meditation room to try once more to induce a husband-locating trance. “How do you suppose the seeds are distributed at the poles?” she called through the perfumed curtains. Then the writer heard no more. Except a gentle fanning. Like the passage of a moth.
Part II
ALONG THEIR MIGRATORY routes, monarch butterflies stay nights in certain trees. The “butterfly trees,” as they are called, are carefully chosen—although the criteria exercised in their selection are not known. Species is unimportant, obviously, for at one stopover the roosting tree may be a eucalyptus, at another a cedar or an elm. But, and this is what is interesting, they are always the same trees. Year after year, whether moving south or returning north, monarchs will paper with their myriad wings at twilight a single tree that has served as a monarch motel a thousand times before.
Memory? If so, it is genetic. For you see, the butterflies who journey south are not the ones who come back. Monarchs lay their eggs in sunny climes. Then they die. The hordes who flutter northward in spring are a succeeding generation. Yet, without hesitation, they roost in the same trees as did their ancestors.
Scientists have examined butterfly trees and found them chemically and physically identical to the trees surrounding them. Yet no other tree will do. Investigators have camouflaged a tree's color, altered its scent. The monarchs were not fooled. Another of nature's mysterious constants. A butterfly always knows when it is
there
.
They found the zoo site on an October Sunday: a soft burpy day on which they crossed many bridges. Bridges over rivers and bridges over sloughs. The sky sagged like an udder. The air had a feel of heavy birds. Their motorcycle was a flash of overheated color in the damp green landscapes. At seventy miles an hour, it whined like a spinning top—and rattled Amanda's kidneys like dice in a box.
Amanda had peed in Seattle, she had peed in Everett. And now as they sped through the Skagit River Valley, she had to pee again. Already, she and John Paul were far behind the caravan that motored to Bellingham (near the Canadian border) where, on the campus of Western Washington State College, the circus was to unfurl its canvases for the last time. But when she rapped her code on Ziller's ribs, he dutifully braked the BMW and turned into the big fir-ringed parking lot of Mom's Little Dixie Bar-B-Cue. Luckily, Amanda's biological urgency became manifest on that rare stretch of Interstate 5 where the limited access rule had, for some reason, been suspended. Along that one fifteen-mile section of the Seattle-Vancouver Freeway (between Everett and Mount Vernon), there were scattered gas stations, general stores and restaurants. Not many, however, for this was farming country of almost unequaled lushness and the black juicy soil was far too valuable to be relegated to commerce.
The motorcycle engine died with a prolonged series of soft smoky gasps—like a dwarf choking on a burning rag. The couple dismounted. Only to discover that Mom's was closed. Not shuttered for the Sabbath but permanently shut down. Padlocked. Vacant. In a cobweb-frosted window corner a faded FOR RENT sign hung by one ear from a snipping of tape. So, while his young bride went around back to water the ferns, Ziller scrutinized the roadhouse—noted its spaciousness, its quaint but sturdy construction, the broad fields behind it, the grove in which it sat—and surmised that it was a likely edifice in which to house a zoo, a family and secret world headquarters.
“I am always voyaging back to the source,” Ziller had said. He was a source-rer. Internally, he pursued the bright waters of his origins with whatever vehicles he could command. “In our human cells are recorded every single impulse of energy that has occurred since the beginning of time,” Amanda had said. “The DNA genetic system is the one library in which it is really worthwhile to browse.”
Part II
ALONG THEIR MIGRATORY routes, monarch butterflies stay nights in certain trees. The “butterfly trees,” as they are called, are carefully chosen—although the criteria exercised in their selection are not known. Species is unimportant, obviously, for at one stopover the roosting tree may be a eucalyptus, at another a cedar or an elm. But, and this is what is interesting, they are always the same trees. Year after year, whether moving south or returning north, monarchs will paper with their myriad wings at twilight a single tree that has served as a monarch motel a thousand times before.
Memory? If so, it is genetic. For you see, the butterflies who journey south are not the ones who come back. Monarchs lay their eggs in sunny climes. Then they die. The hordes who flutter northward in spring are a succeeding generation. Yet, without hesitation, they roost in the same trees as did their ancestors.
Scientists have examined butterfly trees and found them chemically and physically identical to the trees surrounding them. Yet no other tree will do. Investigators have camouflaged a tree's color, altered its scent. The monarchs were not fooled. Another of nature's mysterious constants. A butterfly always knows when it is
there
.
They found the zoo site on an October Sunday: a soft burpy day on which they crossed many bridges. Bridges over rivers and bridges over sloughs. The sky sagged like an udder. The air had a feel of heavy birds. Their motorcycle was a flash of overheated color in the damp green landscapes. At seventy miles an hour, it whined like a spinning top—and rattled Amanda's kidneys like dice in a box.
Amanda had peed in Seattle, she had peed in Everett. And now as they sped through the Skagit River Valley, she had to pee again. Already, she and John Paul were far behind the caravan that motored to Bellingham (near the Canadian border) where, on the campus of Western Washington State College, the circus was to unfurl its canvases for the last time. But when she rapped her code on Ziller's ribs, he dutifully braked the BMW and turned into the big fir-ringed parking lot of Mom's Little Dixie Bar-B-Cue. Luckily, Amanda's biological urgency became manifest on that rare stretch of Interstate 5 where the limited access rule had, for some reason, been suspended. Along that one fifteen-mile section of the Seattle-Vancouver Freeway (between Everett and Mount Vernon), there were scattered gas stations, general stores and restaurants. Not many, however, for this was farming country of almost unequaled lushness and the black juicy soil was far too valuable to be relegated to commerce.
The motorcycle engine died with a prolonged series of soft smoky gasps—like a dwarf choking on a burning rag. The couple dismounted. Only to discover that Mom's was closed. Not shuttered for the Sabbath but permanently shut down. Padlocked. Vacant. In a cobweb-frosted window corner a faded FOR RENT sign hung by one ear from a snipping of tape. So, while his young bride went around back to water the ferns, Ziller scrutinized the roadhouse—noted its spaciousness, its quaint but sturdy construction, the broad fields behind it, the grove in which it sat—and surmised that it was a likely edifice in which to house a zoo, a family and secret world headquarters.
“I am always voyaging back to the source,” Ziller had said. He was a source-rer. Internally, he pursued the bright waters of his origins with whatever vehicles he could command. “In our human cells are recorded every single impulse of energy that has occurred since the beginning of time,” Amanda had said. “The DNA genetic system is the one library in which it is really worthwhile to browse.”
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