Magdalena Mountain

by Robert Michael Pyle

  He didn’t reach Aspen until early evening—too late to hitchhike out—and wondered where he would spend the night. Old masonry, brick, and wooden buildings lined the leafy streets, tucked between slopes of grass, sage, and the eponymous white-barked poplars. But from the looks of the place, there weren’t likely to be any cheap digs, and certainly no place to throw down his sleeping bag. He was dying to get his pack frame off his shoulders. He thought of Professor Winchester, the massive bookcase behind his desk, and felt he was carrying the whole of it on his back right now.

  Just then a Ford Fairlane rolled by, and a voice called, “Is that a butterfly net?” Mead had borrowed one from Freulich for the duration of the summer. He gritted his teeth and girded his loins for derision, but it never came. The driver parked, got out, and extended his hand. He had been a collector as a kid, until the taunts got to him. He was as pleased as punch, he said, to meet someone who had “made it through the gauntlet” and would even walk the posh streets of Aspen with his net on full display. Before he knew it, Mead had a warm dinner and good wine in his belly and a soft condominium pillow under his head. It wouldn’t be the last time that net would help him land on his feet this summer. The next, in fact, was only hours away.

  Glitzy Aspen was Babylon to Gothic’s simplicity and the unadorned hills. Seductive playthings and delectables crowded the shop windows the next morning. Skinny hippie climbers in denim and tie-dye threaded their way among paunchy polyester flatlanders on the crowded sidewalks while the sleek and the chic trolled expensive boutiques. Out of place, Mead suspected that Carson would have felt the same. Then, in a small square, he spotted a prospector and his burro. His heart raced as he approached the hoary gold hunter and saw the short line of tourists waiting to have their pictures taken with him.

  “Good God!” he screeched. “Could it be . . .” Several in the queue turned to see what he was on about, and one smart-ass Texan said, “No, he’s not Santa Claus, son. Just a bum who’s about to jigger me out of five bucks!”

  Mead remembered that Carson’s journal had mentioned rival entrepreneurs. When his turn came, trying to sound casual, he asked, “Been doing this gig for long?”

  “Too damn long, kid. What’s it to ya?”

  “Well, I used to, uh, know someone who did this around here. Did you ever have a colleague named October Carson?” There, he’d spilled it, for what it was worth.

  “Have a what? You mean a partner? Never had one at all. Never even knew nobody named October—what kind of a weird name is that, anyhow? Wait a minute . . . Carson, you say? That mighta been the handle of the bugger I bought my gear off. He made it sound more, how’d he say it—LOO-cru-tiv—than it’s turned out ta be. He wouldn’t sell me his dunkey, talked me inta buyin’ Ginny here from a herd over ta Leadville. That bum never told me how much she ate er how short a ways she’d go between feedbags!”

  “Yes, that’s him!” Mead said. “What did he look like?”

  “Thought he was your friend? Hell, I don’t rightly remember. This was a couple-three summers ago. What’s it matter?” Mead’s eyes told him it did. “Well, hell. Big fella, not in the belly like me, but taller. Beard kinda like mine, but not as gray or as long. Real distant sort—anxious to get the hell outta there, like maybe the gold pan was hot or he was on the run. Hey, are you the law after him? I don’t wanna stool on my colleague!”

  “Do I look like the Man?” Mead asked. “Don’t worry, sir, he’s just a long-lost friend. I’d like to run into him is all . . . again, that is. Any idea where he was headed?”

  “Not a damn notion. But like I say, it’s been a while. Guy could be over in that café or halfway ta China, fer all I know.”

  “Well, thanks anyway,” Mead said, and handed him a scarce five-dollar bill. “Good prospecting!”

  “I ain’t no beggar, buddy—doncha wantcher pitcher taken?”

  “I don’t even have a camera,” Mead replied. “But that fiver is no insult. I really appreciate your time, and the word—I’ve been looking for him for a long time. Have a coffee and a doughnut on Carson and me, and buy Ginny some oats.” He patted the burro on her soft brown muzzle. Though she wasn’t Betsy, she was the closest he’d come to Carson yet. The Kodak crowd was gathering again, so Mead turned on down the street. He’d gotten all he could—a line to Carson—enough to tell him he wasn’t just plain nuts.

