“Look at the monarch!”
My colleague leading the hike stopped mid-cactus-lecture to point at a passing butterfly. I trailed at the back of the group, a long line of fifth-graders on a field trip.
“Thousands of monarchs migrate through Texas on their way to Mexico each fall. Many other birds and butterflies migrate through here as well.”
My fellow park ranger described the life cycle of a monarch butterfly, more strange than any fantasy tale Hollywood could invent. A species that migrates over multiple generations, traveling thousands of miles a year on fragile wings and in numbers so great that for a few days every year they consume the sky over this tiny Texas border town.
I had recently watched another colleague as she counted monarchs overhead with binoculars, recording tens of thousands of butterflies over the course of a couple of hours.
At peak migration, the clouds of monarchs crossed the roads of town, exploding against our windshields like tiny gold glitter bombs.
This single monarch was a straggler, trying to catch up to its relatives down in Mexico so it could cling to them and to trees, sharing warmth through a long winter.
My colleague leading the field trip asked the fifth-graders to wave at the monarch, wishing it luck on its long journey, and we hiked on.
At the back of the long line of schoolchildren, many of them on their first ever hike, I fielded a lot of questions. “Ranger Stephanie, do the mountain lions around here ever jump out and eat children?” that sort of thing.
My answer to this question was always that mountain lions were a rarity here and that we were protected from wildlife in such a large, obnoxiously loud group.
Wild animals weren’t the only fears these children faced, though.
Each year, all fifth graders from the nearby town came out to our park to go on a short hike and a little boat trip on the lake. It was what I used to do with my winters, travel down to the Texas-Mexican border and take the local children out on field trips.
Many of the kids were not white. Many didn’t speak English as their first language. All of them and everyone in the town, including myself, had experienced run-ins with border patrol.
My fellow rangers had told me of the time a few years back when men with guns crept through the brush toward another class of fifth graders. Helicopters circled overhead. And then behind them, sneaking up from the visitor center, another group of armed men.
Someone had called to warn that a group of “Mexicans” was spotted by our park visitor center. Border patrol had arrived to break up the field trip.
At the back of the hike, I pointed to the monarch as it wafted delicately through the crisp, fall air.
The children around me, a pack of girls, watched it head south, toward the nearby border crossing.
“Ranger,” said a girl with a slight accent, “I don’t understand.”
“What don’t you understand?”
“The butterflies and the birds,” her face crinkled with concern. “How do they get to Mexico?”
“They fly,” I said.
“But don’t the police stop them?”
This child’s face held fear; she knew to be afraid of the border patrol. We didn’t need a platoon of men with guns sprinting toward us that day to remind these children that they had brown skin, accents, and were not always welcome even in their own community.
I opened my mouth and tried to achieve the impossible: explaining why something as precious as a child might not feel safe here, but that not even the scary men with guns would harm the butterflies.
A few years later, a massive group of migrants would land nearby, trying to cross the river and into the United States through this tiny town. Photos of border agents on horseback brandishing whips not far from this spot, not far from where I used to hike with children, shocked the Internet.
Not long after that and in a nearby town, a gunman entered an elementary school and massacred children, children with faces like these fifth graders, like the face of that girl afraid for the monarch butterflies, a face imprinted forever in my memory.
I wasn’t sure what to do for her then. There is so much in the world to fear. So I tried to point out something good.
People can be terrible to one another, but a border is, after all, a human construct. It is as complicated as anything else about humans, capable of unspeakable brutality and yet, also, miraculously, beauty and peace.
For a few days each fall, over those little Texas border towns, across the walls and barbed wire, above the heads of the scary men with guns, the sky is alight with a fog of fluttering gold.
And the armed men look up. The brown-skinned children look up. And everyone smiles. And the monarchs float on, unaware of the turmoil below.