Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

  "Surviving," Ovid put back. Even from behind, she saw the absent enthusiasm.

  "It's a bad idea. Sorry." A cold drop of rain hit the back of her left hand.

  "Very generous, though. This man, who is he?"

  "A long-haul trucker, Mr. Baird is his name. He lives in Feathertown. He really means well. But okay, dumb idea."

  "In Feathertown," Ovid said. "It's really quite touching, the good intentions, you know?" He stopped in the path to look up through the canopy as more drops fell.

  "Is this rain picking up?" she asked.

  He nodded, aiming his finger like a pistol down through the trees toward the blue tarp shelter at the study site, and they made a break for it through the sudden shower. Ovid covered the ground in a deerlike way with his long strides, dodging fallen branches. She reached the shelter behind him and shivered, pulling her sweatshirt hood close around her face and tucking her hands in her sleeves.

  "Why is it a bad idea?" she asked.

  The rain was loud on the plastic tarp. He seemed to be waiting his turn to speak. Ovid and Pete had strung up this shelter one rainy day using a taut rope stretched between two trees to form a ridge, with ropes through metal grommets in the tarp's four corners pulling it outward, also tied to trees. Dellarobia had marveled to watch them construct a simple, perfect roof that seemed to levitate over the plywood table and single folding chair. Here they now stood, she and Ovid together, in their little house without walls.

  "An animal is the sum of its behaviors," he said finally. "Its community dynamics. Not just the physical body."

  "What makes a monarch a monarch is what it does, you're saying."

  He stood looking out at the forest, arms crossed. Not exactly facing her, but not turned away. "Interactions with other monarchs, habitat, the migration, everything. The population functions as a whole being. You could look at it that way."

  She did, often. This butterfly forest was a great, quiet, breathing beast. Monarchs covered the trunks like orange fish scales. Sometimes the wings all moved slowly in unison. Once while she and Ovid were working in the middle of all that, he had asked her what was the use of saving a world that had no soul left in it. Continents without butterflies, seas without coral reefs, he meant. What if all human effort amounted basically to saving a place for ourselves to park? He had confessed these were not scientific thoughts.

  The rain softened its percussion on the roof, a little. Light passing through the tarp bathed them both in a faint cerulean glow. The study site was completely deserted. She wondered if he also felt the concentrated atmosphere of their aloneness.

  "But do they have to move? Could the whole being just stay in one place?"

  "The problem is genetics," he said. "You are who you are, because of a history of genetic combinations. So are they. The monarchs rely on a particular alternation between inbreeding and outbreeding."

  Dellarobia corrected her impression of the moment. Ovid was not alone with her here. It was not going to be that scene in the movie. He was in church: with these ideas, the companionship of creatures. Every day she rose and rose to the occasion of this man.

  "Tell me what that means," she said. "The alternation."

  "For most of a year the genetic exchanges are relatively local. Summer generations breed in smaller groups as they move north. Some might fly only a few miles from where they are born before mating and dying. But then, in winter, the whole population comes together in one place. The gene pool is thoroughly blended."

  "I get that. Okay. Like mostly swapping your goods at the secondhand store in town, and then once a year doing the international-trade thing at the dollar store."

  Ovid laughed. "You are good. I wish I could put you in front of my students."

  She tried not to smile too hard. Her thermos of coffee was on the table, hidden among the plastic boxes and someone's raincoat. She shuffled through other junk to find their two stained mugs that stayed on-site as permanent fixtures. She tossed out the grainy dregs of yesterday's coffee and held the cups outside the shelter to collect a little rain, then wiped them with her shirttail. She unscrewed the thermos and filled both mugs. Housekeeping in the invisible house. She and Ovid liked their coffee black, they had that in common.

  He took the mug, nodding his thanks, and sat on an upended section of log they used as furniture. "We don't know of anything else like it on earth," he said. "This system of local and universal genetics makes a kind of super-insect. The population can fluctuate fivefold in a year. It's an insurance policy against environmental surprises."

