The Blues

It was Mother’s Day and my wife was not feeling well, so I took my two youngest sons to the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Only for the second time we visited the Cockerell Butterfly Center, a three-story cone of glass and steel housing a half-acre of rain forest. Like magical realism come to life – but lovelier, not at all whimsical or heavy-handed -- the center is home to 1,500 or 2,000 butterflies from 60 species. Most are native to Central and South America, a few from Asia, and I noticed a homegrown monarch. My 3-year-old watched the ragged cloud of butterflies above us, silhouetted against the sky, and said, “Look, Dad. They look like birds, pretty birds.”

We sat on a bench and butterflies landed on our heads and arms. You feel nothing – so much weightless beauty. At the exit is a full-length mirror, and a signs warns: “Watch for stowaways.” My favorite name for one of the Asian imports: rice paper.

I remembered this passage from Nabokov’s sad, funny Pnin:

”A score of small butterflies, all of one kind, were settled on a damp patch of sand, their wings erect and closed, showing their pale undersides with dark dots and tiny orange-rimmed peacock spots along the hindwing margins; one of Pnin’s shed rubbers disturbed some of them and, revealing the celestial hue of their upper surface, they fluttered around like blue snowflakes before settling again.”

I love “blue snowflakes.” Nabokov was a lepidopterist as well as a novelist of genius. His specialty were the “blues” he mentions in Pnin, and I was lucky enough, while living in Albany, N.Y., to often see and write about the Karner blue, an endangered species named for an old railroad stop in the Pine Bush – a habitat just west of Albany mentioned by Melville in Moby-Dick and now surrounded by suburban development. The Karner blues have a wingspan of about 25 mm. The caterpillars live only on blue lupine, a specialization that makes their survival even more precarious. Nabokov named all the genera, species and subspecies.

In 1975, Robert Dirig, an entomologist at Cornell University, wrote to Nabokov about his research into the Karner blue and the Pine Bush. Nabokov wrote back, clearly delighted, and said he remembered the Pine Bush “as a sandy and flowery little paradise.” That’s how I remember it, despite the hum of the nearby New York State Thruway – a rare convergence of natural beauty and artistic genius. Nabokov died in 1977.