Magdalena Mountain

by Robert Michael Pyle

  “And Brownie’s still around?”

  “You bet. These days he studies fossil butterflies at Florissant, along with the itineraries of the early Colorado butterfly explorers, among other things.”

  “Sounds like a real Renaissance man.”

  “Or polymath. He’s taught almost everything at Fountain Valley School in the Springs. He could tell you about your namesake, Theodore L. Mead, of Mead’s sulphur and Mead’s wood nymph fame. He’s studied Mead’s itinerary in the West. Do you know about him?”

  “Of course I’ve noticed the butterflies with his name. CB started to tell me about his travels in Colorado back on Weston Pass yesterday, but we were . . . interrupted. Another stagecoach butterfly hunter, wasn’t he?”

  “Among other things. In the summer of 1871, Teddy Mead and his brother Sam came out collecting for W. H. Edwards of West Virginia, the great butterfly man of his day. Mead covered a lot of territory, reaching lots of remote places by horseback, rail, and stage. He even came right here to Georgetown. His letters home were full of tales of Arapaho after scalps, Utes running them back to their reservation, and marauding bears, bandits, and bedbugs. Those guys were tough, don’t you think? To come into a gold rush saloon like the Red Ram with butterfly nets?”

  “No kidding. I wouldn’t even do it these days.”

  “He also had his priorities right. In one of his letters home he compared a visit to Europe with his western adventures: ‘what profiteth a man that he sees twenty miles of pictured saints and “Holy Families” and loseth the sight of the Rocky Mountains?’ ”

  “I’ll drink to that,” James said, raising his glass. “So what did it profiteth him coming here, other than having some beautiful butterflies bear his name forevermore?”

  “Well, I’ll let you be the judge. Mead was one of several entomological suitors of Edwards’s daughter, Edith. He named Edith’s copper after her. And yes, he eventually won out over his rivals. The couple were wed and lived pretty happily for a long time after, raising oranges and orchids in Florida. But not till he fulfilled his quest out west and brought back a dowry of new butterflies—twenty-eight new kinds!—did Edith’s dad give her hand to Mead.”

  “Nice story. Florida, eh? So he got the girl and the best of both worlds.”

  “Florida might look pretty good pretty soon if an early autumn is riding in on that storm out there. Anyway, I’ll bet you’re related to ol’ T. L.”

  “I wonder. Can you inherit scientific patronyms, like titles? I’ll take Mead’s alpine! Well, I’ll be sure to get in touch with Brownie if I do dive into Magdalena.”

  “Okay, and while you’re at it, here’s a nice mystery for you. One of the best Magdalena habitats I know is a mountain on the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park, in the Front Range. It’s got the most extensive rockslides for miles around.”

  “Oh?” Mead’s ears pricked. “So what’s the mystery?”

  “The peak is called Magdalena Mountain, and the place at its foot is known as Magdalena Park. And there’s an old log hotel there called Magdalena Park Lodge.”

  “Too much! So what’s the connection with the butterflies?”

  “Beats me,” said Heap. “I’ve admired the mountain and the lodge for years, but I’ve always been too lazy or busy to look into it. If you should discover the reason for the many Magdalenas, if there is one, please be sure to let me know!”

  “For sure. So where is this Magdalena Mountain, exactly?”

  “It’s on the Peak to Peak Highway, between Allenspark and Estes Park. Let’s see, it’s not too far from . . . What’s the matter, James? Is the lasagna bad?”

  Mead, a little too much wine in his belly, slept while Heap, with more body mass to absorb it, drove down Highway 40 and then north out of Clear Creek Canyon. He awoke only when the handbrake squeaked. “Where are we?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.

  “Central City,” said Heap. “Someone I think you ought to know lives here.”

  Mead followed Heap up to an old cabin. Its clapboards as black as the unlit night around them, the cabin perched near the very rim of a deep ice-cream scoop out of the ground. “The Glory Hole,” said Heap. “They used to mine gold this way here. Richest Square Mile on Earth, they called it. That money went down to Denver, except for what stayed in the opera house and gingerbread Victorians here in town.” He gestured with a thrust of his shoulder. “It won’t last, but for now, life is still cheap enough up here on the tailings for a destitute lepidopterist to hole up.”

