11 Dec If We Were Them
As the nation faces its worst yet pandemic peak and 2020 draws to a close, I find myself thinking back to the early days when so little was known about the disease; when entire cities and regions spontaneously locked down. As SARS-CoV-2 shrank my world to the borders of my yard, my companions became the cloud of monarch butterflies that spiraled in courtship across my garden. Theirs was a happy and hopeful dance, and yet it filled me with foreboding, a foreboding that haunts me still. What if we were them?
COVID-19 started in a city in China that few beyond those borders had likely heard of before this pandemic. The world watched as the death toll rose. It seemed far away and remote. It was them.
It’s less clear where the entomological version of pandemic began for monarchs, perhaps invasive plants in California – not exactly remote, but monarchs were probably little considered when the plants began to spread.
The coronavirus jumped to Italy, to cities I’ve visited before and was planning to visit again in the ensuing months. The situation no longer felt remote, but still far away – still them. Yet it began to feel less like them when I abandoned my trip plans, when Venice’s Carnival was canceled, when northern Italy was closed, when all of Italy locked into a mandatory quarantine. How do you shut down Rome?
For monarchs, the harm of non-native plants spread beyond California into other southern states where tropical milkweeds replaced natives on nursery shelves and in butterfly gardens. There was no way to warn the monarchs that their archnemesis parasite could exist in lethal concentrations on non-native milkweeds that didn’t die back for a refresh as did the native milkweeds. Or to tell them that the nectar was sweeter and the flowering season longer; that if they were lulled to its pleasures, their migration patterns might be disrupted. How do you keep monarchs out of the south? How do you shut down an area critical to a species’ livelihood?
Then the coronavirus was in Seattle, my home town. I’d moved away long ago and my parents had recently moved south to California. Seattle was now them, but it didn’t feel far away. There was no ocean between us. Still, my life remained unaffected. Yet as I stared at the maps on the news, I saw the impending approach. New York, D.C. … Florida would be soon.
I wonder whether anyone noticed in the moment when Round-up resistant crops in the Wheat Belt caused an increase in widespread toxic applications from 500,000 kilos in 1997 to 100 million kilos in 2014. Surely the monarchs noted the dying milkweeds. Would it have helped if someone had mapped the wilting plants to somehow show the monarchs when their individual summer foraging grounds would be affected?
I don’t recall exactly when them became us, but suddenly Miami’s grocery stores looked like Armageddon. Food staples were sparse. The paper products aisle was wiped clean. The cleaning products aisle was devoid of all but a few earth-friendly cleansers. Even shopping carts were in short supply. I found myself dousing my hands in an alcohol-based sanitizer before getting back into my car. My husband watched a woman in Home Depot take the last four bottles of bleach, adding them to her two cartloads already filled with the product. And this was before the coronavirus officially crept into Florida.
What if monarchs could have hoarded milkweeds when that shortage started?
I began to get texts and emails. Perhaps we should postpone this. Perhaps we should cancel that. I resisted. I attended a garden club meeting, then a women’s art luncheon. I led a photo workshop, justifying it with the idea that it would only be ten people out-of-doors, albeit on a popular and often crowded boardwalk. Thankfully those proved fine but shortly after the virus was proclaimed a pandemic and Florida got its first case.
That night, I had a nightmare – I had COVID-19. I spread it to colleagues, friends, and family. We were all miserably ill and I knew death was inevitable. I jerked awake, covered in sweat, struggling to breathe and with a racing heart. My relief that it was just a dream was momentary. How did I know that I wasn’t a carrier? That my days of being miserably ill weren’t just around the corner?
I wonder if the monarchs responded when the first trees were removed from the edges of their wintering grounds in Mexico. Did anyone consider how long until the oyamel fir forests would become miserably ill? Ill beyond repair and too diminished to support monarch torpor? This too seems a viable nightmare.
Many days before stay-at-home orders were issued, my husband and I decided to self-isolate. We spent a day completing chores that required leaving the house. We checked our bee hives across town. We collected the honey, giving the bees plenty of space to thrive in our absence. We took our boat out for one last trip to pull our stone crab traps from the bay, two months before the season closed. We filled our gas tanks. We made one last visit to the grocery store – my husband grabbed back-up condiments while I bolstered our long-term vegetable stocks in the freezer section. In and out, no dilly dallying and lots of post-trip sanitizing.
I considered the monarchs, their world devoid of milkweed markets, sanitizers, stay-at-home options and cancelled flights. With their multigeneration migration genetically imbedded, monarchs couldn’t exactly consider stopping travel when clouds of herbicides and pesticides spread not just across their foraging grounds, but across their entire migratory route.
In those early days, the world became a frenzy of rubber gloves and medical masks. There was tension in the air. There was no laughter. There were no smiles. Everyone rushed, their faces taut and serious. I cringed away, no longer seeing people around me just potential coronavirus carriers. First I gave wide berth, and then I retreated altogether – my range diminished to the home and garden behind my four walls.
Migratory monarchs have no gloves, masks nor walls to hide behind. What protections do they have? What might shield them from the unseasonably hot temperatures or equally problematic cold and wet spells that are less outliers and more normal all the time given our changing climate?
Monarchs continued to brave an unrestrained world while the human world shut down. Shops, bars, gyms, and spas closed. Marinas closed. Restaurants closed. Hotels closed. Human access to the natural world closed as public parks and beaches were barricaded. I took solace in the monarchs flirting above the flowers in my yard until the day it occurred to me – what if we were them?
Monarch butterfly numbers decreased by more than half between the last two migration cycles. Over the last two decades, their population declined by more than 80%. What if the flitting I’d interpreted as blissful flirtation wasn’t so much a happy existence as an obliviousness to “them butterflies” – butterflies elsewhere like those early COVID-19 cases in China and Italy, “them” that had already confronted first-hand habitat loss, chemicals and the myriad other factors that have shrunk the monarch world and claimed their lives? I suddenly saw their dance as less hopeful and more of an indication that they were in an oblivious pre-trauma phase. Had I not blissfully lived my life while the coronavirus ravaged from the remote to the familiar, creeping ever closer to my own home? If our encroachment on the natural world were mapped in the same way we map the pandemic, might the monarchs also have their bliss replaced with fearful uncertainty?
Have we humans finally experienced what we’ve subjected the rest of the world to for centuries? If forests, oceans, plants, animals and particularly endangered species could communicate, would they describe humans in the same way we describe COVID-19 – a pandemic? If we were them, how would we feel about being hunted by an unforeseen enemy, having our food chain disrupted, our yards cleared, our homes poisoned, and our ranges diminished?
Maybe we already are them – one of the many species that will disappear if we don’t become better stewards of the land. Perhaps now that we know how that feels, we humans can be better motivated to stop being a coronavirus to the natural world. Before the memory of that feeling fades into the bustle of a return to normalcy, might we consider how we can become the much-needed vaccine to counter our environmental degradation?
Dana OHara Smith
Posted at 02:53h, 21 DecemberBeautiful Kirsten. Thanks for sharing that story.
Kirsten Hines
Posted at 12:51h, 21 DecemberThank you, Dana! I appreciate the feedback.
Rose Bechard Butman
Posted at 17:20h, 21 DecemberVery well done article.
Thank you.
Kirsten Hines
Posted at 13:40h, 22 DecemberThank you for reading!
Joan Rebstock
Posted at 02:55h, 30 DecemberGreat story Kirsten loved it of course I love all your stories but this one was exceptionally nice
Kirsten Hines
Posted at 17:18h, 30 DecemberThank you, Joan! I’m so glad you liked it.