"The inside of joy"

It took me over a month to finish Barbara Kingsolver's novel Flight Behavior, which might be a new personal best for slow reading.  I've been busy during the day, and you don't get very far in 15 minutes before you fall asleep and the book flops over.  But it's also one of those novels that deserve close reading, with excellent writing and a multi-layered story.

Barbara Kingsolver wrote The Bean Trees (1988) and The Poisonwood Bible (1998) read by every 1990's book club, so she has many fans. She was a biologist long before she became a writer, and her novels often have themes about community, biodiversity and climate change.

In the first chapter of Flight Behavior, an unhappy young wife heads up the hill from her farm in Appalachia for a tryst. There she sees the forest below her "burning" like a lake of fire. The color is actually millions of Monarch butterflies.  Needless to say, the insects are far off track up in the Tennessee woods.

Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve- Mexico

She describes the sight like this:

It looked like the inside of joy, if a person could see that. A valley of lights, an ethereal wind. It had to mean something.

And so, it does. This strange event sets in place big changes in her life and for the community.  She becomes a celebrity and the hardscrabble farmers encounter scientists, journalists and sightseers for the first time.  The "butterfly miracle" sparks a host of explanations from religious leaders and the media.  Great characters and a good story follows.

The story of butterflies wintering in Tennessee is fiction, but in Mexico it's estimated that up to a billion butterflies arrive in any given year.  The butterfly reserve (now a World Heritage Site) is 60 miles NW of Mexico City in a small belt of oak and pine forests in the mountains.  The Monarch butterfly is the only species to make a long north-south migration like birds. In Mexico they fill the sky like clouds and their beating wings look like rain.

Even more incredible than a billion butterflies in once place is the fact this area, so close to a major city,  wasn't even discovered by scientists until the 1970's. Some of you may still remember the almost unbelievable National Geographic article and photographs published in 1975.