It’s butterfly season. A major reason¹ I came to Zitácuaro is that, having booked flights into and out of Mexico, I discovered I was visiting right in the middle of the annual monarch migration, and having discovered that, I thought about what it would feel like if I knew that and didn’t visit.

Like a lot of kids who went to school in the United States, I had this whole class on metamorphosis where we raised a caterpillar into a monarch and learned about the migration and all that. And lots of people live places where the butterflies fly through or overwinter.² But their population is dropping — in the mid 1990s there were 1 billion, and it’s now estimated at 100 million. Like so much in the world, it seemed like it was now or never.

There are four places to see the migration in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. I decided to visit Cerro Pelón, which is closer to Zitácuaro, lesser known,³ and slightly more inaccessible (involving a steep hike through some narrow forest paths). In poking around I found JM’s Butterfly B&B.⁴ Finding tour guides can be a little disconcerting; it’s very hard to tell who’s reliable and who you can trust, but they turned out to be fantastic; it’s run by a couple, Joel and Ellen. Joel grew up in the village and runs the B&B with his family, while Ellen is an American who settled there⁵ to focus on sustainable tourism and monarch conservation, as well as handling bookings and advertising.

In retrospect⁶ I should have booked in at the B&B rather than getting a hotel in Zitácuaro; it would have made for a more relaxing time. But I got to see the city and wander around a bit, and I’ll know better next time. The B&B is in Macheros, so you need to catch a half-hour cab ride from Zitácuaro to get there.⁷ I managed to arrive early enough to get breakfast, and then it was time to head up the mountain.

Hiking is, apparently, an option, but the vast majority of people choose to ride a horse. The locals provide horses and then lead you up and down the mountain. This actually has an important effect for conservation. There have been problems with the locals who live around the roosting sites illegally deforesting the area; the more jobs tourism provides the local economies, the more incentive to protect the reserve.⁸

I’ve ridden horses before, although I don’t know that you can really call sitting-on-a-horse-while-someone-slowly-leads-it “riding” exactly. What’s nice is you get sore like you’ve been exercising, so you feel virtuous, but you haven’t put in any real work at all. At any rate, we saddled up, and set off.

It’s hard to describe the actual experience. It’s almost mystical. You likely have seen one or two stray butterflies on the cab ride to Macheros. Once you got there, as the weather warms up, you start to occasionally see small groups of two or three fluttering around. Not far up the mountain there’s a point where there’s always at least one in sight, somewhere, and soon that becomes two or three or a half-dozen, mostly down the path or through the trees but sometimes nearby.

I realized we’ve all seen this kind of thing before, usually in Lovecraftian horror, where the thing that should not be lurks hidden somewhere and is twisting its unnatural tendrils into the world, where one is lead deeper and deeper into a strange realm. But I can’t think of many cases where that’s used the opposite way, where the journey is filled with more and more wonder and delight, where one is being lead to salvation, not doom.⁹

You eventually reach a point where there’s a glade, and you dismount your horse, and it turns out the sunlight is what drives the butterflies out, into activity, and while you might be surrounded by a couple dozen in the shade walking into that light means you are suddenly surrounded by hundreds, literally thousands, all flying and gliding and fluttering in an endless stream as they circulate looking for nectar or mates or just flocking with the others.

You might try to imagine it, and think maybe it’s like a cloud of gnats. Or like one of those exhibitions at zoos where you can walk through a room filled with butterflies — and this just isn’t that. These are wild, and ceaseless; it’s a river more than a swarm. There’s no end to it, no contours, no edges you could skirt. It’s like being underwater. You’re drowning in butterflies, and eventually you remember to breathe and you can even start to get a little used to it, but it never stops being miraculous.

The butterflies’ return every year coincides with the Day of the Dead. They’ve always been connected to the spirit realm for the locals. And we need that. We need more mysteries, more sacred spaces. The monarchs are in danger of dying out; milkweed is vanishing across the United States, and pesticides are making it harder for them to survive. As I sit here on this bus back to Mexico City, I find myself returning to a quote by the naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch: “If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either.”

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Footnotes

¹ Okay, the only reason

² Among other places, there are monarch butterflies in Spain and Australia, and the North American population has parts which spend the winter in California, Florida, and even Cuba.

³ Hence, fewer tour buses

⁴ It doesn’t take much poking around; their Google SEO is kind of impressive.

⁵ After getting a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from UCLA, no less

⁶ Meaning if I bothered to do more research than “Oh, I’ll head to Zitácuaro and figure out how to get a tour once I get there”

⁷ The B&B website provides, amusingly, a “ticket” you can print out and show the cab driver if you fear your Spanish isn’t good enough. Mine was sufficient, although I ended up dropped right by the entrance to the Biosphere, and there’s no cell service to help you navigate from that point.

But, I mean, Macheros is a village of 300 people. I hadn’t spent more than 3 minutes looking perplexed before one of Joel’s brothers wandered by and helped me out.

⁸ The B&B also helps fundraise to increase the number of rangers patrolling the mountain, which is doubly clever, because not only do they prevent logging by their presence but they’re hired from the local villages which helps the economy.

⁹ Lothlórien, perhaps? Tolkien did this a lot, I seem to recall, both ways.

I’d be remiss if I also didn’t point out that this has some similarities with Gnostic thought, where the True God radiates divine perfection which weakens and splinters as you move further from them.