  Heap’s knock was answered by a thin man with a thin brown beard and a look of constant surprise. Sure, he was surprised by a knock at the cabin door way up here late at night, but the look never left, through smile or frown. Mead came to understand that this was the look of infatuation with the world and all its working parts.

  Heap introduced him to Charles Slater and his wife, Ellie. “If you think I have a claim on Maggie,” Heap whispered, “just talk with Charles for a spell.” And so James Mead, for the third time in three days, settled into the company of someone who put his own knowledge of his chosen subject to shame. Slater, the softest-spoken of men, not only had a close acquaintance with all the Colorado species of Erebia and Oeneis in the field, he also kept various life stages of each of them in his makeshift cabin “lab.” So came James to see his first immature magdalena—a pale green tube with reddish lines and a black head—as well as those of several other arctics and alpines. And by the time they left, he held under his arm a copy of a sheaf of notes headed “magdalena: Loveland I. elev. 3680 m.” His to keep! So much for proprietary egos in natural history. Mead didn’t know how to thank him, so he simply said, “I’ll try to do them justice.”

  The next day, he found himself on his own, sitting on the asphalt of the Peak to Peak, reading Slater’s Maggie notes. Heap had spent the night in his bus in a campground near Rollinsville while Mead laid out his sleeping bag beside the VW. In the morning they shared a breakfast of granola with wild currants and raspberries, just coming ripe, and boiled coffee. “I hate to leave the hills for what lies below,” said Heap, “but I’ve got a brother down there expecting me today—if he even remembers that I’m coming.” They made their goodbyes, and Michael left Mead happy to hitch north. But it was a Monday morning with precious little traffic, so Mead finally gave in, recoiled his thumb, and sat. It gave him a chance to get into the precious notes, which he was eager to do.

  Slater must have been a soulbrother of Carson’s, each approaching the world as both poet and scientist. The eight xeroxed pages mixed typed third-person notations of careful observation and data with handwritten flights of lyrical first-person appreciation: a complex graph of daily flight patterns next to a judgment of July 19, 1973, as “a day of haunting beauty so intense as to remain in memory for life.” Slater gave away his conservationist bent, lamenting truck traffic excluded from the tunnel and forced to drive over the pass. “Despite heavy jet and car traffic,” he wrote, “magdalena, damoetus, and cupreus survive, classic alpine glacial relicts sequestered by drifting snow in their last refugia, indicators of intolerable environmental change.”

  This was followed by pages of rearing notes—the first successful rearing of this species ever, as Edwards had got only to first instar with an egg sent him by T. L. Mead, and no one had tried since, until Slater. Charles had been enjoying scrambled eggs and puffballs fried in butter

  when a fresh female Magdalena Alpine flew by as if to flirt with possible capture. Right at that moment, I was thinking how observation sometimes reveals clues to the secrets of nature and how it works. There was lightning in the dark cloud to the south of the divide and thunder rolled far down into the valleys with a slow grumbling. In a burst of sun from behind the cloud I dropped the net on the ground as if hypnotized and followed the female magdalena up the steep slope of the rockslide. She flew to a place where bedrock outcropped. Below the outcrop was a little hollow, and in the hollow, a mound, and on the mound some grass an
d flowers. And on a rock below and to the left of this mound, she found a cleft which will be in shadow, except for about two hours a day. And in this small cleft on the rock, she laid an egg by backing up to it and reaching over the edge with her abdomen. It seemed to be placed very carefully, on lichen.

  This was the first oviposition by a Magdalena alpine ever reported from the wild.

  Mead read all this as if he were buried in a novel that he couldn’t put down. A dozen cars went by without him so much as lifting a thumb. He could see why Slater would probably never get this material published in a journal, and also why Heap had told him that it was a rich lode, mined by a fine naturalist. The experiments realized and imagined, the observations, the experience—all there, offered to him for his use.

  And when again Mead stood, brushed off his butt, and ran for a jeep that slowed for him, he knew something that he had only hoped before. He knew there was help for him in his deepening desire to know this creature intimately—help all around, everywhere he looked and didn’t look. He knew he could do it and that it was right for him to be here.

