Similkameen

It was the time of asters. Purple asters, mauve asters, tiny white asters. Summer was slipping out of the North, and with it the creatures of passage. On the last day of August, somewhere, monarch butterflies were on the move.

Leaving western Washington for eastern, I noticed that the maritime greens had gone tired and blanched, ready for refreshment from the winter rains. Up on Swauk Pass, the first yellow among the serviceberry leaves rumored frost. That was where I had first seen and photographed a migrant monarch in Washington, twenty-five years before, as it sought nectar in a broad meadow near Blewett Summit. This afternoon the only butterflies on the wing were pine whites, flimsy pale drifters that fly at the end of summer and into the time of asters. Lake Chelan, the ancient glacial fjord in the heart of Washington's highlands, had gone gray from a light wind with the cold bit of autumn in its mouth. Dropping downlake out of the North Cascades, that wind suggested that any sensible butterfly would want to head south soon, if it had the means.

But the next morning was bright and warming at Gallagher Flat, north of Chelan. I intended to begin following monarchs in Canada but to first search for signs of them on my way north. I was not alone at the start. My wife, Thea, set out with me, though she would return home before long, leaving me to make the chase solo. It was Thea, some years before, who had first found monarchs here. Chelan is among the richest and best-studied counties in the Northwest for butterflies, and it is not easy to find something new within its borders. Thea, who used to live in Chelan, knew Gallagher Flat, a former embayment of the Columbia River, as an excellent site for wild asparagus. Noticing milkweed, she looked one fall for monarchs, and found them — the first recorded from the county. What better place to join these dances with monarchs?

The old river channel lies between State Highway 97 on the east and a curving railroad line on the west, both built well up above the level of the frequently flooding bottoms. Across the roadway burbles the broad Columbia, dulled here now by Rocky Reach Dam. As we walked down onto the flat, we were surrounded by milkweed in various stages of maturation, from plants with soft, fuzzy little pods to those already bursting, seeding their down onto the air, as well as a single flower head still in fragrant pink bloom. A big Oregon swallowtail, the official state butterfly of Oregon, nectaring on a weedy purple vetch, rose, circled, and disappeared into an asparagus forest. This cheddar-yellow, black, and blue flier was the only other species likely to be seen here that is as big as a monarch, and it gave me a start. So did bright red grasshoppers. With my search image not yet calibrated, these flashes of color made potent false alarms. Yet when the real thing appeared, I knew it instantly.

Recent years had not been strong for monarchs in the West. So when the first one showed up, around noon, I was both thrilled and relieved. There would be monarchs to follow! We were halfway up the length of the crescent-shaped flat on the river side. The monarch, too, nectared on the royal purple vetch, but a sturdy fence ran between us. Since it was my intention to catch, examine, and physically tag every monarch I could, in the slim hope that one or more might be recovered, I needed to get to it. I found a way through the tight-gauge wire, and then the monarch drifted like a feather, floated over the fence, and dropped onto the side I'd just come from. I shimmied through again, worked myself slowly into position for a wing shot, and swung. But I bricked it — one of the more polite collector's terms for missing a butterfly.

The big orange beast powered up to the highway, then drifted back. I lost it against the crazy quilt of fall vegetation. Having noted its penchant for vetch nectar, I headed for a thick, tangled purple swale, and there it was. This was my first good, close look at a living monarch in months, and I savored it before taking a good, clear swing for what seemed a certain catch. But, hair-triggered, I struck short and bricked it again.

The unsympathetic butterfly, a large, fresh male, was really disturbed this time. Before, it had flapped away from the source of menace in a leisurely way and resettled. Now it flew fast, high up toward the railroad tracks, then topped the bluff to the west, and, circling, disappeared into the clear sky at least a hundred yards above the ground. I saw right off the conflict between tagging and following, because in catching, or missing, I could scare them off. This one flew so high I was unable to get even a vanishing bearing, the direction of disappearance that enables observers to plot or follow an animal's movements.

Still, something about missing my very first monarch seemed right. The Indians up and down the ruined Columbia, the Chinook and Yakama, Umatilla and Warm Springs, observed the rite of releasing the First Salmon of the season in thanks to the Salmon People for coming back. (This practice had many variations, and sometimes just its bones were sent back as emissary.) Of course, I was going to release the monarch anyway after I tagged it. But there is a tincture of enforced humility in missing that has to be salutary for a venture such as this. Pride is no friend to the wandering naturalist.

