12
Magdalena Mountain melts. At least its white carapace melts and slides away down avalanche chutes, sublimates into the alpine sky, or is sucked into stony rivulets by the thirsty warmth of spring. Blackened mosses along those rills regain their green as the running snowmelt fills their sponges and swells their thalli. The first of the flowers burst out—marsh marigolds in the wet edges, glacier lilies beneath the shrinking snowloads, pale mauve pasqueflowers down where the limber pines wrestle with the rocks in perpetual border dispute over timberline.
These early floral offerings are not without their croppers, for the diminishing cold grows too weak to hold pikas in their places. The gray harelets, a little less round than last autumn, pop out and eagerly see to the pruning of the early-spring vegetation. This is turning out to be a wet and lush year, with plenty of runoff and succulent regrowth, so no desperate pika or poor skinny coyote grazes the strawlike clump of grass at the edge of the rockslide where Erebia is coming back to life. About the size of an apostrophe, he shares that character’s round black head, a feature that sets him apart from the young of the other three species of Colorado alpines. The rest of his body is colored pale flesh with purplish stripes. A greenish cast will overtake it as the grass’s chlorophyll passes down the translucent tube of his hungry gut.
Activity accelerates on the scree, where so recently the only movement was white crystals falling or blocks of them breaking away. Now screaming flocks of silver-gray, black, and white birds—Clark’s nutcrackers—swoop from one patch of pines to the next. Related ravens too pass upslope and over the rocks, kronking, their great black shapes foreshadowing the smaller ones that will mime their flight after another moon’s circle. When the ravens cross overhead, pikas squeak eek! and dive for the safety of their crevices. When any big shadow could as well be a raptor as a corvid, why take chances?
Marmots at last shake off their somnolence and begin to bask on reflective slabs of granite. Soon their whistles will be heard, an academy of traffic cops shrilling contradictory commands from every major intersection on the mountain.
Erebia remains insensitive to all these goings-on. Only the rising, falling temperature rules his day, along with the intensity of the sunshine, such that he can seek the shelter of the grassroots when nightfall threatens late frosts. The duration, too, of the sun, for the gathering daylength quickens his hormones even as the rising sun thaws his muscles. Subject to desiccation at the drop of a dry grass blade, Erebia constantly seeks the dampest patch of turf, often resting on a spongy clump of moss or moss campion to maintain his water balance.
Now Erebia’s sliver of a larva faces many dangers. Ground beetles, spiders, woodlice, ants, and many other creeping predators prowl the sparse vegetation, ready to catch and consume his tiny packet of protein. Parasitic wasps and flies probe his haunts. But the greatest threat comes from the presence or absence of moisture: too much means mold; too little, death by crisping. Any fool who has tried to rear mountain ringlets and graylings knows this. But Erebia finds his needs, is not himself found, and so he grazes and grows.
Then, not many days after spring breaks out on Magdalena Mountain’s southeast flank, at eleven thousand feet, Erebia reaches the point when his skin can stretch no more. Taut, sleek, and bulging, it splits, and along the new suture a softer, deeper green skin shows through. Like any dry seed erupting, cotyledon unfurling, atom splitting, the new form lunges into the come-what-may with vigor. This is Erebia’s first molt of five—a shedding, a rebirthing that some of his siblings already experienced last fall, before their winter’s diapause. Now, out comes a more supple and pliant caterpillar, bigger, the size of a shaved pencil point, his head still black but his tube suit gray-green and darker striped.
Erebia eats more, no longer restricted to the baby food of the softest blades, and so grows faster. He has it in him to go either way: if heavy weather or an early snowfall should cut short the season, he can reenter that state of winter grace and pass a second season of chill. After all, many alpines are routinely biennial, taking two full years to mature. But, for the robust black Erebia magdalena, just one year usually suffices. So this particular wee one feeds on, and feeds, and feeds some more.
As he grows, Erebia’s range of potential predators only broadens. Rockslide rodents, passing bands of rosy finches, nesting pipits patrolling their territories, any of these and many more would readily snap up this black-tipped wormlet for an iota of their day’s nutrition. Many of his brothers and sisters become such bites. But this one has the luck with him, and four more molts will follow in their time, each one delivering a larger, more succulent animal.