  32

  A cloudy afternoon in early August found James Mead in a piney place in Allenspark called the Meadow Mountain Café. A weathered red-and-yellow sign nailed onto the faded yellow-and-red porch of upright logs read COFFEE 25¢. That drew him in, and he also ordered a well-upholstered vegetarian sandwich and a blueberry-peach smoothie, in spite of its designation as “booberry” on the menu.

  The man at the next table was bantering with the waitress. “Children say amazing things, Nina. This morning some tourist’s daughter asked me whether I believed in God.” Oh god, even here, Mead thought, thinking back to the Greyhound evangelists.

  “So what did you tell her?”

  “I said no. She seemed a little crestfallen to hear it.” He smiled at Mead as he said it.

  Mead noticed, as the other guy shifted in his seat, a necklace that fell out of his half-open purple shirt. The pendant was a crucifix, crafted from heavy-gauge silver nails.

  “Then, if I may ask,” said Mead, “why do you wear that cross?”

  “Keeps the amateur preachers off my back,” he said. “These hills are full of ’em, from Anabaptists to Zionists, as thick as Amway reps. Besides, it’s my livelihood, such as it is. I make these things and sell them. I do really well peddling my crown-of-thorns virginity pins to all the waitresses in the resorts around here—for all the good it does them.”

  I could like this guy, thought Mead. And then a thought struck him in the midsection like a booberry smoothie in the face: What if this is Carson? He could be. He looked about the right age—mid-forties or so, body features carved of driftwood by the adze of experience, long teeth mostly straight. In addition to the cross of nails he wore a big silver ring on a massive hand that would be equally comfortable gripping a netstick, a splitting maul, or a fountain pen. Yes, this could be Carson—he wrote that he was going to Allenspark. Mead was pretty sure it was. His search over so soon, so coincidentally, it was almost anticlimactic.

  “Name’s Tony Lee,” the silversmith said. “What’s yours?”

  “Not October Carson?”

  “How should I know?”

  “No, you—I mean, I’m James Mead, but you’re not actually October Carson?”

  “I told you, I’m Tony Lee.” A shade passed over Lee’s face that told Mead he was in danger of dismissal, just as he’d written off the various loons of the road.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just that I thought you might be someone I’ve been looking for. Have you ever heard that name around here?”

  “Can’t say as I have, and I’ve been here for years, all seasons, unlike most of ’em. Ever since I got back from Da Nang, mostly in one piece. Hey—is that great about Nixon, or what? What a parcel of poop. Did you see his insane smile as he was waving from the helicopter before he split the White House for the last time? None of those poor bastards scrambling for a lift off the roof of the embassy in Saigon were smiling like that. Felt bad for Pat, though. Nice woman, your basic martyr to a Messiah complex. Anyway, back to your dude. Hey, Nina?”

  The waitress, in an embroidered blue peasant dress, changed course as her pixie cut flipped about. “More java, Tony? You’ll float out of here on a caffeine cloud!”

  “At least that’s still legal. No thanks, Nina, I’ve had enough, believe it or else. Gotta get back to the shop and get into my afternoon downers from Golden now that I’ve been sucking down your good cheap uppers all morning.”

  “How can you drink that trout piss, anyway?”

  “Well, it’s cheap too. But not too much Coors today—I need to keep a level head. That little girl’s father is coming by tomorrow to pick up crucifixes for all his deacons.”

  “He doesn’t mind buying them from a confessed infidel?” Mead asked.

  “Hell, no. My price is right, and he prayed for me.”

  “You need it,” said Nina. “So what’ll it be? You’ve already paid your quarter, and I’ve got paying customers waiting for me over here.”

  “Don’t forget the nickel for you, Nina. If you can help my friend James here, he might do you even better. He wants to know if we’ve ever heard of some cat named November Wilson.”

  “October Carson,” said Mead.

  “Nooo . . . no. Doesn’t ring a bell. Let me ask Jake.” Nina took an order, then disappeared into the kitchen to confer with the cook, a Jesus-bearded hippie.