  Environmental surprise within known limits, he would mean. He grew broody as he drank his coffee, looking out through the rain. He'd left her the lawn chair, but she stayed on her feet. Long clusters of butterflies began to drip. Hangers-on at the bottoms of their strings twisted slowly in an imperceptible wind, like the caricature of a hanged man. A chunk of a cluster near the shelter dropped suddenly onto the ground, severed from the great beast. Grounded butterflies could not hope to lift themselves in a rain like this. She watched this fresh legion of the extinguished, taking their time to die.

  "Nobody else came to the site today?" she asked.

  He shook his head.

  "I've left a couple of messages with Vern, but he doesn't call back. It seems like we're losing our volunteers. Maybe they're having exams."

  Ovid said, "Not everyone has the stomach to watch an extinction."

  She noticed the fabric over their heads had begun to droop in spots where the rain pooled. The roof of their invisible house, collapsing. What wouldn't, under all this? She was slowly submitting to his sense of weather as everything. Not just the moving-picture view out a window. Real, in a way that the window and house were not.

  A scattering of butterflies in the fallen mass twitched open and closed, while getting pounded, showing their vivid orange a few last times. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. That was the end of a poem, brought to her by the one bright spot in her education, Mrs. Lake, now dead. Dellarobia suddenly found she could scarcely bear this day at all. She stepped out in the rain to pick up one of the pitiful survivors and bring it under their roof. She held it close to her face. A female. And ladylike, with its slender velvet abdomen, its black eyes huge and dolorous. The proboscis curled and uncurled like a spring. She could feel the hooked tips of the threadlike legs where they gripped her finger. She held it out and the wings opened wide, a small signal.

  "So you're one of the people that can," she said. "Watch an extinction."

  He did not quite break his communion with the day, his vigil, whatever it was, but asked, "If someone you loved was dying, what would you do?"

  She refused that sentence its entrance. Preston and Cordie, no. Not another runaway loss. The Cooks she could think of, barely. Their boy. You do the bone marrow transplants, whatever it takes. She had examined Ovid's sadness by degrees, but now it hit her fully, the nature of his loss. "You do everything you can," she said. "And then, I guess, everything you can't. You keep doing, so your heart won't stop."

  The butterfly on her hand twitched again, and she held it sideways to the light. On the gloss of the wings she could see every scratch, like the marred lenses of an old pair of glasses. "If they could just breed and lay eggs," she said. "A few. I'm not saying truck them all to Florida. But just to get them through this one winter?"

  He glanced up at her. "It's not my call, Dellarobia."

  She considered this. To whom did a species belong? She wondered if that kind of law was even on the books. She sat down in the lawn chair, and saw he was getting restless, eyeing a stack of field notes on the table. "I am not a zookeeper," he said. "I'm not here to save monarchs. I'm trying to read what they are writing on our wall."

  Dellarobia felt stung. "If you're not, who is?" She could think of some answers: the knitting women, the boys with duct-taped clothes. People Cub and her in-laws thought to be outside the pale of normal adulthood.

  "That is a concern of conscience," he
said. "Not of biology. Science doesn't tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is."

  "That must be why people don't like it," she said, surprised at her tartness.

  Ovid, too, seemed startled. "They don't like science?"

  "I'm sorry. I'm probably speaking out of turn here. You've explained to me how big this is. The climate thing. That it's taking out stuff we're counting on. But other people say just forget it. My husband, guys on the radio. They say it's not proven."

  "What we're discussing is clear and present, Dellarobia. Scientists agree on that. These men on the radio, I assume, are nonscientists. Why would people buy snake oil when they want medicine?"

  "That's what I'm trying to tell you. You guys aren't popular. Maybe your medicine's too bitter. Or you're not selling to us. Maybe you're writing us off, thinking we won't get it. You should start with kindergartners and work your way up."

  "It's too late for that. Believe me."

  "Don't say that, 'too late.' I hate that. I've got my kids to think about."

  Ovid nodded slowly. "We were not always unpopular. Scientists."

