Flight Behavior

“Preston and Cordelia when they later arrived were both blonds, cut from the Turnbow cloth, but that first one that came in its red pelt of fur was a mean wild thing like her. Roping a pair of dumbstruck teenagers into a shotgun wedding and then taking off with a laugh, leaving them stranded. Leaving them trying five years for another baby, just to fill a hole nobody meant to dig in the first place.”

Dellarobia reflects on how she ended up in a marriage with Cub as she walks the path to meet with Jimmy. An unplanned pregnancy ushered in a teenage marriage between two people with nothing in common but the child Dellarobia eventually miscarried. Instead of divorcing or considering what was best for both of them, Dellarobia and Cub tried to have another child.

“She was on her own here, staring at glowing trees. Fascination curled itself around her fright. This was no forest fire. She was pressed by the quiet elation of escape and knowing better and seeing straight through to the back of herself, in solitude. She couldn’t remember when she’d had such room for being. This was not just another fake thing in her life’s cheap chain of events, leading up to this day of sneaking around in someone’s thrown-away boots. Here that ended. Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road. For her alone these orange boughs lifted, these long shadows became a brightness rising. It looked like the inside of joy, if a person could see that. A valley of lights, an ethereal wind. It had to mean something.”

Dellarobia’s first encounter with the valley full of monarch butterflies is described as almost a religious experience: a vision or miracle of sorts. On a day when she was deliberately planning to throw her marriage away through adultery, the butterflies and the image they create stop her from proceeding with her plan. Dellarobia feels that the vision she has seen must be representative of something greater than her.

“They all attended Hester’s church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.”

The Turnbow family is highly religious, which Dellarobia often privately criticizes. A child of a dysfunctional home, having lost her father early in life and grown up with a mother with an alcohol addiction, Dellarobia has found little to have faith in when it comes to God and religion. However, establishing the work’s conservative Christian setting is key to developing the theme of Different Americas.

“Something had gotten into her, yes. The arguments she’d always swallowed like a daily ration of pebbles had begun coming into her mouth and leaping out like frogs. Her strange turnaround on the mountain had acted on her like some kind of shock therapy. She’d told her best friend Dovey she was seeing someone that day, but not even Dovey knew what she’d been called out to witness. A mighty blaze rising from ordinary forest, she had no name for that. No words to put on a tablet as Moses had when he marched down his mountain. But like Moses she’d come home rattled and impatient with the pettiness of people’s everyday affairs. She felt shamed by her made-up passion and the injuries she’d been ready to inflict. Hester wasn’t the only one living in fantasyland with righteousness on her side; people just did that, this family and maybe all others. They built their tidy houses of self-importance and special blessing and went inside and slammed the door, unaware the mountain behind them was aflame. Dellarobia felt herself flung from complacency as if from a car crash, walking away from that vale of fire feeling powerful and bereft.”

Instead of withering before her mother-in-law’s domineering personality, Dellarobia finds that she stands up for herself and the others around her far more since she first saw the butterflies. This realization prompts her to reflect on what the butterflies have changed within her. Unwittingly, the vision she has seen has put her on the path to a radical change in her life.

“These boyish things had made him lovable. But you could run out of gas on boyish, that was the thing. A message that should be engraved in every woman’s wedding band.”

Throughout the novel, Dellarobia considers how it is that she ended up married to Cub, a kind man-child who won’t stand up for himself and rushes to do his mother’s bidding whenever she calls. Although Cub is a solid, good person, his once-endearing qualities have worn on Dellarobia, and she cannot view him with respect or equanimity.

“That was one thing she could do well, make Cub happy, if only she could apply herself. She took this vow as regularly as she breathed, and reliably it was punctured by some needling idea that she was cut out for something more. Something, someone.”

Dellarobia often blames herself for the faults in her marriage. She thinks there is something wrong with her that she cannot find it in her heart to fully love and respect her husband. She wants to make him happy, but she is aware of how unhappy she is in the process. Dellarobia can’t shake the feeling that there is another person and/or purpose out there waiting for her.

“Cub had puffed up like a rooster when the article came out, taking it in to show the guys at the gravel company. He was impressed with all celebrity in equal measure, the type of kid who had cut out pictures of football players, Jesus, and America’s Most Wanted to tape on his bedroom wall. He’d confessed to having cried in sixth grade when he learned that superheroes weren’t real. Dellarobia was his Wonder Woman. But Hester seemed incensed by the article, which referred to Dellarobia as Our Lady of the Butterflies. Among other complaints, Hester said it made them sound Catholic.”

When media fame follows Dellarobia’s butterfly discovery, her husband is initially proud of the attention because celebrity easily impresses him. His parents are not as thrilled with the people now descending upon their property, and Hester is offended that Dellarobia, who is not particularly religious, is being treated as the vessel of a miracle.

