When poet St. Exerbery said the desert throbs and gleams, he wasn’t thinking of butterflies. Heat, sand dunes, succulents and silence maybe, but not butterflies.
Yet here in Scottsdale, that gleam and throbbing is exactly what makes the Butterfly Wonderland full of magic and surprises. The ten-thousand-foot glass conservatory comes at you like a summer rainstorm and is a rare glimpse into one of the most fascinating of all insects. Whatever doldrums you had when you entered the towering steel cage goes away on the flutter of a wing as you realize the world you’re in isn’t yours anymore. It’s a fairytale land where freedom reigns, and the marvel of flight, however impossible for us, becomes child’s play for the butterfly.
Approachable? Hmmm, not always. Fragile? Not as much as you might expect. Marvelous and magical? Absolutely!
There’s one! Over there! Look! Here and there and back, then over there! Up high! Two, no three, YIKES! They are everywhere!! Being in the Wonderland is like being in a miniature airport where all the planes were given permission to take off at the same time! Gliding on tissue-thin paper, delicate yet hardy, delicate yet expertly navigating the air…and… everywhere!
Passing through a curtained entrance, I entered a lab where sheets of floor-to-ceiling glass separated us from hundreds of cocoons, like spools of thread, in every stage of development. Inside each chrysalis a caterpillar is turning into a gooey soup and will eventually emerge as a stiff and sleepy butterfly. The timing of their exit process is so sensitive that if one were to open the cocoon a minute early, the wings would not yet be fully veined. The waiting butterfly would not have the strength to emerge into the world and continue the cycle of life and would die inside its cocoon.
As I stood in the softly lit laboratory, it felt for a moment like I was in a maternity ward. As I was snapping pictures and reading all the accompanying posters and material, I thought of Dolly Parton, a huge fan of butterflies. She wrote of the lightness and freedom of the butterfly in her songs and considered them part of God’ handiwork and divine energy. Who else could have come up with these bugs, I thought? What fun God must have had while swathing the air with colorful splatters and patterns of every imaginable form and fashion. That’s when, out of nowhere, I got bumped, and I mean BUMPED!
“Sorry dude, my bad,” a tattooed kid said as he stepped in front of me.
And I was still peeling my face off the glass when he slid in front of me and snapped a selfie of his fleshy face with the cocoons. Never mind, I slunk out from under his I-phone and began making my way through sealed doors and plastic curtains to a room policed by a oddish lady with unusually large biceps. She raised her hand for me to halt, which I did without question, and I waited patiently if not a bit scared until she waved me in through another series of secured doors. Remember the TV show called Get SMART where Agent 86 had to walk through a gauntlet of doors? Before your time? Oh, you gotta u-tube that one. It’s classic. That’s could have been me at the Butterfly Gardens, only I didn’t fall down an elevator at the end.
Inside, I was hit immediately by ninety percent humidity, and a tropical garden swarming with butterflies. To be scientific about it, I was hit with a kaleidoscope of butterflies. Bees have swarms, whales have pods, but when butterflies gather it is called a kaleidoscope, and when they gather at a puddle to drink it is called a pool.
Inside the garden I was struck by the sheer numbers of butterflies flying, the most striking of which was the giant Blue Morphos. I was waiting for one to light so I could snap a picture, but yet I kept losing them in the foliage. That is because Blues, like many butterflies, are a completely different color on the top than the underside. The fact that the Blue Morphos change from blue to a rich spotted brown when they fly helps them avoid predators, as they appear to vanish then reappear in the jungle.
Everywhere I walked, you could almost feel butterflies freely floating around you. If that isn’t enough F’s for you – there are four, yes, FOUR thousand of them! My brochure listed species like Great Mormon, Pink Rose, Spotted Tiger, Postman, and the Zebra Mosaic and I had to wonder who got the fun job of naming all these amazing critters? I might have come up with names like Breezy Cheeks or Theodella Checkerspot…and come to think of it, that’s probably why they didn’t hire me for the job.
While I have always loved learning about insects, I realize I’ve never really paid much attention to butterflies Maybe I thought it was a girl thing – you know, perhaps their gentleness and delicacy, or maybe their daintiness seemed more fit for a children’s book. Then I came upon a older lady sitting on a bench, palm open, cradling a Swallowtail. I could see by her peaceful expression that she had entered a different zone. Butterflies do all their tasting with their feet, so perhaps this specimen, the Ruby Spotted, had found something tasty on this lady’s hand. Clearly, they had both made a friend, and their connection was more than just a sentimental scene from a Disney movie.
