Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

There is no use blaming the rain and mud, these are only elements. The disaster is the failed expectation.

their cloying scent and falling-apart flowerheads opened a door straight into the memory of her parents’ funerals.

They all attended Hester’s church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.

She knew it would take only minutes for Luther to finish the lamb he’d taken next, ahead of its mother, so she ran back to fetch that soft dove-gray fleece and was careful to keep it separate. The wool from these lambs’ first and only shearing was finer and more valuable than regular wool. Hester could get an astounding fifty bucks apiece for virgin fleeces on the Internet, selling to hand spinners, and last year recouped the cost of her new computer in one season. The lambs’ flesh was already contracted to a grocery chain and would be consumed by Christmas, but their wool would go on keeping people warm for years.

slightly overripe ladies whose dyed-black hair was identically parted down the middle by a stripe of white roots.

The better part of friendship might be holding one’s tongue over the prospect of self-made wreckage.

But being a stay-at-home mom was the loneliest kind of lonely, in which she was always and never by herself.

And the idea of being named for an artist. A person could be reborn on the strength of that.

It’s a selfish habit. I never learn anything from listening to myself.”

Bonnie showed her how to tell the males, which had darker wing borders than the females and a black dot on each lower wing.

She asked him how long the butterflies lived, and his answer was baffling: generally about six weeks. The ones that lived through winter lasted longer, a few months, by going into something like hibernation. “Diapause,” he called it, a pause in the normal schedule of growing up, mating, and reproducing. Somewhere in midlife, the cold or darkness of winter put them all on hold, shutting down their sex drive until future notice.

It made no sense, a lifespan of a few weeks did not add up to an annual migration of many thousand miles. How did they learn where to go? Dr. Byron explained that no single butterfly ever made the round trip.

She wanted to like the scientists too, who really did care about the butterflies, probably a far cry more than she did. It was true what Ovid said, they were only taking the measure of things. If the news was bad, that wasn’t their fault.

Dellarobia thought of the wooden ornaments her father made years ago, which must still exist somewhere. What a complicated life cycle those must have passed through: attic boxes, funeral upheavals, yard sales. Like an insect going through its stages, all aimed in the end toward flying away.

She looked over the bins of tinselly junk and felt despair, trying to find one single thing that wouldn’t fall apart before you got it home. Maybe her father was lucky to die young with his pride of craftsmanship intact. What would he make of this world? Realistically, it probably wasn’t slave children, but there had to be armies of factory workers making this slapdash stuff, underpaid people cranking out things for underpaid people to buy and use up, living their lives mostly to cancel each other out. A worldwide entrapment of bottom feeders.

Blanchie said, tugging at her tightly belted raincoat. Everything she ever wore was sized for a previous Blanchie, before creeping weight gain took its toll. Dellarobia thought of it as the Wardrobe of Denial.

There was too much information. What they actually did was scope around, decide who was looking out for their clan, and sign on for the memos on a wide array of topics.

In a world of wars and religious fracas, prosperity might be the sole point of general agreement. Honestly, if you waved a handful of money, whose head didn’t turn toward it? Only those who’d already paid off their houses, was her guess.

She resented his new list of cares, wondering how they stacked up against, say, a foreclosure notice or a car breakdown you walked home from without any hope of repair. In her experience people had worries or they had tons of money, not both.

“A journalist’s job is to collect information,” Ovid said to Pete. “Nope,” Pete said. “That’s what we do. It’s not what they do.” Dellarobia was unready to be pushed out of the conversation just like that. “Then what do you think the news people drive their Jeeps all the way out here for?” “To shore up the prevailing view of their audience and sponsors.”

“You’re saying people only tune in to news they know they’re going to agree with?” “Bingo,” said Pete.

People who’d never known the like of Ovid Byron would naturally mistrust him. They couldn’t close out the whole world, maybe, but they could sure find something on their TV or radio to put scientists or foreigners or whatever they thought he was in a bad light. Truly, they were no better than the city people always looking down on southerners, with one Billy Ray Hatch or another forever at their disposal. If people played their channels right, they could be spared from disagreement for the length of their natural lives. Finally she got it. The need for so many channels.

“Honestly, I’m a little worried about those two. They exist on political commitment and gorp.”

“Three hundred fifty parts per million,” he replied. “The number of carbon molecules the atmosphere can hold, and still maintain the ordinary thermal balance. It’s an important figure. I suppose they want to draw attention.

“The thermal stability of the planet.” He studied the little plastic cup for a moment before grasping and pulling off the foil seal. She watched him down it like a glass of water, and tried to think of any other edibles she might be carrying on her person. “What are we up to so far?” He swallowed a few times before speaking. “About three-ninety.” “What? We went past? Why hasn’t everything blown up?” He studied the empty cup in his hand. “Some would say it has. Hurricanes reaching a hundred miles inland, wind speeds we’ve never seen. Deserts on fire. In New Mexico we are seeing the inferno. Texas is worse. Australia is unimaginably worse—a lot of the continent is in permanent drought. Farms abandoned forever.”