“Dellarobia had not been back up the mountain since the day with her in-laws. Hester had taken full charge of the traffic of visitors, which seemed unfair. Suddenly the butterflies belonged to Mountain Fellowship. The church and Hester had their own pet miracle. Not that tour guiding was a career option for Dellarobia, they wouldn’t let her show up wearing a toddler as a pendant and a kindergartner for a shin guard. But still, when the groups passed behind her house to get to the High Road, Dellarobia snapped down the blinds, feeling something had been stolen from her, and flaunted.”

The increasing attention and foot traffic to the Turnbow trail has prompted the Turnbows to start giving tours. Dellarobia, however, has not been up to the mountain since she went there with Cub’s parents. The butterflies were a discovery she made, and she struggles with a sense of loss when she feels that what was exclusively and profoundly hers now belongs to everyone else.

“He finished chewing a mouthful before he spoke. ‘Things that probably sound very dull. Taxonomy, evolution of migratory behavior, the effect of parasitic tachinid flies, the energetics of flight. Population dynamics, genetic drift. And as of today, the most interesting and alarming question anyone in the field has yet considered, I think. Why a major portion of the monarch population that has overwintered in Mexico since God set it loose there, as you say, would instead aggregate in the southern Appalachians, for the first time in recorded history, on the farm of the family Turnbow.’”

Scientist Ovid Byron first lays out the purpose of his study of butterflies on the Turnbow property by explaining that the butterflies should not be there. The typical flight behavior of the monarchs, a pattern followed for as long as humans have recorded it, has suddenly changed. Instead of ending up in Mexico, the butterflies flew to Tennessee. As a scientist, Ovid is determined to study and find the reasons why this phenomenon has occurred.

“After last night’s strong winds, a fresh raft of sticks and small trees had washed down into the pasture and were strewn down the full length of the hill, pinned on their sides like little dams so the runnel broadened and poured over each one in turn. No creek had ever run here, in any year Cub could remember, and now a series of waterfalls climbed the hill like a staircase. Her eye was not used to so much flickering motion back there. It made her fretful.”

Dellarobia begins to better understand the dangers of climate change when a sudden heavy rainstorm floods the area. As with the abrupt change in the butterflies’ flight patterns, the sudden weather changes bode ill for the future of humanity.

“She’d done some looking on the Internet about the town in Mexico where Preston’s little friend and her family lost their home, and logging was a part of it. They had clear-cut the mountainside above the town, and that was said to have caused the mudslide and floods when a hard rain came. The horrifying photos showed houses and the twisted metal of cars all flattened together like sandwiches in the mud. Utility poles snapped like kindling. She’d had to shut off the computer before Preston completely figured out what they were seeing. She told him not to worry, that was a long way from here.”

After meeting the family of Josefina, who is Preston’s classmate, Dellarobia goes online to research the massive flood that destroyed the family’s home and livelihoods, prompting them to immigrate to the United States. The pictures of the damage that she sees are devastating. Worse yet, the flooding was caused in no small part by logging, something that Cub’s father wants to do with the land the butterflies occupy.

“She asked him how long the butterflies lived, and his answer was baffling: generally about six weeks. The ones that lived through winter lasted longer, a few months, by going into something like hibernation. ‘Diapause,’ he called it, a pause in the normal schedule of growing up, mating, and reproducing. Somewhere in midlife, the cold or darkness of winter put them all on hold, shutting down their sex drive until future notice. Like life in an uninsulated house, she thought. Maybe like marriage in general.”

Dellarobia is astonished to learn that butterflies live for such a short period and that those that survive the winter months go into hibernation. She compares the process of diapause to the coldness and dullness of her marriage to Cub, once again thinking about how the two of them ended up together. The imagery of diapause is key to the novel’s interest in Nature, Life, and Rebirth, as it implies the possibility of returning from a deathlike state to craft a new life.

“As habitually as a prayer, Dellarobia wished she were a different wife, for whom Cub’s good heart outweighed his bad grammar. Some sickness made her deride his simplicity. Really the infection was everywhere.”

As the novel progresses, Dellarobia becomes less tolerant of Cub. She becomes critical of the smallest things about him, including his poor grammar skills, which she takes as a sign of his lack of intellectual curiosity.

“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.”

Dellarobia considers the fact that science might be more accepted by the general public if scientists like Ovid were better able to explain things in ways that the public could easily understand. Otherwise, the media will fill that vacuum with whatever information will earn it the ratings it desires; whether the information it broadcasts is true or not is a moot point.

“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.”

Bear wants to push forward with the logging contract for the mountain and valley despite the church and Hester’s opposing position. Dellarobia considers the role that nature has played in human literature: The human-versus-nature conflict has always been one of the most popular themes for writers. In all the stories, however, humanity never won its battle against nature, which suggests that Bear won’t either.