  "Herbert Hoover was one! I read that." Preston's encyclopedias had already made it to show-and-tell. Flying Ants were making the rounds.

  Ovid seemed the smallest bit amused. "I meant more recently than Herbert Hoover. Fifteen years ago people knew about global warming, at least in a general way, you know? In surveys, they would all answer, Yes, it exists, it's a problem. Conservatives or liberals, exactly the same. Now there is a divide."

  "Well, yeah. People sort themselves out. Like kids in a family, you know. They have to stake out their different territories. The teacher's pet or the rascal."

  "You think so, it's a territory divide? We have sorted ourselves as the calm, educated science believers and the scrappy, hotheaded climate deniers?"

  Dellarobia definitely felt he was stacking one side of the deck with the sensible cards. Where did wild-haired girls knitting butterflies in the woods fit into that scheme?

  "I'd say the teams get picked, and then the beliefs get handed around," she said. "Team camo, we get the right to bear arms and John Deere and the canning jars and tough love and taking care of our own. The other side wears I don't know what, something expensive. They get recycling and population control and lattes and as many second chances as anybody wants. Students e-mailing to tell you they deserve their A's."

  Ovid looked stupefied. "What, you're saying this is some kind of contest between the peasant class and the gentry?"

  She returned his look. "I definitely don't think I said that."

  "Something like it. One of your teams has all the skills for breaking the frontier. And the other seems to be nursing a restive society that grows in the wake of the plow."

  "Huh," she said.

  "But would you not agree, the frontiers of this world are already broken?"

  "I guess. Maybe. Well, no. It depends."

  "Really?"

  "Well, yeah. If it's true what you're saying. That this whole crapload is going to blow. Then what, we start over?"

  Ovid said nothing. She knew she'd crossed a line of disrespect, putting it that way. This was like church to him, or children. The thing that kept him awake at night. "Sorry," she said. "I'm just saying. The environment got assigned to the other team. Worries like that are not for people like us. So says my husband."

  His brow wrinkled gravely. "Drought and floods are not worries for farmers?"

  "You think any of this is based on information? Come on, who really chooses?"

  "Information is all we have." Ovid stared at her, somehow managing to look as naked as she'd ever seen him. Which was very. "Everyone chooses," he said. "A person can face up to a difficult truth, or run away from it."

  She shook her head. "My husband is not a coward. I've seen him stick his whole arm into the baling machine to untangle the twine while it's running. Trying to save a hay crop with rain coming in. I mean, if we're talking guts. He and my in-laws face down hard luck six days a week, and on Sundays they go pray for the truly beleaguered."

  He seemed to take this in, even though he probably didn't know as many men as she did who'd lost an arm to a baling machine. "These positions get assigned to people," she said. "If you've been called the bad girl all your life, you figure you're already paying the price, you should go on and use the tickets. If I'm the redneck in the pickup, fine, let me just go burn up some gas."

  Ovid seemed perplexed. Maybe he knew more about butterflies than people.

  "I hate to say it, but people are not keen on a person like me coming up here to work with a person like you. Pete sure wasn't, at first. He got over it. But not everybody does." She'd finally had a look at the gossip site Dovey mentioned, and it scalded her. By many accounts Dr. Byron was a foreign meddler in local affairs. By some, Dellarobia was carrying his child.

  "Was there some difficulty with Pete?"

  "Pete's great. Bonnie and Mako, they all were. For some reason you all decided to let me in. But trust me, if you'd first run into me as your waitress down at the diner, you would not have included me in the conversation about your roosting populations and your overwintering zones. People shut out the other side. It cuts both ways."

  She could imagine herself in an apron bringing them coffee at one of the grease-embalmed booths at the Feathertown Diner, rest in peace. Ovid actually might have asked her opinion, even there. I never learn anything from listening to myself, he'd said that first night. The moment for her to shut up would be right now.

  "Humans are hardwired for social community," he said. "There's no question, we evolved with it. Reading the cues and staying inside the group, these are number-one survival skills in our species. But I like to think academics are the referees. That we can talk to every side."

