Butterfly Effect

Photo by Herb Bohler

I hate to disturb nature.

Sure, I help along red newts trying to cross the road on dewy mornings. I use my gentle, firm, mother's-voice to encourage baby deer to leave the roadside and look for safer, greener pastures. I invite my late-fall animal friends to remain in the safe haven of my yard when hunters' shots begin echoing through the hills. I've even tried to throw a few beached jelly fish back into the sea.

Otherwise, I trust Mother Nature to take care of her own.

Then along comes a boy. Boys, true to their reputations, love salamanders, toads, frogs, bugs. I love them too. As a kid, I loved them. I spent a lot of time visiting my grandparents' lake home at the base of the Adirondacks. There was no T.V., save Saturday night's Lawrence Welk and Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. I could only sit and color or attempt to crochet for just so long. And so I spent a lot of time outside, hunting under rocks, searching near the woodpile, collecting red newts and toads and frogs. I was a girl, so the daintier the catch, the better. I was gentle with these creatures. I spent hours creating perfect mini-worlds for their existence in the base of empty Cool-Whip containers I'd found in the pantry. My attention to detail was painstaking. I supplied them with a texturally diverse world - multiple varieties of mosses and lichens, some like rich carpet, others a forest of tiny trees. I spent entire cool, dewy mornings collecting and creating, always releasing my new-found pets before lunch, before the sun turned their min-paradises into tropical wastelands. I didn't want them to die.

Then along comes a boy. He doesn't want them to die either. But he isn't interested in their home decor. He believes that each little amphibian is looking for its family and he carries each creature he finds up and down the yard, searching for its mama or papa, a brother or sister even. I hold my breath, praying the thing doesn't have a heart attack in his warm little hand. Praying his well intentioned search doesn't turn to tragedy if he slips on the wet grass and tries to catch his fall, the tiny orphan still in his hand.

But I am glad he likes to catch them, am delighted he finds joy in nature. And happy when he lets them go, all legs still intact.

And so when late summer's sun shines, when the yellow of golden rod offers its striking contrast to the clear blue skies, I set out with this boy looking for monarch caterpillars. What better joy can be witnessed then this magic slight-of-hand of nature? The tiny caterpillar, turned fat, turned chrysalis - not only a lovely green chrysalis, but one sealed with a line of gold - turned butterfly. And not just any butterfly, but one that will migrate 2,000 miles to Mexico.

To witness this act, to have this boy and his sister witness this act, I am willing to disturb nature.

But not without some reservation. Monarchs, like so many creatures, are becoming endangered. They depend almost solely on the milkweed plant for nourishment. Herbicides often target milkweed. Development transforms meadows. The monarchs have fewer and fewer places to call home.

And then there are the preschoolers and the kindergartens. Every teacher of a kid under six wants a few token caterpillars for their classrooms each fall. What easier, cheaper, planning- free lesson could there be? It's science. It's metaphor. It's magic. And every fall, following the first day of school, every child within one hundred miles of a milkweed plant goes out searching, hoping against hope to be The One, The One who brings the teacher what she needs. And we would have searched too, but we had a wedding to get to...

Someone else brought Alex's teacher the caterpillars, but he hopped off the bus today and reported that while the caterpillars had been found, they needed milkweed, lots of milkweed. Anyone who has ever read The Hungry Caterpillar knows that caterpillars eat a lot. And so Alex hopped off the school bus and into the stroller. We know a good milkweed patch along with side of the road. I should have thrown a paper bag into the stroller, but I didn't want to take the time to go inside, and so I pulled an empty coffee can out of the garage.

A word about coffee. I love it - I would even consider myself a bit of a connoisseur. I only want to drink the stuff I like and I try to make delicious, fair-trade choices. Exploiting people and rain forests isn't something I want on my conscience any more then delimbing toads or newts. But I did have a giant can of Folder's in my freezer - a can I reserved for guests who don't care about flavor, they just need a hot cup of Joe, for times I needed to make coffee in bulk, for those sad, desperate mornings when my good stuff had run out. That non-sustainable, non fair trade, rain forest stripping can was in with the recyclables.

As luck would have it, we found a giant, healthy caterpillar on the first milkweed plant we saw. Shamelessly, I threw my reverence for nature to the wind. Alex might have a caterpillar at school, but Cate does not and neither do I. What joy. What magic. We carefully plopped the caterpillar and an ample supply of milkweed into our coffee can container and continued on our way.

I think it was the few remaining grounds of coffee. Maybe the ride was too bumpy, the shock too great. The caterpillar is dead. Dead within 30 minutes of its discovery. I tried to save it. I looked into its lush home and saw it lying listlessly on the bottom, not chowing down on the fresh milkweed. I used a leaf to pick it up and place it on a leaf. It rallied for a moment, and then was still. Resting? About to transform? But no. It has not moved. It has not crawled high and turned into its characteristic J. It's dead. Dead because I disturbed it and dead because I bought bad coffee that grows without regard nature... just like me. Fair trade coffee comes in little bags. Had I stuck to my guns and only bought fair trade coffee, I wouldn't have had a giant plastic coffee can in my possession. Had I stuck to my guns and left nature alone, the caterpillar would have doubled in size by morning and crawled to a safe branch to form its green and golden chrysalis. A gorgeous monarch would have emerged, joining the centuries-old migratory flight to Mexico.

Nature always offers a lesson and this one has illustrated what I have been trying to teach my kids - respect nature, don't disturb it. I hate to think I played a role in the endangerment of the monarch butterfly. I hate to think I played a part in the destruction of the rain forest. These thoughts disturb me.