  Feeling he ought to enjoy Aspen while he was there, Mead loitered in a bookstore for an hour. A novel and a field guide asked to go along, so he paid for them and fitted them into the side pockets of his backpack. Halfway down the block, entering a coffee shop, he noticed an unusual buzz among the patrons. Then he heard a few Hoorays, All RIGHTs, and Fucking As from the street. “What’s up?” he asked the waitress.

  “Richard Nixon has just resigned!” she said. On that high note, the best news he’d heard since . . . when? . . . he inhaled a turkey and avocado croissant with three glasses of milk. “Well, here’s to Gerald Ford,” he said to no one in particular as he raised the last glass, and then he bought three rolls for the road. From there he walked to the edge of town, put out his thumb, and settled in for the wait.

  Mead had been hitchhiking for no more than twenty minutes and eaten only one of the rolls when a battered bright green Toyota station wagon pulled over onto the grass verge beside him. It was a hot day, and he would have taken any ride. He ran to the window, lugging his pack awkwardly, and confronted a giant of a man crammed into the driver’s seat. A broad baby face, crowned with wavy yellow hair and crossed by a generous smile, looked back at him. “Hop in, entomologist! Where are you headed?”

  “Uh”—Mead had not quite asked himself that question nor answered it—“over to the Front Range . . . Boulder, Estes Park,” he said, mouthing names he remembered from the journals. “Eventually, maybe, a place called Allenspark.”

  “What’s happenin’ in old Allenspark?”

  “I don’t know—maybe nothing.”

  “Well, we can take you to Loveland Pass, anyway.” Once Mead was installed, the driver said, “We’re entomologists too. You can tell by our outfits.”

  Mead looked back at a trio of young women in the back seat (one had leaped out of the front, leaving it for him). And behind them, he beheld a bouquet of insect nets stacked atop coolers and packs.

  “Are you a collector?” the driver asked.

  “Butterfly researcher—to be—I hope,” Mead answered. “What about you all?”

  The man’s musical voice rose an octave with interest. “Well, I’ll be! You picked the right ride, young man. Welcome to Bagdonitz’s Flying Circus!”

  Mead settled into the passenger seat of the Nordic Green Aphid, official lead car of the itinerant field team of which his current patron, Carolinus Bagdonitz, was leader. Mead scarcely noticed the broken suspension as the story of the BFC unfolded: Bagdonitz taught at Jim Bridger University in Wyoming, where he’d landed after a boyhood catching butterflies and frogs in Colorado, graduate school in Fort Collins, a postdoc in Uppsala, and a teaching job on Long Island. He taught all sorts of biology courses, but his heart was really in the field, with the Lepidoptera and the students he called “the kids.” Ten years earlier he’d first brought students out west to study Rocky Mountain butterflies and moths. Now his field teams were a regular summer institution, staging out of research houses he rented in Lyons and Dubois. “And why the BFC?” asked Mead, who could barely believe his luck.

  “That’s because of our crazy schedule,” Bagdonitz explained, “running all over the Rockies all summer long in motley vehicles and on foot, investigating everything from miller moths to grizzly bears, but mostly butterflies. We hit as many habitats as we can, mostly high country and wilderness areas. We also caravan to annual meetings of the Lepidopterists’ Society to give papers on our projects. One year, someone there called us Bagdonitz’s Flying Circus, and it stuck.” Bagdonitz cruised around a tight curve.

  “Do you have any trouble fillin
g your research teams?” Mead asked. This seemed a lovely alternative to the roach room, especially if he got kicked out for abandoning it, and more especially if the BFC always included the likes of his traveling companions in the back seat. One in particular caught his eye, and he hers, when he’d climbed in.

  “Hell, no!” said the prof. “Everyone in the department wants to come, and a few outside. Positions on the field team are so sought after, even with the modest wages . . .”

  Hoots rose from the back: “Modest? Try slave!”

  “. . . that I have to conduct auditions with a butterfly net each spring.”

  “Or a spatula,” came from behind. “Or a church key!”

  On cue, CB, as he was called to save syllables for everyone, handed Mead a Hamm’s. “We operate on an incredibly tight budget, so we get the cheapest beer, the cheapest gas, and the cheapest women.” He winked into the rearview and got a kick in return. “Everyone gets his or her choice of camp jobs—cooking, washing up, or cleaning fish.”