  "Could, maybe. But you're not. You're always telling me you're not even supposed to care, you just measure and count." Okay, she thought. Now shutting up.

  "It's a point," he said. "If we tangle too much in the public debate, our peers will criticize our language as imprecise, or too certain. Too theatrical. Even simple words like 'theory' and 'proof' have different meanings outside of science. Having a popular audience can get us pegged as second-rank scholars."

  Dellarobia was surprised to hear it. If people behaved sensibly anywhere, surely it would be in an institute of higher learning. Although "second-rank scholar" was not an exact equivalent to "whoring with the enemy."

  "Is that why you don't talk to reporters? Because, honestly, you're good."

  He exhaled such a long breath, she wondered if he might collapse. "It's a hazardous road. For ecologists especially, my field. Ecology is the study of biological communities. How populations interact. It does not mean recycling aluminum cans. It's an experimental and theoretical science, like physics. But if we try to make our science relevant to outsiders, right away they look for a picket sign."

  "I could see that," she said.

  "If I hear one more milksop discussing the environment and calling it 'the ecology,' honestly, Dellarobia. I might break a Mettler balance on his head."

  "Wow."

  "In my field, we can be touchy about this," he said.

  No kidding, she thought.

  The cloudburst was winding down. The rain would move on, sweeping its chill up the valley. Ovid stood up from his log and smacked the tarp with the flat of his hand, discharging the puddle that had collected there. He drained his coffee cup and set it with finality on the plywood table. "I think we can safely return to our posts," he said. "I should get down to the lab. I want to dissect some of these females under the scope to see if they might be coming out of diapause. What did you see this morning?"

  "Some flying around," she said. "A lot, early on when the sun was almost out. Mostly they were headed down the valley to the west."

  He shoved his hands into his raincoat pockets. "If the rain stays away, it would be good if you could keep watching this afternoon. I'm curious to know if they're co
ming back to the roost. Probably these are short forays for water or nectar, rather than the start of a spring dispersal. But we really don't know."

  He picked up the red-and-white cooler they used for transporting live butterflies and stepped outside the shelter, squatting on his heels to pick through the fallen pile. He was choosing among the already doomed to get specimens for his afternoon's dissections. At least they would give their bodies for science. Dellarobia knelt beside him to help. They would need to pack up the equipment. This front was supposed to bring a lot more rain and possible high winds. "When they do that, the spring dispersal," she said, "if we get that far, where will they go from here?"

  "Where will they go from here," he repeated. He said nothing else for such a long time, she stopped waiting for an answer. She picked up stiff, brittle bodies, one after another, and flicked them away. Most of these were already too dead.

  Finally Ovid said, "Into a whole new earth. Different from the one that has always supported them. In the manner to which we have all grown accustomed."

  She found a live female, still pliable, faintly flapping, and dropped it into the open cooler. These little six-pack-size coolers were also used to carry organs from a deceased donor to the hospital where someone waited for a transplant, maybe with an empty chest, the old heart already cut out. She'd seen that on television. It seemed such a dire responsibility for just an ordinary cooler.

  "This is not a good thing, Dellarobia," he added. "A whole new earth."

  "I know," she said. A world where you could count on nothing you'd ever known or trusted, that was no place you wanted to be. Insofar as any person could understand that, she believed she did.

  She was unprepared to meet Leighton Akins at the top of the trail, still occupying the small gravel territory she would like to have had to herself. He was sitting in her lawn chair, no less. He had made a sort of tent over himself and the chair with a plastic poncho and seemed to have entered a dreamy state. He jumped when she hailed him.

  "I was just about to go," he said, surrendering her chair. "I ran out of my flyers. The paper airplane, that was all she wrote. But I had to wait out that rain."

  "Shoot," she said. "I wanted to see one of those."

  "I have one," he said. "But I need to keep it. To make more copies. Is there a copy shop in the little town here? Because I've looked, and I see nada."