I couldn't blame the miss on my butterfly net. Marsha's shaft is a five-foot cottonwood branch from the High Line Canal in Colorado. My brother Bud first found and used it as a walking staff. When I needed a new net pole one summer, I appropriated it, made a big hoop and bag for it, and named it for a strong friend. Donald Culross Peattie has written that the Omaha made sacred poles from cottonwoods, "the chief tree of the prairies." Marsha is my sacred pole. I have used her for more than twenty years now, and her skin is burnished from sweat, oil, and flesh. Heavier than most butterfly nets, Marsha is a two-handed tool. Though she was crooked, cracked, and liberally bound with duct tape, when I bricked a butterfly, it was almost never her fault.

But even if this one had gotten away without a trace, I followed it anyhow in my mind. I could see it climbing the Entiat Valley into the Chumstick Mountains, down the other side and across the Wenatchee River, up again to Swauk Pass, where I had seen that lone traveler long ago. But then the route got blurry. I couldn't see where it went next.

Thea and I rejoined at the far end of the flat, where hobos occasionally camped beneath cottonwoods. As we wandered back toward the car, barn swallows hunted insects over the sward, western kingbirds and meadowlarks screeched and fluted from the few vantages. For practice I stalked and netted Oregon swallowtails, taking care not to damage their long legs and tongues. Even the fresh ones often lacked one or both tails, having lost them to would-be insectivorous birds. When a kingbird targets the waving tails with their orange and blue highlights, rather than the boring-looking body, the tails are doing their job for the butterfly's survival.

The place was full of butterflies. Little, bright orange mylitta crescents patrolled the pathways, darting out at purplish coppers the color of the vetch when the sun caught their prismatic scales just right. In truck ruts, where a little moisture remained, tawny skippers, buttery sulphurs, and cocoa wood nymphs puddled for salts. On the riverbank, a pair of Mormons were basking in the sun. Actually, they were Mormon metalmarks, very handsome rust, black, and white-checked butterflies, fall fliers and the only member of a vast group of tropical beauties that ranges up to the cold northern deserts.

We saw no more monarchs until, driving north on 97, a few flashed by headed the other way. They seemed to be moving with the river, all right. Soon I would be following them south, but first I wanted to reach their northernmost breeding grounds in British Columbia. It was early enough, I hoped, that most of the migratory generation would still be caterpillars or chrysalides. They would metamorphose into adult butterflies and begin their migration in September. We were seeing the advance guard.

At Pateros, where the wild Methow River gushes into the Columbia, we stopped at a fruit stand to buy late apricots and cherry cidersicles and to cast an eye over the milkweed around the mouth of the Methow. This stretch of the Columbia was once a major center for Northwest butterfly studies. Andy Anderson in Pateros and John Hopfinger in Brewster maintained important collections and traded specimens with lepidopterists from all over. They explored a great deal of unsampled territory in the North Cascades and Okanogan Highlands, places like Twisp Pass and the Sawtooth Range above Lake Chelan, and were the first to collect several far northern species south of the Canadian border. Specimens with their Brewster, Black Canyon, and Alta Lake locality labels found their way into museums all over the world.

Hopfinger's and Anderson's records over more than half a century provide a window on the changes nature endured as the Columbia was altered. For example, in the early 1900s, Hopfinger found viceroy butterflies common all the way north to Brewster and beyond. Later, the inundation of riparian habitats by the Columbia dams drowned the viceroys' host plants and drove these butterflies up into the orchards. They were happy to feed on apple trees, but the heavy use of pesticides on the trees (little abated today) killed them off. Now viceroys can't be found nearly this far up the Columbia. Hopfinger and Anderson left no records for monarchs, however. It may be that milkweed, which spreads under some forms of human disturbance, has expanded upriver — and with it, breeding monarchs — even as the viceroys have withdrawn.

Showy milkweed is common around Brewster now. Late in the day we walked the shoreline of Casimer Bar to the confluence of the Okanogan and Columbia rivers. Young Mexican men, fishing with poleless lines, looked askance at Marsha. Riparian plantings of alders and osiers, peachleaf and curly willows — a floristic mélange of local species and imported cultivars vaguely related to indigenous types — show the restoration engineers' liberal definition of "native plants." Bright coppers shimmered in the pink knotweed, out of the wind. My broad canvas hat flew off into the marsh and I retrieved it with Marsha, another thing she's good for.

We camped at Osoyoos Lake State Park next to Vladimir and Vera, Czech immigrants from Vancouver. I was struck by their given names, the same as those of the great novelist/lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov and his wife. Nabokov, in his memoir Speak, Memory, expressed his amazement at how few people notice butterflies. My experience supports this and further suggests that of those who do, many refer to all large, colorful butterflies as "monarchs." Tiger swallowtails, in particular, are conflated with monarchs by the general public. Given the distinctive pattern of monarchs, this never ceases to surprise me. It speaks of people's vague awareness that big bright butterflies exist, the widespread familiarity of the name "monarch," and a desire to name the objects of the world even when knowledge lags way behind experience.

