1949. I became a collector of butterflies. I had a net, a jar with some ammonia to extinguish the last bit of life in the captive butterfly, pieces of cardboard and pins, and soon I had a few dozen butterflies impaled on my pieces of cardboard. I was intrigued. I started learning names of both the butterflies and the bushes they loved to visit.
There were several lantana plants near our home, and they were filled with Painted Ladies and delicate-looking Gulf Fritillaries, both of them small-to-medium-sized, orange with dark stripes. Neither had the majesty, though, of the Monarchs, which migrated through our Southern California neighborhoods a couple of times a year and could very often be found around the milkweed.
Two butterflies were always very easy to find—the Cabbage White, whose caterpillar feasted on cabbage and kale, and the Mourning Cloak, often rather ragged, as if it had just been in a fight, and with dark colors befitting its name, as if it were on its way to a funeral.
For some reason, I had a special place in my heart for these dark, mournful butterflies. Though there weren’t as many of them as there were Cabbage Whites, they seemed all the more common and vulnerable, perhaps because of their roughed-up appearance.
There were also butterflies that I have always revered: The Tiger Swallowtails which seemed to bring the spring with them and to fly as if nothing could give them more pleasure than a few loop-de-loops and exciting spirals as they flew toward the wispy clouds high above.
There is an extended family of Swallowtails. Cousins live in other states and countries, but they are all recognizable variations on one another’s colors and designs. The Tiger’s wings swoop out gracefully, ending in slender, dark tails; the wings are dark-bordered with tiger-like stripes and little blue eyes—or so it seems—at the base of the wings.
This was the ultimate prize. I imagined a piece of cardboard covered with a half dozen of these beautiful creatures. But every time I discovered one in the air above me, it flew beyond my reach and seemed to hover and mock me.
>>>
If you look at butterfly books, you quickly realize that the place every lepidopterist must make a pilgrimage to is a warm-climate rainforest. My parents, impressed by my sudden interest in science, had bought me a little book with a dazzling blue butterfly on the cover.
I was struck immediately by the fact that we live on a planet that is capable of producing such creatures. “What if someone opened her eyelids and what we saw was some eyes as blue as that! Wow!” I declared to my mother, who told me my observation was rather poetic.
I didn’t know what that meant, but I was filled with a wish to see such butterflies in person. So I thought it through carefully and I developed a plan.
I couldn’t go to South America, but I could go toward South America. It seemed to me that if the Mourning Cloaks, for example, were known to be an Orange County butterfly—but we saw them by the dozen in L.A.—surely the occasional blue butterfly might find its way to our neighborhood.
I became momentarily obsessed with the Blue Morpho butterfly. The Blue Morpho has bright blue wings dipped in black at the edges, but on the underside, the wings are a dull brown with splotches that look like eyes, so that when it rests and closes its wings, predators tend to see it as a part of its muddy environment—a big, decaying leaf, perhaps. (The wings, just to knock your socks off, are as much as 8 inches wide.)
One of the many miracles here is that when the Morpho flies, the opening and closing of its wings make the beautiful butterfly seem to appear momentarily and then vanish, appear and vanish, across the sky. Like a child’s game: “Where’s baby? There he is!”
My plan was simple. I would get up at 5 a.m. the next Saturday, dress warmly, take my net, and head south. I wouldn’t tell anyone about this plan for the simple reason that they would forbid it. But I would be very careful.
>>>I love mornings in the spring, with a bit of cold hanging in the air and the promise of warm sunlight. With my butterfly net over my shoulder, my “Hollywood Stars Baseball Team” sweatshirt over a blue tee shirt, my oversized shorts and undersized tennis shoes and, perhaps above all, with my orange Shell Oil baseball cap all but covering my eyes, I may have been an unusual sight at 5:30 on a Saturday morning. People seemed to slow down in their cars to look at me, but I just smiled and waved and, though they didn’t smile back, they soon drove on.
