Coyote Crossing

In September I sat near here for three days watching a cloud of butterflies move through the desert. There were desert swallowtails, millions of them in yellow and black pursuing anything red or orange through the Joshua trees, including the taillight lenses on my pickup. Among the millions were a few hundred Indra swallowtails, sable and indigo and sublime, intent on laying single pale jade eggs on the stems of iodine bush.

There were other butterflies as well, or so they seemed at least, though they flew strongly enough that they might have been beetles, or hummingbirds. There was little of the flutter to their habit: they roared through my camp in aggressive straight lines, hovering only briefly over anything they found of compelling interest. Among the many purposes of their purposeful flight was avoiding me, so I got only a few quick, vague glimpses: not enough detail to identify them with any confidence. I got frustrated. A dramatic denizen of the Joshua tree forest and I couldn’t describe it other than “noisy brown blur” the same shape as the hole in my writing.

Last week I turned on a fluorescent light here in Nipton’s laundromat and turned to face my laptop screen. Within four minutes, among the whine of flies and mosquitoes and the rainfall noise of tiny gray moths, I heard a familiar buzzing noise. Ten of the moths I had struggled to observe were bashing themselves against every white surface in the room, including my shirt.

They were, and are, Hyles lineata, the white-lined hawkmoth. It was a little embarrassing. I knew the hawkmoth well. I just hadn’t expected it in the Mojave outback. It’s a close cousin of the familiar hornworms that plague gardeners, those giant glossy green caterpillars that denude tomato plants.

White-lined hawkmoth larvae will eat tomatoes if they can get them, but out here they’re more likely to do their denuding on evening primrose, sand verbena, four-o-clocks, and a host of other desert forbs, mainly annuals. A wet winter brings a hawkmoth bloom.

This last winter was wet enough. This summer has been wet too. The monsoons have been abundant in this heat. We are actually plagued with mosquitoes here in this dry valley, and the hillsides grow anomalous green fuzz on them, like Penicillium on rotting oranges. It has been a good year for hawkmoths.

For all their aggressive flight and noise, the hawkmoths are about the least obtrusive insects in the neighborhood. They will fly pell mell into your shoulder and then change course, and you may not notice their impact even if you happen to be watching. It is an aggressive softness. They are merely looking for pale datura blooms in the Mojave night, and the general datura whiteness of fluorescent tubes, of moonlit skin, of laptop monitors provide them with frank confusion.

There are hawkmoths in the tropics that drink the tears of birds, of people. I thought of them tonight. I sat out in the dark reading email on my phone, my downturned face illuminated in pale white, and they came, hovered near my face. A soft, moist touch crossed my lips. I flinched, then realized what it was. I turned off the phone and they came, one after another, bearing the faint imagined sweet taste of datura on their mouthparts. First the loud soft buzz of flight announced each one, and then a draft of beaten wing across my face sent shivers to my toes, and then the lightest meeting of lips and my toes curled yet again, and each kissed moth flew off into the Mojave night.