But there are unstoppable processes. Like the loss of polar ice. White ice reflects the heat of the sun directly back to space. But when it melts, the dark land and water underneath hold on to the heat. The frozen ground melts. And that releases more carbon into the air. These feedback loops keep surprising us.”

“A trend is intangible, but real,” he said calmly. “A photo cannot prove a child is growing, but several of them show change over time. Align them, and you can reliably predict what is coming. You never see it all at once. An attention span is required.”

“Water, you can see that. Warm air holds more water. Think of condensation on a windshield. Multiply that times all the square meters above you, and it’s a hell of a lot of water. It evaporates too quickly from the hot places, and floods the wet ones. Every kind of weather is intensified by warming.”

“Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,” he said. “We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.” “I really hate this. What you’re saying. Just so you know.” “Sorry. I am a doctor of natural systems. And this looks terminal to me.”

“Well, you’re hardly the first,” he said. “People always want the full predicament revealed and proven in sixty seconds or less. You may have noticed I avoid cameras.” “You did well, though,” she insisted. “Explaining it to me. I’m not saying I don’t believe you, I’m saying I can’t.” “You underestimate yourself. You have a talent for this endeavor, Dellarobia. I see how you take to it. But choose your path carefully. For scientists, reality is not optional.”

‘Honk if you love Jesus, text while driving if you want to meet up.’”

Passers-by must see the stuff piled up here and automatically eject their own castoffs, a townie equivalent to the wildcat landfills that grew alongside country roads. Some universal junk-attraction principle.

As a child she’d never thought to ask, and now she would never know. So much knowledge died with a person.

This place was a museum of people’s second thoughts.

“Seriously,” she said, “is it hateful if you don’t agree with your home team about every single thing? Because I can agree on maybe nine out of ten. But then I start to wander out of the box on one subject, like this environment thing, and man. You’d think I was flipping everybody the bird.”

Dellarobia felt bleary again, looking at this unused luggage: the golden anniversary cruise that detoured into the ICU, the honeymoon called off for financial reasons. Every object in this place gave off the howl of someone’s canceled hopes.

“An animal is the sum of its behaviors,” he said finally. “Its community dynamics. Not just the physical body.”

he had asked her what was the use of saving a world that had no soul left in it. Continents without butterflies, seas without coral reefs, he meant. What if all human effort amounted basically to saving a place for ourselves to park? He had confessed these were not scientific thoughts.

“I am not a zookeeper,” he said. “I’m not here to save monarchs. I’m trying to read what they are writing on our wall.”

Science doesn’t tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is.” “That must be why people don’t like it,” she said, surprised at her tartness.

“I’d say the teams get picked, and then the beliefs get handed around,” she said. “Team camo, we get the right to bear arms and John Deere and the canning jars and tough love and taking care of our own. The other side wears I don’t know what, something expensive. They get recycling and population control and lattes and as many second chances as anybody wants. Students e-mailing to tell you they deserve their A’s.”

There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line. He warned her about this, as a standard point of contention. People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race, astounded to see the scientists approach, pass the mark, and keep running. It’s a common misunderstanding, he said. They conclude there was no race. As long as we won’t commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing.

You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from everything that comes next.

A boy put up his hand, pulled it down, then put it up again, and finally asked, “Are you the president?” Ovid laughed heartily. “No, I am not,” he said. “What makes you think I might be the president? Is it because my skin is dark?” The little boy appeared forthright. “Because you’re wearing a tie.” Ovid looked startled. “A lot of men wear a tie when they go to work,” he said. “Maybe your dad does that?” “No,” said the boy, and Dellarobia could see Ovid taking this in: no on the tie, or no on the going to work, maybe no dad, period.

All the coal that has ever been mined, that’s carbon. All the oil wells, carbon, again! We have evaporated that into the air. What’s in the world stays in the world, it does not go poof and disappear. It’s called the conservation of matter. The question was settled well before the time of Sir Isaac Newton.”

Scientists used to call these things the canary in the mine. What they say now is, The canary is dead. We are at the top of Niagara Falls, Tina, in a canoe. There is an image for your viewers. We got here by drifting, but we cannot turn around for a lazy paddle back when you finally stop pissing around. We have arrived at the point of an audible roar. Does it strike you as a good time to debate the existence of the falls?”

“It’s like I’m standing by the mailbox waiting all the time for a letter. Every day you come along and put something else in there. A socket wrench, or a milkshake. It’s not bad stuff. Just the wrong things for me.”

“Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It’s kind of all one.” She felt a humorless ripple move through her chest. “You know what Hester told me when we were working the sheep one time? She said it’s no good to complain about your flock, because it’s the put-together of all your past choices.”

Her skin was the brown color of winter pasture, her face a mysterious clause between the commas of long gold earrings:

asked about the name King Billies, and she knew it. From colonial times, she said. Protestant settlers noticed this butterfly wore the royal colors of their prince, William of Orange, who got around eventually to being the king of England. The name monarch came from the same old king.