Musings on the day before the autumnal equinox

I find it impossible to ignore their silent passage this year. Much of my days is spent traversing back and forth on the pavement outside my office door. Each time I walk through the lot I try to remember to look up, and I’m seldom disappointed. Even if I forget to look because of distractions from the problems in my workday world, the sudden flutter of shadow brings me back to my surroundings. If it isn’t the shadow of wings against sun, then it can be the black and orange on the pavement before my feet of a butterfly whose wings won’t be equal to the southbound migration.

This year it seems like more monarch butterflies than ever before are passing by. There’s no great cloud of butterflies. In fact, I never see more than a single butterfly at any one time. But there is nearly always that single butterfly headed due south in defiance of sun, rain, wind, trucks and odds.

More than once this month I have found the remains of one who hasn’t made it. The wings have been surprisingly intact. They seem so fragile, but even the wings of those butterflies that have been caught on the grills of the great trucks that constantly pull in and out of my workplace have little more than a nick or two in them. I look at them and am forced to understand that their thin beauty does not equate to frailty.

The monarchs are indeed so sturdy that sometimes even a collision with a truck isn’t enough to kill them. A few weeks ago I found one grimly clinging to the grill of a parked truck with its three remaining legs. The wings, as usual, were in near perfect shape, but the energy to carry on was nearly gone. I suppose the kindest thing to do would have been to put it out of its misery, and I even considered that for the briefest of seconds. I couldn’t do it though. It just didn’t seem right for that kind of determination to be extinguished between thumb and forefinger. I gently pried the legs from the grill, and it clung to my finger instead. I carried it into my office, and made some sugar-water mixture in a bottle cap. I put the butterfly on the good-luck bamboo that the girl who cleans my office gave me (another story for another time), and set the sugar water beneath it. All afternoon the butterfly stubbornly clung to the bamboo. When I tried to show him the sugar water, he just struggled his way back into the bamboo. When I returned to my office the next morning, the monarch was dead, still tenaciously clinging to the bamboo.

So I watch the butterflies on the migration this year, and wonder with each one whether or not its fate is to make it to the mountains of Mexico. I can’t decide if I admire their blind ambition, or feel sorry for them. Their birthright didn’t give them any choice. Autumn comes, and She demands that they fly south. It doesn’t ask them if they want to go, it doesn’t warn them of oncoming trucks and hurricanes in the Gulf. It doesn’t give them the option of a peaceful death tucked comfortably under a leaf on the morning of the first frost. Nature can be a bitch that way.

It seems that there should be some sort of lesson in this that I could take to heart and apply in my own life. Something grandiose, about small creatures with great hearts and insurmountable odds surmounted. But then I look at the cost in terms of the ones who obey the call and can’t finish the race, and I feel a little sad.