Swallowtail Vigil

the softest, most porous of hearts

She started taking mid-afternoon telework breaks during the summer of 2020 and planting herself beside the butterfly bush in her backyard in Toledo, Oregon. By 2:30, she reached capacity on faces-in-boxes meetings, spreadsheets, regression plots on the respiration of fish embryos. For someone whose career had been so feet-in-boots, hands-on-fish, work-from-home was an adjustment. Her breaks coincided with rush hour traffic for butterflies on the buddleia. Each oblong purple corncob on the bush was composed of a thousand tiny trumpet-shaped florets. Yellow and black winged beauties wrapped their legs around each inflorescence and dove into the orange throat of each tubular floret tongue first. The air became fragrant like honey.  

As soon as she paid attention, she began to tell the individual butterflies apart by their scars, the shapes of their missing parts. She is incorrigible that way as a biologist. She’s supposed to think in terms of populations, not individuals, but she has never complied, and her observations always tend back toward noticing who is who among whatever species she studies. Technically, she studies fish, not butterflies, but it’s hard to stop the impulse to collect observations once it’s ingrained.

She continued the tradition after she emerged from quarantine. The summer of 2023, she spent two ten-day trips in Kodiak, Alaska, surveying cod. The two trips bookended butterfly season, so for those three interim weeks at home, she stayed in field mode, notebook and camera at the ready. On weekends, she surveyed butterflies all day, and on weekdays, she visited the bush first thing when she arrived home from the lab in the afternoons. She strove to recognize the same individuals on consecutive days. The one who was bright without a nick to her filigreed lobes might arrive with a v-shaped notch in her forewing from clinging to a tree branch in yesterday afternoon’s wind. The one she’s been watching for five days now is tattered on every edge, the purple florets visible through windows cut into her forewing, whose tissue-thin membranes seem stretched across thin wire like an antique parasol, as though it would crumple if opened, yet she lifts her wings in flight even still. Backlit by the sun, her branching wing veins shine like molten gold threads still powering her across the blue pane of sky. She has laid her eggs, tiny green marbles, under a leaf in a good feeding tree by now. Soon she’ll stop seeking the morning sun’s warmth, stop stretching her wings, stop straddling the flowers to drink their sweetness. She will stop documenting the acceleration of age in the tapestry of her wings, stop accumulating trauma. But for now, she is a story in motion, and in dancing her swift timeline, dances the biologist’s last four summers, and time collapses.

The butterfly over which the biologist holds vigil is a western tiger swallowtail, a non-migratory butterfly who probably likes the biologist’s area because of the enormous tulip poplar trees, one in Floyd’s yard to the east, another two doors down at John and Lucy’s, to the west. It probably likes the swamp full of willow saplings down the slope at the bottom edge of the acre. Discussing the butterfly’s “likes,” she knows, is just another sign of her incorrectness in biology, but she is unapologetic in her anthropomorphism. It is the larger mistake to ascribe an absence of emotion, to attribute to another species an inability to feel pain or desire. There is ample food for swallowtail caterpillars in these woods, with nectar-providers like the buddleia strategically nearby, blooming at a convenient time, at least the way the seasonal phenology is aligned for now. 

She watches them deteriorate day by day, which sounds morbid, but it is a microcosm of what the biologist does at work. What even is ecology anymore? At times she can convince herself she is still saving species, but the work she does is more like a careful documentation of extinction. All the measurements, analyses, and recommendations she can make will paint ever so precise an image of the demise of the Pacific cod. The cod, vulnerable to the marine heat waves that become more intense and frequent in the Pacific, swim north seeking spawning grounds as suitable ones vanish. They will reach a northern limit as they exhaust the finite options. Swallowtails, too, are subject to range-shifts and asynchronies brought on by climate change. One day the buddleia will bloom and fade too early and the swallowtails might move north, if they have the collective memory to do so, until they no longer can. But the process the biologist watches, the aging of one individual butterfly over a lifespan of days, is normal for a butterfly. Demise is their whole trajectory. The morphology of butterfly memory is only and always collective. They are built of ephemera that would melt in heavy rain, would shred in strong wind, would shatter in a freeze. They were never meant to last. And yet, they do endure, across generations.

