns out it was nominated for Best Butterfly Garden in USA Today’s 10Best awards last year. I did not know that until I went looking. What caught me off guard was the sound. Step into that netted enclosure at the edge of the museum grounds and you hear it right away, a thousand sets of wings moving at once, quiet but never actually silent. I did not expect that. They call the path through it a lazy river, which is exactly right. You move with the current, families and children drifting from one section to the next, and every few minutes a chime sounds to mark the transition. The chime is not for atmosphere. It is the signal to check yourself before you leave, to make sure nothing has decided to come with you.
A tail, apparently
We were somewhere in the middle of the river when Jim said, quietly, that I had a tail. I turned to look and could not see it, which is the nature of tails, and there was only so far I could twist without doing something ridiculous. Jim took a picture instead and turned his phone around so I could see. An owl butterfly had landed on the tail of my shirt, right at my waist, and it had been there long enough that it had apparently made a decision. I did not reach back to check for myself. The last thing I wanted was to hurt it. It was not resting. It had chosen. The wings were open and still, the eyespots looking out at the room with the calm authority of something that does not worry about meetings or agendas
I did not try to stay still. I just kept walking, aware the whole time that I was carrying a passenger, something that had made its own decision about where it wanted to be. People gathered the way people do around small beautiful things. Someone took photographs. The butterfly stayed through all of it, through the attention and the murmuring and the phones, apparently unbothered by any of it, and it held on for nearly the whole walk.
There is a specific kind of stillness that comes over you when something wild has decided you are safe. It is not the stillness of standing frozen. It is the stillness of being momentarily reclassified.
Jim’s turn
Jim got tagged too. He sat down for a second on a bench along the river and a giant swallowtail landed on his leg, wings folded up in that yellow and black checkerboard they wear. He did not want to move, and as far as I could tell he did not, not until it decided on its own to leave. Both of us walked out of that pavilion having been chosen for something, whatever that something was
The blue morphos never stopped moving, which is how they survive, that impossible blue coming from structure-bending light rather than pigment, never sitting still long enough to photograph. I stopped trying and just watched, which is what you are supposed to do anyway.
Butterfly Lane
On the way out, I mentioned to Jonah that the street behind our house, probably three miles from where we were standing, is called Butterfly Lane. He knew it, of course. I have lived in Santa Barbara fifty-four years now, and I found that name decades before I ever lived near it, back when it still sounded like a rumor, and it took years to understand it was not one. It is named for the migration that used to happen there every year, tens of thousands of monarchs arriving in the eucalyptus groves to overwinter. In the twenty years we have lived in Montecito we have walked that street more times than I can count, down to Butterfly Beach and back, a stretch of sand that stays mostly local because you have to already know it is there, eucalyptus towering on both sides the whole way, and I still close my eyes sometimes and try to see what it looked like when those trees were actually dripping with them. The numbers now are a fraction of what they were. I already knew that. Days like this one just make it heavier.
A hundred monarchs
About ten years ago, a friend handed us a chrysalis, the kind of thing that sends you straight back to sixth-grade science class, and we watched it through to the end. We loved it enough that within a few years we had a garden full of milkweed and were doing it on purpose, caterpillar to chrysalis to wing, launching them off our own back porch into their six weeks of life. We probably helped a hundred of them make that trip. Every stage of it felt like a small magic trick performed slowly enough that you could see how it worked. Now, when we are out somewhere in town and one drifts past, usually while everyone else keeps walking, we stop. We do not say much. We just watch it, then look at each other, both of us back on that porch for a second before it flies off.
Checking for hitchhikers
The chime sounded before the exit, the reminder to check. A volunteer was waiting there with a feather duster and had us spin around slowly while she checked us for hitchhikers, working the duster along our shoulders and sleeves like she had done it a thousand times, because she had. There is also a large mirror so you can inspect yourself, and an exhaust fan above the door that discourages anything from slipping through regardless. I checked my shirttail in the mirror. The owl butterfly was already gone, sometime between the chime and the mirror, departed without ceremony back into the warm air of the pavilion. We walked out with the kind of smiles you cannot manufacture, and the agenda from earlier was already ancient history. I said it then and still mean it: every meeting should end this way, a little recreation and a little education bolted onto the back end. But the afternoon had already been reclassified, and my waist still carries a kind of memory that is hard to explain to anyone who was not there.
♪ Listen to “Butterfly Lane”: suno.com/s/9TA3jLYk6DbQj9sI ♪