A couple of years ago, I was reading a book about insects and the many different ways they connect with their surroundings. I began thinking, what if someone had the ability to communicate with insects – actually feel what they feel or talk to them? What if all the insects had a human queen or king who was human, who was their leader? That is when I began to develop a character for a new book, a girl named Evinore. Her discovery, that she has the supernatural gift to communicate with insects becomes the over-arching narrative of the book. I’ve only shared this project with a few people, but given the subject of butterflies, I thought this passage might be of interest, as Evi makes her transformative entrance into another world, the world of insects. I’m only sixty pages into the manuscript, so you’ll have to excuse some roughness. In this scene, Evi has gone missing, prompting a search through an impenetrable jungle.
All manner of belongings, what few they had were there and packed, and the father had been round and explained hisself to the villagers and said his just goodbyes, so it was late when Evi stole out and down the paths laden with every leaf and kind of greenery jungle, spreadt in mystery and secretness of palms and thin grasses until the black lake appeared to her that had been her night refuge for near two years. My mother told me then that she sat on the water’s edge, cross-kneed, and began to cry openly and talked out loud as if someone could hear her, which to any of us would have been gibberish, but was her voices inside, all of them, and clammerings and inconsolable murmmerings that cannot be repeated in any language, and it was all mixed in with a weeping and forlornness, as if all the sadness of the world came up out of that sinkhole of darkness and laid itself upon her.
And then she fell asleep in her wailing and whimper, so deep nothing would wake her, and her face returned to a calm and morning came and she lay there still, without a sound.
Back in the port a search went out all day, and the ship was held back for them, and every person who believed and some who did not, native or not spread out to find her, and I know this now from Ogten. Her name could be heard said and yelled and called out all day throughout as if they were looking for a child who was playing a game, that hid in fun behind a tree. No one had seen her, or knew of her, so they began through the jungle, walking only feet apart, spread out until they found her in a most peculiar sight beheld.
A mile almost, through leaves and tangled vines and sheaths of palmettos so rough liked of unhewed boards and so thick only a millipede could crawl through it, they found her in the middle of the island asleep by a lake that grew to the edges, was pitch black as night and all around the deepness of the lake absorbed. Yet still, at a sandy opening, she could be seen from the other side, there was Evi, asleep sound, and hovering with a thousand flutters over her a vast and colossal cloud of butterflies were flying about, like one mass in an apocrypha-like scene. Purples and violets, iridescent in nature, some transparent and all manners of yellows and white wings reflecting the light upwards to the sky, and every other color as well in the form of the winged phenomena and their movement could be felt as a cyclonic whirling which lifted her straight up then over the sinkhole and lowered her sound asleep she was to dip dip her down and down into the black until she could not be seen any longer.
I was told this with eyes from Ogten, whereby his scar I thought went away for a moment in the light, but it could not have been so, but it was told to me like this, and he was one of the ones that had been there a-looking for her. And he swore a deafening noise to where the searchers had to cover their ears was heard, like the rush of a whirlwind, deafening, and pressing.
And up Evi came out of that darkness a moment later and was laid down on the sand there gently and her body was covered by glowing yellow wings opening and closing of butterflies, as I said, and then spread out in layers in all directions at once, lighted, and then became nothing in the thick of the jungle as if they had never been.
No one spoke at all when she was carried on board the waiting ship, Rose and Irons, no one said anything about what it was they had seen. It was not fright, or worry, no rush or confusion followed as if the entire incident had never happened. Not a word as said, or asked of Evi about her hiding, where have you been or none of that as in scolding or explanation. Not the crew, not the captain, and there was free passage for Evi and her parents, Chancellor and Amargarette when the ship weighed anchor and turned homeward towards England.
So, here this future book of mine, we witness a powerful force possessed by these gliding anomalies of nature, the butterflies. I don’t know just yet what adventures await Evi in the book. I don’t know quite how she is going to be affected by the kaleidoscope of jungle butterflies who covered her like a blanket and then dipped her into a mysterious dark pond. If it’s anything like I was affected as hundreds of these delicate creatures fluttered and floated around me, then she will travel through an extraordinary Wonderland, like I was, and be transformed from the inside out.