Vlad and Vera eagerly told of a "carpet" of monarchs on the ground at a rest area south of Nelson in the Canadian Rockies, but I knew that Jon Shepard, a lepidopterist in Nelson who knows the British Columbian butterflies better than anyone else, had seen no monarchs there. This was the first of dozens of intriguing but certainly erroneous tips I would receive in the coming weeks. Vlad and Vera had seen a mess of swallowtails at mud, or tortoiseshells, or fritillaries. Still, they had noticed.

As we curled into our sleeping bags, I thought again of the trip's first monarch, very fresh and richly colored, like burnt cinnamon and oranges. Easy to see at a distance, nectaring avidly on the purple vetch. I could have watched it for a long time, maybe followed it downriver until it was ready to fly on — though it might have stayed at Gallagher Flat all day or all week, tanking up for its long flight. I was sorry to drive it from the nectar fields. Such a fresh butterfly, so late in the summer, surely was a migrant. Any monarch emerging that late is subject to the dictate of day length to depart rather than mate. Wielding Marsha to no good effect, I might have sent it prematurely on its way to California or wherever it was bound; but it was probably ready to go. I wondered where and how it was spending this gusty last night of August.

Did an Irishman really put the "O" on what had been Soyoos Lake, as the state park interpretive sign said? The name comes from an Indian word, sooyos, meaning narrows. But the sign also referred to the painted turtles in the lake as "amphibians," so I wasn't sure I wanted to trust it on the Irish issue. Another sign told of fecal coliform present in the park water system, so we drank some of the last of our good Gray's River water. Vlad and Vera chose to ignore the notice, taking the waters of Osoyoos liberally. As we packed up and parted, we wished them well, and meant it more than idly.

Below the Canadian border, the Similkameen River flows from the west through a striking canyon. We followed it from Oroville to Shanker's Bend, then walked a rough track back along a canal that paralleled the river. An old homestead was now the headquarters of four species of woodpeckers: red-naped sapsuckers and little downies worked the bank willows, while red-shafted flickers and a family of blue-blacked, rose-breasted Lewis's woodpeckers all hung around the old hardwoods. Downstream stood an antique dam with a waterfall, where men and kids fished from the rocks. Steel-hooped wooden pipes the old watermen call "galleries" rusted and rotted their way down the canyon. Across the river a trail, built on the old Union Pacific line, ran upstream. Lined with milkweed and goldenrod, the trail rounded the rugged canyon and dived into a dramatic tunnel. On our side, a fresh Lorquin's admiral dried its big, banded, apricot-tipped wings on a sagebrush. This close relative of the viceroy had come out just that morning.

The tunnel emerged around a bend, pointing toward Nighthawk. Unwelcoming Nighthawk. From the cold stares and diffidence I have encountered there, I have sensed this tiny community with the beautiful name and remote location to be one of the least friendly in Washington. True, my first visit, several years earlier, may have been colored by the hordes of mosquitoes (suitably attended by nighthawks on the summer dusk). But this time the feeling was again palpable. No smiles, people disappearing around corners as we approached, no "Open" signs on the few businesses, and plenty of "No Trespassing" postings. Thea and I both felt it. Who can blame them, we agreed, with "Chopacka Estates" bulldozed out downstream and the thin edge of the cappuccino culture just a canyon away? Solitude like this is reluctantly surrendered. Garlands of wild hops draped themselves over ghost shacks with faded false fronts and sloping wooden stoops. This place too will change. I wanted to shout, Don't let it! The looks we got said, Just go away.

Beyond Nighthawk the Similkameen broadens into Champney's Slough, a marshy bottomland with oxbows. Two-tailed tiger swallowtails and coronis fritillaries thronged the abundant asters. There was lots of milkweed, but no monarchs; I was beginning to realize that large orange migrants were not going to be omnipresent. Well, I told Thea, a surfeit at the outset has spoiled many an expedition, though I couldn't think of any examples offhand. She replied that there seemed little danger of that.

The Similkameen River pours out of Canada. Rather than take the main road north from Nighthawk, I wanted to loop with the river and try a little boundary crossing that one of our maps showed farther west. The dirt road became a pair of ruts and stopped altogether at a fence well before the border. There was no entry station in sight. We lunched beneath Chopacka Mountain with a sheepdog who wandered by. The border collie (as, quite suitably, she was) begged bites. Together we watched a cheeky coyote trot over her field and across the international boundary, oblivious.