  The cook appeared, tugging at the stringy brown tuft on his chin. “Howdy, Tony,” he said, nodding at Mead. “Hmmmm. You know, it seems to me that I have heard that name. A couple-three summers ago, right? Yeah . . . seems some dude come in here by that name several times for about a week running, always had the booberry, then disappeared. Yeah, that’s right. He liked our cinnamon rolls too, and now that I think of it, he asked me for a large juice jar so he could get some water from Silver Spring up the road across from the Fawn Brook.”

  “I told you,” said Nina. “Jake remembers everything and everybody.”

  “Now, why didn’t I see him?” Lee asked, slightly piqued. “I see most folks who stick around here at all, and I remember most of them too, whether they come into the shop or not. Wait . . . three summers ago, you say? Okay—I was living down in Ward for a while with Cindy . . . that Cindy! Coulda missed him then. And Nina wasn’t here yet.”

  “No, that’s right—I started that fall, after I escaped Reno, so I wouldn’ta seen him.”

  “There you go,” said Jake with a quiet note of triumph at finding no contrary witnesses. He spoke with the sort of bogus Oklahoma drawl that many Front Rangers had taken on in a curious blend of hippie looks and redneck lingo. They got it from Dylan, who got it from Woody, who got it by rights. “Yeah, this Carson cat, he come in here several times. Booberry and a cinnamon roll. Tried one yet?”

  Mead finally got a word in. “No.”

  “But I don’t know what become of ’im—I sure ain’t seen ’im since,” said Jake. “Can’t tell you much more. But, besides the fact that he had a donkey tied up outside, I do remember one thing. Prob’ly why I recollect him at all—that and his strange name.”

  “Yes?” Mead asked, his anxiousness dripping off his sleeve. “What is it?” He could see that the stores of information here were lean, but he was starved for any crumb.

  “Well,” continued the cook, enjoying his reprieve from the kitchen and his central role here, “it’s kinda hard to define. He wasn’t really . . . nervous, in fact he was stone calm, I’d say. And I don’t think he was stoned—seemed totally straight. But he had this look in his eye . . . what the Stones called a ‘faraway look’—that’s it. Now you’re looking for something too, but you know what it is—it’s this cat. But he seemed like he didn’t know what it was he was looking for.”

  “Sounds like my man. He had a burro, all right. Anything else?”

  “Just that he had no patience for small talk. He wanted to
hear about the area, the hills around here, the trails, and so on. When he left—one morning he just didn’t come in no more—I wondered if he wasn’t a prospector onto a possible strike.”

  “You might say that,” said Mead.

  Nina asked him outright why he was trailing the guy, like, did he owe him money or something?

  Mead just said, “We’ve got a girlfriend in common. I’d like to buy him a smoothie and compare notes.” And they let it drop.

  “Me, I came here searching for fresh air, man,” said Tony, “and quiet. After Agent Orange and Denver smog, bombs and traffic.” He lit up the Woodbine he’d been rolling, and stepped outside.

  “People around here,” Nina said, “do not aspire toward making a whole hell of a lot of sense. They have many fine qualities, consistency not necessarily one of them.”

  “I see,” said Mead. “Real individuals.”

  “They like to think so. Then there’s this macho thing. Camels, trucks, and big dogs, and yet they eat Jake’s quiche. Individuals. But then from the little you’ve said, it sounds like this fellow you’re tailing is another one.”

  “Oh, yeah. I don’t know a lot about him. But I know he has good taste. If the cinnamon rolls were good enough for October Carson, I’d better try one.”

  “All right,” said Jake, ducking back into the kitchen.

  “And one for the road.”

  On his way out to the porch, a cloying scent overwhelmed even the scent of the cinnamon rolls. Planters of petunias rimmed his vision in Popsicle pink, magenta, deep purple, violet-and-white stripes, and red in pinwheels and barber poles. He leaned over and smelled the perfume, recalling unbidden his mother’s garden borders of petunias and four o’clocks, and how they were haunted by big sphinx moths, like gray and pink hummingbirds coming for their nectar in the summer’s dusk. He tried to pull back to Carson, but it was too late: damned petunias.