  “That’s if we pin specimens until three a.m. every night! Otherwise we lose those privileges,” came a voice from the back. But the grousing passengers were clearly on top of the situation, each of them a grad student further along on her thesis than Mead was. With his own project embryonic, joining this Foreign Legion of Lepidoptera sounded even more attractive. He steered the talk away from his studies, but they were all impressed that he was a student of the legendary George Winchester, cofounder of the Lepidopterists’ Society, and that he knew Freulich.

  “The living gods of Lepidoptera,” said CB. “You keep good company.”

  “Until now,” came a chorus of three.

  The route took the Flying Circus up the Roaring Fork to Independence Pass, one lane and spectacular in places, with a broad tundra lawn on top; down Lake Creek past the south shoulder of Mount Elbert, Colorado’s tallest mountain at 14,323 feet; then north to Leadville before turning off on an old mining road toward the east.

  “ ‘Road Unsuitable for Passenger Vehicles,’ ” Mead read aloud from a weathered sign.

  “Signs like that mean nothing to us,” CB replied gravely. “This will save us many miles.” The backseat gallery let out a collective groan.

  A rugged and bumpy ride took the travelers over the Mosquito Range via Weston Pass, “a butterfly paradise,” according to Bagdonitz. He spotted a stunning burnt-orange-and-green beauty beside the road and said, “A nice male Mead’s sulphur!” Then, to James, “You do know about T. L. Mead, right?”

  “George told me a little of his exploits out here.”

  “For a while, during that productive summer of his in 1871, he was based just southwest of here in Twin Lakes. He—” Just then CB hit a deep puddle at speed, flooded the distributor, and brought about an hour’s wait while he dried it out. The time out gave Mead and the other students a chance to stretch their legs in the blessed alpine and to sample three bog fritillaries on which Freulich had recently tutored him. Each bore the name of a Norse goddess and might as well have been named for his new companions. “God, that seems like a month ago,” Mead said aloud, thinking of the day on Cumberland with Freulich and the bikers.

  “Oh, we get stranded for much longer than this sometimes,” said Emily.

  Near dark, the Nordic Green Aphid rolled into the night’s camp, well below Loveland Pass. This was always an occasion for relief and celebration, for (as Mead learned) anywhere from a quarter to half the time, it didn’t make it without repairs. A venerable gent awaited them, the hands on his hips missing a fingertip or two, just a few teeth showing in his broad troll’s smile. “So you made it,” he said. CB’s father, Tiny, a retired immigrant coal miner who wasn’t even small, often preceded the rest in an advance car. He had camp set up and many fish ready to fry by the time anyone else arrived. The fact that all the other students were female (another carful had arrived from the north) struck Mead as odd but agreeable. Was Jim Bridger a girls’ school? he wondered. But he asked no questions aloud.

  Food rolled out, and the camp meal got under way. Mead was included so naturally that he didn’t even question it, other than to quip that he had fallen out of the hills into heaven. “Or out of the hot springs into the frying pan,” CB came back as he flipped a burger. Mead had mentioned the sojourn at Conundrum, as much as was decent, and CB had guessed the rest.

  “The field team spent a few days in the Maroon-Snowmass last summer, and we always seemed to find our way back to Conundrum,” Lisa said. “Ah, such a paradise that place is.”

  “Yes,” said Kate, “but don’t forget that the Big Man made us leap out of the water every time a moth came to our black light!”

  “Do you suppose CB is short for Humbert Humbert?” asked Emily.

  “Come on, you guys,” said CB. “Remember what we’re up here for.” A ritual chorus went up, “For biology!” and Hamms were raised all around. In spite of himself, Mead had to admit that the idea of all those present disporting au naturel around Conundrum might quite rightly be described as paradisiacal.

  About that time another van rolled in. A knot of gangly young men unfolded from it and pushed toward the cooler. Until then Mead had thought the sex ratio of the BFC to be excellent. But it had to be too good to last, he thought. “Hey, Sterling, what kept you guys? And how’d you do?” CB was obviously relieved to see them arrive safely, never mind the bluff banter.

