Written 5 December 2002.
I've lived in Santa Barbara all my life, but for the first five or six years we lived about half an hour from downtown. Very suburban area, used to have lots of big fields which are now housing developments, of course... We lived about two or three blocks from the beach, and in between us and the beach was a large grove of eucalypus trees. Every winter, thousands of monarch butterflies would come and eat and mate and die on the trees, then continue migrating south into Mexico. Our homeschooling group would meet there sometimes. Us kids would play that we were lost in the undergrowth, or scootch across trees that had fallen across the gully. An expert on monarch butterflies came out from UCSB once and told us all about their lifecycle, and showed us how to pick the butterflies up very gently by their wings.
I remember standing on the bottom of the gully, looking up at a sky thick with butterflies, not daring to walk for fear I'd step on some mating on the ground.
We moved into town. Every couple years I go back there. Last time, I promised myself that as soon as I got my driver's license I'd drive myself out there with a journal.
I've been thinking a lot about coming-of-age rituals and milestones lately. I never really cared or could visualize my first kiss, first job, getting my driver's license, anything like that. But I could picture this. And today, it was perfect.
Mom said she didn't need the car all afternoon. I put "Dial-a-Song" on and drove out. Once I got on the freeway, I realized I didn't quite know where I was going. I mean, I knew quite well where I was going, and even where it was, and I certainly knew where I was... I just had no idea of street names. So I got off the freeway two or three exits before I needed to, but made it all the way out past Costco into the boonies by the beach. Once I made it out there, I just kind of... found a street that looked right and drove to the end of it. What could be easier...
I parked next to the sign that said "Butterfly Reserve". That's a new one... Thankfully, though, they limited themselves to the sign and about twenty yards of a neat wood-chip path. After that, it was just all fields and eucalyptus. I wandered into the grove.
The gully was cordoned off, "to prevent erosion". Well. I approve of that. No more narrow escapes from broken bones for the neighborhood kids nowadays, but you can't have everything. I looked up. I didn't see anything but the tops of the trees. Everything was very still.
I walked up the path to the side and found a nice fallen tree to sit on. Got out my journal and sort of mused, gazed off into the distance, into the grove... I saw a flickering bit of orange out of the corner of my eye, and then another one, and another. Tens of butterflies, dozens of them. And then I saw the clusters of brown dead leaves on the trees which aren't really leaves at all. Hundreds of butterflies... Everything was exactly as I remembered. The plywood boards across one of the fallen trees were even still there, although I couldn't get out to them. I wrote, and picked up a leaf to paste in my journal.
I walked out through the flat fields of grass and scrub towards the ocean. Everything was exactly the same and exactly different. I had never seen this before, but I knew exactly where I was. I walked for a while, then sat down on a bluff and read "The Gift of Tongues" for a while in the cold, moist, salty ocean wind.
I saw two hawks, and a pelican flying low over the water.
I walked back to the car and drove home through 3 o' clock traffic.