Holiday Crowd

On the first day of a massive butterfly migration through the place you live and work, it's disorienting the way a magic trick or a roller coaster can be disorienting. The defaults of your senses, the passive absorption of light and sound, color and odor, wind and flavor, we're so used to actively de-keening, filtering out the predictable patterns to tease out the anomalous, the askant, the threatening. As traffic behaves itself, you're likely to see the speeding truck about to charge through the intersection against the light because everything else is where it's supposed to be. The looming vibrates into sharp, avoidable relief when everything else fades out to a soft monotonous haze of blue-brown-green.

So at first you don't notice that you don't notice a few extra very small things indeed dipping and swirling on breezes experienced and generated, just off the ground between pedestrians and cars. But when, say at a stoplight, enough of them cluster past in a spasmodic burst of antigravity, and then more, and then more and then more, you realize you've been seeing them all day. And what a wonder it is! So much so that you miss the light change, but nobody behind you honks impatiently because they've all been similarly taken.

On the second day of a massive butterfly migration through the place you live and work, you're Darwin, you're Muir, you're Audobon, an active witness to the wonder of nature. Your eyes are opened, maybe for the first time, to the scope of small things as the thin, scattered could of wandering butterflies extends like a welcome, guiding fog, all the way from work to home and back again, swirling away and beyond, out of sight. You wonder what a bird or a helicopter must see from above, just a carpet of beating Painted Lady wings from Mexicali to Santa Barbara, caravaning north, on and on and endlessly on, expanding to swallow the whole Pacific maybe. Inside it, feet planted, you allow yourself to feel small. As they pass by, indifferent yet engaged, you feel your place in the taxonomy of being, in the magisterium of fauna. What should be metaphysically terrifying instead makes you intensely aware, perhaps for the first time, that you may possess a soul.

On the third day of a massive butterfly migration through the place you live and work, you first remark to yourself: I don't know where they're going, but I know they're leaving here. What do they know that I don't? And you spend the rest of the day trying to figure out if butterflies are somehow sensitive to the activity of fault lines. You buy jerky and all the Tang you can find.

On the fourth day of a massive butterfly migration through the place you live and work, you don't really mind any more if they impact-disembowel themselves against your windshield. You can't really try to hit them, but you know, would it be the worst thing if you could? You've stopped wondering about wonderment and you realize there's really only one thing you know, maybe to the exclusion of all else: too many goddamned butterflies. Seriously, how can this many of anything be good for anything else? They're flower vampires, basically. If they try this shit next year, maybe Trump should build a wall.