Serenity now!

Who knew I'd return to Merida and find... politics. Suddenly I seem to be everyone's idea of palanca (leverage), and if I play my cards right, I just might be...

With all of these words and ideas floating around in the air, you can understand my wanting to harken back to my peaceful day last weekend when it was los monarchas who were floating and flitting to and fro. (Come on, what better time to pull out to and fro than with butterflies?).

We're talking here about the great state of Michoacan, due west of Mexico City. We'd heard that getting there takes a while, about three hours. Fellow Fulbrighter Stephany and her husband Victor, still recovering from weeks of overactivity from various conferences, decided they were up for the drive, so we dragged our butterfly-motivated selves out of bed and were on the road by 7:30.

Let me say here that the drive from Mexico City to El Roasario, Michoacan, is no fewer than 4.5 hours. Victor deserves several trophies for his excellent, tireless driving. We made good use of our time together, though: we're all talkers, so when we weren't grooving to Stephany's eclectic mix of CDs, we were placticando. (My dictionary tells me that the verb placticar (to chat or to talk over) is uniquely Mexican-- I'd be curious to know where else this verb is used. It took me a while after arriving to realize folks weren't saying practicar, to practice.)

Anyway, we made it to El Rosario by noon, a photographer's least favorite time of day but the perfect time to see a sky full of monarchs-- by noon, the air is warm enough for butterflies to fly around without losing body heat. Imagine us with our cameras photographing the, er, sky... at high noon, trying to capture the uncapturable.

Neeless to say, I have no convincing pictures of our butterfly sky, but I did manage to catch a couple of monarchs in this picture of Victor and Stephany, walking sticks in hand.

The first portion of the path leading to the butterfly sanctuary is lined with souvenir shops and kitchens, tempting on the way up and irresistable on the way back down. (Eating hot-off-the-griddle blue corn tlacollos made for a heavenly reward after our hike.) Here, still pre-hike, we bought our walking sticks before turning our attentions to the sometimes-steep 2K loop ahead of us.

Ahead of us was... the essential, nourishing familiar. Soon after you pass the last shop on the way up, the noise of commerce dies away and you realize you're no longer in El Rosario, or Michoacan, or even Mexico. You're in Nature. Some things are universal, and I think the smell of pine trees and dirt kicked up by hikers is one of them. Breathe it in, and you're transported the first forest you ever hiked in. (For me, that's the San Bernardino mountains surrounding Idyllwild, California.)

But this sight of monarchs, hibernating here in this little spot of forest in Michoacan, is unique. Describing what we took in that afternoon is a little bit like photographying the butterfly sky at high noon... fleeting.

Hopefully, this shot captures something of the wonder-- the dark clumps you see weighing down the branches are monarchs, huddled together by the thousands to conserve body heat so that they might survive their upcoming travels to North America, Canada and elsewhere. (Click on the photo to see an enlarged version.)

It's still pretty much a mystery as to how the descendants of these monarchs, still to be born abroad, will undoubtedly find their way back to their ancestral tree in Michoacan. One article I found suggests that the mountains of Michoacan are uniquely magnetic as a result of volcanic activity, and that this serves as a beacon for the returning monarchs. One of the signs we encountered during our hike posited that the thousands of dead butterflies left behind in Michoacan descompose to provide the returnees with the scent of homecoming. I imagine it's a combination of these and many more factors.

It seems we humans are so attracted to singularity-- the reason we feel sad or happy today, the solution to a problem, the best way to teach... the monarchs are here to remind us that the world is complex and mysterious, a confluence of interdependent factors.

But I'm getting philosophical again. Suffice it to say those butterflies were damn pretty, we had a awesome time finding them, and by the end of the day, Victor still at the wheel, we were absolutely pleased that we'd dragged ourselves out of bed that morning.