The generations do not interact. A swallowtail does not get to meet her grandmother, nor even her mother. The biologist thinks of her Nana. She did not get to ask about Nana’s traumas, about how it might have been to grow up too soon when her great-grandfather died young, how it was to be a bookkeeper and not finish high school, how it was to realize she loved a man the moment he was declared missing in action, how it was to marry him the minute he returned from a world war. She can’t ask about when Nana’s mother was threatened with losing Nana’s younger sisters, CPS was a thing even then. If the biologist had known of this generational trauma before her ex got CPS involved in her own life as a mother, would it have made things any different? Would this echo across generations have resonated for her in advance? Would all the mentions of PTSD her ex relied so heavily on as his excuse for treating her in appalling ways have waved a red flag, if any family member had ever mentioned that her grandfather came back from the war a shell of himself?

The biologist does finally find out about these things, the way she always learns, through research—that pack of letters her grandfather sent her grandmother from the vet’s camp where he went for a month to recuperate from combat fatigue—which the biologist had always been led to believe was one of his hospitalizations for tuberculosis, because respiratory illness does not carry as much stigma as perceived weakness. This research requires her to read between his looping cursive lines, to detect traces on the thin ivory stationery, to understand how she’s done many things with her life that mirror things her Nana did. It’s almost as if she couldn’t have prevented it if she had tried, as though it was preordained in collective memory. Nobody wrote “combat fatigue” in 1947, which was the term for what would become PTSD in the late 1970s, so all she has to work with is that her grandfather lost weight and needed to get his appetite back. She has that one reply from her grandfather’s friend who tells him to stop thinking of “all that happened over there.” Only now in the middle of the biologist’s life, long after her grandparents’ lives have ended, after accumulating enough scars of her own, does the idea of his war trauma fully develop like an image in a darkroom, floating in something vague and murky.

Leave it to quarantine to bring all of this to her consciousness. The way this pause in her life sent her seeking out the parallel gaps in her ancestors’ lives, reading their letters from quarantine, no from trauma camp, yes from quarantine. The way she spiraled inward when outward life came to a halt. The way the silence cleared the air for butterflies. 

Much is made of the caterpillar’s transformation into the butterfly. Time as metamorphosis. This is the miracle, the transition from crawler to flyer. But each butterfly is not an endpoint, though butterfly photography is dominated by photos of the first day they emerge, the perfect, chiseled beauty. Yet the butterfly will live for days, maybe as long as two or three weeks, and that first perfect body is only one snapshot, and not the most interesting one, of the story the insect will weave across air currents.

It is a difficult story to witness, though. She became an ecologist not because she was hardened enough to document demise, but because of having the softest, most porous of hearts. She is turned inside out daily, laid threadbare. Each fish that sinks to the bottom is another hole in her tapestry. She is alive to every death. Time in swallowtails, swallows-tail. Her unsuitability for the grief work of extinction is an ouroboros she confronts but may never understand. The biologist’s younger self did not listen to anyone who told her unsavory things about marine biology. This moment is always where time was going to lead her.

It is December 2023, and the swallowtails are all dead. None are extant now in butterfly form. She could almost imagine their extinction. But she knows about diapause. Time as seasons. This is not a vigil, but a form of faith. There are no butterflies to observe, only unseen caterpillar soup, simmering in chrysalis slow cookers, seasoned with imaginal cells, those bits of the crawling beings that encode the dream of flying. She believes in it with her whole soft heart.

Next summer, she will watch them, newly emerged, resplendent in black and gold with their carved edges. She will take flight herself, to Alaska, to number the fishes of the sea, to document the facets of decline. She will return to her yard and notice as many details as she can about the western tiger swallowtails of 2024 in Toledo, Oregon. She will meticulously document how much of their wing surface can be gouged away and yet they can still lift up on air currents. She will watch them sit still in the early morning and angle themselves toward the sun, just as she sits by her own fake sun each morning to chase away her shadows. The butterflies need to absorb enough sunlight to warm their muscles before they can fly. She will watch them gather hurts and torn edges, become frayed and ragged. Time as deterioration. She will watch their tattered bodies hold onto the flowers and ride the wind. She will hold onto the flowers and ride the wind. She will watch as time takes pieces of them away until their golden threads are revealed.

Epilogue

I wrote this in December. In January, every tree in our forest backyard was glazed in ice for a week in a freak storm. I am in the space between July and August Kodiak trips but there are no swallowtails in our yard this year. It might be the ice, it might be something else; I found a reddit where folks from a wide geographic range chimed in, noticing their backyards lack butterflies this year. Whereas some swallowtails produce antifreeze proteins and would be protected, much like Arctic cod, from ice, they are also said to have the ability to remain in diapause for over a year to survive drought. I have a thing for survivors. I understand a little about having to disappear for a while to survive.

“She could almost imagine their extinction.”

This is not a vigil, but a form of faith.