Nearing the summer solstice, Erebia slips into his final instar. Now he would be readily recognized for what he is—no tiny worm of indeterminate nature, but an actual caterpillar, precedent to butterfly or moth. A handsome animal he is as a mature larva, spring-green, lined and diagonally slashed with white. Now nearly an inch and a half long, he bends the grass blades over when he climbs them, like a child on a small aspen. His shape is that of a streamlined dirigible, tapering toward twin tails at the stern, thickening to that shiny, still-black head capsule: a black helmet to keep his brain ganglion warm, allowing longer feeding, greater alertness, faster development. That jet headpiece shines in the undeflected high-country sun.
Erebia’s striped pattern and grassy coloration render him cryptic among the tussocks, confounding predators that by now would find him a more than worthwhile morsel. So refined is this crypsis that the majority of larvae reaching this stage (a small portion of those hatched last summer) will now survive to pupate. Because by now, color-sighted birds are the chief threat rather than creeping, tapping invertebrates. The new, mottled chicks of ptarmigan present a particular peril to Erebia and his like. Their parents eked their way through winter, white on white, stuffing themselves on willow buds before bundling under the snow for the night. But the new hatchlings need protein for rapid growth during the brief season when insects are available, so they work the greening sward like hens and chicks scratching their way across a barnyard. By chance and grace, no pecking ptarmigan or jabbing jay comes across Erebia.
So it is that in the last week of June, a final molt takes place. This time no larger, greener caterpillar comes out. First, Erebia goes walkabout for many yards—a risky, exposed procession, but one almost every caterpillar undertakes—negotiating sedge and stone, exposed and parching bare spots, and soaking mountain moss. Under and over the lichened rocks he wanders, across the pygmy savanna of alpine sedges and forget-me-nots. Finally he winds his way into a random wickerwork of last year’s grasses, where he turns around, catlike, several times, and settles into the scrape. Then his skin splits one last time, he wriggles out of his old bodysuit and emerges as a grublike thing, dark viscous green, like a blob of crude oil in color and shine.
Even before the last used skin fell away, the body it held began to dissolve within. Now the prepupa quickly hardens on the outside into a black, sarcophagus-like case—but hardly that, since the insides are yet quick. These contents soften and fall apart, and their tissues break down almost entirely. A deer mouse biting into the fresh pupa would find no caterpillar, nor butterfly, but a portion of puslike soup devoid of apparent form. Nor does the pupal shell, embossed as it is with butterfly features, damasked with the shapes of wings, legs, tongue, antennae, and eyes, serve as a cast to mold the muddled substance within, to give it the form into which tissues may take shape, as the ancients concluded. No waxen die from some creator’s hand, the chrysalis is a pod of change in which Pan works and plays. His tools are a set of imaginal disks, bundles of cells that direct the reassembly of materials into the adult hard and soft parts that make up a butterfly. Genes direct the scene, and enzymes and hormones carry it to completion.
Thus programmed, the new features come together from the inchoate brew and fill out into the waiting, shaped receptacle of the chrysalis shell. The engraved case then receives the form of th
e insect rather than tooling it from wet prepupal clay. And in this way, the finer details still obscure and of no moment whatever to Erebia, the black animal that is the Magdalena alpine comes into its improbable adult existence.
A day comes, just two weeks after pupation, when the finished butterfly presses to be released. His casket goes glassy black. Then it bursts open, dehiscing along the dotted lines of its seams, revealing that this was no coffin, but a birthing chamber. It is easy to see why the Arapaho of these summer peaks called the butterfly chrysalis an egg, for surely the pupa is to a butterfly what the egg is to a bird. The shell cracks and falls back, transparent. The blackness, which has deepened from soot to sable, belongs to the creature within rather than to its wrappers. That heavy pellet, the pupa, which seemed so solid as it lay ripening in the summer sun, now lies insubstantial as a November husk long since robbed of its kernel by mouse or maggot. Erebia steps out.
