She was unsure now whether he’d dismissed her from the microscope. Ovid was fiddling with rectangular glass slides in a slotted box. “I know Pete needs you back,” he said a little absently, pulling out one slide after another and holding it up to the window, closing one eye to peer through. “Our Pete is never satisfied without a lovely assistant at his elbow. But I want to show you just one more thing. Ah. Here.” He fitted the slide under the microscope’s flat metal elbows, clamping it to the platform. “As soon as we finish the lipids, I am going to put you on O-E counts. This is interesting. Have a look.”
She fiddled with the focus, and it jumped up in 3-D: a strange collage of ridged, transparent ovals that overlapped slightly like roof shingles. These were the scales that covered a butterfly’s wings, he said, magnified times three hundred. Nestled among the scales she saw smaller, darker shapes like water beetles, and these, he told her, were the parasites. OE for short. He would write down the whole name for her later, it was easier to learn that way. This was a prepared slide he used for teaching, but they would start looking for these parasites on the monarchs. Infestations were associated with butterfly populations that did not succeed in making normal migrations.
“So parasites could be the cause of them coming here instead of Mexico?”
“The cause,” he said with a rueful smile, tilting his head, and suddenly there he was, the man who’d sat at her kitchen table. He must be everyone’s favorite professor. “Cause,” he said, “is not the same as correlation. Do you know what I mean by that?”
She smiled an eager novice’s smile. “No.”
“Families that take foreign vacations also tend to own more televisions than those that do not. Is that second television causing families to be more adventurous?”
“No, that would be the cash flow.”
“Probably, yes. Something else is the cause of both. Cars with flames painted on the hood might get more speeding tickets. Are the flames making the car go fast?”
“No. Certain things just go together.”
“And when they do, they are correlated. It is the darling of all human errors to assume, without proper testing, that one is the cause of the other.”
“I get that. Like, crows flying over the field will cause it to snow tomorrow. My mother-in-law always says that, and I’m thinking, no way. Maybe it’s a storm front or something that makes both things happen, but the crows move first.”
“And there you are, Dellarobia. Ahead of half of my college students.”
“And all journalists,” Pete piped up from across the room.
“Some journalists,” Ovid said. “I’m afraid he is right.”
“New proof!” Pete shouted. “Facebook use lowers kids’ grades! Breast implants boost suicide rates! Smiling increases longevity!”
“Many journalists,” Ovid said.
Correlation, cause. She would write the words in the corner of her lab notebook, which was starting to fill with small, encrypted notes to herself.
“Is the parasite sapping the monarch’s strength and preventing a long migration?” Ovid asked. “We don’t know. We are seeing a big increase in these parasite infestations. And we have recorded rising average temperatures throughout the range. Is the warmer climate giving the parasite an advantage? It’s tempting to say this, but again, we don’t know for sure. Not unless we can create experimental conditions that hold everything steady except for temperature. We cannot jump to conclusions. All we can do is measure and count. That is the task of science.”
It seemed to Dellarobia that the task of science was a good deal larger than that. Someone had to explain things. If men like Ovid Byron were holding back, the Tina Ultners of this world were going to take their shots.
She stayed a while longer at the microscope slides before she was released again to Pete’s elbow to record his sample weights. She was getting better at the Mettler balance and dispatched the pans quickly, sometimes having to wait for Pete to catch up. It thrilled her that Ovid felt she was ready for something more complicated than writing numbers in a book. She thought of Valia weighing skeins of yarn and recording her crabbed columns of numbers in Hester’s kitchen, on that long-ago day when they’d dyed the yarn. Two months ago. Impossible. Her world had been the size of a kitchen then. Now she had a life in which she might not see Hester for over a week. Working left her with so little time, her evenings with the kids were a whirlwind of preparation and catch-up. She’d skipped church two Sundays in a row, first for the chance to hose down the milking parlor before Ovid and Pete arrived, and the next week doing more or less the same in her own home, which she’d had no chance to clean. If neither of these qualified in Hester’s mind as valid church-excused emergencies, Dellarobia begged to differ.
She wondered how the environment club was making out right now at Bear and Hester’s, if they even managed to find their way over there. They’d seemed disoriented, in more ways than one. They should probably be told the logging was on hold for now. And that evidently it was not the worst thing likely to happen to the monarchs. Ovid was keeping track as the temperatures crept to freezing, miserably watching the downward march. After decades of chasing monarchs and their beautiful mysteries, he would now be with them at the end, for reasons he had never in his whole life foreseen. She wished he could explain this to those kids who’d been in her yard. Some deep and terrible trouble had sent the monarchs to the wrong address, like the protesters themselves. The butterflies had no choice but to trust in their world of signs, the sun’s angle set against a turn of the seasons, and something inside all that had betrayed them.
And what could any person do to protest the likes of that? Bear Turnbow’s business plan was stoppable in theory, but you couldn’t stand up and rail against the weather. That was exactly the point of so many stories. Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, confidence swaggering into the storm: Man against Nature. Of all the possible conflicts, that was the one that was hopeless. Even a slim education had taught her this much: Man loses.
10
Natural State
January made its way like a high-wire walker, placing one foot, then another, on the freezing line. It wavered, rising to forty, dipping to thirty, but never plunged. A small, nervous audience watched. On some nights Dellarobia could not sleep for thoughts of cold air creeping down along the ridgelines. It would fill the forest secretively like a poisonous gas and surround the butterflies in the quarters where they crowded close, riveted to their family trees, lulled into a dormancy from which they would not wake. One crystal clear night it would happen.