For discrete entities to exist, borders must also exist. How else to bound the entity, to determine where self diverges from other? Twilight makes the line between day and night. That band of cattails has dry land on one side, open water on the other.
But borders themselves are entities, and in the natural world at least they are themselves fuzzy, bounded by indistinct borders that are themselves discrete entities. There are no sharp lines in the world, other than those cartographers draw on pieces of paper. In the real world borders are filters, softening the lap of wave against bank, allowing passage to moving entities with their own porous borders; nutrients, weather, ideas, guys from Oaxaca with mouths to feed back home.
If it were not for border crossers, borders would cease to exist.
I am not exactly a border crosser on this hike. I walk nearly to the edge of my home territory, here on the eastern fringes of the Coast Ranges in Morgan Territory Regional Park, but I stay in the hills. Below me and to the east is the California Delta, confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, which ooze greenly past leveed islands of farmland. Past it, the Great Central Valley’s haze obscures the snowy wall of the Sierra Nevada. Beyond be dragons.
From my comfortable refuge here, on a sliver of rock overhanging a 100-foot cliff, I watch the painted ladies flying north.
Hundreds of the butterflies pass me in any five-minute period. They’ve been headed north for some weeks, nourished by a spectacular growth of annual flowers in the Mojave and deserts south, and those that linger near me for a moment show signs of wear. They have tattered tails, and holes have been worn in their fragile wings. They do not falter, flying toward the Sacramento in pairs and threes.
It’s really rather impressive. This blizzard of orange and black crepe crossing mountains, desert valleys, going from country to country, no luggage nor passport, orange and black wings thinner than crepe and fueled by tiny sips of flower, and they’re moving faster than I can run. Each is just slightly more substantial than a thought, maybe a tenth of a gram of chitin and water and light. But probably ten thousand butterflies will pass me on my hike, a kilogram of flying stained glass shards. My hike covers five and a half miles. Extrapolate from there: many tons of butterflies are moving north in California today.
Butterflies hate cameras, I find. With the lens stowed safely in my pack the painted ladies linger in my gaze, slowly, languorously opening and closing their wings like long mascaraed lashes, almost allowing me to stroke them. But if I hold my camera I become a paparazzo, and they flee when I get within thirty feet.
When stealth and slyness fail, a cheating hunter uses bait. I park myself near a black sage in flower, ready to shoot should a butterfly feed on its resiny nectar. I waste a dozen shots on orange blurs.
Sitting on a precipice usually makes me think the big thoughts, and watching once-in-a-decade wildlife migrations does the same. Combine the two and I become a great big maudlin ball of triteness. I distract myself with attention to the camera, fiddling with the focus ring and puzzling at the newness and opacity of the buttons. A hundred thousand slips of tattered crepe speed through this park on their way to mate and die. Black sage pushes out flower after flower. Larkspur and shooting star and goldfields dot the meadows. A turkey vulture soars high above the tops of the trees in the canyon through which flows Marsh Creek: I can just make out the feathers on its back fifty feet below me. The breeze does little to cool my sunburned skin. Discrete entity though I may be, this reddening border between me and not-me is less distinct than I would like. For a moment I forget exactly where I end and the lichen-covered rock on which I lean begins. Did I drive here past the swell of fake winery homes and vanity ranches — none of which were there on my last visit — or have I always been here, clasped by the rock from which I’ve grown? I am forty-five years old, and my life seems to be changing in ways I’ve long desired but which, now, are a little frightening.
Is the aperture set right for the depth of field I want?
A butterfly lands to feed on the sage. I snap three shots of it, each sharp enough to identify the species but not particularly pretty. After the third shot it stirs and flies away.
Satisfied, I relax a bit. The view of Diablo is really quite nice from this spot. It’s a vantage point I don’t often have, here all the way across the mountain from my usual haunts. It’s odd, looking at the mountain, to realize I’ve walked from peak to peak a dozen times, that I climbed the long west slope of the mountain once a quarter century ago, and the far, north side twice in the last six months. If I had to grow out of rock and spend my life affixed to any one spot, this might me the one I’d pick. I raise the camera, lock my elbows against my knees to steady myself, and shoot.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
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