“But in the lab Dellarobia listened to Ovid and Pete speaking hopelessly about so many things. The elephants in drought-stricken Africa, the polar bears on the melting ice, were ‘as good as gone,’ they said with infuriating resignation as they worked through what seemed to be an early autopsy on another doomed creature. Gone, as if those elephants on the sun-bleached plain were merely slogging out the last leg of a tired journey. The final stages of grief. Dellarobia felt an entirely new form of panic as she watched her son love nature so expectantly, wondering if he might be racing toward a future like some complicated sand castle that was crumbling under the tide. She didn’t know how scientists bore such knowledge. People had to manage terrible truths. As she lay awake she imagined Ovid doing the same in his parallel bed, not so far away across the darkness, joined with her in the vigil against the cold. Because of him, she wasn’t alone.”

The realization that the butterflies are unlikely to survive, and that species all over the world are close to extinction, depresses Dellarobia. She thinks of the difficulty of being a scientist and carrying these burdens of truth every day. However, the knowledge that she is not alone in this worry, that people like Ovid lay awake at night and grieve as well, is a strange comfort to her.

“She had heard him say the word thermocline, and now she could see that too. She had begrudged the clubbish vocabulary at first, but realized now she had crossed some unexpected divide. Words were just words, describing things a person could see. Even if most did not. Maybe they had to know a thing first, to see it.”

Dellarobia was initially resentful and somewhat resistant to learning scientific terms, afraid that she wasn’t bright enough or that her subpar high school education was worthy of mockery. However, Ovid sees the potential in her and encourages her to learn. The scientific definitions she once bristled at become easier to understand with practice and study, and she realizes that the terms themselves are a way to do what the people of Feathertown seem unwilling to do: know something to see it and believe.

“‘He’s not from here, that’s the thing,’ Cub said.

‘Just because he’s the outsider, he has no say? Should we not read books, then, or listen to anybody outside this county? Where’s that going to leave us?’”

This conversation between Dellarobia and Cub displays how much her character has grown at this point in the book. She recognizes that for the people of Appalachia to have a future, they need to be less tribal and insular. Instead, they must be more open and willing to learn from and interact with people from outside of their area.

“She felt an exasperation that she knew would be of no use to this debate. She let it rise and fall inside her, along with wishful thoughts. Every loss she’d ever borne had been declared the Lord’s business. A stillborn child, a father dead in his prime.”

Cub refuses to believe Dellarobia when she tells him that the butterflies are proof of climate change. His stubborn insistence that only God controls the weather, and that a scientist isn’t worthy of trust, causes her to see a pattern in her marriage going back to her lost child. Even then, Cub declared it God’s will, which Dellarobia simply cannot accept.

“Dellarobia corrected her impression of the moment. Ovid was not alone with her here. It was not going to be that scene in the movie. He was in church: with these ideas, the companionship of creatures. Every day she rose and rose to the occasion of this man.”

As Dellarobia and Ovid watch the butterflies and consider their fates, Dellarobia sees that Ovid is at home and alive in the presence of these creatures. His dedication to his job, despite the known outcome, and his passion for these delicate insects cause Dellarobia to respect Ovid more each day.

“She made herself breathe slowly, feeling numb. It was an earthquake, an upheaval of buried surfaces in which nothing was added or taken away. Her family was still her family, an alliance of people at odds, surviving like any other by turning the everyday blind eye. But someone had seen the whole thing.”

For 11 years, Dellarobia thought she had buried her feelings deep inside so that none of the Turnbows would ever suspect she was unhappy in her marriage to Cub. However, when she helps Hester vaccinate the pregnant ewes, she finds out that Hester has long known of Dellarobia’s restlessness and unhappiness. It shocks her to think that someone ever noticed.

“‘I know. And you’re sweet to me. It’s just never quite—I don’t know how to put this—’ She pressed her lips together and shook her head. ‘It’s like I’m standing by the mailbox waiting all the time for a letter. Every day you come along and put something else in there. A socket wrench, or a milkshake. It’s not bad stuff. Just the wrong things for me.’”

When Dellarobia tells Cub she wants a divorce, she tries to explain why they are not a good match for each other. While Cub thinks they can muddle on as they have for even longer, Dellarobia doesn’t agree. She feels that Cub has tried his best but is not the right person for her.

“At some point in the evening Dellarobia had stopped being amazed that Ovid had turned into someone new, and understood he had become himself, in the presence of his wife. With the sense of a great weight settling, she recognized marriage. Not the precarious risk she’d balanced for years against forbidden fruits, something easily lost in a brittle moment by flying away or jumping a train to ride off on someone else’s steam. She was not about to lose it. She’d never had it.”

Watching Ovid and his wife, Juliet, at dinner, Dellarobia is struck by the fact that, for the first time, she is witnessing what a marriage can and ought to be between husband and wife. More starkly, she understands that her marriage was never a marriage in this sense. She can divorce Cub and walk away because she never had a true marriage to begin with, and as such, she is not losing a thing.