  “Not bad, Boss,” replied a compact, fair youth, gritty with the dust of many miles of mountain trails and roads. “We got maybe three hundred moths at the lights, including a few arctiids I didn’t recognize. I think one or two might be that relict tiger species you’ve been after. And some nice series of sulphurs and coppers and stuff like that.”

  “All right!” CB tossed Sterling some praise wrapped around a can of beer. Then he turned to Mead. “These guys have just returned from Mount Zirkel Wilderness, north of Rabbit Ears. They had to drive all day to make this rendezvous, after hiking out. Now we’re complete again, in terms of the Colorado contingent. About the same number of kids are up in the Wind Rivers and Absarokas. We’ll all gather in Dubois later to compare notes, take care of the bugs and data before we close up shop and head back to campus.”

  Carolinus Bagdonitz presided over the picnic table in the rustic campground. With the stream gurgling in the background and the evening warm, thirsts rose. The ringmaster, trail boss, and barkeep shifted from beer to his specialty, an occasional treat granted the crew in moderation after a long, hard day in the field, like a sailor’s dram of grog. This concoction, called a “tall cooler,” consisted of equal parts, more or less, depending on age and body weight (3:2:1 for CB, 1:2:3 for little Lisa), of lab alcohol, lemonade, and creek water. “A lot cheaper than gin,” said CB, “and it looks better on the requisition. Have one?” His meaty pink arm stretched out of his sleeveless striped T-shirt toward the bemused Mead. “Don’t worry, the water’s been boiled, then recooled. I much prefer to use it right out of the river, but the giardia is too bad nowadays. That’s all we need, for the whole crew to come down with that! We’d be out of business for weeks, and there’s only one head in the research house.”

  “And then the prof’d be even more full of shit than usual,” came a voice from the dark edge of the site.

  Mead was still considering the drink offer. What could he say? Don’t offend the natives. To his surprise, the cooler was not only refreshing but also delicious. He made a note to locate the lab alcohol stores at Osborn, though he suspected the pure Rocky Mountain spring water, as Coors called it, had something to do with it.

  Over the campfire, rainbow trout caught by Tiny fried in their heavenly scent as bears and beavers sang “The Land of Sky Blue Waters” from the famous Hamm’s ad over the reflections in the mountain stream. “You’re awfully lucky to have such a great dad, CB—provider, camp retainer, and field companion, all rolled into one,” Mead said. Tiny heard that and grumped. But Mead meant it. He thought of his own father’
s preoccupation, which made him too often distant, if not actually absent. And he thought of the one time they had all gone to the mountains together. It hadn’t worked out so well. His mind changed the subject.

  “Darn tootin’,” CB said. “Dad’s wonderful. The girls all love him, too. That keeps the rest of us in line.” Emphasizing “in line,” he popped a bottle top off a Hamm’s. “Plus, he teaches the boys to fish, the girls too if they want. But we seldom have time for it, so he limits daily for us.”

  “That must stretch the food budget.”

  “You bet! And he provides our field vials for free.” CB gestured to the little jars on the table, each bright with specimens.

  Looking closely, Mead saw that they were salmon egg jars—dozens of them. “So you don’t use cyanide bottles?”

  “For moths we do. But for butterflies we pinch the thorax while they’re still in the net, then transfer them with tweezers to these jars.”

  Carson did much the same, Mead knew, only he used triangular envelopes instead of jars. But that was for shipping dry—Mead had moistened, relaxed, and mounted many of his specimens—while the protocol here called for pinning the specimens directly from the jar. Looking around the table, he saw several members field pinning so the harvest could be transported safely in boxes and properly spread later. Others were making labels or transcribing field notes, all by the light of a Coleman lantern. Still others were cleaning up after supper while a couple of students played soft harmonica and guitar by the fireside.

  “So what will you be doing here?” Mead asked.

  “We’re meeting a friend, Michael Heap, so the kids can see his field experiment.”

  “I heard Heap mentioned by Professor Freulich; apparently he’s a conservationist. Does he teach, or what?”

  “Not full-time. He got a PhD in butterfly ecology, but he’s never had a university job. He teaches some, summer institutes and such. Mostly he tries to write. He lives in some rain-sodden backwater up in Oregon, but he has family in Colorado. He still does some work with butterflies, and he has a neat little project here at Loveland Pass.”