Butterflies Live!

I'd been living in Mexico City as a casual writer, Spanish speaker, and amateur Lepidopterist when I decided to go see “the butterflies” in Michoacán with a couple of British strangers I was rooming with. By “the butterflies,” I mean the monarchs that migrate across North America from Canada to Mexico every year. They have a season, late winter,

and during this time tourists make pilgrimage to watch them fluttering around the ancient forests of the high country. Besides Butterflies Live!, an exotic butterfly showcase that takes place at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens in Richmond, Virginia, I had never seen more

than three or four butterflies at a time. Butterflies Live! is, truthfully, awesome, but even so, it's a kind of butterfly petting zoo. What would it be like to see so many of them, out there, in the wild? I could only guess.

Getting to the butterflies is not easy. We woke up at two in the morning to take the train and transferred twice to get to the station for the only bus to Angangueo that morning. Angangueo is a small mining town of about 12,000 residents. More specifically, we were going to El Rosario, a Monarch biosphere and sanctuary perched up in the mountains outside of town. Angangueo is nosebleedingly high in elevation; it’s cold, but the air is fresh. Immediately upon arrival I went to the corner store, ordered a cafe de olla, purchased a few packaged cake snacks, ate a torta on the corner, smoked three cigarettes, and waited silently in the hopes that one of my travel companions had planned the next steps of our journey.

An old man dressed like Hunter S. Thompson approached us and first offered, then reduced, his price to take his car service up to El Rosario and back. His name, he told us, was George. My flatmates looked at George skeptically. I could see them weighing the possibility that George's magical promise of a round trip was another scam. We'd all fallen prey to scams throughout our time in Mexico, but I was willing to give George a chance; I sympathize

with hustlers. Since I had moved to Mexico City, I’d encountered a horse ride hustle, hammock hustle, fish hustle (pescadilla), tamale hustle, ballpoint pen hustle, roasted peanut hustle, cigar hustle, coconut on a string hustle, spoiled oyster hustle, wooden fish mobile hustle, artisanal hustle, transportation hustle, shell purse hustle, coconut purse hustle, sarong hustle, blanket hustle, mezcalito hustle, flower hustle, michelada hustle, helados hustle, mariachi hustle, gondola hustle, weed hustle, Magic Eye card hustle, doll hustle, stack-of-hats hustle, gold figurine hustle, photo hustle, shoe shine hustle, shaky medical hustle, lollipop/chiclets/candy hustle, didgeridoo hustle (terrible!), circus hustle, full body prostitution hustle, flower crown hustle, bathroom hustle, bookmark/comb hustle, champagne hustle, cotton candy hustle, New Years hat hustle, record hustle, poppers hustle, and a late night cab hustle. This list is by no means exhaustive, and I know that not every hustle is a scam, which is why I supported George's round trip up the mountain and back hustle. Still, in all our deliberation, suspicion won out and we settled for a one-way cab up to El Rosario, a decision we would later regret.

It costs 60 pesos to enter the biosphere, about three dollars. Visitors can hike up to the forest or take horses, and because I was traveling with virtual strangers there was another debate about whether or not to ride horses to the sanctuary, a type of hustle that I do not usually support, but I give in.

My Miserable horse trudged up to the top of the mountain and dropped me at the pony corral in the middle of a lush meadow where hundreds of tiny flashes of orange and black winged monarchs danced on the edge of the fir forest. Light glinted in the trickling waters of a nearby stream, and the sound was soothing, delicate, just a little bit eerie. The air was crisp and the heat from the sun warmed my face. My travel mates and I laughed together and swapped horse stories. "Did you see the butterflies on the way up?" We were so happy to have finally made it.

Just as we began exploring the meadow, our guide appears and says, "Follow me; there's more."

A group of butterflies is called a kaleidoscope. We followed the guide into the forest and my eyes adjusted to the sudden darkness, the way light was reflecting against trees, how the sky had turned an electric shade of blue. Suddenly it hit me that I was in a cloud of butterflies. The trunks of trees were covered in them, like orange leaves. Thick pine branches swayed heavily under their collective weight, and sometimes a whole limb would snap off a tree and fall to the ground. They were everywhere. All together, this number of monarchs created an ancient hum. A prehistoric, so-worldly-it’s-otherworldly sound. I didn't know butterflies could be this live.

The forest floor was littered with old wings and bodies. Our guide told us that we must leave them there undisturbed, that the wings contain a special mineral that helps the monarchs continue to locate the same forest year after year. We practiced standing still so that they would stop to land on us. We tried not to breathe.

What we witnessed was the end of the hibernation, or the “overwintering” phase for the monarchs. The entire life cycle for three consecutive generations of monarch butterflies is about 4-6 weeks. The fourth, and last, generation of butterflies goes through a normal life cycle, but instead of dying

in 6 weeks, they fly to the forests of Michoacán to hibernate for about six months. This means that at certain times of year, over 50% of the monarch butterfly population is concentrated at or near the El Rosario sanctuary.

When we finally left the butterflies and walked out of the humming forest, the world seemed harsher, more quiet, less colorful, and more complicated in comparison: we didn't have a ride back to town. There were no cabs, and the collectivo wasn't running. Feeling desperate, we almost agreed to hitch a ride with an eccentric grifter gringo type who said he had just driven to Michoacán from Florida nonstop. Deciding that was too risky, we hopped into the back of a van that claimed to be a collectivo, but turned out to be some guys with a van and a scam. They didn't drive us back to Angangueo, but to another town an hour away. We drove down remote, cliffside roads and I remember thinking, “This is how I die.” I thought about the monarchs that followed us out of the forest, to the edge of the sanctuary, flying easily above our human world, before turning back. The van guys took a lot of our money and left us stranded in a bizarro sleepy town where we were not really welcome. I also remember thinking, “If this is how I die at least I got to see the butterflies.” I still think that sometimes.