When I was a kid left alone to pull weeds from the family garden, I could often be found sitting beside the plants, reading a historical novel by the likes of Leon Uris, whose “Trinity,” taught me about “the Troubles” of Northern Ireland and “Exodus,” about the Jews trying to escape Hitler.
I was similarly engrossed by the writing of James A. Michener, who often lived, at least briefly, in the areas his books depicted. His familiarity with the fabric of Maryland’s Eastern Shore informed his depiction of the Chesapeake Bay from the late 1500s through the period of the Watergate Scandal in the 1970s, and a period of residence in South Africa fed his depiction of the Dutch colonization of that region.
I may recently have gained a new favorite historical fiction writer, Barbara Kingsolver, whose research and storytelling are similarly engrossing — because she intimately knows the people about whom she writes. Like others of my favorite word weavers, her flow takes a few pages to become comfortable, but in the time it took Dellarobia — the tale’s main protagonist — to stumble the round trip one dark night to the top of a mountain, I was hooked.
“Flight Behavior” is woven around a migration of Monarch butterflies landing on a rural Tennessee mountain — instead of a fir forest on a mountain in Mexico. The colorful insects bring controversy to the (fictitious) farming Appalachian community of Feathertown, Tennessee, where generations of farmers have raised crops, livestock and their own families.
Dellarobia — her mother named her for a Renaissance-era artist —was pregnant and married, in that order, at 17 — the baby’s father “did the right thing.” The young woman, whose son is six when we meet, has long thought something was missing from her life, but she did not know what. In fact, it was that search that led her up the mountain the night she discovered the Monarch colony.
Her mom and dad had died when she was young. Her in-laws have multiple income streams, primarily raising sheep and shearing, dying and selling the wool. When Hester, the family matriarch, learns of the unexpected butterfly landing, she thinks to charge tourists to take them to the site; the money will come in handy in the struggle to pay off the mortgage on farm equipment they could not afford not to buy.
A reporter from the local television station gets wind of the story and interviews Dellarobia, then edits it to give the perception that Delarobia was on her way up that mountain to commit suicide. Some members of her church community saw her as having been blessed. And someone posted a picture online they titled “Butterfly Venus” in which Dellarobia was depicted as the goddess in Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” painting, except Dellarobia was standing on a the wings of a Monarch butterfly.
The story garners the attention of Ovid Byron, a biologist leading a research team into the Monarch appearance errant appearance in the Tennessee Appalachians rather than their normal overwinter region of Michoacan, Mexico. Shortly after their first meeting, she invites him to set up shop in the family barn, where she begins to learn about research equipment and methods.
She is intrigued by the sophisticated microscopes and computers and unsuccessfully attempts to hide her lack of science knowledge from the bewildered scientist. Feathertown youth were not expected to attend college. To a bewildered Byron, she explained she had graduated from a high school where the science teacher “hated biology about twenty percent more than the kids did. He’d leave the girls doing study sheets while he took the boys to the gym to shoot hoops.”
Kingsolver has crafted a powerfully entertaining tale, a year in the lives of residents and researchers we knew and liked, or didn’t, and would miss when the last page turned, leaving us wondering which questions had been resolved and which, like life itself, would never be.
Text & images ©2024 John Messeder. John is an award-winning environmental storyteller, nemophilist and social anthropologist, and lives in Gettysburg, PA. He may be contacted at john@johnmesseder.com