Crawling up a spike of grass, clinging to an overarching stone, Erebia hangs wet and rumpled and limp. But not for long. His swollen abdomen begins pumping. The wings expand slowly, erectile, as the sun-warmed hemolymph courses into their veins. They stiffen like the struts of a kite. Gradually the wings’ oval shape comes clear as the body shrinks to normal proportions. For some hours the wings are as soft as silk and just as delicate. This is a dangerous time, for a fall or a scrape could crush them or prevent their proper expansion. But all goes well. Erebia shimmers with moisture for a few minutes before the droplets evaporate on the dry alpine air, and it continues to glisten with a violet-green sheen imparted by a layer of prismatic scales that will soon fall away.
And beneath the iridescence, black: a blackness so deep that it tells the entire tale of the long night of pupation at a glance, so thick that it hints, if you can see, at the depth of the void that provident evolution has filled with these wings and the body they will carry on high. Black-panther black, black-velvet black, far blacker than starlit-night black, but not as black as a hardrock hole because there is a luminosity to it also.
Such a blackness bears the Magdalena alpine.
This new-to-the-world Erebia magdalena creeps onto a patch of black lichen, warmer than the surrounding sugar-stone granite, and tilts his now-dry wings down against the surface, together. A constant cool breeze tries to chill all tissues, but the sun warms them faster. Soon his flight muscles reach the temperature necessary to work, to lift that black package off the rocks and set it sailing into thin air.
Erebia has passed the survival gauntlet of his profound metamorphosis. He has endured the long sentence of the ground-borne and the parole of the pupa. Now a butterfly, this creature flies free across the mountain’s face for the first time.
13
The shaggy mat of yellow grass outside the nursing home, studded on warm days with forlorn people and cigarette butts, began to turn muddy green. Spring came fast to Denver, announcing itself with days that began blue, then turned brown by rush hour. Mary sat outside for as long as she was allowed, sometimes even walked to a nearby pocket park. Still she had no friends, no champion, no one who moved her to speak. The nurses had stopped trying, believing that her one lucid outburst had been an aberration.
Still the meds came each morning and night, leaving her too muddy-minded to read or to ponder. But each late afternoon, when the drugs began to wear off and the ozone air took on a mellow glow and a balmy feel, Mary came clear of mind. Then she would walk around to the vacant lot behind the squat white brick building. From there she could watch the little green things and see just a shoulder of Mount Evans between a distant shiny skyscraper and the redbrick Full Gospel Mount Pisgah Pentecostal Church. That glimpse of the Rockies sometimes made her soar, sometimes despair, always made her high, pale cheeks wet with tears of longing.
Mary felt sick every time the aide called her back in for dinner. To take food among all these unfortunates who drooled and looked through her, to face the evening ahead that would be filled with moans, shouts, and gurgled laughter against incessant radio and television babel and finally the lights-out of a forced pill and a flicked switch, it made her desperate, made her weep inside. As spring drew into summer, Mary knew that something had to happen soon or she would make it happen. Those clear times in the afternoon became her mental open space, where plans began to grow. She found whole scenarios forming themselves, but only during that hour of the day. More and more those thoughts inclined toward suicide.
The time came when the only obstacle seemed to be how to do it with as little chance of failing as possible. Mary knew nothing of killing. One day, another resident, who had been leering at Mary for weeks, rubbing himself and gesturing until the nurses had to remove him, jumped Mary in the laundry exchange. She was stronger, and help was nearby, so she escaped with bruises. The man was transferred, but the incident brought her despair to a head. By now she had reclaimed enough self-presence, yet not lost enough self-respect, to know that this existence was impossible; the injustice, intolerable. No matter the meds, acceptance would never, thank God, be hers.
So the next day when John Everson, the director, attempted to soothe and question her about the assault, she spoke.
“Are you okay, Mary?”
“Not hurt. But hardly okay. No business being here.”
“No, but how good to hear you speak! Mary, where do you have business being?”
“Don’t know. Yet. Just, not here. I’m not. Like them.”