The Mourning Cloaks were hovering by now, and I caught a few with my net, just for the heck of it, and I kept walking in the direction I assumed to be south.
About eight blocks from my home, though, two guys about five years older than me by my reckoning made their bicycle brakes screech and soon stood looking me over as if I were a pancake they wanted to flatten for breakfast.
“Hey, kid,” one of them said.
I nodded.
“Hey,” he repeated, “my name is Kenny. You ever hear of Kenny?”
I shook my head.
“Not from around here, are you?”
I shook my head again.
“Cat got your tongue, kid?” Kenny asked unpleasantly.
I shook my head.
Wham! Kenney slammed his fist into my cheek. “When I say something to you,” he ordered, “you answer. With words.”
I almost nodded. “Yes, sir,” I said.
Kenny’s friend howled with laughter. “Yes, sir, Kenny sir,” he cried.
“Shut up, Melvin,” Kenny said. Melvin stopped very quickly.
Kenny turned back to me. “My friend Melvin here,” Kenny resumed—“well, he and I were out innocently riding our two-wheelers…. You ride a two-wheeler yet, boy?”
I nodded my head and Wham! I took another right hook to the jaw, falling in a heap to the ground, trying very hard not to cry.
“I told you to answer me with words,” Kenny repeated.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Sorry, sir,” Melvin parroted.
“Shut up, Melvin,” Kenny repeated, then he looked at me again. “As I was saying, my friend and I were looking for a little entertainment on a Saturday morning, and who should we run into but—what’s your name, boy?”
“Um,” I stammered.
Wham! My nose started to bleed this time and I began to whimper, afraid my life was about to end.
Kenny began to pace. “I’m thinking,” he said, “that this time we’ll let you go without hurting you too bad. You know what I mean?”
Nearly nodding, I blurted out, “Yes, sir.”
“Don’t nod!” Kenny yelled.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay, I won’t.”
“So we’re going to let you go with your stupid outfit and your net this time, but I’m going to want that hat.”
I handed it to him.
“I’m pretty sure you’ll see me again,” Kenny said. “I’m pretty sure you’ll be sorry you did. Though it might help if you carry a bit of money. I will give you the choice: Money or pain. Understand?”
“Yes,” I said. “Can I go now?”
Kenny thought for a minute and said, “Got any money?”
I had two weeks’ allowance. Fifty cents, which I handed him.
“Okay,” Kenny leered. “You can go.”
>>>
At the beach weeks later, I saw very small butterflies with wings that were pale blue on one side and looked like dirty sand on the other. They were unspectacular specimens, yet I felt an immediate affection for them as they hopped from one branch to another, fragile and sweet.
I never went on another blue butterfly expedition, though. Never again went south with my net on my shoulder. Mother made a series of threats about what might happen if I tried that “stunt” again, but I was committed to staying away from Kenny and Melvin, if at all possible.
One day, I found out that another butterfly with pale blue wings was seen relatively often in the San Francisco area. “Worth a trip?” my Dad asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said, imagining the unpleasantness of running into another bully. “It would be fun to go to San Francisco, though.”
“Yeah. We’ll do that one day,” Dad said. “Maybe we can take a plane.”
“That would be great,” I said. I’d never been on a plane.
“Maybe we can go to an Italian restaurant I know in San Francisco.”
“Yeah,” I said, delighted. “And I could have some Pasghetti.”
My father chuckled. “Right,” he said. “As much as you want.”
We did that once, in fact. But we didn’t seek out the Mission Blue butterfly in San Francisco’s gardens. I learned, maybe a decade later, that the Mission Blue had landed uncertainly on the endangered species list, and I was very glad I’d never killed any.
I hadn’t killed any more Mourning Cloaks, either. Or Cabbage butterflies. And I was happy to leave the magnificent Tiger Swallowtail to its looping flights high above me. It always seemed to come with a message of beauty and peace, a message I never wanted to kill.
