My wife and I have been fortunate enough throughout our adult lives to take a number of trips around the world. We’ve been to Europe on four different
occasions, we’ve traveled through the Panama Canal, we’ve been to Alaska, and we’ve traveled throughout the United States.
Every trip has included finding out what we could about our destination prior to the trip. From brochures in the mail, to Google searches to chats with friends that have made similar trips, we’ve gathered and analyzed intel to ensure that each trip would be the best possible. We’ve had more than one trip that would qualify as “the trip of a lifetime,” often thanks to those pre-trip scouting efforts.
As August has become September, our grandson is keeping track of five little guys that are about to commence their own respective “trips of a lifetime”. His keen eyes have harvested a small travel group of monarch butterfly caterpillars, four of which have begun their pre-trip preparations of packing themselves into cocoons. In a week or two they’ll unpack themselves and come out in their new traveling attire. Where the modern human traveler opts for comfortable simplicity when dressing for long trips, these caterpillars will accept nothing short of spectacular as they coordinate themselves with every other monarch butterfly and wear yet another orange with black ensemble for their journey.
As they hang from the lid of his little butterfly “nursery,” morphing from an insect that crawls, eats, and poops into an insect that flutters and flies, they’re searching little more than their own DNA in preparation for their long flights down to Mexico.
Mexico?
We’re going to Mexico? Has anybody ever been to Mexico? What’s that, your great-grandmother was in Mexico earlier this year?
I can hear the butterflies asking each other questions.
Such a strange place for this particular generation of monarch to head. Earlier this year, various generations of monarchs were heading north to Michigan, braving multiple perils and obstacles that nature and humankind have placed in their way. Monarchs have done butterfly things; gorging on milkweed, hanging in a chrysalis, morphing into flying machines, throughout their evolution. Without so much as a check of the local weather, this generation of butterfly will hatch, dry their wings, take a brief shakedown flight, and then head south to Mexico for the winter on their single, solitary “trip of a lifetime.”
It’s not my idea of a “trip of a lifetime,” but then, my DNA prefers on time arrivals, connecting flights, and in flight snacks.
Butterflies and I are not the same but they’ve always fascinated me.
Not necessarily the part about spending one butterfly lifespan traveling across the hemisphere, but just the idea of finding a caterpillar and watching it change into a butterfly. “Fascinating” is a word that comes to mind, but confining the monarch caterpillar/chrysalis/butterfly paradigm to a single word is missing the point of its existence.
Here’s what I’m trying to say.
The world is populated with many humans who dislike things that change and are even more uncomfortable with the concept of fluidity — this same population often prefers that their borders be slammed shut and obstacles erected to deter anything that wishes to cross. In all that, here is a creature that’s sole purpose is to fly into the face of any obstacle..
Marcy and I would never head to the airport with nothing more than the clothes on our back and hop onto the first available flight south. But that doesn’t mean we can’t provide as much milkweed as we can to those that do.