“No one is like anyone else here, Mary . . . except that all our clients need help.”
Mary turned her face down and mumbled something.
“I beg your pardon?” asked Everson, a youngish man who’d been in VISTA before grad school and still clung to tatters of the ideals he’d gone in with.
“I said, that’s so, but doesn’t feel like help to me.”
He could see that her intelligence was intact, and he considered calling the psychiatrist to ask whether he would agree to release Mary. But where to? First he asked, “Do you know who you are yet, beyond just ‘Mary’?” And when she answered, his face clouded. “You’d better get to lunch, Mary,” he said. “We’ll talk again soon. I’m glad you weren’t hurt. That poor fellow is in Fort Logan now, and he won’t be bothering you anymore.” As he paused outside the door, Mary heard him on the phone with the doctor.
“I almost thought she was better, Mitchell. That’s right—speaking and cogent, bright, more or less logical. Well, then she blew it. She told me she was . . . yes, that’s right . . . oh, you’ve already heard that from the nurse? Yes, I know she talked a bit a while back, before her seizure up in the mountains . . . Well anyway, she seems as deluded as half the people here, staff excluded, by the way. Can you imagine how long she’d last out on the streets, believing what she does and telling people about it, pretty woman like her? No, not violent, and I don’t think schizophrenic. Still, we’d better keep a watch on her . . . right, and that was a close call. A rape or a suicide before the new facilities grant review is all we’d need. All right, goodbye, Mitchell.”
Mary crumbled. They really think I’m mad, she thought. Here is best? God, no, can’t be, can’t stay here . . . can’t! Yet she knew the director might be right about her chances on the streets were she to run off. Everything was still too hazy: she had no idea where to seek real help, no idea of family, friends, place, or purpose, only a firm but filmy sense of identity, and that she must get to the mountains. Or (her train of thought always ran this way, like a toy locomotive on a slow track that comes around and around) failing that, she must end her life. After all, she thought before the evening pill took over, she’d died before. Maybe in order to get to the mountains, she’d have to go around again.
For several days Mary skipped her outing. She just lay on her bed, concentrating on nothingness, hoping that might help her achieve it. But she was too strong, and they made her eat; she’d live forever this way. Eventually her sloth made her stiff. She realized that to kill herself, she’d have t
o have strength, so she lumbered outside again. Feeling one hundred years old, she faced the fading day, paced the weedy yard a few times, then crumpled into the old dinette chair that someone had carried outside and no one had bothered to bring back in. All the others sat out front where they could watch the buses, the cars, and the pimps parading into the bar down the block. No one else sat out by the vacant lot, or even went there much, so she was startled when a voice tried on a hopeful, gentle “Hi.”
Mary twirled to face the speaker and raised her hands, then dropped them. She recognized the tall, gangly young man named Howard. He was articulate, and she’d first wondered if he worked there, but the nurses’ demeanor showed that he was another resident. Howard walked downtown early most days for coffee and came back after dinner, so she seldom saw him. She’d overheard that he liked to hang out at either a bar or a strip joint where the staff looked after him and gave him small jobs to do for a dollar or two. She wondered why he was here at all. “Hello,” she returned, the first normal greeting she’d exchanged in nearly a year.
“Mind if I sit by you?” Howard asked, motioning at the alleyway beside her chair, overhung by pigweed.
“It’s okay,” she said. She noticed that his hand had a palsy, and when he sat, she saw a fearsome scar across his forehead.
“I’m Howard,” he said.
“I’m Mary.”
“I know.” His voice held a deep quaver. “Well, hello, Mary!” He closed his nice, smiling lips over stained false teeth, adjusted his glasses, and lit a cigarette. Then he offered her one, which she declined with a shake of her ratty hair. “What are you in for?” he asked.
“They say I was in a car wreck up in the mountains. Hurt my head, supposedly.”
“Oh, me too!” said Howard. “But up in Oregon. Benny fell asleep, and we hit a cattle truck head-on. Benny and Stan were killed. Well, so was I, but I came back. They call it frontal lobe damage.”
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